Excerpt from Dead End in Norvelt by Jack Gantos, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Finally, one of Pizarro's own men sneaked up and stabbed him to death because he thought Pizarro was cheating him out of his share of gold for helping to conquer the Incas. Gold had driven the conquistadors crazy and they ended up killing themselves and all of those poor Incas. It was a really tragic story. I just wished I had been with Atahualpa and his army when the conquistadors fired off that blunderbuss. I could have told Atahualpa that I had fired off a rifle too and that it was scary, but not to panic. Then we could have ordered the Inca army to capture the gold-crazed conquistadors and saved the Inca civilization, and history would have been different. If only...

Excerpted from Dead End in Norvelt by Jack Gantos. Copyright © 2011 by Jack Gantos. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.