Author: Busch, Akiko, author.
Published: 2019
Call Number: 304.2
Format: Books
Summary: "Vivid, surprising, and utterly timely, Akiko Busch's How to disappear explores the idea of invisibility in nature, art, and science, in search of a more joyful and peaceful way of living in today's increasingly surveilled and publicity-obsessed world In our increasingly networked and image-saturated lives, the notion of disappearing has never been both more enchanting and yet fanciful. Today, we are relentlessly encouraged, even conditioned, to reveal, share, and self-promote. The pressure to be public comes not just from our peers, but vast and pervasive technology companies, which want to profit from patterns in our behavior. A lifelong student and observer of the natural world, Busch sets out to explore her own uneasiness with this arrangement, and what she senses is a widespread desire for a less scrutinized way of life--for invisibility. Writing in rich painterly detail about her own life, her family, and some of the world's most exotic and remote places--from the Cayman Islands to Iceland--she savors the pleasures of being unseen. Discovering and dramatizing a wonderful range of ways of disappearing, from virtual reality goggles that trick the wearer into believing her body has disappeared and to the way Virginia Woolf's fictional Mrs. Dalloway feels a flickering of personhood as an older woman, Busch deliberates on subjects new and old with equal sensitivity and incisiveness. A unique and exhilarating accomplishment, How to disappear is a shimmering collage of poetry, cinema, memoir, myth, and much more, which overturns the dangerous modern assumption that somehow fame and visibility equate to success and happiness"--
Author: Higginbotham, Adam, author.
Published: 2019
Call Number: 363.17 HIGGINBO
Format: Books
Summary: Draws on twenty years of research, recently declassified files, and interviews with survivors in an account of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster that also reveals how propaganda and secrets have created additional dangers. Journalist Adam Higginbotham's definitive, years-in-the-making account of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster--and a powerful investigation into how propaganda, secrecy, and myth have obscured the true story of one of the twentieth century's greatest disasters. Early in the morning of April 26, 1986, Reactor Number Four of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station exploded, triggering history's worst nuclear disaster. In the thirty years since then, Chernobyl has become lodged in the collective nightmares of the world: shorthand for the spectral horrors of radiation poisoning, for a dangerous technology slipping its leash, for ecological fragility, and for what can happen when a dishonest and careless state endangers its citizens and the entire world. But the real story of the accident, clouded from the beginning by secrecy, propaganda, and misinformation, has long remained in dispute. Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews conducted over the course of more than ten years, as well as letters, unpublished memoirs, and documents from recently-declassified archives, Adam Higginbotham has written a harrowing and compelling narrative which brings the disaster to life through the eyes of the men and women who witnessed it firsthand. The result is a masterful nonfiction thriller, and the definitive account of an event that changed history: a story that is more complex, more human, and more terrifying than the Soviet myth. Midnight in Chernobyl is an indelible portrait of one of the great disasters of the twentieth century, of human resilience and ingenuity, and the lessons learned when mankind seeks to bend the natural world to his will--lessons which, in the face of climate change and other threats, remain not just vital but necessary.
Author: Morrison, Toni, author.
Published: 2019
Call Number: 814 MORRISON
Format: Books
Summary: Arguably the most celebrated and revered writer of our time now gives us a new nonfiction collection--a rich gathering of her essays, speeches, and meditations on society, culture, and art, spanning four decades.00The Source of Self-Regard is brimming with all the elegance of mind and style, the literary prowess and moral compass that are Toni Morrison's inimitable hallmark. It is divided into three parts: the first is introduced by a powerful prayer for the dead of 9/11; the second by a searching meditation on Martin Luther King Jr., and the last by a heart-wrenching eulogy for James Baldwin. In the writings and speeches included here, Morrison takes on contested social issues: the foreigner, female empowerment, the press, money, "black matter(s)," and human rights. She looks at enduring matters of culture: the role of the artist in society, the literary imagination, the Afro-American presence in American literature, and in her Nobel lecture, the power of language itself. And here too is piercing commentary on her own work (including The Bluest Eye, Sula, Tar Baby, Jazz, Beloved, and Paradise) and that of others, among them, painter and collagist Romare Bearden, author Toni Cade Bambara, and theater director Peter Sellars.
Author: Damour, Lisa, 1970- author.
Published: 2019
Call Number: 155.5
Format: Books
Summary: Though anxiety has risen among young people overall, studies confirm that it has skyrocketed in girls. Research finds that the number of girls who said that they often felt nervous, worried, or fearful jumped 55% from 2009 to 2014 while the comparable number for adolescent boys has remained unchanged. As a clinical psychologist who specializes in working with girls, Lisa Damour, Ph.D., has witnessed this rising tide of stress and anxiety in her own research, private practice, and in the all-girls' school where she consults, and knew this had to be the topic of her new book. In the same engaging, anecdotal style and reassuring tone that won over thousands of readers of her first book, Untangled, Damour starts by addressing the facts about psychological pressure. Surprisingly, she explains the underappreciated value of stress and anxiety--that stress can helpfully stretch us beyond our comfort zones and anxiety can play a key role in keeping girls safe. When we emphasize the benefits of stress and anxiety we can help our daughters take them in stride. But no one wants their girl to suffer from emotional overload, so Damour then turns to the many facets of their lives where tension takes hold: their interactions at home, pressures at school, social anxiety among other girls and among boys, and on social media. As readers move through the layers of girls' lives, they'll learn about the critical steps that adults can take to shield their daughters from the toxic pressures to which our culture--including we, as parents--subjects girls.
Author: Wright, Snowden, 1981- author.
Published: 2019
Call Number: F WRIGHT
Format: Books
Summary: "Moving from Mississippi to Paris to New York and back again, an epic saga of family, ambition, passion, and tragedy that brings to life one unforgettable Southern dynasty--the Forsters, founders of the world's first major soft-drink company--against the backdrop of more than a century of American cultural history"-- The child of immigrants, Houghton Forster has always wanted more--from his time as a young boy in Mississippi, working twelve-hour days at his father's drugstore; to the moment he first laid eyes on his future wife, Annabelle Teague, a true Southern belle of aristocratic lineage; to his invention of the delicious fizzy drink that would transform him from tiller boy into the founder of an empire, the Panola Cola Company, and entice a youthful, enterprising nation entering a hopeful new age. Now the heads of a preeminent American family spoken about in the same breath as the Hearsts and the Rockefellers, Houghton and Annabelle raise their four children with the expectation they'll one day become world leaders. The burden of greatness falls early on eldest son Montgomery, a handsome and successful politician who has never recovered from the horrors and heartbreak of the Great War. His younger siblings Ramsey and Lance, known as the "infernal twins," are rivals not only in wit and beauty, but in their utter carelessness with the lives and hearts of others. Their brother Harold, as gentle and caring as the twins can be cruel, is slowed by a mental disability--and later generations seem equally plagued by misfortune, forcing Houghton to seriously consider who should control the company after he's gone.
Author: Wilkinson, Lauren, 1984- author.
Published: 2019 2018
Call Number: F WILKINSO
Format: Books
Author: Sudbanthad, Pitchaya, author.
Published: 2019
Call Number: F SUDBANTH
Format: Books
Summary: "A house in the center of Bangkok becomes the point of confluence where lives are shaped by upheaval, memory, and the lure of home. Witness to two centuries' flux in one of the world's most restless cities, a house plays host to longings and losses past, present, and future. A nineteenth-century missionary doctor pines for the comforts of New England even as he finds the vibrant foreign chaos of Siam increasingly difficult to resist. A post-war society woman marries, mothers, and holds court, little suspecting the course of her future. A jazz pianist is summoned in the 1970s to conjure music that will pacify resident spirits, even as he's haunted by ghosts of his former life. Not long after, a young woman gives swimming lessons in the luxury condos that have eclipsed the old house, trying to outpace the long shadow of her political past. And in the post-submergence Bangkok of the future, a band of savvy teenagers guides tourists and former residents past waterlogged, ruined landmarks, selling them tissues to wipe their tears for places they themselves do not remember. Time collapses as these stories collide and converge, linked by blood, memory, yearning, chance, and the forces voraciously making and remaking the amphibian, ever-morphing city itself. Bangkok Wakes to Rain is a wildly imaginative, mesmerizing reading experience from an author at the beginning of what promises to be a thrilling career"--
Author: McCracken, Elizabeth, author.
Published: 2019
Call Number: F MCCRACKE
Format: Books
Summary: "A sweeping and enchanting new novel from the widely beloved, award-winning author Elizabeth McCracken about three generations of an unconventional New England family who own and operate a candlepin bowling alley"-- From the day she is discovered unconscious in a New England cemetery at the turn of the twentieth century--nothing but a bowling ball, a candlepin, and fifteen pounds of gold on her person--Bertha Truitt is an enigma to everyone in Salford, Massachusetts. She has no past to speak of, or at least none she is willing to reveal, and her mysterious origin scandalizes and intrigues the townspeople, as does her choice to marry and start a family with Leviticus Sprague, the doctor who revived her. But Bertha is plucky, tenacious, and entrepreneurial, and the bowling alley she opens quickly becomes Salford's most defining landmark--with Bertha its most notable resident. When Bertha dies in a freak accident, her past resurfaces in the form of a heretofore-unheard-of son, who arrives in Salford claiming he is heir apparent to Truitt Alleys. Soon it becomes clear that, even in her death, Bertha's defining spirit and the implications of her obfuscations live on, infecting and affecting future generations through inheritance battles, murky paternities, and hidden wills. In a voice laced with insight and her signature sharp humor, Elizabeth McCracken has written an epic family saga set against the backdrop of twentieth-century America. Bowlaway is both a stunning feat of language and a brilliant unraveling of a family-s myths and secrets, its passions and betrayals, and the ties that bind and the rifts that divide.
Author: Robinson, Peter, 1950- author.
Published: 2019 2018
Call Number: F ROBINSON
Format: Books
Summary: One of the world's greatest suspense writers returns with this gripping, powerful new mystery featuring Alan Banks, continuing what Stephen King calls "the best series now on the market." "Two suspicious deaths challenge DS Alan Banks and his crack investigative team. A young local student's body is found in an abandoned car on a lonely country road. The death looks like suicide, but there are too many open questions for Banks and his team to rule out foul play. The victim didn't own a car. She didn't even drive. How did she get there? Where--and when--did she die? Did someone move her, and if so, why? A man in his sixties is found dead in a gully up on the wild moorland. He is wearing an expensive suit and carrying no identification. Post mortem findings indicate that he died from injuries sustained during a fall. Was it an accident--did he slip and fall? Or was he pushed? Why was he up there? And why are there no signs of a vehicle near where he fell? As the inconsistencies multiply and the mysteries surrounding these two cases proliferate, a source close to Annie reveals a piece of information that shocks the team and impacts the investigations. An old enemy has returned in a new guise--a nefarious foe who will stop at nothing, not even murder, to get what he wants. With the stakes raised, the hunt is on. But will Banks be able to find the evidence to stop him in time?" --
Author: Anders, Charlie, author.
Published: 2019
Call Number: F ANDERS
Format: Books
Summary: ""If you control our sleep, then you can own our dreams . . . And from there, it's easy to control our entire lives." The bestselling author of All the Birds in the Sky returns with a strange, haunting, and deeply human tale. Sophie serves coffee at an underground cafe. She stays in the shadows and listens to the troubles of the parlor guests, but does not draw attention to herself for one simple reason: Sophie is supposed to be dead. When a nationalistic revolution forces Sophie from her safe haven, she must make a dangerous journey to a new city, one that revels in hedonism and chaos. After joining up with a band of smugglers, she finds herself on a long and treacherous path that will lead her far closer to the truth of her entire world---and to the dangers that lurk even in the light of day" --
Author: Robb, J. D., 1950- author.
Published: 2019
Call Number: F ROBB
Format: Books
Summary: In this gritty and gripping new novel in the #1 New York Times bestselling series, Eve Dallas fights to save the innocent--and serve justice to the guilty--on the streets of New York. Homicide cop Eve Dallas and her billionaire husband, Roarke, are building a brand-new school and youth shelter. They know that the hard life can lead kids toward dangerous crossroads--and with this new project, they hope to nudge a few more of them onto the right path. For expert help, they hire child psychologist Dr. Rochelle Pickering--whose own brother pulled himself out of a spiral of addiction and crime with Rochelle's support. Lyle is living with Rochelle while he gets his life together, and he's thrilled to hear about his sister's new job offer. But within hours, triumph is followed by tragedy. Returning from a celebratory dinner with her boyfriend, she finds Lyle dead with a syringe in his lap, and Eve's investigation confirms that this wasn't just another OD. After all his work to get clean, Lyle's been pumped full of poison--and a neighbor with a peephole reports seeing a scruffy, pink-haired girl fleeing the scene. Now Eve and Roarke must venture into the gang territory where Lyle used to run, and the ugly underground world of tattoo parlors and strip joints where everyone has taken a wrong turn somewhere. They both believe in giving people a second chance. Maybe even a third or fourth. But as far as they're concerned, whoever gave the order on Lyle Pickering's murder has run out of chances...
Author: Letts, Elizabeth, author.
Published: 2019
Call Number: F LETTS
Format: Books
Summary: "This richly imagined novel tells the story behind The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the book that inspired the iconic film, through the eyes of author L. Frank Baum's intrepid wife, Maud. Hollywood, 1938: As soon as she learns that M-G-M is adapting her late husband's masterpiece for the screen, seventy-seven-year-old Maud Gage Baum sets about trying to finagle her way onto the set. Nineteen years after Frank's passing, Maud is the only person who can help the producers stay true to the spirit of the book--because she's the only one left who knows its secrets. But the moment she hears Judy Garland rehearsing the first notes of "Over the Rainbow," Maud recognizes the yearning that defined her own life story: from her youth as a suffragette's daughter to her coming of age as one of the first women in the Ivy League, from her blossoming romance with Frank to the hardscrabble prairie years that inspired The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Judy reminds Maud of a young girl she cared for and tried to help in South Dakota, a dreamer who never got her happy ending. Now, with the young actress under pressure from the studio as well as her ambitious stage mother, Maud resolves to protect her--the way she tried so hard to protect the real Dorothy"--
Author: Grippando, James, 1958- author.
Published: 2019
Call Number: F GRIPPAND
Format: Books
Summary: "James Grippando's crusader Jack Swyteck is back in his sixteenth adventure, a timely and pulse-pounding thriller"-- Julia Rodriguez and her teenage daughter Beatriz escaped bloodthirsty gangs, random violence and, Julia's abusive husband back in El Salvador. Arriving in Miami, mother and daughter struggled to carve their own piece of the American dream. While life in the States is hard, it is safer, until Julia's rejects her boss's unwanted sexual advances. Suddenly--thanks to an "anonymous" tip to U. S. immigration authorities--she is arrested, locked in detention with criminals, and slated for deportation. Jack's only viable legal move to save her is asylum--a long shot that's become nearly impossible in today's charged political climate. When Julia and Beatriz made the perilous trek north to freedom, they thought they'd left the danger behind them. But now, even Miami isn't safe. A ruthless enemy may have tracked them to south Florida and is biding time, patiently waiting to strike. In a case where the stakes have never been higher, Jack Sywteck may not be able to save his client--even if he wins.
Author: Tudor, C. J., author.
Published: 2019
Call Number: F TUDOR
Format: Books
Summary: "A suspense novel about a teacher returning to his hometown"-- "The thrilling second novel from the author of The Chalk Man, about a teacher with a hidden agenda who returns to settle scores at a school he once attended, only to uncover a darker secret than he could have imagined. Joe never wanted to come back to Arnhill. After the way things ended with his old gang--the betrayal, the suicide, the murder--and after what happened when his sister went missing, the last thing he wanted to do was return to his hometown. But Joe doesn't have a choice. Because judging by what was done to that poor Morton kid, what happened all those years ago to Joe's sister is happening again. And only Joe knows who is really at fault. Lying his way into a teaching job at his former high school is the easy part. Facing off with former friends who are none too happy to have him back in town--while avoiding the enemies he's made in the years since--is tougher. But the hardest part of all will be returning to that abandoned mine where it all went wrong and his life changed forever, and finally confronting the shocking, horrifying truth about Arnhill, his sister, and himself. Because for Joe, the worst moment of his life wasn't the day his sister went missing. It was the day she came back."--
Author: Foley, Lucy (Novelist), author.
Published: 2019
Call Number: F FOLEY
Format: Books
Summary: During the languid days of the Christmas break, a group of thirtysomething friends from Oxford meet to welcome in the New Year together, a tradition they began as students ten years ago. For this vacation, they've chosen an idyllic and isolated estate in the Scottish Highlands--the perfect place to get away and unwind by themselves. They arrive on December 30th, just before a historic blizzard seals the lodge off from the outside world. But after a decade, the weight of secret resentments has grown too heavy for the group's tenuous nostalgia to bear. Amid the boisterous revelry of New Year's Eve, the cord holding them together snaps. On New Year's Day, one of them is dead, and another of them did it.
Author: Castellani, Christopher, 1972- author.
Published: 2019
Call Number: F CASTELLA
Format: Books
Summary: "An expansive yet intimate story of desire, artistic ambition, and fidelity, set in the glamorous literary and film circles of 1950s Italy in July of 1953, at a glittering party thrown by Truman Capote in Portofino, Italy, Tennessee Williams and his longtime lover Frank Merlo meet Anja Blomgren, a mysteriously taciturn young Swedish beauty and aspiring actress. Their encounter will go on to alter all of their lives. Ten years later, Frank revisits the tempestuous events of that fateful summer from his deathbed in Manhattan, where he waits anxiously for Tennessee to visit him one final time. Anja, now legendary film icon Anja Bloom, lives as a recluse in the present-day U.S., until a young man connected to the events of 1953 lures her reluctantly back into the spotlight after he discovers she possesses the only surviving copy of Williams's final play. What keeps two people together and what breaks them apart? Can we save someone else if we can't save ourselves? Like The Master and The Hours, Leading Men seamlessly weaves fact and fiction to navigate the tensions between public figures and their private lives. In an ultimately heartbreaking story about the burdens of fame and the complex negotiations of life in the shadows of greatness, Castellani creates an unforgettable leading lady in Anja Bloom and reveals the hidden machinery of one of the great literary love stories of the twentieth-century"--
Author: Luiselli, Valeria, 1983- author.
Published: 2019
Call Number: F LUISELLI
Format: Books
Summary: "From the two-time NBCC Finalist, a fiercely imaginative novel about a family's summer road trip across America--a journey that, with breathtaking imagery, spare lyricism, and profound humanity, probes the nature of justice and equality in America today. A mother and father set out with their kids from New York to Arizona. In their used Volvo--and with their ten-year-old son trying out his new Polaroid camera--the family is heading for the Apacheria: the region the Apaches once called home, and where the ghosts of Geronimo and Cochise might still linger. The father, a sound documentarist, hopes to gather an "inventory of echoes" from this historic, mythic place. The mother, a radio journalist, becomes consumed by the news she hears on the car radio, about the thousands of children trying to reach America but getting stranded at the southern border, held in detention centers, or being sent back to their homelands, to an unknown fate. But as the family drives farther west--through Virginia to Tennessee, across Oklahoma and Texas--we sense they are on the brink of a crisis of their own. A fissure is growing between the parents, one the children can feel beneath their feet. They are led, inexorably, to a grand, unforgettable adventure--both in the harsh desert landscape and within the chambers of their own imaginations. Told through the voices of the mother and her son, as well as through a stunning tapestry of collected texts and images--including prior stories of migration and displacement--Lost Children Archive is a story of how we document our experiences, and how we remember the things that matter to us the most. Blending the personal and the political with astonishing empathy, it is a powerful, wholly original work of fiction: exquisite, provocative, and deeply moving"-- "A novel about a family of four, on the cusp of fracture, who take a trip across America--a story told through varying points of view, and including archival documents and photographs"--
Author: Harper, Jane (Jane Elizabeth), author.
Published: 2019 2018
Call Number: F HARPER
Format: Books
Summary: Two brothers meet at the remote fence line separating their cattle ranches in the lonely outback. In an isolated belt of Western Australia, they are each other's nearest neighbor, their homes four hours' drive apart. The third brother lies dead at their feet. Something caused Cam, the middle child who had been in charge of the family homestead, to die alone in the middle of nowhere. So the eldest brother returns with his younger sibling to the family property and those left behind. But the fragile balance of the ranch is threatened. Amidst the grief, suspicion starts to take hold, and the eldest brother begins to wonder if more than one among them is at risk of crumbling as the weight of isolation bears down on them all. Dark, suspenseful, and deeply atmospheric, The Lost Man is the highly anticipated book from the bestselling and award-winning Jane Harper, author of The Dry and Force of Nature .
Author: Greaney, Mark, author.
Published: 2019
Call Number: F GREANEY
Format: Books
Summary: "The Gray Man deals in death with mathematical precision, but this time he may finally find himself on the wrong side of the equation in this blistering thriller from New York Times bestselling author Mark Greaney. Court Gentry's flight on a CIA transport plane is interrupted when a security team brings a hooded man aboard. The mysterious passenger is being transported to England where a joint CIA/MI6 team will interrogate him about a mole in Langley. When they land at an isolated airbase in the UK, they are attacked by a hostile force that kidnaps the prisoner. Gentry, the lone survivor, is ordered to track down the assassins and rescue the asset. In Virginia, an assault on a CIA safe house leaves dead and wounded agents littering a suburban neighborhood. The object of the attack is Court's former lover, Zoya Zakharova. She escapes, but with a team of killers on her trail. Now, two different agents on two different continents are battling blind against the impossible--but each may be holding the piece the other needs to fight their way out"--
Author: Cumming, Charles, 1971- author.
Published: 2019
Call Number: F CUMMING
Format: Books
Summary: Renowned author Kit Carradine is approached by an MI6 officer with a seemingly straightforward assignment: to attend a literary festival in Morocco and track down a mysterious woman hiding somewhere in the exotic, perilous city of Marrakesh. But when Carradine learns the woman is a dangerous fugitive with ties to international terrorism, the glamour of being a spy is soon tainted by fear and betrayal. Lara Bartok is a leading figure in Resurrection, a violent revolutionary movement whose brutal attacks on prominent right-wing public figures have spread hatred and violence across the world. Her disappearance ignites a race between warring intelligence services desperate to find her-at any cost. But as Carradine edges closer to the truth, he finds himself drawn to this brilliant, beautiful, and profoundly complex woman.--
Pages
