Berthoud Community Library District

"This story ... tells of a marriage falling apart and the emotional development of a young man, Paul Morel. Paul is torn between his close relationship with his mother and his romantic relationships with two young women."--P. [4] of cover.

Selma, a Czechoslovakian immigrant, is a single mother working in a factory in rural America circa 1964. She is also afflicted by a hereditary disease, which will cost her her sight. Determined to protect her 10-year-old son from the same fate, Selma is saving her money to get him an operation. In the evenings, Selma escapes by rehearsing for a production of The Sound of Music with her best friend. When a neighbor betrays her trust, Selma's life spirals...

"An exploration of how workers in the U.S. have been invisible for decades because the mainstream news media lost sight of the American working class"--

Queenan's deeply funny and affecting memoir about his great escape from a childhood of poverty in a Philadelphia housing project in the early 1960s.

"Thatcherite Britain is not a particularly advantageous time to be born. The latest in a long line of Aberdeen fishwives, Janie Ryan is just a few days old when a blazing row lands her mother in a local women's shelter. From there it's on to a dodgy council flat and a succession of unsuitable men, including the hard-drinking, drug-dealing, ice-cream-buying Tony Hogan. Narrated by Janie from her less than idyllic birth, Tony Hogan bought me an ice-cream...

In Plutopia, Brown draws on official records and dozens of interviews to tell the stories of Richland, Washington and Ozersk, Russia--the first two cities in the world to produce plutonium. To contain secrets, American and Soviet leaders created plutopias--communities of nuclear families living in highly-subsidized, limited-access atomic cities. Brown shows that the plants' segregation of permanent and temporary workers and of nuclear and non-nuclear...