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Author
Description
"With a new introduction by Anthony Arnove, this edition of the classic national bestseller chronicles American history from the bottom up, throwing out the official narrative taught in schools--with its emphasis on great men in high places-- to focus on the street, the home, and the workplace. Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, A People's History of the United States is the only volume to tell America's story from...
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"For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by...
3) The years
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Description
"Available in English for the first time, the latest astonishing, bestselling, and award-winning book by Annie Ernaux. The Years is a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present -- even projections into the future -- photos, books, songs, radio, television and decades of advertising, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from six decades of diaries. Local dialect,...
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"Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jon Meacham helps us understand the present moment in American politics and life by looking back at critical times in our history when hope overcame division and fear. Our current climate of partisan fury is not new, and in The Soul of America Meacham shows us how what Abraham Lincoln called the "better angels of our nature" have repeatedly won the day. Painting surprising portraits of presidents including, besides...
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"From one of our most beloved authors, a fascinating excursion into the history behind the place we call home--now richly illustrated with almost four hundred images. A national bestseller, At Home is Bill Bryson's epic chronicle of domestic history. In this lavish new edition, his riveting room-by-room journey of discovery around his house--a Victorian parsonage in southern England--is enhanced by some four hundred carefully selected full color and...
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Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 12.3 - AR Pts: 48
Description
Who Hasn't Gazed upon the abandoned temples of Angkor Wat or the jungle-choked cities of the Maya and wondered, could the same fate happen to us? In this riveting book, Jared Diamond--whose Guns, Germs, and Steel revolutionized our understanding of history--explores how humankind's use and abuse of the environment reveal the truth behind the world's great collapses, from the Anasazi of North America to the Vikings of Greenland to modern Montana. What...
Author
Appears on list
Description
"'As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power--which groups have it and which do not.' In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched...
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In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nations history. Hurston was there to record Cudjos firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade...
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Collected in one volume, three counterculture classics that embody the spirit of the 1960s.
Included here are three great works by the incomparable Richard Brautigan:
Trout Fishing in America is by turns a hilarious, playful, and melancholy novel that wanders from San Francisco through the country’s rural waterways—a book “that has very little to do with trout fishing and a lot to...
Included here are three great works by the incomparable Richard Brautigan:
Trout Fishing in America is by turns a hilarious, playful, and melancholy novel that wanders from San Francisco through the country’s rural waterways—a book “that has very little to do with trout fishing and a lot to...
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Pub. Date
[2012]
Description
The author, a behavioral economist, challenges our preconceptions about dishonesty and urge us to take an honest look at ourselves. We all cheat, whether it is copying a paper in the classroom, or white lies on our expense accounts. Does the chance of getting caught affect how likely we are to cheat? How do companies pave the way for dishonesty? Does collaboration make us more honest or less so? Does religion improve our honesty? Here the author...
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"The untold story of the women killed by Jack the Ripper--and a gripping portrait of Victorian London--[this book] changes the narrative of these murders forever. Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Catherine, and Mary jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from some of London's wealthiest and poorest neighborhoods, from teh favtory towns of middle England, and from Wales and Sweden. They wrote ballads, rand coffeehouses, lived...
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Meet the Ames Girls: eleven childhood friends who formed a special bond growing up in Ames, Iowa. As young women, they moved to eight different states, yet managed to maintain an enduring friendship that would carry them through college and careers, marriage and motherhood, dating and divorce, a childs illness and the mysterious death of one member of their group. Capturing their remarkable story, The Girls from Ames is a testament to the...
Author
Appears on list
Description
This book offers a powerful account of four young Mexican women coming of age in Denver, two of whom have legal documentation, two of whom who don't, and the challenges they face as they attempt to pursue the American dream. Helen Thorpe tells the story of four high school students whose parents entered this country illegally from Mexico. All four of the girls have grown up in the United States, and all four want to live the American dream. As the...
15) Don't know much about history: everything you need to know about American history, but never learned
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Series
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"From Columbus through to the twenty-first century, Don't Know Much About History takes readers on a tour through more than 500 years of American life. Drawing on the latest scholarship and new archaeological discoveries, Davis presents a thorough overview of American history that is exciting, interesting and fun to learn." --
16) The library book
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Pub. Date
2018.
Description
Reopens the unsolved mystery of the most catastrophic library fire in American history, the 1986 Los Angeles Public Library fire, while exploring the crucial role that libraries play in modern American culture
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Description
The summer of 1927 began with one of the signature events of the twentieth century: on May 21, a927, Charles Lindbergh became the first man to cross the Atlantic by plane nonstop. This and much, much more transpired in the epochal summer of 1927, and Bill Bryson captures its outsized personalities, exciting events, and occasional just plain weirdness with his trademark vividness, eye for telling detail, and delicious humor.
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John Connolly and James "Whitey" Bulger grew up together on the tough streets of South Boston. Decades later in the mid-1970s, they met again. By then, Connolly was a major figure in the FBI's Boston office and Whitey had become godfather of the Irish Mob. Connolly had an idea, a scheme that might bring Bugler into the FBI fold and John Connolly into the Bureau's big leagues. But Bulger had other plans. Told by two former Boston Globe reporters who...
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"The best-selling author of How Children Succeed returns with a devastatingly powerful, mind-changing inquiry into higher education in the United States"--
"Does college still work? Is the system designed just to protect the privileged and leave everyone else behind? Or can a college education today provide real opportunity to young Americans seeking to improve their station in life? The Years That Matter Most tells the stories of students trying...
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Unique among the arts, ballet has no written texts or standardized notation. It is a storytelling art passed on from teacher to student. A ballerina dancing today is a link in a long chain of dancers stretching back to sixteenth-century Italy and France: Her graceful movements recall a lost world of courts, kings, and aristocracy, but her steps are also marked by the dramatic changes in dance and culture that followed. From ballet's origins in the...