MYSTERY - BOOKS ABOUT BOOKS Israel Armstrong is a passionate soul, lured to Ireland by the promise of an exciting new career. As he prepares to drive a mobile library around a small, damp Irish town he discovers that the rolling library's 15,000 volumes have mysteriously gone missing. It's up to Israel to discover who would steal them.
(15 copies)
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NON-FICTION - RACE RELATIONS This book provides us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as it 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 the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people - including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball's Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others - she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their out-cast of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.
(15 copies)
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PSYCHOLOGICAL FICTION - GRIEF Single mother Elise has her world destroyed when her son is killed in a car accident.
(15 copies)
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BILDUNGROMANS - SEA STORIES In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy in Colombo boards a ship bound for England. Looking back from adulthood, the narrator relates a tale about the magical, often forbidden, discoveries of childhood and a lifelong journey that begins unexpectedly with a sea voyage.
(15 copies)
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NON-FICTION - TRUE CRIME STORIES A journalist's twenty-year obsession with the Manson murders brings shocking revelations about the most infamous crimes in American history: carelessness from police, misconduct by prosecutors, and even potential surveillance by intelligence agents. What really happened in 1969?
In 1999, when Tom O'Neill was assigned a magazine piece about the thirtieth anniversary of the Manson murders, he worried there was nothing new to say. Weren't the facts indisputable? Charles Manson had ordered his teenage followers to commit seven brutal murders, and in his thrall, they'd gladly complied. But when O'Neill began reporting the story, he kept finding holes in the prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi's narrative, long enshrined in the best-selling Helter Skelter. Before long, O'Neill had questions about everything from the motive to the manhunt. Though he'd never considered himself a conspiracy theorist, the Manson murders swallowed the next two decades of his career. He was obsessed.
Searching but never speculative, CHAOS follows O'Neill's twenty-year effort to rebut the "official" story behind Manson. Who were his real friends in Hollywood, and how far would they go to hide their ties? Why didn't law enforcement act on their many chances to stop him? And how did he turn a group of peaceful hippies into remorseless killers? O'Neill's hunt for answers leads him from reclusive celebrities to seasoned spies, from the Summer of Love to the shadowy sites of the CIA's mind-control experiments, on a trail rife with cover-ups and coincidences.
Featuring hundreds of new interviews and dozens of never-before-seen documents from the LAPD, the FBI, and the CIA, CHAOS mounts an argument that could be, according to Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Stephen Kay, strong enough to overturn the verdicts on the Manson murders. In those two dark nights in Los Angeles, O'Neill finds the story of California in the sixties: when charlatans mixed with prodigies, free love was as possible as brainwashing, and utopia-or dystopia-was just an acid trip away.
(10 copies)
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SCIENCE FICTION - LIFE ON OTHER PLANETS The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. They discover the greatest treasure of the past age, a world terraformed and prepared for human life. But all is not right in this new Eden. New masters have turned it from a refuge into mankind's worst nightmare. As the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, who are the true heirs of this new Earth?
(10 copies)
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HISTORICAL FICTION - BIOGRAPHICAL Beautiful young horse trainer, adventurer and aviator Beryl Markham tells the story of her life among the glamorous and decadent circle of British expats living in colonial East Africa--and the complicated love triangle she shared with the white hunter Denys Finch Hatton and Karen Blixen, author of Out of Africa. A fictitious account of Beryl's life set in colonial Kenya in the 1920s.
(12 copies)
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ROMANCE FICTION - MANHATTAN NEW YORK A unique love story set in the New York City theater world during the 1940s. Told from the perspective of an older woman as she looks back on her youth with both pleasure and regret (but mostly pleasure), this novel explores themes of female sexuality and promiscuity, as well as the idiosyncrasies of true love. In 1940, 19-year-old Vivian has just been kicked out of college, owing to her lackluster freshman-year performance. Her affluent parents send her to Manhattan to live with her aunt who owns a flamboyant, crumbling midtown theater. There Vivian is introduced to an entire cosmos of unconventional and charismatic characters. But when Vivian makes a personal mistake that results in professional scandal, it turns her new world upside down in ways that it will take her years to fully understand. Ultimately, though, it leads her to a new understanding of the kind of life she craves - and the kind of freedom it takes to pursue it. It will also lead to the love of her life, a love that stands out from all the rest. Now 89 years old and telling her story at last, Vivian recalls how the events of those years altered the course of her life - and the gusto and autonomy with which she approached it.
(13 copies)
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FANTASY FICTION - FATE AND FATALISM Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. The novel careens, with dazzling virtuosity, to Belgium in 1931, to the West Coast in the 1970s, to an inglorious present-day England, to a Korean superstate of the near future where neocapitalism has run amok, and, finally, to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history.
But the story doesn't end even there. The novel boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, David Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky.
(15 copies)
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THRILLERS - VATICAN CITY The bestselling author of An Officer and a Spy turns to today's Vatican in a ripped-from-the-headlines novel, and gives us his most ambitious, page-turning thriller yet. The pope is dead. Cardinal Lomeli, dean of the College of Cardinals, presides over the election for the next pope and, in the process, uncovers evidence of corruption among the sequestered cardinals. He must act discreetly to ensure that the eventual pope is spiritually worthy of the post. Behind the locked doors of the Sistine Chapel, one hundred and eighteen cardinals from all over the globe will cast their votes in the world's most secretive election. They are holy men. But they are not immune to the human temptations of power and glory. And they are not above the tribalism and factionalism that consumes humanity. When all is said and done, one of them will become the most powerful spiritual figure on Earth."--Provided by publisher.
(10 copies)
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