John Bemelmans Marciano

After happily exploring garbage cans in the streets of Paris and pulling fish from the river, Genevieve, the puppy belonging to Madeline and the other orphans, receives an unwanted bath.

Madeline and the other orphans of the vine-covered house in Paris spend Easter at the White House visiting with the President's daughter.

Most of the rest of the world is on the metric system, and for a time in the 1970s America appeared ready to make the switch. Yet it never happened, and the reasons for that get to the root of who we think we are, just as the measurements are woven into the ways we think. Marciano chronicles the origins of measurement systems, the kaleidoscopic array of standards throughout Europe and the thirteen American colonies, the combination of intellect and...