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As World War I raged across the globe, hundreds of young women toiled away at the radium-dial factories, where they painted clock faces with a mysterious new substance called radium. Assured by their bosses that the luminous material was safe, the women themselves shone brightly in the dark, covered from head to toe with the glowing dust. With such a coveted job, these "shining girls" were considered the luckiest alive--until they began to fall mysteriously...
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At the age of 36, on the verge of a completing a decade's worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi's health began to falter. He started losing weight and was wracked by waves of excruciating back pain. A CT scan confirmed what Paul, deep down, had suspected: he had stage four lung cancer, widely disseminated. One day, he was a doctor making a living treating the dying, and the next, he was a patient struggling to live. Just like that, the...
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In a time when discussions of race are once again coming to the fore, the event that launched the civil rights movement -- the 1955 lynching of a fourteen-year-old black boy named Emmett Till -- is now reexamined by an award-winning author with access to never-before-heard accounts from those involved as well as recently recovered court transcripts from the trial.
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Both George Orwell and Winston Churchill came close to death in the mid-1930's -- Orwell shot in the neck in a trench line in the Spanish Civil War, and Churchill struck by a car in New York City. If they'd died then, history would scarcely remember them. At the time, Churchill was a politician on the outs, his loyalty to his class and party suspect. Orwell was a mildly successful novelist, to put it generously. No one would have predicted that, by...
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"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...
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The follow-up to Pinker's groundbreaking The Better Angels of Our Nature presents the big picture of human progress: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science. Far from being a naive hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense. The Enlightenment project swims against...
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Adult - Native American Heritage Month
Adult - Native American Heritage Month 2022
AMPL Native American Heritage Month
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Adult - Native American Heritage Month 2022
AMPL Native American Heritage Month
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The received idea of Native American history--as promulgated by books like Dee Brown's mega-bestselling 1970 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee--has been that American Indian history essentially ended with the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. Not only did one hundred fifty Sioux die at the hands of the U. S. Cavalry, the sense was, but Native civilization did as well. Growing up Ojibwe on a reservation in Minnesota, training as an anthropologist, and researching...
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Between the world wars, no sport was more popular, or more dangerous, than airplane racing. Thousands of fans flocked to multi-day events, and cities vied with one another to host them. The pilots themselves were hailed as dashing heroes who cheerfully stared death in the face. Well, the men were hailed. Female pilots were more often ridiculed than praised for what the press portrayed as silly efforts to horn in on a manly, and deadly, pursuit. Keith...
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From the New York Times bestselling author of Reviving Ophelia, a guide to wisdom, authenticity, and bliss for women as they age. Women growing older contend with ageism, misogyny, and loss. Yet as Mary Pipher shows, most older women are deeply happy and filled with gratitude for the gifts of life. Their struggles help them grow into the authentic, empathetic, and wise people they have always wanted to be. In Women rowing north, Pipher offers a timely...
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HPL Women's History Month 2023
MPL-Women Who Made History
Non Fiction That Reads Like Fiction
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MPL-Women Who Made History
Non Fiction That Reads Like Fiction
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"During World War II, when the newly minted Jet Propulsion Laboratory needed quick-thinking mathematicians to calculate jet velocities and plot missile trajectories, they recruited an elite group of young women--known as human computers--who, with only pencil, paper, and mathematical prowess, transformed rocket design and helped bring about America's first ballistic missiles. But they were never interested in developing weapons--their hearts lay in...
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"Best-selling author David McCullough tells the story of the settlers who began America's migration west, overcoming almost-unimaginable hardships to build in the Ohio wilderness a town and a government that incorporated America's highest ideals"--
"Best-selling author David McCullough tells the story of the settlers who began America's migration west, overcoming almost-unimaginable hardships to build in the Ohio wilderness a town and a government...
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At a moment of crisis over our national identity, journalist Dan Rather reflects on what it means to be an American. He reminds us of the principles upon which the United States was founded. Looking at the freedoms that define us, from the vote to the press; the values that have transformed us, from empathy to inclusion to service; the institutions that sustain us, such as public education; and the traits that helped form our young country, such as...
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Most people want to avoid thinking about death, but Caitlin Doughty -- a twenty-something with a degree in medieval history and a flair for the macabre -- took a job at a crematory, turning morbid curiosity into her life's work. Thrown into a profession of gallows humor and vivid characters (both living and very dead), Caitlin learned to navigate the secretive culture of those who care for the deceased. Smoke Gets in Your Eyes tells an unusual coming-of-age...
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In 2015, journalist John Leland set out to meet members of America's fastest-growing age group: 85 and up. He anticipated learning of challenges, of loneliness, and of the deterioration of body, mind, and quality of life. But the elders he met took him in an entirely different direction. Despite disparate backgrounds and circumstances, they each lived with a surprising lightness and contentment. The reality Leland encountered upended contemporary...
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"Bring meaning and joy to all your days with this internationally bestselling guide to the Japanese concept of ikigai -- the happiness of always being busy -- as revealed by the daily habits of the world's longest-living people." -- From Amazon.com summary.
"...In researching this book, the authors interviewed the residents of the Japanese village with the highest percentage of 100-year-olds -- one of the world's Blue Zones. Ikigai reveals the secrets...
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FPPL Latine and Hispanic Heritage Month 2022
Hispanic & Latinx Voices
Hispanic Heritage Month (Adult)
Staff Picks September 2021
Hispanic & Latinx Voices
Hispanic Heritage Month (Adult)
Staff Picks September 2021
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""A beautiful, fiercely honest, and nevertheless deeply empathetic look at those who police the border and the migrants who risk - and lose - their lives crossing it. In a time of often ill-informed or downright deceitful political rhetoric, this book is an invaluable corrective."--Phil Klay For Francisco Cantú the border is in the blood: his mother, a park ranger and daughter of a Mexican immigrant, raised him in the scrublands of the Southwest....
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Exotic, exciting, and brutally dangerous, bobsledding was the must-see event of the 1932 Winter Olympics at Lake Placid. Speed Kings is story of risk, adventure, and daring as four Americans race to win the gold medal in the most dangerous competition in Olympic history.
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"A groundbreaking plan to prevent and reverse Alzheimer's Disease that fundamentally changes how we understand cognitive decline. Everyone knows someone who has survived cancer, but until now no one knows anyone who has survived Alzheimer's Disease. In this paradigm shifting book, Dale Bredesen, MD, offers real hope to anyone looking to prevent and even reverse Alzheimer's Disease and cognitive decline. Revealing that AD is not one condition, as it...
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On a winter day in 1903, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, two unknown brothers from Ohio changed history. But it would take the world some time to believe what had happened: the age of flight had begun, with the first heavier-than-air, powered machine carrying a pilot. Who were these men and how was it that they achieved what they did? Far more than a couple of unschooled Dayton bicycle mechanics who happened to hit on success, they were men...