Catalog Search Results
Author
Pub. Date
2015.
Summary
The American decade known as "The Roaring Twenties" continues to hold our collective fascination. But how did this surge of innovation and cultural milestones emerge from the ashes of The Great War? Eric Burns examines the crucial year of 1920, the first full year of armistice. From prohibition to immigration, the vote for women, the birth of jazz, the rise of expatriate literature, and the original Ponzi scheme, 1920 was a year like no other.
Author
Summary
Award-winning journalist Hannah Nordhaus attempts to uncover the truth about her great-great-grandmother, whose ghost is said to haunt an elegant hotel in Santa Fe. Julia Schuster Staab died nearly a century before the hauntings were reported at La Posada, once the grand home of Julia and her Jewish merchant husband. Tracing the strands of Julia's life and unsettled afterlife, Nordhaus delivers a spellbinding exploration of myth, family history, and...
Author
Series
Lexile Measure
1090L
Appears on these lists
Summary
"For Ta-Nehisi Coates, history has always been personal. At every stage of his life, he's sought in his explorations of history answers to the mysteries that surrounded him -- most urgently, why he, and other black people he knew, seemed to live in fear. What were they afraid of? In Tremble for My Country, Coates takes readers along on his journey through America's history of race and its contemporary resonances through a series of awakenings -- moments...
Author
Summary
"While getting into his car on the evening of February 16, 1978, the chief of the CIA's Moscow station was handed an envelope by an unknown Russian. Its contents stunned the Americans: details of top-secret Soviet research and development in military technology that was totally unknown to the United States. From 1979 to 1985, Adolf Tolkachev, an engineer at a military research center, cracked open the secret Soviet military research establishment,...
Author
Pub. Date
2015.
Summary
"One of the most acclaimed travel writers of our time turns his unflinching eye on an American South too often overlooked. Paul Theroux has spent fifty years crossing the globe, adventuring in the exotic, seeking the rich history and folklore of the far away. Now, for the first time, in his tenth travel book, Theroux explores a piece of America--the Deep South. He finds there a paradoxical place, full of incomparable music, unparalleled cuisine, and...
Author
Summary
Jimmy Carter, thirty-ninth President, Nobel Peace Prize winner, international humanitarian, fisherman, reflects on his full and happy life with pride, humor, and a few second thoughts. At ninety, Carter reflects on his public and private life with a frankness that is disarming. He adds detail and emotion about his youth in rural Georgia that he described in his earlier memoir An Hour Before Daylight. He writes about racism and the isolation of the...
Author
Lexile Measure
1010L
Summary
"'I am most grateful for two things: that I was born in North Korea, and that I escaped from North Korea.' Yeonmi Park was not dreaming of freedom when she escaped from North Korea. She didn't even know what it meant to be free. All she knew was that she was running for her life, that if she and her family stayed behind they would die--from starvation, or disease, or even execution. This book is the story of Park's struggle to survive in the darkest,...
Author
Pub. Date
2015.
Summary
"Chronicling General Lafayette's years in Washington's army, Vowell reflects on the ideals of the American Revolution versus the reality of the Revolutionary War. Riding shotgun with Lafayette, Vowell swerves from the high-minded debates of Independence Hall to the frozen wasteland of Valley Forge, from bloody battlefields to the Palace of Versailles, bumping into John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Lord Cornwallis, Benjamin Franklin, Marie Antoinette and...
Author
Summary
"Rosenfelt's latest work of nonfiction has a slightly misleading title; although Tara, the author's first dog, takes center stage, other dogs--a handful of the hundreds the author and his wife have taken in over the years--do make some appearances. The book's theme is pretty straightforward: here are some of the things I've learned about myself through my dogs. Grieving after Tara's death, for example, allowed Rosenfelt to open up a more emotional...
10) No better friend: one man, one dog, and their extraordinary story of courage and survival in WWII
Author
Summary
"[T]ells the remarkable story of Royal Air Force technician Frank Williams and Judy, a purebred pointer, who met in an internment camp during WWII. Judy was a fiercely loyal animal who sensed danger and instinctively mistrusted anyone in enemy uniform. Their relationship deepened throughout their imprisonment. The prisoners suffered severe beatings which Judy would interrupt with her barking. The dog became a beacon for the men, who saw in her survival...
Author
Series
Appears on list
Summary
Buck's epic account of traveling the length of the Oregon Trail the old-fashioned way-- in a covered wagon with a team of mules, an audacious journey that hasn't been attempted in a century-- tells the rich history of the trail, the people who made the migration, and its significance to the country.
Author
Appears on list
Summary
Some people's lives are entirely their own creations. James Rebanks' isn't. The first son of a shepherd, who was the first son of a shepherd himself, his family have lived and worked in the Lake District of Northern England for generations, further back than recorded history. It's a part of the world known mainly for its romantic descriptions by Wordsworth and the much loved illustrated children's books of Beatrix Potter. But James' world is quite...
Author
Pub. Date
2016.
Summary
"This real-life The X-Files and Close Encounters of the Third Kind tells the true story of a computer programmer who tracks paranormal events along a 3,000-mile stretch through the heart of America and is drawn deeper and deeper into a vast conspiracy. Like "Agent Mulder" of The X-Files, computer programmer and sheriff's deputy Zukowski is obsessed with tracking down UFO reports in Colorado. He would take the family with him on weekend trips to look...
Author
Pub. Date
2016.
Summary
"Based on two decades of reporting, NBC's chief foreign correspondent's riveting story of the Middle East revolutions, the Arab Spring, war, and terrorism seen up-close--sometimes dangerously so. When he was just twenty-three, a recent graduate of Stanford University, Richard Engel set off to Cairo with $2,000 and dreams of being a reporter. Shortly thereafter he was working freelance for Arab news sources and got a call that a busload of Italian...
Author
Summary
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author draws on his scientific knowledge and research to describe the magisterial history of a scientific idea, the quest to decipher the master-code of instructions that makes and defines humans; that governs our form, function, and fate; and that determines the future of our children. The story of the gene begins in earnest in an obscure Augustinian abbey in Moravia in 1856 where Gregor Mendel, a monk working with pea...
Author
Summary
"In 1942, social worker Irena Sendler was granted access to the Warsaw ghetto as a public health specialist. She reached out to the trapped Jewish families, asking the parents to trust her with their young children. She started smuggling them out of the walled district, convincing her friends and neighbors to hide them. In a friend's garden, she buried lists of the names and true identities of those children, with the hope that their relatives could...
Author
Summary
"In 1942, as Japan dominates the Pacific Theater, small contingents of US Army Airmen make their way to the embattled Allied airbase on Papua, New Guinea. When pilot Captain Jay Zeamer and bombardier Sergeant Joseph Raymond Sarnoski can't convince superiors to give Zeamer his own plane, they recruit a crew and rebuild a B-17 with junkyard parts. In June 1943, they fly Old 666 on a 1200-mile suicide mission into the teeth of the Japanese Empire, engage...