Catalog Search Results
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
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
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
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
Summary
"Ann Romney, former First Lady of Massachusetts, bestselling author, and founder and global ambassador of the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, will talk candidly about her journey with multiple sclerosis. She will share details from her initial diagnosis in 1998, through the highs and lows of her treatment to the sources of faith that gave her strength and ultimately transformed her life and that...
Author
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...
7) 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
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
Formats
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...
14) The bad-ass librarians of Timbuktu: and their race to save the world's most precious manuscripts
Author
Summary
Describes how a group of Timbuktu librarians enacted a daring plan to smuggle the city's great collection of rare Islamic manuscripts away from the threat of destruction at the hands of Al Qaeda militants to the safety of southern Mali.
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...
18) How to make a spaceship: a band of renegades, an epic race, and the birth of private space flight
Author
Summary
Alone in a Spartan black cockpit, test pilot Mike Melvill rocketed toward space. He had eighty seconds to exceed the speed of sound and begin the climb to a target no civilian pilot had ever reached. He might not make it back alive. If he did, he would make history as the world's first commercial astronaut. The spectacle defied reason, the result of a competition dreamed up by entrepreneur Peter Diamandis, whose vision for a new race to space required...
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...
20) Love warrior
Author
Series
Summary
Just when Glennon Doyle Melton was beginning to feel she had it all figured out--three happy children, a doting spouse, and a writing career so successful that her first book catapulted to the top of the New York Times bestseller list--her husband revealed his infidelity and she was forced to realize that nothing was as it seemed. A recovering alcoholic and bulimic, Glennon found that rock bottom was a familiar place. In the midst of crisis, she knew...