Lyons Regional Library

"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...

"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,...

"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...

"'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...

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...

"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...

An engaging narrative about an incredible, life-giving organ and its imperiled modern fate.

"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." --

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.

"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...