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Books Page 24 of 26, showing 10 records out of 252 total
Christina Lauren

Felicity Chen is lost. Sure, she's got an incredible career as a beloved romance novelist with a slew of bestsellers under her belt, but when she's asked to give a commencement address, it hits her: she hasn't been practicing what she's preached. Fizzy hasn't ever really been in love. Lust? Definitely. But that swoon-worthy, can't-stop-thinking-about-him, all-encompassing feeling? Nope. What happens when the optimism she's spent her career encouraging in readers starts to feel like a lie? Connor Prince, documentary filmmaker and single father, loves his work in large part because it allows him to live near his daughter. But when his profit-minded boss orders him to create a reality TV show Connor is out of his element. Desperate to find his romantic lead, a chance run-in with an exasperated Felicity offers Connor the perfect solution. What if he could show the queen of romance herself falling head-over-heels for all the world to see? Fizzy gives him a hard pass, unless he agrees to her list of demands. When he says yes, and production on The True Love Experiment begins, Connor wonders if that perfect match will ever be in the cue cards for him, too.

(10 copies)  Reserve

Garret M. Graff

NON-FICTION - UFOs For as long as we have looked to the skies, the question of whether life on Earth is the only life to exist has been at the core of the human experience, driving scientific debate and discovery, shaping spiritual belief, and prompting existential thought across borders and generations. And yet, the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence has been largely seen as a joke, banished to the realm of fantasy and conspiracy. Now, for the first time, the full story of our national obsession with UFOs--and the covert, decades-long search by scientists, the United States military, and the CIA for proof of alien life--is told by bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize finalist Garrett M. Graff in a deeply reported and researched history. It begins in 1947, when two headline-making sightings of strange flying objects--the first near Mount Rainier, Washington, involving a pilot named Kenneth Arnold, and the second a ranch on the outskirts of a New Mexico town called Roswell--prompt the US Air Force's newly formed Department of Defense to create a series of secret programs to determine how unidentified phenomena may pose a threat to national security. Over the next half-century, as the atomic age gives way to the space race and the Cold War, the search continues, bringing together an unexpected group of astronomers, military officials, civilian contactees, and true believers who bring us closer, then further, then closer again, to answering one of our most enduring questions: What exactly is out there? Drawing from original archival research, declassified documents, and interviews with senior intelligence and military officials, Graff brings every moment of this extraordinary quest to life, transporting readers from secret military meetings and congressional hearings, where the validity of the search is debated, to the cluttered offices of UFOlogists and hoaxers determined to see the truth revealed, remote observatories where astronomers monitor the stars, and even the halls of the White House, where staffers and presidents alike eagerly await answers. Filled with twists and turns, and populated by an unforgettable cast of characters, UFO is a thrilling story of science, national security, the secrets of space, and the enduring mysteries of the universe.

(10 copies)  Reserve

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption
Laura Hillenbrand

On a May afternoon in 1943 an Olympic runner turned Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean. Driven to the limits of endurance by leaping sharks, a foundering raft, thirst and starvation, and enemy aircraft, the bomber would answer desperation with ingenuity, suffering with hope, and human brutality with rebellion. The book is a testament to the resilience of the human mind, body, and spirit.

(15 copies)  Reserve

Colin Dickey

The United States was born in paranoia. From the American Revolution (thought by some to be a conspiracy organized by the French) to the Salem witch trials to the Satanic Panic, the Illuminati, and QAnon, one of the most enduring narratives that defines the United States is simply this: secret groups are conspiring to pervert the will of the people and the rule of law. We’d like to assume these panics exist only at the fringes of society, or are unique features of the internet age. But history tells us, in fact, that they are woven into the fabric of American democracy. Cultural historian Colin Dickey has built a career studying how our most irrational beliefs reach the mainstream, why, and what they tell us about ourselves. In Under the Eye of Power, Dickey charts the history of America through its paranoias and fears of secret societies, while seeking to explain why so many people—including some of the most powerful people in the country—continue to subscribe to these conspiracy theories. Paradoxically, he finds, belief in the fantastical and conspiratorial can be more soothing than what we fear the most: the chaos and randomness of history, the rising and falling of fortunes in America, and the messiness of democracy. Only in seeing the cycle of this history, Dickey says, can we break it.

(10 copies)  Reserve

Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, The: A Novel
Rachel Joyce

Recently retired, sweet, emotionally numb Harold Fry is jolted out of his passivity by a letter from Queenie Hennessy, an old friend, who he hasn't heard from in twenty years. She has written to say she is in hospice and wants to say goodbye. Leaving his tense, bitter wife Maureen to her chores, Harold intends a quick walk to the corner mailbox to post his reply but instead, inspired by a chance encounter, he becomes convinced he must deliver his message in person to Queenie--who is 600 miles away.

(14 copies)  Reserve

Adrienne Young

MAGIC REALIST - FAMILY SECRETS In the small mountain town of Jasper, North Carolina, June Farrow is waiting for fate to find her. The Farrow women are known for their thriving flower farm--and the mysterious curse that has plagued their family line. The whole town remembers the madness that led to Susanna Farrow's disappearance, leaving June to be raised by her grandmother and haunted by rumors. It's been a year since June started seeing and hearing things that weren't there. Faint wind chimes, a voice calling her name, and a mysterious door appearing out of nowhere-the signs of what June always knew was coming. But June is determined to end the curse once and for all, even if she must sacrifice finding love and having a family of her own. After her grandmother's death, June discovers a series of cryptic clues regarding her mother's decades-old disappearance, except they only lead to more questions. But could the door she once assumed was a hallucination be the answer she's been searching for? The next time it appears, June realizes she can touch it and walk past the threshold. And when she does, she embarks on a journey that will not only change both the past and the future, but also uncover the lingering mysteries of her small town and entangle her heart in an epic star-crossed love

(15 copies)  Reserve

Untamed
Glennon Doyle

Untamed is an inspiring memoir of Glennon Doyle, a woman who found peace and inner strength by challenging life in all its areas, from love to parenting, personal growth, and work, after going through a powerful change that led her to discover crucial aspects about herself and allowed her to build a new life.

(14 copies)  Reserve

Up and Down: A Novel
Terry Fallis

David Stewart has left his job on Parliament Hill to join the team at a dog-eat-dog international PR firm in Toronto. Within his first few moments on the job he is assigned to a major project with the Canadian Space Agency and NASA to revitalize the public's interest in the CSA and NASA. David suggests the most out-of-this-world idea imaginable: hold a contest where two regular, Joe-Blow civilians accompany a shuttle mission for an orbit around the Earth.

(14 copies)  Reserve

Vanishing Half, The
Brit Bennett

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern Black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Ten years later, one sister lives with her Black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for White, and her White husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters' storylines intersect? Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, this story is a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, this novel considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person's decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.

(14 copies)  Reserve

Warlight
Ondaatje, Michael

From the internationally acclaimed, bestselling author of The English Patient: a mesmerizing new novel that tells a dramatic story set in the decade after World War II through the lives of a small group of unexpected characters and two teenagers whose lives are indelibly shaped by their unwitting involvement. In a narrative as beguiling and mysterious as memory itself--shadowed and luminous at once--we read the story of fourteen-year-old Nathaniel, and his older sister, Rachel. In 1945, just after World War II, they stay behind in London when their parents move to Singapore, leaving them in the care of a mysterious figure named The Moth. They suspect he might be a criminal, and they grow both more convinced and less concerned as they come to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women joined by a shared history of unspecified service during the war, all of whom seem, in some way, determined now to protect, and educate (in rather unusual ways) Rachel and Nathaniel. But are they really what and who they claim to be? And what does it mean when the siblings' mother returns after months of silence without their father, explaining nothing, excusing nothing? A dozen years later, Nathaniel begins to uncover all that he didn't know and understand in that time, and it is this journey--through facts, recollection, and imagination--that he narrates in this masterwork from one of the great writers of our time.

(15 copies)  Reserve