| The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a nuclear war planner by Daniel EllsbergWhat it's about: Author Daniel Ellsberg (who leaked the Pentagon Papers) recounts his role in the RAND Corporation's 1960s study of the U.S. policy on nuclear strikes. Framed as a memoir, The Doomsday Machine explains how the nuclear policy developed, its flaws (which continue to the present), and the urgency of reducing the availability of nuclear weapons.
Why you'll want to read it: This sobering and thought-provoking book shines a spotlight on issues that have become more prominent since North Korea started demonstrating their missile capabilities. |
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| It's all relative: Adventures up and down the world's family tree by A.J. JacobsWhat it's about: A global adventure in family tree-climbing, Esquire contributing editor A.J. Jacobs' engaging study of genealogy and genetics provides often startling insight into tradition, clannishness, and individual identity.
Is it for you? This peripatetic approach to individual family history and the history of human beings offers laugh-out-loud humor and intriguing information, whether you're interested in genealogy or hadn't given it a second thought. |
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Paradise in chains: The Bounty mutiny and the founding of Australia
by Diana Preston
"Celebrated historian Diana Preston presents betrayals, escapes, and survival at sea in her account of the mutiny of the Bounty and the flight of convicts from the Australian penal colony. The story of the mutiny of the Bounty and William Bligh and his men's survival on the open ocean for 48 days and 3,618 miles has become the stuff of legend. But few realize that Bligh's escape across the seas was not the only open-boat journey in that era of British exploration and colonisation. Indeed, 9 convicts from the Australian penal colony, led by Mary Bryant, also travelled 3,250 miles across the open ocean and some uncharted seas to land at the same port Bligh had reached only months before. In this meticulously researched dual narrative of survival, acclaimed historian Diana Preston provides the background and context to explain the thrilling open-boat voyages each party survived and the Pacific Island nations each encountered on their journey to safety. Through this deep-dive, readers come to understand the Pacific Islands as they were and as they were perceived, and how these seemingly utopian lands became a place where mutineers, convicts, and eventually the natives themselves, were chained"--Provided by publisher
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Gilded suffragists: The New York socialites who fought for women's right to vote
by Johanna Neuman
In the early twentieth century over two hundred of New York's most glamorous socialites joined the suffrage movement. Their names Astor, Belmont, Rockefeller, Tiffany, Vanderbilt, Whitney and the like--carried enormous public value. These women were the media darlings of their day because of the extravagance of their costume balls and the opulence of the French couture clothes, and they leveraged their social celebrity for political power, turning women's right to vote into a fashionable cause. Although they were dismissed by critics as bored socialites "trying on suffrage as they might the latest couture designs from Paris," these gilded suffragists were at the epicentre of the great reforms known collectively as the Progressive Era. Johanna Neuman restores these women to their rightful place in the story of women's suffrage. Understanding the need for popular approval for any social change, these socialites used their wealth, power, social connections and style to excite mainstream interest and to diffuse resistance to the cause. In the end, as Neuman says, when change was in the air, these women helped push women's suffrage over the finish line.
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Princesses on the wards: Royal women in nursing through wars and revolutions
by Coryne Hall
Queens and princesses have always shown care and compassion, but many went much further. They were not afraid to roll up their sleeves, work in wards or help in field hospitals and operating theatres, despite their sheltered upbringings. Through wars and revolutions across Europe, their experiences were similar to those of thousands of other nurses, but this is the first time that their involvement in nursing and the extent of their influence on the profession has been detailed in full. Beginning with two daughters of Queen Victoria - Princess Alice and Princess Helena - this book looks at the difficulties these royals faced while carving a worthwhile role in an age when the place of a well-born woman was considered to be in the home. Empress Alexandra of Russia, Queen Marie of Romania, Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent, and Princess Alice of Greece (mother of the Duke of Edinburgh) were just a few of Queen Victoria's relatives who set an example of service well beyond that considered necessary for their rank. Not all of them were fully trained nurses, but each made a positive contribution towards alleviating suffering which cannot be overestimated.
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Bethlehem: Biography of a town
by Nicholas Blincoe
Bethlehem is so suffused with history and myth that it feels like an unreal city, even to the people who call it home. For many, Bethlehem remains the little town at the edge of the desert described in Biblical accounts. Today, the city is hemmed in by a wall and surrounded by forty-one Israeli settlements and hostile settlers and soldiers. Nicholas Blincoe tells the town's history through the visceral experience of living there, taking readers through its stone streets and desert wadis, its monasteries, aqueducts, and orchards to show the city from every angle and era. His portrait of Bethlehem sheds light on one of the world's most intractable political problems, and he maintains that if the long thread winding back to the city's ancient past is severed, the chances of an end to the Palestine-Israel conflict will be lost with it.
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We were eight years in power: An American tragedy
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
A compelling portrait of the historic Barack Obama era, combining new and annotated essays from the National Book Award-winning author of Between the World and Me, includes the articles, "Fear of a Black President" and "The Case for Reparations" as well as two new pieces on the Obama administration and what is coming next.
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The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar's hidden genocide
by Azeem Ibrahim
The Rohingya are a Muslim group who live in Rakhine state (formerly Arakan state) in western Myanmar (Burma), a majority Buddhist country. According to the United Nations, they are one of the most persecuted minorities in the world. They suffer routine discrimination at the hands of neighbouring Buddhist Rakhine groups, but international human rights groups such as Human Rights Watch (HRW) have also accused Myanmar's authorities of being complicit in a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya Muslims. The Rohingya face regular violence, arbitrary arrest and detention, extortion, and other abuses, a situation that has been particularly acute since 2012 in the wake of a serious wave of sectarian violence. Islam is practiced by around 4% of the population of Myanmar, and most Muslims also identify as Rohingya. Yet the authorities refuse to recognize this group as one of the 135 ethnic groups or 'national races' making up Myanmar's population. On this basis, Rohingya individuals are denied citizenship rights in the country of their birth, and face severe limitations on many aspects of an ordinary life, such as marriage or movement around the country.
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Living the Cold War: Memoirs of a British diplomat
by Christopher Mallaby
The centrepiece of this memoir by Sir Christopher Mallaby, former British Ambassador in Germany and France, is the unification of Germany in 1990, the culmination of years of work by Sir Christopher and his colleagues. He held different views from the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. He saw unification as the key to ending the Cold War with a peaceful victory for the West and the liberation of millions in eastern and central Europe from Soviet control. She disliked the Germans and opposed unification. Christopher Mallaby writes vividly of many other people, places and events. He and his wife were a young couple in Moscow during the Cuba crisis, and knew they might be destroyed by American nuclear weapons. He explains why Khrushchev took such a huge risk and why he yielded to President Kennedy. 'Living the Cold War' describes the work of diplomats and leaders on many other fronts, from dealing with the threat of the Soviet Union to Britain's attempt to persuade Argentina to withdraw peacefully from the Falklands. The author brings different experiences alive, including the KGB's harassment of diplomats in Moscow and the fascination of his time as Ambassador in France. In doing so, he shows what diplomats can really achieve. He mixes amusing incidents with an insider's insights on crucial world events.
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A moonless, starless sky: Ordinary women and men fighting extremism in Africa
by Alexis Okeowo
In the tradition of Behind the Beautiful Forevers, this is a masterful, humane work of literary journalism by New Yorker staff writer Alexis Okeowo - a vivid narrative of Africans who are courageously resisting their continent's wave of fundamentalism. In A Moonless, Starless Sky Okeowo weaves together four narratives that form a powerful tapestry of modern Africa: a young couple, kidnap victims of Joseph Kony's LRA; a Mauritanian waging a lonely campaign against modern-day slavery; a women's basketball team flourishing amid war-torn Somalia; and a vigilante who takes up arms against the extremist group Boko Haram. This debut book by one of America's most acclaimed young journalists illuminates the inner lives of ordinary people doing the extraordinary - lives that are too often hidden, underreported, or ignored by the rest of the world. | |
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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