Culpeper County Library271 Southgate Shopping Center, Culpeper, Virginia 22701 | 540-825-8691https://www.cclva.org |
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History and Current Events May 2026 |
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Stand
by Cory Booker
In Stand, Senator Cory Booker offers a hopeful and practical path forward, weaving together powerful stories and stirring personal reflections to remind us that our country's shared ideals can serve as a North Star to guide us, even when our journey feels especially dark and perilous. He argues that our principles are not luxuries; they are vital, strategic keys to our survival and success. By wielding these tools, we can reclaim our sense of common cause and change the course of our country's history.Stand takes readers on a trip through America's past and present, showcasing moments when individuals and communities--in unexpected situations and against staggering odds--prevailed by embodying the best of our nation's virtues. Through the stories of leaders from President George Washington and Congressman John Lewis, to suffragist Alice Paul and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, to environmental justice advocate Ron Finley and disability rights activist Jennifer Keelan-Chaffins, Booker offers inspiring and actionable insights for Americans from all walks of life.
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White Supremacy: A Short History
by John Broich
When did whiteness begin? Was its rise inevitable? In this powerful history, John Broich traces the emergence, evolution and contradictions of white supremacy, from its roots in the British empire, to the racial politics of the present. Focussing on the English-speaking world, he examines how ideas of whiteness connect to the history of slavery, Enlightenment thought, European colonialism, Social Darwinism and eugenics, fascism and capitalism. Far from being the natural order of things, Broich demonstrates that white supremacy is a brittle concept. For centuries, it has been constantly shifting, rebranding, and justifying itself in the face of resistance. The oft-repeated excuse that its architects were simply men of their time collapses under scrutiny. With brutal honesty, Broich exposes the lies embedded in the grim biography of an invented race. White Supremacy calls for a deeper understanding of the past, that we might undo its grip on the present.
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| This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History by Beverly GagePulitzer Prize-winning historian Beverly Gage's engaging travelogue surveys 250 years of American history via visits to 13 places that have shaped the country, from Independence Hall to Disneyland and everything in between. Try this next: American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed by Isaac Fitzgerald. |
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The Price of Mercy: Unfair Trials, a Violent System, and a Public Defender's Search for Justice in America
by Emily Galvin Almanza
As Americans, we are told a rose-tinted story about our criminal courts--that these are the hallowed halls of justice, that the purpose of our legal process is to find the truth, and that those who enforce the law are both equitable and heroic. But what if the reality is purposefully obscured to hide something rotten at the system's core? In The Price of Mercy, attorney and former public defender Emily Galvin Almanza weaves hard data and unforgettable stories, dark humor and compelling evidence to tell us the truth about what's really going on behind the closed doors of America's criminal courts. She shows us how jails actually increase future crime, the dirty tricks police use to make millions in overtime pay, how a man could spend decades in prison because scientists mistook dog hair for his own, the perverse incentives that push prosecutors to seek convictions even when they themselves don't want to, and how judges may decide cases differently after lunch. We'll learn what's working, too: how public defenders can improve public health and even economic mobility, and how planting more trees can reduce a neighborhood's murder rates. But a lone defender winning a case won't change the system. Galvin Almanza argues that we need an engaged public to confront the stark reality of our crime-generating, poverty-entrenching, health-destroying legal apparatus and rebuild it into something that can save our collective present and prevent our future from being torn apart.
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| London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth by Patrick Radden KeefeIn his richly detailed latest, award-winning journalist Patrick Radden Keefe (Say Nothing) chronicles the shocking death of 19-year-old Zac Brettler in 2019 London, revealing how Brettler's secret life posing as the son of a Russian oligarch led to his involvement in the city's seedy underworld. For fans of: Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade by Walter Kirn. |
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| Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age by Ibram X. KendiNational Book Award-winning author Ibram X. Kendi's (Stamped from the Beginning) thought-provoking latest details the origins and evolution of the great replacement theory -- the far-right conspiracy that claims white European people are deliberately being replaced by non-white immigrants -- and examines how leading politicians around the globe openly propagate these views. Further reading: The Great White Hoax: Two Centuries of Selling Racism in America by Philip Kadish. |
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The Bitter End: The Final Battles on the Eastern Front in World War II
by Antonio J. Muñoz
As Hitler's empire crumbled, the Eastern Front became a crucible of destruction--this is the definitive account of its final, brutal months. The world had never seen anything like the Eastern Front in World War II. In the so-called bloodlands between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union--from the Baltic in the north to the Balkans, the Crimea, and the Caucasus in the south--the two sides clashed in a series of titanic campaigns that involved millions of soldiers and entangled many more civilians. During the war's last year, the Eastern Front descended into cataclysm as the Red Army forced the Germans into retreat and collapse. The Bitter End chronicles this chaotic final stage of World War II, distilling a sprawling conflict into a concise and highly readable narrative. In concert with the American and British invasion of Normandy in the West, the Soviets launched the war's endgame with Operation Bagration in June 1944 and crushed the German center. It was Barbarossa in reverse as the Red Army killed or captured German forces by the hundreds of thousands. From there, Soviet offensives spread all along the Eastern Front--Finland, the Baltics, the Balkans, Romania--and inflicted defeat after defeat on Germany and its Axis allies. In early 1945, Soviet forces took Warsaw and drove the Germans westward out of Poland, along the way liberating concentration camps including Auschwitz. Shattered German forces attempted to regroup for a desperate showdown in Berlin, but the weight of the Red Army was too great, and after two weeks of street fighting, the Reich capital fell. A week later Germany surrendered. From Bagration to Berlin, from the Vistula to the Oder, from the Kremlin to Hitler's bunker, The Bitter End reconstructs the final battles on the Eastern Front in a narrative covering war-defining operations but never losing sight of the human cost paid by soldiers in the tanks and foxholes and by innocent civilians in the villages, towns, and cities of Eastern Europe.
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| True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color -- from Azure to Zinc Pink by Kory StamperIn her irreverent latest based on a decade of research, lexicographer Kory Stamper (Word by Word: The Secret Language of Dictionaries) traces Merriam-Webster staffers' surprisingly contentious efforts to define colors, which began with the 1931 establishment of the Inter-Society Color Council. Further reading: The World According to Color: A Cultural History by James Fox. |
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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Culpeper County Library271 Southgate Shopping Center, Culpeper, Virginia 22701 | 540-825-8691https://www.cclva.org |
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