Reporting from the ground in Fallujah! High-interest topics, real stories, engaging design and astonishing photos are the building blocks of the XBooks, a new series of books designed to engage and motivate reluctant and enthusiastic readers alike. With topics based in science, history, and social studies, these action-packed books will help students unlock the power and pleasure of reading... and always ask for more!Anne Garrels was a brave news journalist reporting on the war in Iraq. She carried out dangerous missions to keep the public informed and to share first-hand accounts of life in the First Battalion. Candy J. Cooper is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting. She has been a staff writer for four newspapers, including The Detroit Free Press and the San Francisco Examiner. Her work has appeared in the The New York Times , The Columbia Journalism Review and The Chronicle of Higher Education , among other publications. She has written several nonfiction series books for the classroom for Scholastic, and her essay on stepfamilies is part of an anthology, My Father Married Your Mother: Dispatches from the Blended Family , published by W. W. Norton.