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Best of 2025: Adult Nonfiction
December 25, 2025: New Adult Nonfiction
NYT 100 Notable Books of 2025
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December 25, 2025: New Adult Nonfiction
NYT 100 Notable Books of 2025
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"It was Memorial Day, 2019, when Geraldine Brooks received news that her husband, Tony Horwitz, had collapsed and died, far from home, in the middle of his own book tour. The complex tasks required in the face of such a sudden death left her no time to properly grieve for him. Three years later, still feeling broken and bereft, she booked a flight to a remote island off the coast of Tasmania. Alone on a rugged stretch of coast, she revisited a thirty-five-year...
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August 2025 | Artist Appreciation Month
August 2025 Artist Appreciation Month
International Artists Day
August 2025 Artist Appreciation Month
International Artists Day
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"A self-taught artist's odyssey from Jim Crow era Georgia to the Yale Art Gallery--a stunningly vivid, full-color memoir in prose and painted leather, with a foreword by Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan Stevenson. Winfred Rembert grew up as a field hand on a Georgia plantation. He embraced the Civil Rights Movement, endured political violence, survived a lynching, and spent seven years in prison on a chain gang. Years later, seeking a fresh...
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2023 Read Widely: North America & The Caribbean
Audiobooks "Find Your Voice" 2023
Back to School SHPL
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Audiobooks "Find Your Voice" 2023
Back to School SHPL
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Description
Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her "head-for-the-hills bag." In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father's junkyard. Her father distrusted the medical establishment, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse....
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Growing up as the child of former sharecroppers in a segregated Baltimore, Elijah Cummings saw firsthand how injustice could run rampant, even in a democracy that promises fairness and equality. But with a strong support system and fiery self-discipline, Elijah utilized the momentum of the civil rights movement to overcome the obstacles of poverty and racism to effect change at a time when our country so badly needed it. In We're Better Than This,...
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2023 Read Widely: Sub-Saharan Africa
Adult Activity Challenge 2026: Books Published in 2016
Around the World Book Club
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Adult Activity Challenge 2026: Books Published in 2016
Around the World Book Club
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Description
Noah's path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother, at the time such a union was punishable by five years in prison. As he struggles to find himself in a world where he was never supposed to exist, his mother is determined to save her son from the cycle of poverty, violence, and abuse that would ultimately threaten her own life. With an incisive...
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"When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland....
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"Now, for the first time, Christie shares what life has been like, both in front of and behind the cameras, considering the girl she was alongside the woman she has become. Her stories are as heartening as they are eye-opening, as she recounts her most formative chapters, including the betrayal by her biological father as a child, her lifelong passion for art, her whirlwind career, her four tumultuous marriages--including her heartbreaking divorce...
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Best Non Fiction of 2023
IPPL Wrapped 2024 - Adult Nonfiction
Love The Gilded Age? Try these!
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IPPL Wrapped 2024 - Adult Nonfiction
Love The Gilded Age? Try these!
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Description
"The story of the Astors is a quintessentially American story--of ambition, invention, destruction, and reinvention. From 1783, when German immigrant John Jacob Astor first arrived in the United States, until 2009, when Brooke Astor's son, Anthony Marshall, was convicted of defrauding his elderly mother, the Astor name occupied a unique place in American society. The family fortune, first made by a beaver trapping business that grew into an empire,...
9) Lab girl
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"An illuminating debut memoir of a woman in science; a moving portrait of a longtime friendship; and a stunningly fresh look at plants that will forever change how you see the natural world,"--Amazon.com.
Jahren has built three laboratories in which she's studied trees, flowers, seeds, and soil. She tells about her childhood in rural Minnesota with an uncompromising mother and a father who encouraged hours of play in his classroom's labs; about how...
10) Just kids
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Patti's Smith's exquisite prose is generously illustrated in this full-color edition of her classic coming-of-age memoir, Just Kids. New York locations vividly come to life where, as young artists, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe met and fell in love: a first apartment in Brooklyn, Times Square with John and Yoko's iconic billboard, Max's Kansas City, or the gritty fire escape of the Hotel Chelsea. The extraordinary people who passed through their...
11) Melania
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Adult Summer Reading and Activity Challenge 2025 Non-Fiction from July '24 through July '25
NYT Nonfiction Bestsellers
NYT Nonfiction Bestsellers
Description
"In her memoir, Melania reflects on her Slovenian childhood, the pivotal moments that led her to the world of high fashion in Europe and New York, and the serendipitous meeting with Donald Trump, a chance encounter that forever changed the course of her life. Melania opens up about their courtship, life in the spotlight, and experiencing the joy of motherhood. She shares behind-the-scenes stories from her time in the White House, shedding light on...
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2024 ALA Youth Media Awards (SCPL-YS)
Celebrate Women's History Month - YOUTH
Children's Staff Picks 2/2025
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Celebrate Women's History Month - YOUTH
Children's Staff Picks 2/2025
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Description
"Jovita didn't want to cook and clean like her sisters, and she especially didn't want to wear the skirts her abuela gave her. She wanted to race her brothers and climb the tallest mesquite trees in Rancho Palos Blancos, ride horses, and wear pants! When her father and brothers joined the Cristeros War to fight for the right to practice religion, she wanted to help. She wasn't allowed to fight, but that didn't stop her from observing how her father...
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"There are things Chelsea Devantez probably shouldn't be telling you. Many of them are in this book: some are embarrassing (like when she tried to break her three year spell of celibacy using a guide of seduction tips). Some are confessional (getting sentenced to the "hell hill" at Mormon church camp). Some are TMI (a series of outrageous doctor visits that ended with one doctor misdiagnosing her as "pregnant." Woopsies!). Then there are things Chelsea...
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Diagnosed at age 29, Fox is engaged in Parkinson's advocacy work, raising global awareness of the disease and helping find a cure through The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research, the world's leading non-profit funder of PD science. Here he shares personal stories and observations about illness and health, aging, the strength of family and friends, and how our perceptions about time affect the way we approach mortality. Running through...
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Etheridge has lived a life of many blessings-- but has also struggled mightily along the way. Changes in the music industry threated her livelihood; she was diagnosed with breast cancer; and she endured two contentious breakups, all under the scrutiny of the public eye. Then she lost her son Beckett to opioid addiction. Here Etheridge dives into how both joy and sorrow serve as catalysts for growth. In this memoir she creates a rich portrait of success...
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"The first English language edition of a lost memoir by an Auschwitz survivor, offering a shocking and deeply moving perspective on life within the camps. When József Debreczeni, a prolific Hungarian-language journalist and poet, arrived in Auschwitz in 1944, his life expectancy was forty-five minutes. This was how long it took for the half-dead prisoners to be sorted into groups, stripped, and sent to the gas chambers. He beat the odds and survived...
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"Keke Palmer thought she knew who she was. What it means to be a good person and what it takes to be a success. It all seemed so simple, until she realized the challenges she would have to face to prove to herself who she wanted to be. From feeling alienated to having to restart her career after ten years in to becoming a single mother just months after her son was born--everything she worked for in life that she felt granted her what she wanted now...
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In September 1776, the vulnerable Continental Army under an unsure George Washington (who had never commanded a large force in battle) evacuates New York after a devastating defeat by the British Army. Three weeks later, near the Canadian border, one of his favorite generals, Benedict Arnold, miraculously succeeds in postponing the British naval advance down Lake Champlain that might have ended the war. Four years later, as the book ends, Washington...
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"In this moving, hilarious, and insightful memoir, Laurie Woolever traces her path from a small-town childhood to working at revered restaurants and food publications, alternately bolstered and overshadowed by two of the most powerful men in the business. But there's more to the story than the two bold-faced names on her resume: Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain. Behind the scenes, Laurie's life is frequently chaotic, an often pleasurable buffet...










