| Romantic outlaws: the extraordinary lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley by Charlotte GordonMary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley were ardent feminists long before feminism was cool - actually, it was considered morally suspect. In Romantic Outlaws, author Charlotte Gordon relates their lives in alternating chapters, demonstrating the parallels between their philosophical and socially conscious outlooks. Wollstonecraft, who penned the revolutionary Vindication of the Rights of Women, died just two weeks after her daughter's 1797 birth, but Shelley (author of Frankenstein), who led a similarly tumultuous life, found inspiration in her mother's writings. |
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Bettyville: a memoir
by George Hodgman
In a powerful story of secrets, silences and enduring love, a veteran magazine and book editor returns to his hometown of Paris, Missouri, to take care of his aging mother, Betty, a strong-willed woman who speaks her mind and has never really accepted the fact that her son is gay.
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Going up is easy: the first woman to ascend Everest
by Lydia Bradey
In 1988, Lydia Bradey became the first woman to climb Mount Everest without supplementary oxygen. She made the ascent alone and to date she is the only New Zealander to have made an oxygen-free ascent. Her climb was a truly remarkable achievement but also an internationally controversial one. Going Up is Easy details for the first time the events surrounding Bradey's historic feat, as well as her many hair-raising expeditions through Alaska, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, India, China, Europe, and New Zealand.
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East in Eden
by Izabela Shopova
Surviving New Zealand in characteristic Eastern European style, while helplessly falling in love with the 'Land of the Thousand Rainbows', the 'Most Beautiful Rainy Hell', the 'Land of Relentless Biscuit Eaters' Aotearoa, the 'Last Eden on Earth'.
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| Blackout: remembering the things I drank to forget by Sarah HepolaIn this candid memoir, Salon's personal essays editor Sarah Hepola poignantly and sometimes hilariously depicts her life as an alcoholic and her eventual recovery. Recalling her youth in search of meaning and self-definition and her early devotion to alcohol, she reveals that she kept on drinking even after she realized that her addiction caused terrifying blackouts, difficulties at work, and relationship problems. Hepola's honest account of how she turned her life around offers inspiration to those who suspect they need to change their own habits. |
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Planck: driven by vision, broken by war
by Brandon R. Brown
He is credited with being the father of quantum theory, and his work laid the foundation for our modern understanding of matter and energetic processes. But Planck's story is not well known. A German physicist working during the first half of the twentieth century, his library, personal journals, notebooks, and letters were all destroyed with his home in World War II. The story of a brilliant man living in a dangerous time, Brandon Brown gives Max Planck his rightful place in the history of science, and shows how war-torn Germany deeply impacted his life and work.
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| How to catch a Russian spy: the true story of an American civilian turned double agent by Naveed Jamali and Ellis HenicanAfter the 9/11 attacks, 20-something Naveed Jamali realized that he wanted to be an intelligence officer. In order to demonstrate his capability, Jamali persuaded the FBI to hire him as a double agent after lining up a contact in the United Nations Russian mission. Drawing on knowledge gained from watching the television series Miami Vice and films such as Spy Game and the James Bond movies, he traded thumb drives loaded with technical information for envelopes full of cash from the Russian. |
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Racing the gods: a Ducati superbike racer's autobiography
by Paul Ritter
Ritter raced a Ducati 750SS and 900SS during the formative days of American Superbike racing. Nearly 20 years after retiring from top-level racing, Ritter was hurt in tragic accident at a vintage race that left him without the use of his legs. His story of dealing with a tragic loss is as powerful and inspiring as his remarkable success on the race track.
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Return: a Palestinian memoir
by Ghada Karmi
After growing up in Britain following exile from Palestine in 1948, Karmi returns to her homeland in the hope of helping with the peace process and the possibility of a Palestinian state. She starts work within the Palestinian Authority ministry. Yet she finds her family home has now been occupied, and much of the West Bank militarized; meanwhile her encounters with fellow Palestinians, politicians, and Israeli solders forces her to question what role the diaspora has in the future of the homeland, and whether return is truly possible.
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West Coast engineman
by Ian Tibbles
Published by the New Zealand Railway and Locomotive Society, this is a real steam enthusiasts book which brings to life through the photographs and text the workings of West Coast steam railways. The author began with NZR in 1952 at Greymouth. The Grey Valley, Ross, Reefton, Westport, Rewanui. Colour and black and white photographs throughout.
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Slipping the moorings: a memoir weaving faith with justice, ethics and community
by Richard Randerson
A memoir covering 50 years of the author's life as Anglican priest and bishop in New Zealand and Polynesia. It addresses issues of poverty and justice, social change such as the anti-apartheid and anti-nuclear weapons movements; same-sex relationships; public and corporate ethics; theology and atheism; the role of the Church in today's society.
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| The Brontë cabinet: three lives in nine objects by Deborah LutzDrawing inspiration from objects that belonged to the Brontë sisters -- Emily, Charlotte, and Anne -- Victorian literature specialist Deborah Lutz paints an evocative group portrait of the three authors. Each of the items, including their writing desks, a walking stick, and a dog's collar, opens a window onto the Brontës' daily activities, the relationships among the sisters, and the prejudice against women writers they had to overcome. |
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| Stalin's daughter: the extraordinary and tumultuous life of Svetlana Alliluyeva by Rosemary SullivanBorn in 1926, Joseph Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva spent most of her youth sheltered from the ravages of Stalin's oppressive Soviet regime Though her mother and several other family members died relatively young, Svetlana Alliluyeva didn't realize the full significance of the Soviet dictatorship and the Cold War until the 1960s. In 1967 she created an international sensation when she defected to the United States. |
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Seven good years
by Etgar Keret
A tender and entertaining tale of a father bringing up his son in a country beset by wars and alarms.
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Focus on: Women in History
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"Treated like a son, Cixi was able to talk to her father about things that were normally closed areas for women." ~ from Jung Chang's Empress Dowager Cixi
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| Empress Dowager Cixi: the concubine who launched modern China by Jung ChangIn 1852, Chinese Emperor Xianfeng selected 16-year-old Cixi to be one of his concubines; in 1856 she gave birth to the Emperor's first son. This son, Tongzhi, became Xianfeng's heir, so that when Xianfeng died five years later Cixi became the Empress Dowager. She cemented her influence through behind-the-scenes manipulation and collaboration with Xianfeng's first wife (also an Empress Dowager), remaining the power behind the throne until her death in 1908. Though often reviled as an evil influence, Cixi worked to bring China out of isolation and to modernize its policies. |
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Hatshepsut, Queen of Sheba
by Emmet Scott
The mysterious Queen, who is said to have visited Solomon in Jerusalem, has cast her spell over poets, painters and storytellers of many lands. The people of Ethiopia have always claimed her as her own, and to this day boast that her son Menelik fruit of the union between the Queen and Solomon stole the Ark of the Covenant from the Temple in Jerusalem after Solomon's death. For all that, historians have been more sanguine, and increasingly over the past century the academic community has veered towards consigning both royal characters to the fairyland of myth and romance. In 1952, however, Immanuel Velikovsky made an astonishing claim: He announced that not only did the Queen of Sheba exist, but that she left numerous portraits of herself as well as an account of her famous journey to Israel. The Queen of Sheba, Velikovsky announced, was none other than Hatshepsut, the female pharaoh of Egypt, who built a beautiful temple outside Thebes on the walls of which she immortalized the most important event of her life: an expedition to the Land of Punt.
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| Mighty be our powers: how sisterhood, prayer, and sex changed a nation at war by Leymah Gbowee with Carol MithersIn Mighty Be Our Powers, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Leymah Gbowee recounts her early life in Liberia and her dreams of higher education, Charles Taylor's devastating brutal takeover of the country, and the domestic abuse that broke up Gbowee's family. Seeing her life and her dreams destroyed, Gbowee could have given in to despair. Instead, she helped to organize a massive women's movement that turned the tide for peace. In now-calm Liberia, she continues to motivate women to work for peace across Africa. |
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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