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New Nonfiction December 2025 |
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Political Fictions: From the Middle Ages to the Post-Truth Present
by Patrick Boucheron
An acclaimed historian illuminates today's political situation by examining the relationship between governing and storytelling, from the Middle Ages to the post-truth present, in these engaging essays. In the wake of Donald Trump's election, renowned medievalist Patrick Boucheron delivered a powerful, probing series of lectures on political fictions in the context of rising authoritarianism and populism. Adapted here for the first time in English, they offer key insights into how we arrived at our current global moment and what history can teach us about moving forward. Long before Trump parlayed his reality TV character into a presidential victory with the MAGA movement, aspiring rulers have used the art of storytelling and the power of fable to control others. Discussing seminal works from Machiavelli's The Prince and Hobbes's Leviathan to Orwell's 1984 and the writings of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, Boucheron explores the profound interconnectedness of political theory and fiction, and the tension between politics and the political.
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Heart Life Music
by Kenny Chesney
In college, [Country Music Hall of Fame member] Kenny Chesney found himself on a barstool with a guitar and an unexpected connection between people, life, and songs. His heart caught fire. With Nashville's vibrant creative scene, characters, legends, and places now long gone from the city he encountered in those early days, Chesney explores the quest to find himself as an artist and a man, as well as a sense of home anywhere there's an ocean. These are the stories of the unlikely game changer who became the sound of coming of age in the 21st century, made friends with his heroes, rocked stadiums, and founded a No Shoes Nation.
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Off the Scales: The Inside Story of Ozempic and the Race to Cure Obesity
by Aimee Donnellan
The inside story of the creation of Ozempic and its revolutionary impact on public health.A cure for obesity has long been the holy grail for the pharmaceutical industry, one that seemed unattainable until recent breakthroughs in type 2 diabetes research led to the development of Ozempic, a weight loss medication that activates a hormone in the stomach called GLP-1, making people feel fuller for longer. The treatment is so effective that it is already disrupting many industries--from healthcare to fast food to fashion--and it has quickly made its creator, Denmark's Novo Nordisk, the most valuable company in Europe. But the impact of GLP-1s goes far beyond billion-dollar profits; a true long-term cure for obesity could save 40 percent of American adults from dangerous, preventable illnesses. And as more potential benefits emerge, one question looms in the minds of investors, healthcare workers, and politicians: Are these drugs too good to be true? In Off the Scales, Reuters journalist Aimee Donnellan illuminates the history of a medical breakthrough that is poised to change the world, while raising difficult social questions about inequality and morality. Through original reporting and rigorous research, she forecasts the future of GLP-1s and examines what their explosive popularity tells us about our ideals of beauty and the lengths to which people will go in order to become thin. Along the way, Donnellan profiles the scientist whose contributions to the discovery of GLP-1 were overlooked, documents her fight for recognition while her colleagues were thrust into the limelight, and offers new insights into the ways that the food and beauty industries made billions while promoting unhealthy and unrealistic body image standards and accelerating the obesity crisis. She also provides firsthand accounts of several early Ozempic users and the transformative effect the drug has had on their weight loss journeys. Off the Scales is an informative and entertaining study of the unexpected consequences of finally getting what we've wanted for so long.
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Midnight Flyboys: The American Bomber Crews and Allied Secret Agents Who Aided the French Resistance in World War II
by Bruce Henderson
The untold history of a top-secret operation in the run-up to D-Day in which American flyers and Allied spies carried out some of the most daring cloak-and-dagger operations of World War II. In 1943, the OSS--precursor to the CIA--came up with a plan to increase its support to the French resistance forces that were fighting the Nazis. To start, the OSS recruited some of the best American bomber pilots and crews to a secret airfield twenty miles west of London and briefed them on the intended mission. Given a choice to stay or leave, every airman volunteered for what became known as Operation Carpetbagger. Their dangerous plan called for a new kind of flying: taking their B-24 Liberator bombers in the middle of the night across the English Channel and down to extremely low altitudes in Nazi-occupied France to find drop zones in dark fields. On the ground, resistance members waited to receive steel containers filled with everything from rifles and hand grenades to medicine and bicycle tires. Some nights, the flyers also dropped Allied secret agents by parachute to assist the French partisans. Though their story remained classified for more than fifty years, the Carpetbaggers ultimately received a Presidential Unit Citation from the US military, which declared: it is safe to say that no group of this size has made a greater contribution to the war effort. Along with other members of the wartime OSS, they were also awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. Based on exclusive research and interviews, the definitive story of these heroic flyers--and of the brave secret agents and resistance leaders they aided--can now be told. Written in Bruce Henderson's spellbinding (USA TODAY) prose, Midnight Flyboys is an astonishing tale of patriotism, courage, and sacrifice.
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Gemini: Stepping Stone to the Moon, the Untold Story
by Jeffrey Kluger
From the bestselling author of Apollo 13 comes the thrilling untold story of the pioneering Gemini program that was instrumental in getting Americans on the moon. Without Gemini, there would be no Apollo. After we first launched Americans into space but before we touched down on the moon's surface, there was the Gemini program. It was no easy jump from manned missions in low-Earth orbit to a successful moon landing, and the ten-flight, twenty-month celestial story of the Gemini program is an extraordinary one. There was unavoidable darkness in the program--the deaths and near-deaths that defined it, and the blood feud with the Soviet Union that animated it. But there were undeniable and previously inconceivable successes. With a war raging in Vietnam and lawmakers calling for cuts to NASA's budget, the success of the Gemini program--or the space program in general--was never guaranteed. Yet against all odds, the remarkable scientists and astronauts behind the project persevered, and their efforts paid off. Later, with the knowledge gained from the Gemini flights, NASA would launch the legendary Apollo program. Told with Jeffrey Kluger's signature cinematic storytelling and in-depth research and interviews, Gemini is an edge-of-your-seat narrative chronicling the history of the least appreciated--and most groundbreaking--space program in American history. Finally, Gemini's story will be told, and finally, we'll learn the truth of how we landed on the moon.
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Life on a Little-Known Planet: Dispatches from a Changing World
by Elizabeth Kolbert
A landmark collection of Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Kolbert's most important pieces about climate change and the natural world. To be a well-informed citizen of Planet Earth, Rolling Stone has advised, you need to read Elizabeth Kolbert. From her National Magazine Award-winning series The Climate of Man to her Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Sixth Extinction, Kolbert's work has shaped the way we think about the environment in the twenty-first century. Collected in Life on a Little-Known Planet are her most influential and thought-provoking essays. An intrepid reporter and a skillful translator of scientific idees, Kolbert expertly captures the wonders of nature and paints vivid portraits of the researchers and concerned citizens working to preserve them. She takes readers all around the globe, from an island in Denmark that's succeeded in going carbon neutral, to a community in Florida that voted to give rights to waterways, to the Greenland ice sheet, which is melting in a way that has implications for everyone. We meet a biologist who believes we can talk to whales, an entomologist racing to find rare caterpillars before they disappear, and a climatologist who's considered the father of global warming, amongst other scientists at the forefront of environmental protection. The threats to our planet that Kolbert has devoted so much of her career to exposing have only grown more serious. Now is the time to deepen our understanding of the world we are in danger of losing.
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Declaring Independence: Why 1776 Matters
by Edward J. Larson
At the beginning of 1776, virtually no one in the colonies was advocating independence: Americans based their grievances against Parliament on their rights as British subjects. By the end of 1776, independence was on every patriot's lips. The many tyrannies of a king had made an independent republic necessary. In Declaring Independence, Edward J. Larson gives us a compact, insightful history of that pivotal year. He traces a narrative arc that runs from the inspiring appeals of Paine's Common Sense in January; through the soaring ideals of midsummer, when the Continental Congress grounded independence in the self-evident truths of human equality and individual rights, and the states wove revolutionary principles of republican government and the rule of law into their new constitutions; to Paine's urgent pleas of December, when "the times that try men's souls" required Americans not "to shrink from the service of their country." Dramatic military clashes also punctuate the year: the British evacuation of Boston forced by the brilliant maneuvers of Washington's Army; the Battle of Long Island, a costly defeat that opened New York to British occupation; and the desperate year-end victory of a threadbare American army at Trenton.
Combined, these ideals and the sacrifices remind us why, on this anniversary and at this political moment, 1776 matters to all of us.
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The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Mutiny, Love, and Adventure at the Bottom of the World
by Tilar J. Mazzeo
The true story of the first female captain of a merchant ship and her treacherous navigation of Antarctica's deadly waters, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Widow Clicquot. Summer, 1856. Nineteen-year-old Mary Ann Patten and her husband, Joshua, were young and ambitious. Both from New England seafaring families, they had already completed their first clipper-ship voyage around the world with Joshua as captain. If they could win the race to San Francisco that year, their dream of building a farm and a family might be within reach. It would mean freedom. And the price of that freedom was one last dangerous transit--into the most treacherous waters in the world. As their ship, Neptune's Car, left New York Harbor and sailed down the jagged coast of South America, Joshua fell deathly ill and was confined to his bunk, delirious. The treacherous first mate, confined to the brig for insubordination, was agitating for mutiny. With no obvious option for a new captain and heartbroken about her husband, Mary Ann stepped into the breach and convinced the crew to support her, just as they slammed into a gale that would last 18 days. Determined to save the ship, the crew, and their future, she faces down the deadly waters of Drake's Passage. Set against the backdrop of the California Gold Rush and taking us to the brink of Antarctica, The Sea Captain's Wife finally gives Mary Ann Patten--the first woman to command a merchant vessel as captain -- her due. Mazzeo draws on new archival research from nineteenth-century women's maritime journals and on her own expedition to the Southern Ocean and Antarctica in search of Mary Ann's route. Thrilling, harrowing, and heroic, The Sea Captain's Wife is the story of one woman who, for love, would do what was necessary to survive.
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Queens at War: England's Medieval Queens Book Four
by Alison Weir
The tumultuous period in English history that marked the end of the medieval era and the rise of the Tudors comes to stunning life in the final volume of Alison Weir's four-part Medieval Queens series, filled with dramatic true stories chronicling the turbulent reigns of the last five Plantagenet queens. The fifteenth century was a violent age. In Queens at War, Alison Weir chronicles the five queens who got caught up in wars that changed the courses of their lives: the Hundred Years' War between England and France, and the Wars of the Roses between the royal Houses of Lancaster and York. Against this tempestuous backdrop, Weir describes the lives of five Plantagenet queens, who occupied the consort's throne from 1403 to 1485. Joan of Navarre was happily married to King Henry IV but was accused of witchcraft by Henry's heir and imprisoned. Paris-born Katherine of Valois's political marriage to Henry V was meant to bring peace between England and France. It didn't, and Henry died during the Hundred Years' War without ever seeing his newborn heir, Henry VI, who was wed to another French princess, Margaret of Anjou, in 1445. In the Wars of the Roses, Margaret staunchly supported her husband and son. Henry's successor, Edward IV, became embroiled in scandal after he fell in love with and married Elizabeth Widville, mother of the tragic Princes in the Tower. The notorious Richard III usurped Edward's throne and married Anne Neville, who died after losing her only child, forsaken by her husband. Underpinned by extensive reading of original sources (The Washington Post), Weir's Medieval Queens series strips away centuries of historical mythologizing to shed light on the genuine accomplishments and bravery of these fascinating female monarchs. Queens at War brings the series to an action-packed close.
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The Breath of the Gods: The History and Future of the Wind
by Simon Winchester
New York Times bestselling author Simon Winchester returns with a thought-provoking history of the wind, written in his edifying and entertaining style. What is going on with our atmosphere? The headlines are filled with news of devastating hurricanes, murderous tornadoes, and cataclysmic fires affecting large swaths of America. Gale force advisories are issued on a regular basis by the National Weather Service. In 2022, a report was released by atmospheric scientists at the University of Northern Illinois, warning that winds--the force at the center of all these dangerous natural events--are expected to steadily increase in the years ahead, strengthening in power, speed, and frequency. While this prediction worried the insurance industry, governmental leaders, scientists, and conscientious citizens, one particular segment of society received it with unbridled enthusiasm. To the energy industry, rising wind strength and speeds as an unalloyed boon for humankind--a vital source of clean and safe power. Between these two poles--wind as a malevolent force, and wind as savior of our planet--lies a world of fascination, history, literature, science, poetry, and engineering which Simon Winchester explores with the curiosity and vigor that are the hallmarks of his bestselling works. In The Breath of the Gods, he explains how wind plays a part in our everyday lives, from airplane or car travel to the natural disasters that are becoming more frequent and regular. The Breath of the Gods is an urgently needed portrait across time of that unseen force--unseen but not unfelt--that respects no national borders and no vessel or structure in its path. Wind, the movement of the air, is seen by so many as a heavenly creation and generally a thing of essential goodness. But when it flexes its invisible muscles, all should take care and be very afraid.
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Centerville Library
111 W. Spring Valley Rd
Centerville, OH 45458
(937) 433-8091
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Woodbourne Library
6060 Far Hills Ave Centerville, OH 45459
(937) 435-3700
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Creativity Commons
895 Miamisburg Centerville Rd
Centerville, OH 45459
(937) 610-4425
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