Catalog Search Results
Author
Pub. Date
2023.
Summary
"An unbeliever writes his way out of a "doomsday cult," one chapter at a time. As an adolescent, Daniel Allen Cox was a dutiful Jehovah's Witness, preaching door to door even before his baptism marked a formal dedication to the movement. Then, at eighteen, whispers of his sexual orientation made their way to his congregation's presiding elder and catalyzed his disassociation from the group. But the difference between "in" and "out" is never that simple....
Author
Summary
"In this bold and exhilarating mix of memoir and master class, Melissa Febos tackles the emotional, psychological, and physical work of writing intimately while offering an utterly fresh examination of the storyteller's life and the questions which run through it. How might we go about capturing on the page the relationships that have formed us? How do we write about our bodies, their desires and traumas? What does it mean for an author's way of writing,...
Author
Pub. Date
2023
Formats
Summary
In February 2016, Ahmed Naji was sentenced to two years in prison for "violating public modesty," after an excerpt of his novel Using Life reportedly caused a reader to experience heart palpitations. Naji ultimately served ten months of that sentence, in a group cell block in Cairo's Tora Prison.
Rotten Evidence is a chronicle of those months. Through Naji's writing, the world of Egyptian prison comes into vivid focus, with its cigarette-based economy,...
Author
Summary
"For readers of Late Migrations and Vesper Flights From the acclaimed author of How to Catch a Mole, this meditative memoir explores the wisdom of plants, the joys of manual labor, and the natural cycle of growth and decay that runs through both the garden's life and our own. Marc Hamer has nurtured the same 12-acre garden in the Welsh countryside for over two decades. The garden is vast and intricate. It's rarely visited, and only Hamer knows of...
Author
Pub. Date
2024.
Summary
"You either were there or you wanted to be. The Freaks Came Out to Write is the definitive oral history of The Village Voice-a New York City institution. Roaming its cramped, chaotic halls were the people who had written the first stories about the Stonewall Riots and the gay rights movement; who had advocated for civil rights before it was mainstream. The Voice was the first to cover hip-hop, the avant-garde art scene, and the AIDS crisis with urgency...
Author
Pub. Date
2016
Formats
Summary
James Pierson Beckwourth (1798 or 1800 – 1866 or 1867), born James Beckwith and generally known as, Jim Beckwourth was an American mountain man, fur trader, and explorer. A mulatto born into slavery in Virginia, he was freed by his father (and master) and apprenticed to a blacksmith; later he moved to the American West. As a fur trapper, he lived with the Crow Nation for years. He is credited with the discovery of Beckwourth Pass, through the...
Author
Summary
"Humankind's love of gorillas has long been reflected in literature and film--Tarzan, King Kong, The Jungle Book, Gorillas in the Mist-- and their popularity continues to grow. But due to climate change and poaching, only a few hundred mountain gorillas remain, restricted to just two isolated highland areas in the border region of Uganda, Rwanda, and Congo. Since there are none in captivity, their future depends on their survival in the wild. Greg...
Author
Summary
"Throughout her prodigious life, activist and lawyer Pauli Murray systematically fought against all arbitrary distinctions in society, channeling her outrage at the discrimination she faced to make America a more democratic country. In this definitive biography, Rosalind Rosenberg offers a poignant portrait of a figure who played pivotal roles in both the modern civil rights and women's movements. A mixed-race orphan, Murray grew up in segregated...
Author
Summary
"It was a wrong turn that changed everything. When Luma Mufleh--a Muslim, gay, refugee woman from hyper-conservative Jordan--stumbled upon a pick-up game of soccer in Clarkston, Georgia, something compelled her to join. The players, 11- and 12-year-olds from Liberia, Afghanistan, and Sudan, soon welcomed her as coach of their ragtag but fiercely competitive group. Drawn into their lives, Mufleh learned that few of her players, all local public school...
Author
Pub. Date
2023
Summary
A granddaughter explores the story of her Ukrainian grandmother's survival of Hitler's forced labor camps.
Irina Nikifortchuk was 19 years old and a Ukrainian schoolteacher when she was abducted to be a forced laborer in the Leica camera factory in Nazi Germany. Eventually pulled from the camp hospital to work as a domestic in the Leica owners' household, Irina survived the war and eventually found her way to Canada.
Decades later Sasha Colby, Irina's...
Author
Pub. Date
2012
Formats
Summary
Former Yankee Bobby Richardson played alongside Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Whitey Ford, Joe Pepitone, and Yogi Berra during one of the most prolific dynasties in baseball history, and he remains to this day the only player from the losing team ever to be named World Series MVP.
In Impact Player, Bobby shares his life story, including never-before-told tales from the Yankee clubhouse during the historic '55-'65 pennant runs and World...
In Impact Player, Bobby shares his life story, including never-before-told tales from the Yankee clubhouse during the historic '55-'65 pennant runs and World...
Author
Pub. Date
2023
Formats
Summary
In 1797 an extraordinary visionary died, leaving behind a grieving husband, a two-year-old daughter, and a newborn. The woman was Mary Wollstonecraft, her daughter Fanny Imlay, and her baby Mary Godwin, who, through many trials and tribulations, grew up to become the remarkable Mary Shelley, creator of one of the most important books in literature: Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus. While many books have examined both women's lives, their...
Author
Pub. Date
2023
Formats
Summary
2022 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR FROM THE TELEGRAPH (UK) AND THE SUNDAY TIMES (UK)
2022 BEST AUDIOBOOKS OF THE YEAR FROM THE TIMES (UK)
This darkly funny, confessional memoir from the star of What Not to Wear tells all: from her posh upbringing and the dishy details of her career in fashion to her journey as a recovering alcoholic.
Author
Pub. Date
2012
Formats
Summary
A deeply personal story of one man’s spiritual odyssey and the unflagging faith which enabled him to survive the ordeal that wrenched his body and spirit to near collapse.
Captured by a Russian army during World War II and convicted of being a “Vatican spy,” Jesuit Father Walter J. Ciszek spent some 23 agonizing years in Soviet prisons and the labor camps of Siberia. He here recalls how it was only through an...
Captured by a Russian army during World War II and convicted of being a “Vatican spy,” Jesuit Father Walter J. Ciszek spent some 23 agonizing years in Soviet prisons and the labor camps of Siberia. He here recalls how it was only through an...
Author
Pub. Date
2023
Formats
Summary
I discover a "lost" aunt, separated from our family due to racism and discrimination against the disabled. She had a mental disability due to childhood meningitis. She was taken away in 1942 when all Japanese Americans were considered the enemy and imprisoned. She then became a "ward" of the state. We believed she had died, but 70 years later found her alive and living a few miles from our family farm. How did
...Author
Pub. Date
2011
Formats
Summary
In the late 1940s Patrick Leigh Fermor, now widely regarded as one of the twentieth century’s greatest travel writers, set out to explore the then relatively little-visited islands of the Caribbean. Rather than a comprehensive political or historical study of the region, The Traveller’s Tree, Leigh Fermor’s first book, gives us his own vivid, idiosyncratic impressions of Guadeloupe, Martinique, Dominica, Barbados, Trinidad,...
Author
Pub. Date
2021
Formats
Summary
The preparation of this book has not been with any idea of self-glory. It is just a message to the white race; to bring my people before their eyes in a true and authentic manner. The American Indian has been written about by hundreds of authors of white blood or possibly by an Indian of mixed blood who has spent the greater part of his life away from a reservation. These are not in a position to write accurately about the struggles and disappointments...
Author
Pub. Date
2014
Formats
Summary
A shimmering jewel of a book about writing from two-time Booker Prize finalist Deborah Levy, to publish alongside her new work of nonfiction, The Cost of Living.
Blending personal history, gender politics, philosophy, and literary theory into a luminescent treatise on writing, love, and loss, Things I Don't Want to Know is Deborah Levy's witty response to George Orwell's influential essay "Why I Write." Orwell...
Blending personal history, gender politics, philosophy, and literary theory into a luminescent treatise on writing, love, and loss, Things I Don't Want to Know is Deborah Levy's witty response to George Orwell's influential essay "Why I Write." Orwell...
Author
Pub. Date
2022
Formats
Summary
Bestselling author the Countess of Carnarvon tells the thrilling behind-the-scenes story of the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun on its centennial, and explores the unparalleled life of family ancestor George Herbert—the famed Egyptologist, world-traveler, and 5th Earl of Carnarvon behind it—whose country house, Highclere Castle, is the setting of the beloved series Downton Abbey.
In November 1922, the world
...