Catalog Search Results
Author
Series
Formats
Summary
In this portrait of the people, the politics, the land, and the poetry of Nicaragua, Rushdie brings to the forefront the palpable human facts of a country in the midst of a revolution. Rushdie went to Nicaragua in 1986, "harboring no preconceptions of what he might find." What he discovered was for him overwhelming: a culture of heroes who had turned into inanimate objects and of politicians and warriors who were poets, a land of difficult, often...
2) Lincoln
Author
Series
Formats
Summary
In the best-selling tradition of Truman, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David Herbert Donald offers a new classic in American history and biography - a masterly account of how one man's extraordinary political acumen steered the Union to victory in the Civil War, and of how his soaring rhetoric gave meaning to that agonizing struggle for nationhood and equality. Donald spent 50 years studying Lincoln, tracing his rise from humble origins...
Author
Series
Formats
Summary
Who formed the first literate society? Who invented our modern ideas of democracy and free market capitalism? The Scots. As historian and author Arthur Herman reveals, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Scotland made crucial contributions to science, philosophy, literature, education, medicine, commerce, and politics, contributions that have formed and nurtured the modern West ever since. This book is not just about Scotland: it is an exciting...
Author
Series
Formats
Summary
In this searing memoir, the author, "the girl" at the center of the infamous Roman Polanski sexual assault case, breaks a virtual thirty-five year silence to tell her story and reflect on the events of that day and their lifelong repercussions. March 1977, Southern California. Roman Polanski drives a rented Mercedes along Mulholland Drive to Jack Nicholson's house. Sitting next to him is an aspiring actress, Samantha Geimer, recently arrived from...
Author
Series
Formats
Summary
In 2006, 27-year-old Jessica Buchanan arrived in Nairobi, Kenya, with long-held dreams of helping to educate African children. By 2009, she had met and married a Swede named Erik Landemalm, who worked to coordinate humanitarian aid with authorities in Africa. They moved to Somalia with hopes of starting a family. Then on October 25, 2011, Jessica and a colleague were kidnapped and held for ransom by a band of Somali pirates. For the next three months,...
Author
Series
Formats
Summary
"In her twenties, Alexandra Heminsley spent more time drinking white wine than she did in pursuit of athletic excellence. When she decided to take up running in her thirties, she had high hopes for a blissful runner's high and immediate physical transformation. After eating three slices of toast with honey and spending ninety minutes on iTunes creating the perfect playlist, she hit the streets--and failed miserably. The stories of her first runs turn...
Author
Summary
"Imagine being trapped inside a Disney movie and having to learn about life mostly from animated characters dancing across a screen of color. A fantasy? A nightmare? This is the real-life story of Owen Suskind, the son of the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind and his wife, Cornelia. An autistic boy who couldn't speak for years, Owen memorized dozens of Disney movies, turned them into a language to express love and loss, kinship, brotherhood....
Author
Series
Formats
Summary
Allen makes the case that we cannot have freedom as individuals without equality among us as a people. Evoking the colonial world between 1774 and 1777, Allen describes the challenges faced by John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston--the "Committee of Five" who had to write a document that reflected the aspirations of a restive population and forge an unprecedented social contract. Although the focus is...
Author
Series
Formats
Summary
"Archetypal wild man Edward Abbey and proper, dedicated Wallace Stegner left their footprints all over the western landscape. Now, ... nature writer David Gessner follows the ghosts of these two remarkable writer-environmentalists from Stegner's birthplace in Saskatchewan to the site of Abbey's pilgrimages to Arches National Park in Utah, braiding their stories and asking how they speak to the lives of all those who care about the West"--Dust jacket...
Author
Series
Formats
Summary
"There is one central, non-controversial idea we're taught about morality--that self-sacrifice is a virtue. What if it's wrong? From childhood, we are told that serving the needs of others, rather than our own, is the essence of morality and the way to achieve social harmony. To be ethical--it is believed--is to be altruistic. Here, Peter Schwartz questions this notion. In Defense of Selfishness shows that what altruism demands is not that you respect...
Author
Series
Formats
Summary
"Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) and her daughter Mary Shelley (1797-1851) have each been the subject of numerous biographies by top tier writers, yet no author has ever examined their lives in tandem. Perhaps this is because these two amazing women never knew each other--Wollstonecraft died of infection at the age of 38, a week after giving birth to her daughter. Nevertheless their lives were closely intertwined, their choices, dreams and tragedies...
Author
Series
Summary
His twenty-year marriage was floundering. His two teenage kids were lost in cyberspace most of the time. He felt disconnected from his work, his family, his life. Which is when he had an idea: Let's volunteer our way around the world. John Marshall had read about the growth of voluntourism, and frankly, it was the only kind of extended trip he could afford. He'd heard that some peoples' lives were changed by a week of overseas service-what might half...
Author
Series
Formats
Summary
"An acerbic, no holds barred indictment of business as usual in Washington, DC--where our elected leaders provide a fig leaf for those who really hold the levers of power--by a 28-year veteran of the Hill, the bestselling author of The Party Is Over Have you ever noticed that behind all the mud-slinging and invective there isn't much difference between the parties? For all of his big talk and promises of change, Obama is basically Bush lite. And Hillary--or...
Author
Formats
Summary
Peter H. Lindert is Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of California, Davis. His books include Growing Public: Social Spending and Economic Growth since the Eighteenth Century. He lives in Davis, California. Jeffrey G. Williamson is the Laird Bell Professor of Economics, emeritus, at Harvard University. His books include Trade and Poverty: When the Third World Fell Behind. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin. Both are research associates...
Author
Series
Summary
In 1946, America had just exited the biggest war in modern history and was about to enter another of a kind no one had fought before. We think of this moment as the brilliant start of America Triumphant, in world politics and economics. But the reality is murkier: 1946 brought tension between industry and labor, political disunity, bad veteran morale, housing crises, inflation, a Soviet menace-all shadowed by an indecisiveness that would plague decision...