Author: Jeffries, Sabrina, author. Published: 2024 Call Number: PB JEFFRIES Format: Books Summary: With a fresh new hook for readers of Regency romance by Julia Quinn, Lisa Kleypas, and Madeline Hunter, New York Times bestselling author Sabrina Jeffries returns to the Dazzling Debutantes series featuring a trio of ladies who defy social constraints by starting a business as party planners to the ton. The creative force behind London's most dazzling events, these young women know plenty about fashion, food, and the perfect setting--but there is always more to learn about love. As a viscount's heir, Rafe Wolfford is obligated to take a wife someday. But she must be the right sort of wife--not too independent, and not inclined to delve into his escapades as a spy. The forthright, perceptive Lady Verity is altogether the wrong choice. But Rafe's courtship is merely a ruse to discover whether Verity or anyone else associated with Elegant Occasions is leaking crucial information to the French. That mission is all that matters--until fate, and desire, intervene. After enduring one disastrous engagement, Verity won't easily open her heart again, preferring to devote herself to Elegant Occasions. Rafe is charming, handsome, and kisses like the very devil, but she knows he's harboring secrets. Still, when her ex-fiancé tries to ruin her reputation, Rafe offers his hand. For the sake of her family and business, Verity has little choice but to accept. Yet turning this arrangement into a true marriage will require daring and trust--which neither will embrace easily, making surrender all the sweeter.
Author: Johnstone, William W., author. Johnstone, J. A., author. Published: 2024 Call Number: PB JOHNSTON Format: Books Summary: "Spanning from 1891 to 2023, this bold new saga of the American West follows Ashton Maddox who runs the biggest Black Angus ranch in the country as he and County Sheriff John T. Drew do what their forefathers did many years ago: join forces against a common enemy" --
Author: Ward, J. R., 1969- author. Published: 2024 Call Number: PB WARD Format: Books Summary: In the conclusion to the series, Lydia and Daniel brace themselves for his inevitable decline, but must first go on a dangerous rescue mission.
Author: Shelton, Paige, author. Published: 2024 2023 Call Number: PB SHELTON Format: Books Summary: "In Fateful Words, the eighth Scottish Bookshop Mystery from beloved author Paige Shelton, bookseller Delaney Nichols stakes her reputation--and her life--when a literary tour turns deadly... When Edwin, Delaney's boss at the Cracked Spine bookstore, leaves town on secret business, Delaney is called upon to guide his yearly literary tour around Edinburgh. But on the first night of the tour, at the inn where the tour group is staying, the inn manager falls--or is pushed--off the roof of the inn, and killed. Then, one of the tour members disappears, leaving a trail of puzzles in her wake. In a race against the clock, Delaney sets out on the expedition of her life, following clues around Edinburgh to get to the bottom of this mystery. Exploring sights from Greyfriars Bobby to the Royal Mile to the Sir Walter Scott Monument, she'll have to put the pieces together quickly, or the bookstore's survival could be on the line...as well as her own"--
Author: Johnstone, William W, author. Published: 2024 1994 Call Number: PB JOHNSTON Format: Books Summary: From the Texas battlegrounds to the Colorado Rockies and the California goldfields, Jamie MacCallister blazes new trails along the Western frontier, joining Kit Carson on his expedition from the Missouri to the Pacific.
Author: Norris, Michele, author. Published: 2024 Call Number: 305.8 Format: Books Summary: "Our Hidden Conversations is a unique compilation of stories, richly reported essays, and photographs providing a window into America during a tumultuous era. This powerful book offers an honest, if sometimes uncomfortable, conversation about race and identity, permitting us to eavesdrop on deep-seated thoughts, private discussions, and long submerged memories."-- "The prompt seemed simple: Race. Your Thoughts. Six Words. Please Send. The answers, though, have been challenging and complicated. In the twelve years since award-winning journalist Michele Norris first posed that question, over half a million people have submitted their stories to The Race Card Project inbox. The stories are shocking in their depth and candor, spanning the full spectrum of race, ethnicity, identity, and class. Even at just six words, the micro-essays can pack quite a punch, revealing, fear, pain, triumph, and sometimes humor. Responses such as: You're Pretty for a Black girl. White privilege, enjoy it, earned it. Lady, I don't want your purse. My ancestors massacred Indians near here. Urban living has made me racist. I'm only Asian when it's convenient..." --Amazon.com
Author: Ixta, Carolina, author. Published: 2024 Call Number: Y IXTA Format: Books Summary: Belen Dolores Itzel del Toro wants the normal stuff: to experience love or maybe have a boyfriend or at least just lose her virginity. But nothing is normal in East Oakland. Her father left her family. She's at risk of not graduating. And Leti, her super-Catholic, nerdy-ass best friend, is pregnant--by the boyfriend she hasn't told her parents about because he's Black and her parents are racist.
Author: Hefner, Crystal, author. Published: 2024 Call Number: B HEFNER Format: Books Summary: "A raw and unflinching look at the objectification and misogyny of the Playboy mansion, a woman's stolen young adulthood and her journey to self-acceptance, and a rare look inside Hugh Hefner's final days. Crystal offers a vulnerable and clear-eyed look at how her experience with Hugh Hefner catalyzed her transformative journey from someone who prized external validation over all else to a person who finally recognizes her true worth. This candid memoir provides a fascinating look behind the scenes at a powerful cultural icon and brand, and an equally empowering perspective on hard-won lessons about who we allow to determine our value."--
Author: Erdozain, Dominic, author. Published: 2024 Call Number: 363.33 Format: Books Summary: "This takedown of American gun culture argues that the nation's fathers did not intend the Second Amendment to guarantee an individual right to bear arms--and that this intentional distortion of the record is an urgent threat to democracy. Hundreds of lives are lost to firearms every day in America. The cost is more than the numbers--it is also the fear, the anxiety, the dread of public spaces that an armed society has created under the tortured rubric of freedom. But the norms of today are not the norms of American history or the values of its Founders. They are the product of a gun culture that has imposed its vision on a sleeping nation. Historian Dominic Erdozain argues that we have wrongly ceded the big-picture argument on guns--as we parse legislation on background checks and automatic weapons bans, we fail to ask: Do individual gun rights have any place at all in American democracy? Taking readers on a brilliant historical journey, Erdozain shows how the Founders feared the tyranny of individuals as much as the tyranny of kings--the idea that any person had a right to walk around armed was anathema to their notion of freedom and the enduring republic they hoped to build...To save our democracy, he argues, we must fight for the Founders' true idea of what it means to be free"--
Author: Hylton, Antonia, author. Published: 2024 Call Number: 362.2109 Format: Books Summary: "On a cold day in March of 1911, officials marched twelve Black men into the heart of a forest in Maryland. Under the supervision of a doctor, the men were forced to clear the land, pour cement, lay bricks, and harvest tobacco. When construction finished, they became the first twelve patients of the state's Hospital for the Negro Insane. For centuries, Black patients have been absent from our history books. Madness transports readers behind the brick walls of a Jim Crow asylum. In Madness, Peabody and Emmy award-winning journalist Antonia Hylton tells the 93-year-old history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the last segregated asylums with surviving records and a campus that still stands to this day in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. She blends the intimate tales of patients and employees whose lives were shaped by Crownsville with a decade-worth of investigative research and archival documents. Madness chronicles the stories of Black families whose mental health suffered as they tried, and sometimes failed, to find safety and dignity. Hylton also grapples with her own family's experiences with mental illness, and the secrecy and shame that it reproduced for generations. As Crownsville Hospital grew from an antebellum-style work camp to a tiny city sitting on 1,500 acres, the institution became a microcosm of America's evolving battles over slavery, racial integration, and civil rights. During its peak years, the hospital's wards were overflowing with almost 2,700 patients. By the end of the 20th-century, the asylum faded from view as prisons and jails became America's new focus. In Madness, Hylton traces the legacy of slavery to the treatment of Black people's bodies and minds in our current mental healthcare system. It is a captivating and heartbreaking meditation on how America decides who is sick or criminal, and who is worthy of our care or irredeemable"--
Author: Lord, Emma, author. Published: 2024 2023 Call Number: Y LORD Format: Books Summary: High school graduate Riley sets off to New York to find Tom, her childhood best friend and co-creator of the Getaway List of adventures they wanted to do together. "The day of her high school graduation, Riley realizes two things: One, that she has spent the last four years trying so hard to be a Good Kid for her mom that she has no idea who she really is anymore, and two, she has no idea what she wants because of it. The solution? Pack her bags and move to New York for the summer, where her childhood best friend Tom and co-creator of The Getaway List -- a list of all the adventures they've wanted to do together since he moved away -- will hopefully help her get in touch with her old adventurous self, and pave the road to a new future..." --Amazon.com
Author: Anderson, Chris, author. Published: 2024 Call Number: 177.7 Format: Books Summary: "From the bestselling author, media pioneer, and curator of TED, an inspiring book about one of humankind's defining but overlooked impulses, and how we can super-charge its potential to build a hopeful future. Recent years have been tough on optimists. Hopes that the Internet might bring people together have been crushed by the divisiveness of social media. But as head of TED, Chris Anderson has had a ringside view of the world's boldest thinkers sharing their most uplifting ideas. Inspired by them and the unique insights he gained from how online sharing transformed TED into a global beacon of transformative ideas, he believes there's a pathway back from outrage to optimism. It all comes down to reimagining the role that one of the most fundamental human virtues-generosity-can play in our connected era. What if generosity could become infectious generosity? Anderson shows how the same technologies that have bred negativity can also be mobilized as an exponential force for good, to create chain reactions of generous behavior. Every day, remarkable stories of individual acts of kindness have sparked remarkable ripple effects when shared online, achieving a level of impact never before possible. This book captures some of the most inspiring such stories, revealing their potential to solve problems and make people happier in the process. Gifts of time, talent, connection, and kindness have always been part of what it is to be a good human. But today they can be catalyzed to have world-changing, self-replicating impact. In Infectious Generosity, Anderson offers readers a playbook to fine-tune these actions, to take generosity from invisible to transformative. Infectious Generosity invites readers, as well as companies, investors, and organizations, to give more to the world than they take from it, and to wholeheartedly embrace new forms of infectious generosity. Doing so isn't merely a test of character-our entire future may depend on it. This book shows the way"--
Author: Burns, V. M., 1964- author. Published: 2024 2023 Call Number: LP F BURNS Format: Large print Summary: "While Sam wraps up her first book tour, Nana Jo has kept Market Street Mysteries running smoothly. The last stop is a prestigious book festival in Sam's hometown of North Harbor, Michigan. But not everyone thinks the guest of honor, bestselling author Judith Hunter, deserves stellar reviews. Sam witnesses nasty arguments between Judith and two different authors--who accuse her of plagiarism and sabotage. When a publicist is poisoned during a cocktail reception, Sam wonders if the killer missed the intended target. With Nana Jo lending a hand, Sam tries to solve the case before the festival delivers another fatality" --
Author: Ditum, Sarah, author. Published: 2024 Call Number: 302.2308 Format: Books Summary: A scathing reexamination of the lives of nine female celebrities in the 2000s, and the sexist, exploitative culture that took them down. Welcome to celebrity culture in the early aughts: the reign of Perez Hilton, celebrity sex tapes, and dueling tabloids fed by paparazzi who were willing to do anything to get the shot. It was a time when the Internet was still the Wild West, and when slut-shaming, fat-shaming, and revenge porn were all considered perfectly legitimate. Celebrity was seen as a commodity to be consumed, and for the famous women of this era, they were never as popular--or as vulnerable--as when they were in crisis. Toxic tells the stories of nine women who defined the hell of celebrity in the 2000s and explores how they were devoured by fame, how they attempted to control their own narratives, and how they succeeded or (more often) failed. These women come from all walks of fame--pop music, acting, reality TV, and WWE wrestling. Some of them you think you know already, and others will be less familiar, but Toxic reveals these women neither as pure victims nor as conniving strategists, but as complex individuals trying to navigate celebrity while under attack from a vicious and fast-changing media. Their portrayal has shaped the way that all women--famous or otherwise--are viewed today, and their experiences preempted the now-universal condition, especially thanks to social media, of living under the public gaze. In this book, Ditum brings readers back to a time before second chances and redemption arcs, and traces the ripple effects that came in the wake of spending a decade vilifying our idols. We'll see how these women's stories intersect with the birth of YouTube, the rise of Internet pornography, and the emergence of Donald Trump as a political force. It's time to come to terms with how those cultural events shaped the way we see ourselves, our bodies, our relationships, our aspirations, and our presence in the wider world. We are all products of the toxic decade.
Author: Durkin, Hannah, author. Published: 2024 Call Number: 306.362 Format: Books Summary: "Joining the ranks of Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Zora Neale Hurston's rediscovered classic Barracoon, an immersive and revelatory history of the Clotilda, the last slave ship to land on US soil, told through the stories of its survivors-the last documented survivors of any slave ship-whose lives diverged and intersected in profound ways"--
Author: Shuster, Simon, author. Published: 2024 Call Number: 947.7086 Format: Books Summary: "Acclaimed journalist Simon Shuster gives us the first inside account of the Russian invasion of Ukraine from the perspective of President Volodymyr Zelensky and his team, who granted him unprecedented access"-- "Time correspondent Simon Shuster chronicles the life and leadership of Volodymyr Zelensky from the dressing rooms of his variety shows to the muddy trenches of Ukraine’s war with Russia. Based on four years of reporting; extensive travels with President Zelensky to the front; and dozens of interviews with him, his wife, his friends and enemies, his advisers, ministers and military commanders, Shuster tells the intimate and revealing story of the president’s evolution from a slapstick actor to a symbol of resilience.In their most candid accounts of the war so far, members of Zelensky’s inner circle show how the president’s character changed under the strains of leadership and the horrors he witnessed each day. His wife, First Lady Olena Zelenska, describes her escape from Kyiv with their children, her life on the run, and the tensions that emerged in her marriage as she struggled to return to a meaningful role in the administration. Ukraine’s top military commander, General Valery Zaluzhny, shares the untold story of his fraught relationship with the president and the subsequent consequences..." --Amazon.com
Author: Cwiklik, Robert, author. Published: 2024 Call Number: 973.82 CWIKLIK Format: Books Summary: An impeccably researched, character-driven narrative history recounting the fascinating late-Reconstruction Era mission of General Philip Sheridan, a Union hero dispatched to the South ten years after the Civil War to protect the rights of newly freed black men, who were under siege by violent paramilitary groups like the White League intent on erasing their postwar gains. "In late 1874, nearly ten years after the Civil War, former slaves, or freedmen, found themselves under siege in the South by violent paramilitary groups like the White League, intent on erasing their newly won voting rights and other postwar gains and consigning them to a condition little better than slavery. President Ulysses S. Grant, vowing to enforce, "with rigor," laws protecting the rights of former slaves, asked General Philip H. Sheridan to visit New Orleans and other Southern trouble spots to investigate the freedmen's plight, all while pretending to be on vacation. Sheridan's Secret Mission recounts the feisty Union war hero's Southern sojourn amid tragic episodes of racial terror that ultimately fueled the overthrow of Reconstruction-era protections for black rights..." --Amazon.com
Author: Alford, Mary (Romance fiction writer), author. Published: 2024 2023 Call Number: LP F ALFORD Format: Large print Summary: "After FBI agent Jade Powell's sister is abducted, K-9 trainer Ethan Connors is determined to help the woman who once saved his life. But an enemy from Jade's past will stop at nothing to keep his agenda hidden. With a storm brewing and a killer hunting them deep into Amish country, can Jade and Ethan survive the treacherous weather long enough to bring a criminal mastermind to justice?"-- "A winter storm turns a fight for justice into a struggle for survival... After FBI agent Jade Powell's sister is abducted, K-9 trainer Ethan Connors is determined to help the woman who once saved his life. But an enemy from Jade's past will stop at nothing to keep his agenda hidden. With a storm brewing and a killer hunting them deep into Amish country, can Jade and Ethan survive the treacherous weather long enough to bring a criminal mastermind to justice?" --Amazon.com
Author: Miller, Vanessa, author. Published: 2024 Call Number: F MILLER Format: Books Summary: "The American Queen is based on actual events that occurred between 1865-1889 and shares the unsung history of a Black woman who built a kingdom as a refuge for the courageous people who dared to dream of a different way of life."-- "Over the twenty-four years she was enslaved on the Montgomery Plantation, Louella learned to feel one thing: hate. Hate for the man who sold her mother. Hate for the overseer who left her daddy to hang from a noose. Hate so powerful there's no room in her heart for love, not even for the honorable Reverend William, whom she likes and respects enough to marry.But when William finally listens to Louella's pleas and leads the formerly enslaved people off the plantation, Louella begins to replace her hate with hope. Hope that they will find a place where they can live free from fear. Hope that despite her many unanswered prayers, she can learn to trust for new miracles..." --Amazon.com
Author: Taylor, Brad, 1965- author. Published: 2024 Call Number: F TAYLOR Format: Books Summary: To finally end the war between their nations, a rogue Ukranian band of partisans known as the Wolves teams up with members of Russia's military intelligence to assassinate Vladimir Putin. But Putin is aware of the traitors in his midst and assigns the loyal commander of the Russian national guard to root them out. It's a mission Victor Petrov is expected to undertake after he prevents Sweden from joining NATO, by assassinating a deputy minister of foreign affairs. After receiving intelligence about the threat in Sweden, the U.S. sends Pike Logan to identify Victor's target, only for him to get caught in the crossfire between Putin's agents and the Wolves. When the smoke clears, Pike makes no effort to stop the Wolves on their ultimate mission, believing it just, until he discovers that their operation has unimaginable consequences. For Putin is preparing a devastating endgame: activating the Dead Man's Hand nuclear response that will launch Russia's missiles in the event of his death.
