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Notable Non-fiction October 2017
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New and Recently Released
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Ants Among Elephants : An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India by Sujatha GidlaWhile most untouchables are illiterate, Sujatha Gidla's family was educated by Canadian missionaries in the 1930s, making it possible for Gidla to attend elite schools and move to America at the age of twenty-six. It was only then that she saw how extraordinary her family history truly was. Her mother, Manjula, and uncles Satyam and Carey were born in the last days of British colonial rule. They grew up in a world marked by poverty and injustice, but also full of possibility. The Independence movement promised freedom. Yet for untouchables and other poor and working people, little changed. Gidla recounts her brother's incredible transformation from student and labor organizer to famous poet and founder of a left-wing guerrilla movement. And Gidla charts her mother’s battles with caste and women’s oppression. Page by page, Gidla takes us into a complicated, close-knit family as they desperately strive for a decent life and a more just society.
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Women Will Vote : Winning Suffrage in New York State by Susan Goodier Women Will Vote celebrates the 2017 centenary of women's right to full suffrage in New York State. Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello highlight the activism of rural, urban, African American, Jewish, immigrant, and European American women, as well as male suffragists, both upstate and downstate, that led to the positive outcome of the 1917 referendum. If women had failed to gain the vote in New York, Goodier and Pastorello claim, there is good reason to believe that the passage and ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment would have been delayed. Women Will Vote makes clear how actions of New York’s patchwork of suffrage advocates heralded a gigantic political, social, and legal shift in the United States. The authors convincingly argue that the agitation and organization that led to New York women’s victory in 1917 changed the course of American history.
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Devil's Bargain : Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency by Joshua GreenThe shocking elevation of Bannon to head Trump’s flagging presidential campaign on August 17, 2016, hit political Washington like a thunderclap and seemed to signal the meltdown of the Republican Party. Bannon was a bomb-throwing pugilist who’d never run a campaign and was despised by Democrats and Republicans alike. Trump became the avatar of a dark but powerful worldview that dominated the airwaves and spoke to voters whom others couldn’t see. Trump’s campaign was the final phase of a populist insurgency that had been building up in America for years, and Bannon, its inscrutable mastermind, believed it was the culmination of a hard-right global uprising that would change the world. Any study of Trump’s rise to the presidency is unavoidably a study of Bannon. Devil’s Bargain is a tour-de-force telling of the remarkable confluence of circumstances that decided the election, many of them orchestrated by Bannon and his allies, who really did plot a vast, right-wing conspiracy.
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Are We Screwed? : How a New Generation Is Fighting To Survive Climate Change by Geoff Dembicki 31-year-old journalist Geoff Dembicki journeyed to Silicon Valley, Canada's tar sands, Washington, DC, Wall Street and the Paris climate talks to find out if he should hope or despair. What he learned surprised him. Millions of people his age want to radically change our world, and they are at the forefront of resistance to the politicians and CEOs steering our planet towards disaster. In Are We Screwed?, Dembicki gives a firsthand account of this movement, and the shift in generational values behind it, through the stories of young people fighting for their survival. It begins with a student who abandons society to live in the rainforest and ends with a Muslim feminist fomenting a political revolution. We meet a Brooklyn artist terrifying the oil industry, a Norwegian scientist running across the melting Arctic and an indigenous filmmaker challenging the worldview of Mark Zuckerberg. Are We Screwed? makes a bold argument in these troubled times: A safer and more equitable future is more achievable than we've been led to believe.
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The Secret Life of the Mind : How Your Brain Thinks, Feels, and Decides by Mariano SigmanWhere do our thoughts come from? How do we make choices and trust our judgments? What is the role of the unconscious? Can we manipulate our dreams? Neuroscientist Mariano Sigman explores the complex answers to these and many other age-old questions. Dr. Sigman draws on research in physics, linguistics, psychology, education, and beyond to explain why people who speak more than one language are less prone to dementia; how infants can recognize by sight objects they've previously only touched; how babies, even before they utter their first word, have an innate sense of right and wrong. The cutting-edge research presented in The Secret Life of the Mind revolutionizes how we understand the role that neuroscience plays in our lives, unlocking the mysterious cerebral processes that control the ways in which we learn, reason, feel, think, and dream.
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Why Poetry by Matthew Zapruder In Why Poetry, award-winning poet Matthew Zapruder takes on what it is that poetry can do. Zapruder argues that the way we have been taught to read poetry is the very thing that prevents us from enjoying it. In lively, lilting prose, he shows us how that misunderstanding interferes with our direct experience of poetry and creates the sense of confusion or inadequacy that many of us feel when faced with it. Zapruder explores what poems are, and how we can read them, so that we can, as Whitman wrote, “possess the origin of all poems,” without the aid of any teacher or expert. Most important, he asks how reading poetry can help us to lead our lives with greater meaning and purpose. Anchored in poetic analysis and steered through Zapruder’s personal experience of coming to the form, Why Poetry is engaging and conversational, even as it makes a passionate argument for the necessity of poetry in an age when information is constantly being mistaken for knowledge.
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The Vietnam War : An Intimate History by Geoffrey C Ward and Ken BurnsMore than forty years after it ended, the Vietnam War continues to haunt our country. We still argue over why we were there, whether we could have won, and who was right and wrong in their response to the conflict. When the war divided the country, it created deep political fault lines that continue to divide us today. Now, continuing in the tradition of their critically acclaimed collaborations, the authors draw on dozens and dozens of interviews in America and Vietnam to give us the perspectives of people involved at all levels of the war: U.S. and Vietnamese soldiers and their families, high-level officials in America and Vietnam, antiwar protestors, POWs, and many more. The book plunges us into the chaos and intensity of combat, even as it explains the rationale that got us into Vietnam and kept us there for so many years. Rather than taking sides, the book seeks to understand why the war happened the way it did, and to clarify its complicated legacy.
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Wednesdays, October 11 & 25 The Protestant Reformation - Two-Part Series 6:30-8:00 p.m. At the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, Dr. Lou Mitchell will present a two-part series on the events leading to this 16th-century religious, political, intellectual, and cultural upheaval. Wednesday, October 11 Intro to Microsoft Publisher 1:00 p.m. Learn how to use the versatile program Microsoft Publisher to create quick publications, newsletters, flyers, and more. Enroll online or at the library. BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)
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Wednesday, October 18 Creating Your Family's Personal History 6:30 p.m. You've taken a stab at organizing your family history, but it's overwhelming. What to do? Katie Murphy of Univoice History offers tips and strategies for family history projects that you can actually complete. Enroll online or at the library. Thursday, October 19 History RepEATs Itself 12:00-2:00 p.m. Sample of a variety of different foods from the Cranbury Women's Club and Historical Society's cookbooks of yore. Library staff and volunteers will be dusting off jello molds and chafing dishes to present foods your grandparents (parents?) loved to eat! Then stick around to make a kitchy craft Lucy Ricardo or Mary Richards would have been proud of. Enroll online or at the library (enrollment for craft portion only).
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Cranbury Public Library
23 North Main Street ~
Cranbury, NJ 08512 ~ Phone: 609-655-0555 ~ Contact Us
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