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History and Current Events March 2026 |
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| Football by Chuck KlostermanJournalist Chuck Klosterman (The Nineties) ruminates on his lifelong love of football in this funny and wide-ranging cultural history that's "a transcendent appraisal of America's favorite sport" (Publishers Weekly). For fans of: Basketball (and Other Things): A Collection of Questions Asked, Answered, Illustrated by Shea Serrano. |
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The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg--And the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema
by Paul Fischer
Riveting, grade A smack for cinema junkies...Fischer's writing pulsates. --Steven Soderbergh, filmmaker The untold, intimate story of how three young visionaries--Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg--revolutionized American cinema, creating the most iconic films in history while risking everything, redefining friendship, and shaping Hollywood as we know it. In the summer of 1967, as the old Hollywood studio system was dying, an intense, uncompromising young film school graduate named George Lucas walked onto the Warner Bros backlot for his first day working as an assistant to another up-and-coming, largely-unknown filmmaker, a boisterous father of two called Francis Ford Coppola. At the exact same time, across town on the Universal Studios lot, a film-obsessed twenty-year-old from a peripatetic Jewish family, Steven Spielberg, longed to break free from his apprenticeship for the struggling studio and become a film director in his own right. Within a year, the three men would become friends. Spielberg, prioritizing security, got his seven-year contract directing television. Lucas and Coppola, hungry for independence, left Hollywood for San Francisco to found an alternative studio, American Zoetrope, and make films without answering to corporate capitalism. Based on extensive research and hundreds of original interviews with the inner circle of these Hollywood icons, The Last Kings of Hollywood tells the thrilling, dramatic inside story of how, over the next fifteen years, the three filmmakers rivalled and supported each other, fell out and reconciled, and struggled to reinvent popular American cinema. Along the way, Coppola directed The Godfather, then the highest-grossing film of all-time, until Spielberg surpassed it with Jaws -- whose record Lucas broke with Star Wars, which Spielberg surpassed again with E.T. By the early 1980s, they were the richest, best-known filmmakers in the world, each with an empire of their own. The Last Kings of Hollywood is an unprecedented chronicle of their rise, their dreams and demons, their triumphs and their failures -- intimate, extraordinary, and supremely entertaining.
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| Neptune's Fortune: The Billion-Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghosts of the Spanish... by Julian SanctonHistorian Julian Sancton's sweeping maritime saga chronicles how the 2015 discovery of the San José, a Spanish galleon that sank off the coast of Colombia in 1708, was mired by accusations that Roger Dooley, the archaeologist who found the wreckage, was a con artist and grave robber. Featuring interviews with Dooley, this compelling adventure tale will appeal to fans of Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief. |
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Focus on: Women's History Month
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| The Six: The Extraordinary Story of the Grit and Daring of America's First Women Astronauts by Loren GrushBloomberg News reporter Loren Grush's inspiring history spotlights the first six American women astronauts: Anna Fisher, Shannon Lucid, Judy Resnik, Sally Ride, Rhea Seddon, and Kathy Sullivan. Grush's accessible reportage blends biographical sketches with engrossing accounts of the women's triumphs and trials. Try this next: The New Guys: The Historic Class of Astronauts That Broke Barriers and Changed the Face of Space Travel by Meredith Bagby. |
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| Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation by Tiya MilesAward-winning historian Tiya Miles (All That She Carried) thoughtfully explores how 19th-century Black and Indigenous women were shaped by their relationship to the natural world, which freed them from the oppressive confines of domestic spaces. Try this next: Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden by Camille T. Dungy. |
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| The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis by Maria SmiliosHidden Figures fans will enjoy this evocative debut history from essayist Maria Smilios that chronicles the work of the early 20th-century Black women nurses at Staten Island's Sea View Hospital, who worked tirelessly to eradicate tuberculosis despite systemic racism, poor working conditions, and understaffing. Further reading: Twice as Hard: The Stories of Black Women Who Fought to Become Physicians, from the Civil War to the 21st Century by Jasmine Brown. |
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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
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 [a] 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. ... 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. ... Set against the backdrop of the California Gold Rush and taking us to the brink of Antarctica, [this book] finally gives Mary Ann Patten--the first woman to command a merchant vessel as captain--her due--
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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