LibGuides: Library Discussion Groups: Reality Readers

Reality Readers Titles by Year

January 22: Killing the Legends by Bill O'Reilly; Martin Dugard
Call Number: 306.48 OReilly
ISBN: 9781250283306
Publication Date: 2022-09-27
Elvis Presley, John Lennon, and Muhammad Ali. These three icons changed not only the worlds of music, film, and sports, but the world itself. Their faces were known everywhere, in every nation, across every culture. And their stories became larger than life―until their lives spun out of control at the hands of those they most trusted. In Killing the Legends, Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard explore the lives, legacies, and tragic deaths of three of the most famous people of the 20th century. Each experienced immense success, then failures that forced them to change; each faced the challenge of growing old in fields that privilege youth; and finally, each became isolated, cocooned by wealth but vulnerable to the demands of those in their innermost circles.
February 26: Hands to the Spindle by Paula Mitchell Marks; Walle Conoly
ISBN: 9780890966990
Publication Date: 1996-03-01
In nineteenth-century Texas women’s hands created most of the clothes their families wore, the blankets used to cover their tired bodies, and the textiles that furnished their homes. Spinning, weaving, dyeing, and knitting of clothing and linens gave them the [palette] to display their abilities and their dreams of a better future. These day-to-day activities of Texas women spinners and weavers come to life in the award-winning author Paula Mitchell Marks’ Hands to the Spindle. The hum of the spinning wheel and the clatter of the loom provided regular accompaniment to the lives of many Texas women and their families. Producing much-needed garments and cloth also provided an escape from the worries and isolation of frontier life. One charming early chronicler, Mary Crownover Rabb, kept her spinning wheel whistling all day and most of the night because the spinning kept her “from hearing the Indians walking around hunting mischief.”
March 25: Year of the Tiger by Alice Wong
Call Number: BIOGRAPHY Wong
ISBN: 9780593315392
Publication Date: 2022-09-06
Drawing on a collection of original essays, previously published work, conversations, graphics, photos, commissioned art by disabled and Asian American artists, and more, Alice uses her unique talent to share an impressionistic scrapbook of her life as an Asian American disabled activist, community organizer, media maker, and dreamer. From her love of food and pop culture to her unwavering commitment to dismantling systemic ableism, Alice shares her thoughts on creativity, access, power, care, the pandemic, mortality, and the future. As a self-described disabled oracle, Alice traces her origins, tells her story, and creates a space for disabled people to be in conversation with one another and the world. Filled with incisive wit, joy, and rage, Wong’s Year of the Tiger will galvanize readers with big cat energy.
April 22: The Captured by Scott Zesch
Call Number: TEXANA 303.482 Zesch
ISBN: 9780312317898
Publication Date: 2005-12-27
On New Year's Day in 1870, ten-year-old Adolph Korn was kidnapped by an Apache raiding party. Traded to Comaches, he thrived in the rough, nomadic existence, quickly becoming one of the tribe's fiercest warriors. Forcibly returned to his parents after three years, Korn never adjusted to life in white society. He spent his last years in a cave, all but forgotten by his family. That is, until Scott Zesch stumbled over his own great-great-great uncle's grave. Determined to understand how such a "good boy" could have become Indianized so completely, Zesch travels across the west, digging through archives, speaking with Comanche elders, and tracking eight other child captives from the region with hauntingly similar experiences.
May 20: Second Battle for the Alamo by Debra L. Winegarten
Call Number: TEXANA 976.4351 Alter
ISBN: 9781493031313
Publication Date: 2020-01-10
By 1900, the tale of the 300 Texians who died in the 1836 battle of the Alamo had already become legend. But to corporate interests in the growing City of San Antonio, the land where that blood was shed was merely a desirable plot of land across the street from new restaurants and hotels, with only a few remaining crumbling buildings to tell the tale. When two women, Adina Emilia De Zavala, the granddaughter of the first vice-president of the Texas Republic, and Clara Driscoll, the daughter of one of Texas’s most prominent ranch families and first bankers, learned of the plans, they hatched a plan to preserve the site—and in doing so, they reinvigorated both the legend and lore of the Alamo and cemented the site’s status as hallowed ground. These two strong-willed, pioneering women were very different, but the story of how they banded together and how the Alamo became what it is today despite those differences, is compelling reading for those interested in Texas history and Texas’s larger-than-life personality.
June 24: The Lost City of Z by David Grann
Call Number: 918.1 Grann
ISBN: 9781400078455
Publication Date: 2010-01-26
After stumbling upon a hidden trove of diaries, acclaimed writer David Grann set out to determine what happened to the British explorer Percy Fawcett and his quest for the Lost City of Z. For centuries Europeans believed the Amazon, the world’s largest rain forest, concealed the glittering kingdom of El Dorado. Thousands had died looking for it, leaving many scientists convinced that the Amazon was truly inimical to humankind. In 1925 Fawcett ventured into the Amazon to find an ancient civilization, hoping to make one of the most important discoveries in history. Then he vanished. Over the years countless perished trying to find evidence of his party and the place he called “The Lost City of Z.”
July 22: Tea in Tripoli by Bernadette Nason
ISBN: 9780998784809
Publication Date: 2017-05-31
Broken by divorce, debt, and workplace sexual harassment, twenty-six-year-old Bernadette Nason is hanging by a thread. When her cat is run over by a garbage truck, Nason makes an impetuous decision. With almost no travel experience, she grabs the first available overseas job and, within two months, finds herself in Libya. ‘Fitting in’ has never been her strength, yet here she is, the most unstable, self-loathing, slightly overweight fish ever to throw itself recklessly out of its own water. Move over, Bridget Jones, there’s a new, real-life idiot in town.Inspired by her expatriate adventures during Gaddafi's turbulent regime, c. 1984-85, Nason covers her thwarted desire to ‘fit in’, from bizarre daily life to terrifying confrontations with the Morality Police. Told with candor and wit, TEA IN TRIPOLI, follows a young woman’s attempts to escape her past on an extraordinary, often perilous, journey of self-discovery. It’s sure to resonate with anyone who has ever run away from problems instead of taking care of business.
August 26: National Treasures by Caroline Shenton
Call Number: 940.53 Shenton
ISBN: 9781529387452
Publication Date: 2023-10-10
As Hitler prepared to invade Poland during the sweltering summer of 1939, men and women from across London's museums, galleries and archives formulated ingenious plans to send the nation's highest prized objects to safety. Using stately homes, tube tunnels, slate mines, castles, prisons, stone quarries and even their own homes, a dedicated bunch of unlikely misfits packed up the nation's greatest treasures and, in a race against time, dispatched them throughout the country on a series of top-secret wartime adventures.
September 23: Babylon's Ark by Lawrence Anthony; Graham Spence
Call Number: 590.73 Anthony
ISBN: 9780312382155
Publication Date: 2008-07-08
When the Iraq war began, conservationist Lawrence Anthony could think of only one thing: the fate of the Baghdad Zoo, caught in the crossfire at the heart of the city. Once Anthony entered Iraq he discovered that hostilities and uncontrolled looting had devastated the zoo and its animals. Working with members of the zoo staff and a few compassionate U.S. soldiers, he defended the zoo, bartered for food on war-torn streets, and scoured bombed palaces for desperately needed supplies. Babylon's Ark chronicles Anthony's hair-raising efforts to save a pride of Saddam's lions, close a deplorable black-market zoo, run ostriches through shoot-to-kill checkpoints, and rescue the dictator's personal herd of Thoroughbred Arabian horses. A tale of the selfless courage and humanity of a few men and women living dangerously for all the right reasons, Babylon's Ark is an inspiring and uplifting true-life adventure of individuals on both sides working together for the sake of magnificent wildlife caught in a war zone.
October 28: The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale
Call Number: 364.152 Summerscale
ISBN: 9780802715357
Publication Date: 2008-04-15
In June of 1860 three-year-old Saville Kent was found at the bottom of an outdoor privy with his throat slit. The crime horrified all England and led to a national obsession with detection, ironically destroying, in the process, the career of perhaps the greatest detective in the land.

At the time, the detective was a relatively new invention; there were only eight detectives in all of England and rarely were they called out of London, but this crime was so shocking, as Kate Summerscale relates in her scintillating new book, that Scotland Yard sent its best man to investigate, Inspector Jonathan Whicher. Whicher quickly believed the unbelievable―that someone within the family was responsible for the murder of young Saville Kent. Without sufficient evidence or a confession, though, his case was circumstantial and he returned to London a broken man. Though he would be vindicated five years later, the real legacy of Jonathan Whicher lives on in fiction: the tough, quirky, knowing, and all-seeing detective that we know and love today…from the cryptic Sgt. Cuff in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone to Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade.
November 25: Three Ordinary Girls by Tim Brady
Call Number: 940.53 Brady
ISBN: 9780806540382
Publication Date: 2021-02-23
May 10, 1940. The Netherlands was swarming with Third Reich troops. In seven days it's entirely occupied by Nazi Germany. Joining a small resistance cell in the Dutch city of Haarlem were three teenage girls: Hannie Schaft, and sisters Truus and Freddie Oversteegen who would soon band together to form a singular female underground squad. Smart, fiercely political, devoted solely to the cause, and "with nothing to lose but their own lives," Hannie, Truus, and Freddie took terrifying direct action against Nazi targets. That included sheltering fleeing Jews, political dissidents, and Dutch resisters. They sabotaged bridges and railways, and donned disguises to lead children from probable internment in concentration camps to safehouses. They covertly transported weapons and set military facilities ablaze. And they carried out the assassinations of German soldiers and traitors--on public streets and in private traps--with the courage of veteran guerilla fighters and the cunning of seasoned spies.
December 23: Global Warming: The Great Deception by Guy K. Mitchell; Guy K. Mitchell
ISBN: 9781954437760
Publication Date: 2022-07-26
Why do the U.N. and certain politicians in the U.S. and Western Europe continue to promote the fraudulent global warming hypothesis? With regards to the U.N., it is all about the money - money for research and to affect socio-economic change. For many politicians, it is all about the power - the power to control the lives of the electorate. Power is the ultimate narcotic. And money follows power in politics. In his new book, Guy Mitchell addresses all of these issues in detail.

January 23: The Gifts of Reading by Jennie Orchard (Selected by)
Call Number: 808.84 Macfarlane
ISBN: 9781474624930
Publication Date: 2022-04-12
This story, like so many stories, begins with a gift. The gift, like so many gifts, was a book....So begins the essay by Robert Macfarlane that inspired this collection. In this cornucopia of an anthology, you will find essays by some of the world's most beloved novelists, nonfiction writers, essayists and poets. You will see books taking flight in flocks, migrating around the world, landing in people's hearts and changing them for a day or a year or a lifetime. The Gifts of Reading forms inspiring, unforgettable, irresistible proof of the power and necessity of books and reading. 352 Pages
February 27: The Great Silence, 1918-1920 by Juliet Nicolson
ISBN: 9780802119445
Publication Date: 2010-06-01
The euphoria of Armistice Day 1918 vaporizes to reveal the carnage that war has left in its wake. But from Britain’s despair emerges new life. For veterans with faces demolished in the trenches, surgeon Harold Gillies brings hope with his miraculous skin-grafting procedure. Women win the vote, skirt hems leap, and Brits forget their troubles at packed dance halls. The remains of a nameless soldier are laid to rest in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Westminster Abbey. Nicolson crafts her narrative using a lively cast of characters: from an aging butler to a pair of newlyweds, from the Prince of Wales to T.E. Lawrence, the real-life Lawrence of Arabia. The Great Silence depicts a nation fighting the forces that threaten to tear it apart and discovering the common bonds that hold it together. 304 pages
March 27: All over but the Shoutin' by Rick Bragg
ISBN: 9780679442585
Publication Date: 1997-08-26
A haunting memoir about growing up dirt-poor in the Alabama hills and about moving on but never really being able to leave. The extraordinary gifts for evocation and insight and the stunning talent for story- telling that earned Rick Bragg a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1996 are here brought to bear on the wrenching story of his own family's life. 329 pages
April 24: If It's Not Impossible... by Barbara Winton
ISBN: 9781783065202
Publication Date: 2014-04-01
There are around 6000 people in the world today who owe their lives to Nicholas Winton. They are the descendants of a group of refugee children rescued by him from the Nazi threat in 1939. Some of them know of his existence and the part he played in their history, many others do not. It was a short event in his life but a critical one for those whose lives were saved. For him that intervention was over in a flash and other adventures supplanted it. Only much later did this episode re-emerge in his life and ever since has brought him visitors from all over the world anxious to learn his story. 298 pages
May 22: Through the Glass Ceiling to the Stars by Eileen M. Collins; Jonathan H. Ward
Call Number: BIOGRAPHY Collins
ISBN: 9781950994052
Publication Date: 2021-10-19
Eileen Collins was an aviation pioneer her entire career, from her crowning achievements as the first woman to command an American space mission as well as the first to pilot the space shuttle to her early years as one of the Air Force’s first female pilots. She was in the first class of women to earn pilot’s wings at Vance Air Force Base and was their first female instructor pilot. She was only the second woman admitted to the Air Force’s elite Test Pilot Program at Edwards Air Force Base. NASA had such confidence in her skills as a leader and pilot that she was entrusted to command the first shuttle mission after the Columbia disaster, returning the US to spaceflight after a two-year hiatus. Since retiring from the Air Force and NASA, she has served on numerous corporate boards and is an inspirational speaker about space exploration and leadership. 368 pages
June 26: Nature's Mutiny by Philipp Blom
Call Number: 304.2 Blom
ISBN: 9781631494048
Publication Date: 2019-02-19
Recounting the deep legacy and far-ranging consequences of this “Little Ice Age,” acclaimed historian Philipp Blom reveals how the European landscape had suddenly, but ineradicably, changed by the mid-seventeenth century. While apocalyptic weather patterns destroyed entire harvests and incited mass migrations, they gave rise to the growth of European cities, the emergence of early capitalism, and the vigorous stirrings of the Enlightenment. A timely examination of how a society responds to profound and unexpected change, Nature’s Mutiny will transform the way we think about climate change in the twenty-first century and beyond. 352 pages
July 24: The Boys Who Challenged Hitler by Phillip Hoose
Call Number: 940.53 Hoose
ISBN: 9780374300227
Publication Date: 2015-05-12
At the outset of World War II, Denmark did not resist German occupation. Deeply ashamed of his nation's leaders, fifteen-year-old Knud Pedersen resolved with his brother and a handful of schoolmates to take action against the Nazis if the adults would not. Naming their secret club after the fiery British leader, the young patriots in the Churchill Club committed countless acts of sabotage, infuriating the Germans, who eventually had the boys tracked down and arrested. But their efforts were not in vain: the boys' exploits and eventual imprisonment helped spark a full-blown Danish resistance. 208 pages
August 28: Firehouse by David Halberstam; Denis Leary (Introduction by)
Call Number: 363.325 Halberstam
ISBN: 9780786888511
Publication Date: 2003-05-21
On the morning of September 11, 2001, two rigs carrying thirteen men set out from this firehouse: twelve of them would never return. Firehouse takes us to the epicenter of the tragedy. Through the kind of intimate portraits that are Halberstam's trademark, we watch the day unfold--the men called to duty while their families wait anxiously for news of them. In addition, we come to understand the culture of the firehouse itself: why gifted men do this; why, in so many instances, they are eager to follow in their fathers' footsteps and serve in so dangerous a profession; and why, more than anything else, it is not just a job, but a calling. 208 pages
September 25: Killing the Mob by Bill O'Reilly; Martin Dugard
Call Number: 364.1 OReilly
ISBN: 9781250273659
Publication Date: 2021-05-04
O’Reilly and co-author Martin Dugard trace the brutal history of 20th Century organized crime in the United States, and expertly plumb the history of this nation’s most notorious serial robbers, conmen, murderers, and especially, mob family bosses. Covering the period from the 1930s to the 1980s, O’Reilly and Dugard trace the prohibition-busting bank robbers of the Depression Era, such as John Dillinger, Bonnie & Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby-Face Nelson. In addition, the authors highlight the creation of the Mafia Commission, the power struggles within the “Five Families,” the growth of the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, the mob battles to control Cuba, Las Vegas and Hollywood, as well as the personal war between the U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy and legendary Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa. 304 pages
October 23: Fire in Paradise by Alastair Gee; Dani Anguiano
Call Number: 363.34 Gee
ISBN: 9781324005148
Publication Date: 2020-05-05
The harrowing story of the most destructive American wildfire in a century. This is the story of a town at the forefront of a devastating global shift―of a remarkable landscape sucked ever drier of moisture and becoming inhospitable even to trees, now dying in their tens of millions and turning to kindling. It is also the story of a lost community, one that epitomized a provincial, affordable kind of Californian existence that is increasingly unattainable. It is, finally, a story of a new kind of fire behavior that firefighters have never witnessed before and barely know how to handle. What happened in Paradise was unprecedented in America. Yet according to climate scientists and fire experts, it will surely happen again. 256 pages
November 27 & December 18 (SPECIAL DATE): The Mosquito Bowl by Buzz Bissinger
Call Number: 796.332 Bissinger
ISBN: 9780062879929
Publication Date: 2022-09-13
When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, college football was at the height of its popularity. As the nation geared up for total war, one branch of the service dominated the aspirations of college football stars: the United States Marine Corps. Which is why, on Christmas Eve of 1944, when the 4th and 29th Marine regiments found themselves in the middle of the Pacific Ocean training for what would be the bloodiest battle of the war – the invasion of Okinawa—their ranks included one of the greatest pools of football talent ever assembled: Former All Americans, captains from Wisconsin and Brown and Notre Dame, and nearly twenty men who were either drafted or would ultimately play in the NFL.
When the trash-talking between the 4th and 29th over who had the better football team reached a fever pitch, it was decided: The two regiments would play each other in a football game as close to the real thing as you could get in the dirt and coral of Guadalcanal. The bruising and bloody game that followed became known as “The Mosquito Bowl.” 480 pages

January 24: A Love Supreme by Ashley Kahn; Elvin Jones (Foreword by)
ISBN: 9780670031368
Publication Date: 2002-10-28
Few albums in the canon of popular music have had the influence, resonance, and endurance of John Coltrane's 1965 classic A Love Supreme—a record that proved jazz was a fitting medium for spiritual exploration and for the expression of the sublime. Author Ashley Kahn tells the story of the genesis, creation, and aftermath of this classic recording. Featuring interviews with more than 100 musicians, producers, friends, and family members; unpublished interviews with Coltrane and bassist Jimmy Garrison; and scores of never-before-seen photographs, 286 pages
February 28 & March 28: Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
Call Number: 303.4 Diamond
ISBN: 9780393061314
Publication Date: 2005-07-17
This books tells of why the peoples of certain continents succeeded in invading other continents and conquering or displacing their peoples. Until around 11,000 BC, all peoples were still Stone Age hunter/gatherers. A great divide occurred in the rates that human societies evolved. In Eurasia, parts of the Americas, and Africa, farming became the prevailing mode of
existence when indigenous wild plants and animals were domesticated by prehistoric planters and herders. Those who gained a head start in producing food would collide with preliterate cultures, shaping the modern world through conquest, displacement, and genocide. The paths that led from scattered centers of food to broad bands of settlement had a great deal to do with climate and geography. 480 pages
April 25: Broken (in the Best Possible Way) by Jenny Lawson
Call Number: 817 Lawson
ISBN: 9781250077035
Publication Date: 2021-04-06
With people experiencing anxiety and depression now more than ever, Jenny humanizes what we all face in an all-too-real way, reassuring us that we’re not alone and making us laugh while doing it. From the business ideas that she wants to pitch to Shark Tank, to the reason why Jenny can never go back to the post office, “Broken” leaves nothing to the imagination in the most satisfying way. And of course, Jenny’s long-suffering husband Victor – the Ricky to Jenny’s Lucille Ball – is present throughout. 304 pages
May 23: Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
ISBN: 9780525657743
Publication Date: 2021-04-20
Author Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. She tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band--and meeting the man who would become her husband--her Koreanness began to feel distant. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her. 256 pages
June 27: Something from the Oven by Laura Shapiro
ISBN: 9780670871544
Publication Date: 2004-03-30
In this captivating blend of culinary history and popular culture, the award-winning author of Perfection Salad shows us what happened when the food industry elbowed its way into the kitchen after World War II, brandishing canned hamburgers, frozen baked beans, and instant piecrusts. Big Business waged an all-out campaign to win the allegiance of American housewives, but most women were suspicious of the new foods—and the make-believe cooking they entailed. With sharp insight and good humor, Laura Shapiro shows how the ensuing battle helped shape the way we eat today, and how the clash in the kitchen reverberated elsewhere in the house as women struggled with marriage, work, and domesticity. This unconventional history overturns our notions about the ’50s and offers new thinking on some of its fascinating figures, including Poppy Cannon, Shirley Jackson, Julia Child, and Betty Friedan. 336 pages
July 25: Killing Crazy Horse by Bill O'Reilly
Call Number: 970.0041 OReilly
ISBN: 9781627797047
Publication Date: 2020-09-08
The bloody Battle of Tippecanoe was only the beginning. It’s 1811 and President James Madison has ordered the destruction of Shawnee warrior chief Tecumseh’s alliance of tribes in the Great Lakes region. But while General William Henry Harrison would win this fight, the armed conflict between Native Americans and the newly formed United States would rage on for decades. The authors venture through the fraught history of our country’s founding on already occupied lands, from General Andrew Jackson’s brutal battles with the Creek Nation to President James Monroe’s epic “sea to shining sea” policy, to President Martin Van Buren’s cruel enforcement of a “treaty” that forced the Cherokee Nation out of their homelands along what would be called the Trail of Tears. 320 pages
August 27: Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald
Call Number: 508 Macdonald
ISBN: 9780802128812
Publication Date: 2020-08-25
Animals don’t exist in order to teach us things, but that is what they have always done, and most of what they teach us is what we think we know about ourselves. In Vesper Flights, Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best loved essays, along with new pieces on topics ranging from nostalgia for a vanishing countryside to the tribulations of farming
ostriches to her own private vespers while trying to fall asleep. Helen invites us into her most intimate experiences: observing the massive migration of songbirds from the top of the Empire State Building, watching tens of thousands of cranes in Hungary, seeking the last golden orioles in Suffolk’s poplar forests. 288 pages
September 26: The Secret Rescue by Cate Lineberry
Call Number: 940.54 Lineberry
ISBN: 9780316220224
Publication Date: 2013-05-07
When twenty-six Army nurses and medics—part of the 807th Medical Air Evacuation Transport Squadron—boarded a cargo plane for transport in November 1943, they never anticipated the crash landing in Nazi-occupied Albania that would lead to a months-long struggle for survival. In a drama that captured the attention of the American public, the group and its flight crew dodged bullets and battled blinding winter storms as they climbed mountains and fought to stay alive, aided by courageous villagers who risked death at Nazi hands to help them. 320 pages
October 24: The Spy and the Traitor by Ben Macintyre
Call Number: 327.12 Macintyre
ISBN: 9781101904190
Publication Date: 2018-09-18
The son of two KGB agents and the product of the best Soviet institutions, the savvy, sophisticated Oleg Gordievsky grew to see his nation's communism as both criminal and philistine. He took his first posting for Russian intelligence in 1968 and eventually became the Soviet Union's top man in London, but from 1973 on he was secretly
working for MI6. For nearly a decade, as the Cold War reached its twilight, Gordievsky helped the West turn the tables on the KGB, exposing Russian spies and helping to foil countless intelligence plots, as the Soviet leadership grew increasingly paranoid at the United States's nuclear first -strike capabilities and brought the world closer to the brink of war. 368 pages
November 28: We Gather Together by Denise Kiernan
ISBN: 9780593183250
Publication Date: 2020-11-10
From Ancient Rome through 21st-century America, bestselling author Denise Kiernan brings us a biography of an idea: gratitude, as a compelling human instinct and a global concept, more than just a mere holiday. This book is anchored amid the strife of the Civil War, and driven by the fascinating story of Sarah Josepha Hale, a widowed mother with no formal schooling who became one of the 19th century’s most influential tastemakers and who campaigned for decades to make real an annual day of thanks. Working at the helm of one of the most widely read magazines in the nation, Hale introduced readers to such newfangled concepts as “domestic science,” white wedding gowns, and the Christmas tree. Hale penned novels, recipe books, essays and more, including the ubiquitous children’s poem, “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” And Hale herself never stopped pushing the leaders of her time, in pursuit of her goal. The man who finally granted her wish about a national
“thanksgiving” was Lincoln, the president of the war-torn nation in which Hale would never have the right to vote. 304 pages
December 19: Bad Smoke, Good Smoke by John R. Erickson
Call Number: TEXANA 363.37 Erickson
ISBN: 9781682830871
Publication Date: 2021-05-28
This book, while relating a tale of gut-wrenching destruction, also provides a more nuanced view of what is often a natural event, giving the two-sided story of our relationship with fire. Not just a first-hand account, the book also synthesizes and explains the latest research in range management, climate, and fire. Erickson tries to understand a rancher’s relationship to good smoke and to reconcile the symbiotic relationship that a rancher has with fire. Bad Smoke, Good Smoke gives voice to the particular pains that ranchers must face in our era of climate change and ever more powerful natural disasters. 208 pages

January 25: Honor in the Dust by Gregg Jones
Call Number: 959.1 Jones
ISBN: 9780451229045
Publication Date: 2012-02-07
On the eve of a new century, an up-and-coming Theodore Roosevelt set out to transform the U.S. into a major world power. The Spanish-American War would forever change America's standing in global affairs and drive the US into its own imperial showdown in the Philippines. From Admiral George Dewey's legendary naval victory in Manila Bay to the Rough Riders' heroic charge up San Juan Hill, from Roosevelt's rise to the presidency to charges of U.S. military misconduct in the Philippines, The book brilliantly captures an era brimming with American optimism and confidence as the nation expanded its influence abroad. 464 pages
February 22: Heartland by Sarah Smarsh
Call Number: BIOGRAPHY Smarsh
ISBN: 9781501133107
Publication Date: 2019-09-03
Smarsh was born a fifth generation Kansas wheat farmer on her paternal side and the product of generations of teen mothers on her maternal side. Through her experiences growing up as the daughter of a dissatisfied young mother and raised predominantly by her grandmother on a farm thirty miles west of Wichita, we are given a unique and essential look into the lives of poor and working class Americans living in the heartland. Combining memoir with powerful analysis and cultural commentary, Heartland is an uncompromising look at class, identity, and the particular perils of having less in a country known for its excess. 290 pages
March 22: Apocalypse Never by Michael Shellenberger
ISBN: 9780063001695
Publication Date: 2020-06-30
Michael Shellenberger has been fighting for a greener planet for decades. He helped save the world’s last unprotected redwoods. He co-created the predecessor to today’s Green New Deal. And he led a successful effort by climate scientists and activists to keep nuclear plants operating, preventing a spike of emissions. But in 2019, as some claimed “billions of people are going to die,” contributing to rising anxiety, including among adolescents, Shellenberger decided that, as a lifelong environmental activist, leading energy expert, and father of a teenage daughter, he needed to speak out to separate science from fiction. 432 pages
April 26: They Called Them Angels by Kathi Jackson
ISBN: 9780275968991
Publication Date: 2000-06-30
With the insight and intimacy of firsthand accounts from some of the thousands of army and navy nurses who served both stateside and overseas during World War II, this book tells the stories of the brave women who used any and all resources to save as many lives as possible. Although military nurses could have made more money as civilians, thousands chose to leave the security of home to care for the young men who went off to war. They were not saints but vibrant women whose performance changed both military and civilian nursing. Kathi Jackson's account follows army and navy nurses from the time they joined the military, through their active service, to their lives today. 222 pages
May 24: The Return by Hisham Matar
ISBN: 9780812985085
Publication Date: 2017-04-04
From Man Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Hisham Matar, a memoir of his journey home to his native Libya in search of answers to his father's disappearance. In 2012, after the overthrow of Qaddafi, the acclaimed novelist Hisham Matar journeys to his native Libya after an absence of thirty years. This book is a profoundly moving family memoir, a brilliant and affecting portrait of a country and a people on the cusp of immense change, and a disturbing and timeless depiction of the monstrous nature of absolute power. 272 pages
June 28: Beautiful Boy by David Sheff
ISBN: 9781328974716
Publication Date: 2018-09-04
Wrenching questions haunted David Sheff’s journey through his son Nic’s addiction to drugs and tentative steps toward recovery. Before Nic became addicted to crystal meth, he was a charming boy, joyous and funny, a varsity athlete and honor student adored by his two younger siblings. After meth, he was a trembling wraith who lied, stole, and lived on the streets. Sheff traces the first warning signs: the denial, the three a.m. phone calls—is it Nic? the police? the hospital? His preoccupation with Nic became an addiction in itself. But as a journalist, he instinctively researched every treatment that might save his son. And he refused to give up on Nic. 352 pages
July 26: Into the Abyss by Carol Shaben
ISBN: 9781455501960
Publication Date: 2014-05-13
On an icy night in October 1984, a commuter plane carrying 9 passengers crashed in the remote wilderness of northern Alberta, killing 6 people. Four survived: the rookie pilot, a prominent politician, a cop, and the criminal he was escorting to face charges. Despite the poor weather, Erik Vogel, the 24-year-old pilot, was under intense pressure to fly--a situation not uncommon to pilots working for small airlines. Overworked and exhausted, he feared losing his job if he refused to fly. Larry Shaben, the author's father and Canada's first Muslim Cabinet Minister, was commuting home after a busy week at the Alberta Legislature. After Paul Archambault, a drifter wanted on an outstanding warrant, boarded the plane, rookie Constable Scott Deschamps decided, against RCMP regulations, to remove his handcuffs--a decision that profoundly impacted the men's survival. 336 pages
August 23: Furious Hours by Casey Cep
Call Number: 364.152 Cep
ISBN: 9781101947869
Publication Date: 2019-05-07
The stunning story of an Alabama serial killer and the true-crime book that Harper Lee worked on obsessively in the years after To Kill a Mockingbird. Reverend Willie Maxwell was a rural preacher accused of murdering five of his family members for insurance money in the 1970s. With the help of a savvy lawyer, he escaped justice for years until a relative shot him dead at the funeral of his last victim. Despite hundreds of witnesses, Maxwell’s murderer was acquitted–thanks to the same attorney who had previously defended the Reverend. Sitting in the audience during the vigilante’s trial was Harper Lee...336 pages
September 27: Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich; Keith Gessen (Translator)
ISBN: 9781564784018
Publication Date: 2005-06-28
On April 26, 1986, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history occurred in Chernobyl and contaminated as much as three quarters of Europe. Voices from Chernobyl is the first book to present personal accounts of the tragedy. Journalist Svetlana Alexievich interviewed hundreds of people affected by the meltdown—from innocent citizens to firefighters to those called in to clean up the disaster—and their stories reveal the fear, anger, and uncertainty with which they still live. Composed of interviews in monologue form, Voices from Chernobyl is a crucially important work of immense force, unforgettable in its emotional power and honesty. 236 pages
October 25: A Woman Like Her by Sanam Maher
ISBN: 9781612198408
Publication Date: 2020-01-28
In 2016, Pakistan’s first social media celebrity, Qandeel Baloch, was murdered in a suspected honor killing. Her death quickly became a media sensation. It was both devastatingly routine and breathtakingly brutal, and in a new media landscape, it couldn’t be ignored. Qandeel had courted attention and outrage with a talent for self-promotion that earned her comparisons to Kim Kardashian—and made her the constant victim of harassment and death threats. Social media and reality television exist uneasily alongside honor killings and forced marriages in a rapidly, if unevenly, modernizing Pakistan, and Qandeel Baloch’s story became emblematic of the cultural divide. 255 pages
November 22: The Big Rich by Bryan Burrough
Call Number: LARGE PRINT 338.2 Burrough
ISBN: 9781594201998
Publication Date: 2009-01-27
In The Big Rich, bestselling author and Vanity Fair special correspondent Bryan Burrough chronicles the rise and fall of one of the great economic and political powerhouses of the twentieth century—Texas oil. By weaving together the epic sagas of the industry’s four greatest fortunes, Burrough has produced an enthralling tale of money, family, and power in the American century. 304 pages
December 27: Killing the SS by Bill O'Reilly; Martin Dugard
Call Number: 940.53 OReilly
ISBN: 9781250165541
Publication Date: 2018-10-09
As the horrors of the Third Reich began to be exposed after WWII, the war criminals who committed genocide went on the run. A few were swiftly caught, Others, however, evaded capture through a sophisticated Nazi organization designed to hide them. Among those war criminals were Josef Mengele, the "Angel of Death" who performed hideous medical experiments at Auschwitz; Martin Bormann, Hitler's brutal personal secretary; Klaus Barbie, the cruel "Butcher of Lyon"; and perhaps the most awful Nazi of all: Adolf Eichmann. This is the saga of the espionage and daring waged by "Nazi hunters." This disparate group included a French husband and wife team, an American lawyer who served in the army on D-Day, a German prosecutor who had signed an oath to the Nazi Party, Israeli Mossad agents, and a death camp survivor. Over decades, these men and women scoured the world, tracking down the SS fugitives and bringing them to justice.304 pages

January 27: Hiroshima by John Hersey
Call Number: 940.54 Hersey
ISBN: 9781684116881
Publication Date: 2019-01-22
On August 6, 1945, Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atom bomb ever dropped on a city. This book, John Hersey's journalistic masterpiece, tells what happened on that day. Told through the memories of survivors, this timeless, powerful and compassionate document has become a classic "that stirs the conscience of humanity" (The New York Times).

Almost four decades after the original publication of this celebrated book, John Hersey went back to Hiroshima in search of the people whose stories he had told. His account of what he discovered about them is now the eloquent and moving final chapter of Hiroshima.
February 24: The Girl with Seven Names by Hyeonseo Lee; David John (As told to)
ISBN: 9780007554836
Publication Date: 2015-07-02
An extraordinary insight into life under one of the world’s most ruthless and secretive dictatorships – and the story of one woman’s terrifying struggle to avoid capture/repatriation and guide her family to freedom.

As a child growing up in North Korea, Hyeonseo Lee was one of millions trapped by a secretive and brutal communist regime. Her home on the border with China gave her some exposure to the world beyond the confines of the Hermit Kingdom and, as the famine of the 1990s struck, she began to wonder, question and to realise that she had been brainwashed her entire life. Given the repression, poverty and starvation she witnessed surely her country could not be, as she had been told “the best on the planet”?

Aged seventeen, she decided to escape North Korea. She could not have imagined that it would be twelve years before she was reunited with her family.
March 23: Small Fry by Lisa Brennan-Jobs
Call Number: BIOGRAPHY BrennanJobs
ISBN: 9780802128232
Publication Date: 2018-09-04
Born on a farm and named in a field by her parents -- artist Chrisann Brennan and Steve Jobs -- Lisa Brennan-Jobs's childhood unfolded in a rapidly changing Silicon Valley. When she was young, Lisa's father was a mythical figure who was rarely present in her life. As she grew older, her father took an interest in her, ushering her into a new world of mansions, vacations, and private schools. His attention was thrilling, but he could also be cold, critical and unpredictable. When her relationship with her mother grew strained in high school, Lisa decided to move in with her father, hoping he'd become the parent she'd always wanted him to be. Part portrait of a complex family, part love letter to California in the seventies and eighties, Small Fry is the poignant story of a childhood spent between two imperfect but extraordinary homes.
April 27: West with the Night by Beryl Markham
ISBN: 1578989531
Publication Date: 2010-08-01
Markham is often described as "the first person" to fly the Atlantic east to west in a solo non-stop flight, though most now dispute this claim. When Markham decided to take on the Atlantic crossing, no pilot had yet flown non-stop from Europe to New York, and no woman had made the westward flight solo, though several had died trying. Markham hoped to claim both records. On September 4, 1936, she took off from Abingdon, England. After a 20-hour flight she crash-landed at Baleine Cove on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. In spite of falling short of her goal, Markham had become the first woman to cross the Atlantic east-to-west solo, and the first person to make it from England to North America non-stop. She was celebrated as an aviation pioneer. Markham chronicled her many adventures in her memoir, West with the Night, published in 1942. Despite strong reviews in the press, the book sold modestly, and then quickly went out of print. After living for many years in the United States, Markham moved back to Kenya in 1952, becoming for a time the most successful horse trainer in the country.
May 18 (SPECIAL DATE): Heartland by Sarah Smarsh
Call Number: BIOGRAPHY Smarsh
ISBN: 9781501133091
Publication Date: 2018-09-18
During Sarah Smarsh's turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, the country's changing economic policies solidified her family's place among the working poor. By telling the story of her life and the lives of the people she loves, Smarsh challenges us to examine the class divide in our country and the myths about people thought to be less because they earn less. Her personal history affirms the corrosive impact intergenerational poverty can have on individuals, families, and communities, and she explores this idea as lived experience, metaphor, and level of consciousness. Born a fifth-generation Kansas wheat farmer on her paternal side and the product of generations of teen mothers on her maternal side, Smarsh grew up in a family of laborers trapped in a cycle of poverty. Whether working the wheat harvest, helping on her dad's construction sites, or visiting her grandma's courthouse job, she learned about hard work. She also absorbed painful lessons about economic inequality. Through her experience growing up as the child of a dissatisfied teenage mother--and being raised predominantly by her grandmother on a farm thirty miles west of Wichita--she gives us a unique, essential look into the lives of poor and working-class Americans living in the middle of our country. Combining memoir with powerful analysis and cultural commentary, Heartland is an uncompromising look at class, identity, and the particular perils of having less in a country known for its excess."--Jacket.
June 22: The Potlikker Papers by John T. Edge
ISBN: 1594206554
Publication Date: 2017-05-16
Like great provincial dishes around the world, potlikker is a salvage food. During the antebellum era, slave owners ate the greens from the pot and set aside the leftover potlikker broth for the enslaved, unaware that the broth, not the greens, was nutrient rich. After slavery, potlikker sustained the working poor, both black and white. In the South of today, potlikker has taken on new meanings as chefs have reclaimed it. Potlikker is a quintessential Southern dish, and The Potlikker Papers is a people’s history of the modern South, told through its food. Beginning with the pivotal role cooks and waiters played in the civil rights movement, noted authority John T. Edge narrates the South’s fitful journey from a hive of racism to a hotbed of American immigration. He shows why working-class Southern food has become a vital driver of contemporary American cuisine.

Food access was a battleground issue during the 1950s and 1960s. Ownership of culinary traditions has remained a central contention on the long march toward equality. The Potlikker Papers tracks pivotal moments in Southern history, from the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s to the rise of fast and convenience foods modeled on rural staples. Edge narrates the gentrification that gained traction in the restaurants of the 1980s and the artisanal renaissance that began to reconnect farmers and cooks in the 1990s. He reports as a newer South came into focus in the 2000s and 2010s, enriched by the arrival of immigrants from Mexico to Vietnam and many points in between. Along the way, Edge profiles extraordinary figures in Southern food, including Fannie Lou Hamer, Colonel Sanders, Mahalia Jackson, Edna Lewis, Paul Prudhomme, Craig Claiborne, and Sean Brock.

Over the last three generations, wrenching changes have transformed the South. The Potlikker Papers tells the story of that dynamism—and reveals how Southern food has become a shared culinary language for the nation.
July 27: Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood
ISBN: 1594633738
Publication Date: 2017-05-02
Father Greg Lockwood is unlike any Catholic priest you have ever met—a man who lounges in boxer shorts, loves action movies, and whose constant jamming on the guitar reverberates “like a whole band dying in a plane crash in 1972.” His daughter is an irreverent poet who long ago left the Church’s country. When an unexpected crisis leads her and her husband to move back into her parents’ rectory, their two worlds collide.

In Priestdaddy, Lockwood interweaves emblematic moments from her childhood and adolescence—from an ill-fated family hunting trip and an abortion clinic sit-in where her father was arrested to her involvement in a cultlike Catholic youth group—with scenes that chronicle the eight-month adventure she and her husband had in her parents’ household after a decade of living on their own. Lockwood details her education of a seminarian who is also living at the rectory, tries to explain Catholicism to her husband, who is mystified by its bloodthirstiness and arcane laws, and encounters a mysterious substance on a hotel bed with her mother.

Lockwood pivots from the raunchy to the sublime, from the comic to the deeply serious, exploring issues of belief, belonging, and personhood. Priestdaddy is an entertaining, unforgettable portrait of a deeply odd religious upbringing, and how one balances a hard-won identity with the weight of family and tradition.
August 24: The Haymakers by Steven R. Hoffbeck
ISBN: 0873513959
Publication Date: 2002-03-01
The Haymakers is an epic—the history of man's struggle with nature as well as man's struggle against machines. It relates the story of farmers and their obligations to their families, to the animals they fed, and to the land they tended. But The Haymakersis also an elegy—to a way of life fast disappearing from our landscape. In the most heartfelt essays, Hoffbeck chronicles his own family's struggle to hold onto their family farm and his personal struggle in deciding to leave farming for another way of life.

Hoffbeck also seeks to document and preserve the commonplace methods of haymaking, information about haying that might otherwise be lost to posterity. He describes the tools and the methods of haymaking as well as the relentless demands of the farm. Using diaries, agricultural guidebooks and personal interviews, the folkways of cutting, raking, and harvesting hay have been recorded in these chapters. In the end, this book is not so much about agricultural history as it is about family history, personal history—how farm families survive, even persevere.
September 28: Friday Night Lights by H. G. Bissinger
Call Number: TEXANA 796.332 Bissinger
ISBN: 9780306812828
Publication Date: 2003-10-09
Return once again to the timeless account of the Permian Panthers of Odessa -- the winningest high-school football team in Texas history. Socially and racially divided, Odessa isn't known to be a place big on dreams, but every Friday night from September to December, when the Panthers play football, dreams can come true.

With frankness and compassion, Pulitzer Prize winner H. G. Bissinger unforgettably captures a season in the life of Odessa and shows how single-minded devotion to the team shapes the community and inspires -- and sometimes shatters -- the teenagers who wear the Panthers' uniforms.
October 26: The Wicked Boy by Kate Summerscale
Call Number: 364.152 Summerscale
ISBN: 9781594205781
Publication Date: 2016-07-12
In East London in the summer of 1895, Robert Coombes (age thirteen) and his brother Nattie (age twelve) were arrested for matricide and sent for trial at the Old Bailey. Robert confessed to having stabbed his mother, but his lawyers argued that he was insane. The judge sentenced him to detention in Broadmoor, the most infamous criminal lunatic asylum in the land. Shockingly, Broadmoor turned out to be the beginning of a new life for Robert. At a time of great tumult and uncertainty, Robert Coombes's case crystallized contemporary anxieties about the education of the working classes, the dangers of pulp fiction, and evolving theories of criminality, childhood, and insanity. With riveting detail and rich atmosphere, Summerscale re-creates this terrible crime and its aftermath, uncovering an extraordinary story of man's capacity to overcome the past. -- Adapted from book jacket.
November 23: The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom
Call Number: BIOGRAPHY Broom
ISBN: 9780802125088
Publication Date: 2019-08-13
he Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America's most mythologized cities. This is the story of a mother's struggle against a house's entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina."--

NO DECEMBER MEETING

January 28 Killing the Rising Sun by Bill O'Reilly; Martin Dugard
Call Number: 940.54 OReilly
ISBN: 9781627790628
Publication Date: 2016-09-13
Autumn 1944. World War II is nearly over in Europe but is escalating in the Pacific, where American soldiers face an opponent who will go to any length to avoid defeat. The Japanese army follows the samurai code of Bushido, stipulating that surrender is a form of dishonor. This book takes readers to the bloody tropical-island battlefields of Peleliu and Iwo Jima and to the embattled Philippines, where General Douglas MacArthur has made a triumphant return and is plotting a full-scale invasion of Japan. Across the globe in Los Alamos, New Mexico, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer and his team of scientists are preparing to test the deadliest weapon known to mankind. In Washington, DC, Harry Truman ascends to the presidency after FDR dies in office, only to face the most important political decision in history: whether to use that weapon. And in Tokyo, Emperor Hirohito, who is considered a deity by his subjects, refuses to surrender, despite a massive and mounting death toll.
February 25 Code Talker by Chester Nez; Judith Schiess Avila
Call Number: BIOGRAPHY Nez
ISBN: 9780425244234
Publication Date: 2011-09-06
Although more than 400 Navajos served in the military during World War II as top-secret code talkers, even those fighting shoulder to shoulder with them were not told of their covert function. And, after the war, the Navajos were forbidden to speak of their service until 1968, when the code was finally declassified. Of the original twenty- nine Navajo code talkers, only two are still alive. Chester Nez is one of them. In this memoir, the eighty-nine-year-old Nez chronicles both his war years and his life growing up on the Checkerboard Area of the Navajo Reservation -- the hard life that gave him the strength, both physical and mental, to become a Marine. His story puts a living face on the legendary men who developed what is still the only unbroken code in modern warfare.

March 25 High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of An American Classic
It's one of the most revered movies of Hollywood's golden era. Starring screen legend Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly in her first significant film role, High Noon was shot on a lean budget over just thirty-two days but achieved instant box-office and critical success. It won four Academy Awards in 1953, including a best actor win for Cooper. And it became a cultural touchstone, often cited by politicians as a favorite film, celebrating moral fortitude. Yet what has been often overlooked is that High Noon was made during the height of the Hollywood blacklist, a time of political inquisition and personal betrayal. In the middle of the film shoot, screenwriter Carl Foreman was forced to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities about his former membership in the Communist Party. Refusing to name names, he was eventually blacklisted and fled the United States. (His co-authored screenplay for another classic, The Bridge on the River Kwai, went uncredited in 1957.) Examined in light of Foreman's testimony, High Noon's emphasis on courage and loyalty takes on deeper meaning and importance.
April 22 Scent of the Missing: Love and Partnership with a Search-and-Rescue Dog by Susannah Charleson
In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, Susannah Charleson clipped a photo from the newspaper of an exhausted canine handler, face buried in the fur of his search-and-rescue dog. A dog lover and pilot with search experience herself, Susannah was so moved by the image that she decided to volunteer with a local canine team and soon discovered firsthand the long hours, nonexistent pay, and often heart-wrenching results they face. Once she qualified to train a dog of her own, she adopted Puzzle, a strong, bright Golden Retriever puppy who exhibited unique aptitudes as a working dog but who was less interested in the role of compliant house pet. Scent of the Missing is the story of Susannah and Puzzleâs adventures as they search for the missingâa lost teen, an Alzheimerâs patient wandering in the cold, signs of the crew amid the debris of the space shuttle Columbia disasterâand unravel the mystery of the bond between humans and dogs.

SPECIAL DATE: May 20 Bad Blood: secrets and lies in a Silicon Valley startup by John Carreyrou
Call Number: 338.7 Carreyrou
ISBN: 9781524731656
Publication Date: 2018-05-21
In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup "unicorn" promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood tests significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at $9 billion, putting Holmes's worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn't work. For years, Holmes had been misleading investors, FDA officials, and her own employees. When John Carreyrou, working at The Wall Street Journal, got a tip from a former Theranos employee and started asking questions, both Carreyrou and the Journal were threatened with lawsuits. Undaunted, the newspaper ran the first of dozens of Theranos articles in late 2015. By early 2017, the company's value was zero and Holmes faced potential legal action from the government and her investors. The biggest corporate fraud since Enron is a cautionary tale set amid the bold promises and gold-rush frenzy of Silicon Valley.
June 24 The Line Becomes a River by Francisco Cantú
Call Number: BIOGRAPHY Cantu
ISBN: 9780735217713
Publication Date: 2018-02-06
"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. Haunted by the landscape of his youth, Cantú joins the Border Patrol. He and his partners are posted to remote regions crisscrossed by drug routes and smuggling corridors, where they learn to track other humans under blistering sun and through frigid nights. They haul in the dead and deliver to detention those they find alive. Cantú tries not to think where the stories go from there. Plagued by nightmares, he abandons the Patrol for civilian life. But when an immigrant friend travels to Mexico to visit his dying mother and does not return, Cantú discovers that the border has migrated with him, and now he must know the whole story."-- Provided by publisher.
July 22 The Immortal Irishman: the Irish revolutionary who became an American hero by Timothy Egan
Call Number: BIOGRAPHY Meagher
ISBN: 9780544272880
Publication Date: 2016-03-01
"From the National Book Award-winning and best-selling author Timothy Egan comes the epic story of one of the most fascinating and colorful Irishman in nineteenth-century America. The Irish-American story, with all its twists and triumphs, is told through the improbable life of one man. A dashing young orator during the Great Famine of the 1840s, in which a million of his Irish countrymen died, Thomas Francis Meagher led a failed uprising against British rule, for which he was banished to a Tasmanian prison colony. He escaped and six months later was heralded in the streets of New York--the revolutionary hero, back from the dead, at the dawn of the great Irish immigration to America. Meagher's rebirth in America included his leading the newly formed Irish Brigade from New York in many of the fiercest battles of the Civil War--Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg. Twice shot from his horse while leading charges, left for dead in the Virginia mud, Meagher's dream was that Irish-American troops, seasoned by war, would return to Ireland and liberate their homeland from British rule. The hero's last chapter, as territorial governor of Montana, was a romantic quest for a true home in the far frontier. His death has long been a mystery to which Egan brings haunting, colorful new evidence"-- Provided by publisher.
August 26 Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean; Timothy Egan (Foreword by)
Call Number: 363.37 Maclean
ISBN: 9780226450353
Publication Date: 2017-05-01
"A magnificent drama of writing, a tragedy that pays tribute to the dead and offers rescue to the living.... Maclean's search for the truth, which becomes an exploration of his own mortality, is more compelling even than his journey into the heart of the fire. His description of the conflagration terrifies, but it is his battle with words, his effort to turn the story of the 13 men into tragedy that makes this book a classic."—from New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice, Best Books of 1992
September 23 Educated by Tara Westover
Call Number: BIOGRAPHY Westover
ISBN: 9780399590504
Publication Date: 2018-02-20
"Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her "head-for-the-hills bag." In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father's junkyard. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one to intervene when one of Tara's older brothers became violent. As a way out, Tara began to educate herself, learning enough mathematics and grammar to be admitted to Brigham Young University. Her quest for knowledge would transform her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge. Only then would she wonder if she'd traveled too far, if there was still a way home. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, Tara Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education offers: the perspective to see one's life through new eyes, and the will to change it."--Provided by publisher.
October 28 The Kings of Big Spring: God, oil, and one family's search for the American dream by Bryan Mealer
Call Number: TEXANA BIOGRAPHY Mealer
ISBN: 9781250058911
Publication Date: 2018-02-06
In 1892, Bryan Mealer's great-grandfather leaves the Georgia mountains and heads west into Texas, looking for wealth and adventure in the raw and open country. But his luck soon runs out. Beset by drought, the family loses their farm just as the dead pastures around them give way to one of the biggest oil booms in American history.

November 25 Mozart: The Man Revealed
Through trials and tribulations, grand successes and disheartening setbacks, Suchet shows us the real Mozart―blessed with an abundance of talent yet sometimes struggling to earn a living. His mischievous nature and earthy sense of humor, his ease and confidence in his own incredible abilities; these were traits that never left him. His music has brought comfort to countless generations; his life, though brief, is no less fascinating.

December - Date and time to be determined
There will be no regular meeting; however, we invite you to join all discussion groups for our annual Holiday Book-Club Brunch!

This group of non-fiction readers meets on the fourth Monday each month at noon. Click on the Home button to get back to the main menu.

January 22 Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick (294 pgs.)

February 26 The Perfect Horse by Elizabeth Letts (400 pgs.)

March 26 I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life by Ed Yong (368 pgs.)

April 23 Max Perkins, Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg

May 21 Killer of the Flower Moon by David Grann

June 25 Mozart's Starling by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

July 23 The Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston

August 27 Killing England by Bill O'Reilly & Martin Dugard

September 24 Zelda: A Biography by Nancy Mitford

October 22 Martin Luther by Eric Metaxas

November 26 American Fire: Love, Arson and Life in a Vanishing Land by Monica Hesse

December 17 (Special Date) Animals Strike Curious Poses by Elena Passarello

January 23 What Remains: A Memoir of Fate, Friendship, and Love by Carole Radziwill

February 27 American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard

March 27 Lincoln's Greatest Case: The River, the Bridge, and the Making of America by Brian McGinty

April 24 The Wild Truth by Carine McCandless

May 22 The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man who Brought Them Down by Colin Woodard

June 26 The Elephant Whisperer: My Life with the Herd in the African Wild by Lawrence Anthony

July 24 Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance

August 28 The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman

September 25 Killing Patton: The Strange Death of WWII's Most Audacious General by Bill O'Reilly

October 23 Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter by Kate Clifford Larson

November 27 Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story--How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War by Nigel Cliff

December 18 Clementine: The Life of Mrs. Winston Churchill by Sonia Purnell

January 25 Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson

February 22 Hemingway in Love: His Own Story by A.E. Hotchner

March 28 Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande

April 25 Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs Photographs of Edward Curtis by Timothy Egan

May 23 Have Mother, Will Travel by Claire and Mia Fontaine

June 27 Following Atticus by Tom Ryan

July 25 Barbarian Days by William Finnegan

August - NO MEETING

September 26 Missoula by Jon Krakauer

October 24 The Wright Brothers by David McCullough

November 28 A House of My Own: Stories from My Life by Sandra Cisneros

December 19 My Southern Journey by Rick Bragg