Christmas Events and Holiday Hours
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Our libraries are closed on public holidays. View our holiday hours for more information. However don't forget that our Digital Library is open 24/7!
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| A beginner's guide to paradise: 9 steps to giving up everything by Alex SheshunoffAlex Sheshunoff was seemingly living the dream: in his mid-twenties, he lived in Manhattan with a lovely Spanish woman and worked at an Internet company he'd helped found. But after a panic attack sent him to the ER, he decided to leave it all behind, move to the South Pacific alone, and read the 100 books he was most embarrassed not to have read. In this "sincerely funny" (Kirkus Reviews) book, he shares his experiences living on a remote island, covering such topics as appropriate attire (loincloths, anyone?), monkey-diapering, building a bungalow...and falling in love. |
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| Pacific: silicon chips and surfboards, coral reefs and atom bombs... by Simon WinchesterThe Pacific Ocean is the largest body of water on Earth. Turning his keen eye to this behemoth, New York Times bestselling author Simon Winchester touches on its geological history, but mainly focuses on events after January 1, 1950. Assessing not only the ocean and what lies beneath it (diverse animals, coral reefs, etc.), he discusses the countries that border it (including China and the United States) as well as the islands in it. Winchester also addresses humanity's relationship with the ocean and the ocean's inescapable role in the future as climate change occurs and power shifts among the countries at its border. Kirkus Reviews calls Pacific a "superb analysis of a world wonder." |
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Better than fiction: true adventures from 30 great fiction writers 2
by Donald W. George
A second collection of true travel tales by some of the world's most popular fiction writers explores the lessons learned from immersing oneself in another culture and includes contributions by such writers as Alexander McCall Smith, Sophie Cunningham and Jane Smiley.
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TopGear drives of a lifetime: around the world in 25 road trips
by Dan Read
Every year, Top Gear dispatches correspondents to cover many serious stories around the world. Wherever they go, they ask tough questions and leave no stone unturned in search of the cold, hard truth. Questions such as: Is it possible to drive a Ferrari up a Scottish ski slope? Exactly how far can you drive a bulldozer across the Antarctic before it falls down a big crack? And what happens when you drive a small 4X4 up a volcano, during an earthquake, with a high chance of eruption? The answers to all of the above - and more - can be found in Top Gear Top Drives, a new book featuring Top Gear's best adventures, neatly arranged in precise geographic order: top, middle and bottom.
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In America: travels with John Steinbeck
by Geert Mak
In 1960, John Steinbeck and his dog Charley set out in their green pickup truck to rediscover the soul of America, visiting small towns and cities from New York to New Orleans. The trip became Travels With Charley, one of his best-loved books. Half a century on, Geert Mak sets off from Steinbeck's home. Mile after mile, as he retraces Steinbeck's footsteps through the potato fields of Maine to the endless prairies of the Midwest and stumbles across glistening suburbs and boarded-up stores, Mak searches for the roots of America and what remains of the world Steinbeck describes. How has America changed in the last fifty years; what remains of the American dream; and what do Europe and America now have in common?
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Black dragon river: a journey down the Amur River at the borderlands of empires
by Dominic Ziegler
A journalist chronicles his extraordinary -- and personal -- journey down Amur River, one of Asia's great rivers that serves as a large part of the border between Russia and China, interspersing history, ecology and peoples throughout to show a region obsessed with the past—and what it means for the future.
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"A traveler am I, and a navigator, and every day I discover a new region within my soul." ~ Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931), Lebanese-American artist and author
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Pilgrimage: my journey to a deeper faith in the land where Jesus walked
by Lynn N. Austin
With gripping honesty, Lynn Austin shares with readers a private and intimate look at her own struggles with spiritual dryness in a season of loss and unwanted change. As she journeys through Israel, Austin turns to Scripture at each site she visits. Then with a fiction writer's eye for detail, she seamlessly weaves events and insights from the Word as she finds hope, renewed faith, and a sense of direction for the future.
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Where the dead pause, and the Japanese say goodbye: a journey
by Marie Mutsuki Mockett
A woman describes her journey visiting Zen priests and performing rituals after the death of both her Japanese grandfather and her American father and her inability to bury them at her family's Buddhist temple in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
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The Saffron Road: a journey with Buddha's daughters
by Christine Toomey
A brief meeting with a Buddhist nun in India made a deep impression on Christine Toomey. It sent her on a two year, 60,000-mile odyssey to learn more about the contemporary women choosing in their thousands to become part of a long tradition of female spirituality that stretches back through the centuries and now embraces the radical possibility that the next Dalai Lama could be female. In The Saffron Road, Toomey follows in the footsteps of earlier generations of Buddhist nuns to trace the routes by which the philosophy has spread from a solitary order in a remote area of India in the 5th century BC, via 1950s San Francisco where Zen was popularised by the Beat generation, to the globally-renowned practitioners of mindfulness of today.
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The lonely city: adventures in the art of being alone
by Olivia Laing
The Lonely City is a roving cultural history of urban loneliness, centered on the ultimate city: Manhattan, that teeming island of gneiss, concrete, and glass. What does it mean to be lonely? How do we live, if we're not intimately involved with another human being? How do we connect with other people, particularly if our sexuality or physical body is considered deviant or damaged? Does technology draw us closer together or trap us behind screens? Olivia Laing explores these questions by travelling deep into the work and lives of some of the century's most original artists, among them Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz, Edward Hopper, Henry Darger and Klaus Nomi.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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