Catalog Search Results
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 10 - AR Pts: 23
Description
"Extremes of religious belief within our own borders, taking readers inside isolated American communities where some 40,000 Mormon Fundamentalists still practice polygamy. Defying both civil authorities and the Mormon establishment in Salt Lake City, the renegade leaders of these Taliban-like theocracies are zealots who answer only to God. At the core of Krakauer's book are brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty, who insist they received a commandment from...
Author
Pub. Date
[2015]
Description
Responding to what he calls the culture of the Big Me, David Brooks challenges us, and himself, to rebalance the scales between our "résumé virtues" achieving wealth, fame, and status; and our "eulogy virtues" kindness, bravery, honesty, and faithfulness. Looking to the world's great thinkers and inpsiring leaders, he explores how through internal struggle and a sense of their own limitations, they built a strong inner character. With wisdom,...
Author
Description
Donald Trump's niece, Mary L. Trump, examines America's national trauma, rooted in our history but dramatically exacerbated by the impact of current events and the Trump administration's corrupt and immoral policies. Our failure to acknowledge this trauma, let alone root it out, has allowed it to metastasize. Whether it manifests itself in rising levels of rage and hatred, or hopelessness and apathy, the stress of living in a country we no longer...
Author
Description
Poses a case against organized religion that documents the myriad ways in which religion reflects human agendas and distorts sexuality and the perception of the origins of the universe, in a science-based analysis that considers the benefits of a secular world of the "Old" Testament -- The "New" Testament exceeds the evil of the "Old" one -- The Koran is borrowed from both Jewish and Christian myths -- The tawdriness of the miraculous and the decline...
Author
Series
Killing volume 11
Pub. Date
2022.
Description
"In the eleventh book in the multimillion-selling Killing series, Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard reveal the startling, dramatic story of the global war against terrorists. In Killing The Killers, #1 bestselling authors Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard take readers deep inside the global war on terror, which began twenty years ago on September 11, 2001. As the World Trade Center buildings collapsed, the Pentagon burned, and a small group of passengers...
Author
Description
"Vance, a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, provides an account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like...
Author
Pub. Date
[2020]
Appears on list
Description
"In this book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people's lives and behavior and the nation's fate. Linking...
Author
Description
Every so often, you meet people who radiate joy—who seem to know why they were put on this earth, who glow with a kind of inner light. Life, for these people, has often followed what we might think of as a two-mountain shape. They get out of school, they start a career, and they begin climbing the mountain they thought they were meant to climb. Their goals on this first mountain are the ones our culture endorses: to be a success, to make your mark,...
Author
Pub. Date
[2013]
Description
This book uncovers the hidden rules that shape the balance between the weak and the mighty and the powerful and the dispossessed. In it the author challenges how we think about obstacles and disadvantages, offering a new interpretation of what it means to be discriminated against, or cope with a disability, or lose a parent, or attend a mediocre school, or suffer from any number of other apparent setbacks. He begins with the real story of what happened...
Author
Description
In this book, Nancy Isenberg reveals that the wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlements to today's hillbillies. Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early nineteenth century and the Civil War itself was fought over class issues nearly as much as it was fought over slavery. Reconstruction pitted white trash against newly freed slaves, which factored in the rise...
Author
Description
"An eye-opening memoir of working-class poverty in the American Midwest. During Sarah Smarsh's turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, the forces of cyclical poverty and 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 look more closely at the class divide in our country and examine the myths about...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 10.2 - AR Pts: 26
Description
The author explores his theory that the food industry's used three essential ingredients to control much of the world's diet.
Traces the rise of the processed food industry and how addictive salt, sugar, and fat have enabled its dominance in the past half century, revealing deliberate corporate practices behind current trends in obesity, diabetes, and other health challenges.
15) Monument 14
Author
Series
Monument 14 volume 1
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 4 - AR Pts: 10
Description
Six high school kids, two eighth-graders, and six little kids trapped together in a chain superstore build a refuge for themselves inside. Outside, a series of escalating disasters, beginning with a monster hailstorm and ending with a chemcial weapons spill, seem to be tearing the world -- as they know it -- apart.
16) The girls
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 4.7 - AR Pts: 3
Description
Each of the girls in a middle-school clique reveals the strong, manipulative hold one of the group exerts on the others, and the hurt and self-doubt that it causes them.
17) The Namesake
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.2 - AR Pts: 18
Description
"With a new afterword from Jhumpa Lahiri, a new edition of the contemporary classic. Meet the Ganguli family, new arrivals from Calcutta, trying their best to become Americans even as they pine for home. The name they bestow on their firstborn, Gogol, betrays all the conflicts of honoring tradition in a new world--conflicts that will haunt Gogol on his own winding path through divided loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. In The Namesake,...
Author
Description
Brings together, for the first time, the best of Gladwell's writing from The New Yorker in the past decade, including: the bittersweet tale of the inventor of the birth control pill; the dazzling inventions of the pasta sauce pioneer Howard Moscowitz; spotlighting Ron Popeil, the king of the American kitchen; and the secrets of Cesar Millan, the "dog whisperer." Gladwell also explores intelligence tests, ethnic profiling and "hindsight bias," and...
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.8 - AR Pts: 13
Description
Two families awaiting the arrival of their adopted infant daughters from Korea meet at the airport. The families lives become interwined after the Donaldsons, a young American couple invite the Yazdan's, Maryam, her son and his Iranian American wife to an arrival party, which becomes an annual event. Maryam, who came to this country thirty-five years earlier, feels her values threatened when she is courted by a newly widowed Donaldson. A penetrating...