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Biography and Memoir April 2018
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New and Recently Released |
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| Educatedby Tara WestoverRaised in a fundamentalist Mormon family who prepped for the "end of days," Tara Westover grew up without an education. Hungering for knowledge, she began educating herself, eventually pursuing an elite academic career at Harvard and Cambridge. "With no real comparison memoir" (Library Journal), Educated stands in a class all its own, though fans of The Glass Castle and Hillbilly Elegy should appreciate it. It is a tale of fierce family loyalty, and of the grief that comes from severing one’s closest ties. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one’s life through new eyes, and the will to change it. |
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In Full Flight : A Story of Africa and Atonement by John Hylan HeminwayDr. Anne Spoerry treated hundreds of thousands of people across rural Kenya over the span of fifty years. A member of the renowned Flying Doctors Service, the French-born Spoerry learned how to fly a plane at the age of forty-five and earned herself the cherished nickname, "Mama Daktari"--"Mother Doctor"--from the people of Kenya. Yet few knew what drove her from post-World War II Europe to Africa. Now, in the first comprehensive account of her life, Dr. Spoerry's revered selflessness gives way to a past marked by rebellion, submission, and personal decisions that earned her another nickname--this one sinister--working as a "doctor" in a Nazi concentration camp. In Full Flight explores the question of whether it is possible to rewrite one's troubled past simply by doing good in the present.
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Visionary Women : How Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Jane Goodall, and Alice Waters Changed Our World by Andrea BarnetThis is the story of four visionaries who profoundly shaped the world we live in today. Together, these women—linked not by friendship or field, but by their choice to break with convention—showed what one person speaking truth to power can do. Jane Jacobs fought for livable cities and strong communities; Rachel Carson warned us about poisoning the environment; Jane Goodall demonstrated the indelible kinship between humans and animals; and Alice Waters urged us to reconsider what and how we eat. With a keen eye for historical detail, Andrea Barnet traces the arc of each woman’s career and explores how their work collectively changed the course of history. All told, their efforts ignited a transformative progressive movement while offering people a new way to think about the world and a more positive way of living in it.
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Everything Happens for a Reason : And Other Lies I've Loved by Kate BowlerA divinity professor and young mother with Stage IV cancer shares her perspectives on friendship, love and death while describing her efforts to remain true to her faith in spite of impossible hardships. Frank and funny, dark and wise, Kate Bowler pulls the reader deeply into her life in an account she populates affectionately with a colorful, often hilarious retinue of friends, mega-church preachers, relatives, and doctors. Everything Happens for a Reason tells her story, offering up her irreverent, hard-won observations on dying and the ways it has taught her to live.
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For Francisco Cantú, the border is in the blood: his mother, a park ranger and daughter of a Mexican immigrant, raised him in the scrublands of the Southwest. Haunted by the landscape of his youth, Cantú joins the Border Patrol. He and his partners are posted to remote regions crisscrossed by drug routes and smuggling corridors, where they learn to track other humans under blistering sun and through frigid nights. They haul in the dead and deliver to detention those they find alive. Cantú tries not to think where the stories go from there. Plagued by nightmares, he abandons the Patrol for civilian life. But when an immigrant friend travels to Mexico to visit his dying mother and does not return, Cantú discovers that the border has migrated with him, and now he must know the whole story.
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Wallis in Love : The Untold Life of the Duchess of Windsor, the Woman Who Changed the Monarchy by Andrew Morton In Wallis in Love, acclaimed biographer Andrew Morton offers a fresh portrait of Wallis Simpson in all her vibrancy and brazenness as she transformed from a hard-nosed gold-digger to charming chatelaine. Using diary entries, letters, and other never-before-seen records, Morton takes us through Wallis's romantic adventures in Washington, China, and her entrance into the strange wonderland that is London society. During her journey, we meet an extraordinary array of characters, many of whom smoothed the way for her dalliance with the king of England, Edward VIII. Wallis in Love goes beyond Wallis's infamous persona and reveals a complex, domineering woman striving to determine her own fate and grapple with matters of the heart.
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Wednesday, April 25 Learn to Preserve Your Family's History with iBiographer 7:00 p.m. Created and presented by Cranbury resident Sofia Milner, iBiographer is designed for you to preserve your family's history, stories, memories and documents all in one safe place for you to share with the whole family. You write their stories, record their lives, preserve information, and share updates from all over the country and globe. And it's free! Enroll online or at the library!
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Friday, May 4 The Chopsticks-Fork Principle 7:00 p.m. Cathy Bao Bean wrote a memoir and manual of how she and her husband, artist Bennett Bean, raised their son to be bicultural. Cathy will speak about her experience as an immigrant from China figuring out how to be herself as well as raise a son. As she attempts to satisfy disparate cultural norms, she provides us with a unique window into the experience of a bicultural family. Enroll online or at the library! Wednesday, May 9 David Brainerd in Cranbury 6:30 p.m. Dr. Lou Mitchell discusses this early missionary and his work in Cranbury and the surrounding area.
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Cranbury Public Library
23 North Main Street ~
Cranbury, NJ 08512 ~ Phone: 609-655-0555 ~ Contact Us
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