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The Royal We
by Roddy Bottum
A founder of the iconic band Faith No More shares his coming-of-age and out-of-the-closet story in pre-tech boom San Francisco
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The Uncool: A Memoir
by Cameron Crowe
The long-awaited memoir by Cameron Crowe--one of America's most iconic journalists and filmmakers--revealing his formative years in rock and roll and bringing to life stories that shaped a generation, in the bestselling tradition of Patti Smith's Just Kids with a dash of Moss Hart's Act One. The Uncool is a ... dispatch from a lost world, the real-life events that became Almost Famous, and a coming-of-age journey filled with characters you won't soon forget--
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Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy
by Julia Ioffe
In 1990, seven-year-old Julia Ioffe and her family fled the Soviet Union. Nearly twenty years later, Ioffe returned to Moscow, only to discover just how much Russian society had changed while she had been living in America. The Soviet women she had known growing up--doctors, engineers, scientists--had seemingly been replaced with women desperate to marry rich and become stay-at-home moms. How had Russia gone from portraying itself as the vanguard of world feminism to the last bastion of conservative Christian values? In Motherland, Ioffe turns modern Russian history on its head, telling it exclusively through the stories of its women. From her own physician great-grandmothers to Lenin's lover, a feminist revolutionary; from the hundreds of thousands of Soviet girls who fought in World War II to the millions of single mothers who rebuilt and repopulated a devastated country; from the members of Pussy Riot to Yulia Navalnaya, wife of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, she chronicles one of the most audacious social experiments in history and how it failed the very women it was meant to liberate--
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We Survived the Night
by Julian Brave Noisecat
Born to a Secwepemc father and Jewish-Irish mother, Julian Brave NoiseCat's childhood was full of contradictions. Despite living in the urban Native community of Oakland, California, he was raised primarily by his white mother. He was a competitive powwow dancer, but asked his father to cut his hair short, fearing that his white classmates would call him a girl if he kept it long. When his father, tormented by an abusive and impoverished rez upbringing, eventually left the family, NoiseCat was left to make sense of his Indigenous heritage and identity on his own. Now, decades later, Noisecat has set across the country to correct the erasure, invisibility, and misconceptions surrounding this nation's First Peoples, as he develops his voice as a storyteller and artist in his own right--
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1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--And How It Shattered a Nation
by Andrew Ross Sorkin
With the depth of a classic history and the drama of a thriller, 1929 unravels the greed, blind optimism, and human folly that led to an era-defining collapse--one with ripple effects that still shape our society today. In 1929, the world watched in shock as the unstoppable Wall Street bull market went into a freefall, wiping out fortunes and igniting a depression that would reshape a generation. But behind the flashing ticker tapes and panicked traders, another drama unfolded--one of visionaries and fraudsters, titans and dreamers, euphoria and ruin. With unparalleled access to historical records and newly uncovered documents, ... Andrew Ross Sorkin takes readers inside the chaos of the crash, behind the scenes of a raging battle between Wall Street and Washington and the larger-than-life characters whose ambition and naivete in an endless boom led to disaster--
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Scream with Me: Horror Films and the Rise of American Feminism (1968-1980)
by Eleanor Johnson
In May of 2022, Columbia University's Dr. Eleanor Johnson watched along with her students as the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade. At the same time, her class was studying the 1968 horror film Rosemary's Baby and Johnson had a sudden epiphany: horror cinema engages directly with the combustive politics of women's rights and offer a light through the darkness and an outlet to scream. With a voice as persuasive as it is insightful, Johnson reveals how classics like Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, and The Shining expose and critique issues of reproductive control, domestic violence, and patriarchal oppression. Scream with Me weaves these iconic films into the fabric of American feminism, revealing that true horror often lies not in the supernatural, but in the familiar confines of the home, exposing the deep-seated fears and realities of women's lives. While on the one hand a joyful celebration of seminal and beloved horror films, Scream with Me is also an unflinching and timely recognition of the power of this genre to shape and reflect cultural dialogues about gender and power-- Provided by publisher.
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Mother Mary Comes to Me
by Arundhati Roy
Mother Mary Comes to Me draws on multiple strands of the author's early years, unveiling an empathetic and at the same time marvelously satirical portrait of an eccentric extended family with a fondness for spectacular family feuds. Roy's maternal lineage was saddled with a legacy of violence yet blessed with the gifts of education and English fluency. 'Mrs. Roy' formed the tempestuous foundation upon which Roy and her brother, 'LKC, ' raised themselves. A single mother who suffered from debilitating asthma and thunderous moods, Mary Roy founded a coeducational school--a revolutionary act in its time--and grew it into a spectacularly influential institution. The rage and unpredictability Mrs. Roy was known for was the secret to her success in a patriarchal society unaccustomed to seeing a woman soar to great heights while rejecting cultural roles designed to clip her wings--
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Why I Love Horror: Essays on Horror Literature
by Becky Siegel Spratford
A love letter to the horror genre from many of the most influential and bestselling authors in the industry. For twenty-five years, Becky Siegel Spratford has worked as a librarian in Reader Advisory, training library workers all over the world on how to engage their patrons and readers, and to use her place as a horror expert and critic to get the word out to others; to bring even more readers into the horror fold. Why I Love Horror is a captivating anthology and heartfelt tribute to the horror genre featuring essays from several of the most celebrated contemporary horror writers including, Grady Hendrix, Paul Tremblay, Stephen Graham Jones, Josh Malerman, Victor LaValle, Tananarive Due, and Rachel Harrison--
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Baldwin: A Love Story
by Nicholas Boggs
Tells the overlapping stories of Baldwin's most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships: with his mentor, the Black American painter Beauford Delaney; with his lover and muse, the Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger; and with his collaborators, the famed Turkish actor Engin Cezzar and the iconoclastic French artist Yoran Cazac--
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Black Genius: Essays on an American Legacy
by Tre Johnson
A powerful read examining the lack of opportunity given to Black Americans due to structural racism, and how forgotten historical figures and the author's own family found a way to succeed despite the obstacles--Provided by publisher.
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How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir
by Molly Jong-Fast
From the political writer and podcaster, a ferociously honest and disarmingly funny memoir about her elusive mother's encroaching dementia and a reckoning with her complicated childhood--
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Things in Nature Merely Grow
by Yiyun Li
Yiyun Li's remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance as she considers the loss of her son James--
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Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care
by Claudia Rowe
Finalist for the 2025 National Book Award for NonfictionAn immersive, devastating look at foster children's lives. (Seattle Times)A compelling exploration of the broken American foster care system, told through the stories of six former foster youth. This powerful narrative nonfiction book delves into the systemic failures that lead many foster children into the criminal justice system, highlighting the urgent need for reform.This book is a must-read for anyone interested in child welfare, social justice, and the transformative power of the best narrative nonfiction.In Wards of the State, award-winning journalist Claudia Rowe's storytelling is both vivid and unflinching, offering readers a deep understanding of the foster care-to-prison pipeline. Through interviews with psychologists, advocates, judges, and the former foster children themselves, Rowe paints a heartbreaking picture of the lives shaped by this broken system.By the time Maryanne was 16 years old, she had been arrested for murder. In and out of foster and adoptive homes since age 10, she'd run away, been trafficked and assaulted, and finally pointed a gun at a man and pulled the trigger. She fled, but it didn't take long for the police to catch up with her.In court, the defense blamed neither traffickers, nor Maryanne, but Washington state itself--or rather, its foster care system, which parents thousands of children every year. The courts didn't listen to that argument, but award-winning journalist Claudia Rowe did.Washington state isn't alone. Each year, hundreds of thousands of children grow up in America's $30 billion foster care system, only to leave and enter its prisons, where a quarter of all inmates are former foster youth.Weaving Maryanne's story with those of five other foster kids across the country--including an 18-year-old sleeping on the New York City subways; a dropout turned graduate student; and a foster child who is now a policy advisor to the White House--Rowe paints a visceral survival narrative showing exactly where, when, and how the system channels children into locked cells.Rowe brings her extensive experience and investigative prowess to this eye-opening work. With a career spanning over 25 years, Rowe has written for publications such as The New York Times and Mother Jones, and her reporting has influenced policy changes in Washington State. Her previous book, The Spider and the Fly, was a gripping true-crime memoir that showcased her ability to blend personal narrative with broader social issues.
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When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World
by Jordan Thomas
Eighteen of California's largest wildfires on record have burned in the past two decades. Scientists recently invented the term 'megafire' to describe wildfires that behave in ways that would have been impossible just a generation ago, burning through winter, exploding in the night, and devastating landscapes historically impervious to incendiary destruction. Wildland firefighters must navigate these new scales of destruction in real time. In [this book], Jordan Thomas recounts a single, brutal six-month fire season with the Los Padres Hotshots--the special forces of America's firefighters. Being a hotshot is among the most difficult jobs on Earth. Their training is as grueling as any Navy SEAL's, and the social induction is even tougher. As Thomas viscerally renders his crew's attempts to battle flames that are often too destructive to contain, he uncovers the hidden cultural history of megafires--
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America, América: A New History of the New World
by Greg Grandin
This ... original reinterpretation of the New World ... reveals how North and South emerged from a constant, turbulent engagement with each other. [The book] traverses half a millennium, from the Spanish Conquest--the greatest mortality event in human history--through the eighteenth-century wars for independence, the Monroe Doctrine, the coups and revolutions of the twentieth century, and beyond. Grandin shows, among other things, how royalist Spanish America, by sending troops and supplies, helped save the republican American Revolution; how in response to U.S. interventions, Latin Americans remade the rules, leading directly to the founding of the United Nations; and how the Good Neighbor Policy allowed FDR to assume the moral authority to lead the fight against world fascism--
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Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America
by Michael Luo
In 1889, when the Supreme Court upheld the Chinese Exclusion Act --a measure barring Chinese laborers from entering the United States that remained in effect for more than fifty years--Justice Stephen Johnson Field characterized the Chinese as a people 'residing apart by themselves.' They were, Field concluded, 'strangers in the land.' Today, there are more than twenty-two million people of Asian descent in the United States, yet this label still hovers over Asian Americans. In [this book], Luo traces anti-Asian feeling in America to the first wave of immigrants from China in the mid-nineteenth-century: laborers who traveled to California in search of gold and railroad work. Their communities almost immediately faced mobs of white vigilantes who drove them from their workplaces and homes. ... In 1965, when LBJ's Immigration and Nationality Act forbade discrimination by national origin, America opened its doors wide to families like those of Luo's parents, but he finds that the centuries of exclusion of Chinese-Americans left a legacy: many Asians are still treated, and feel, like outsiders today--
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Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools
by Mary Annette Pember
From the mid-19th century to the late 1930s, tens of thousands of Native children were pulled from their families to attend boarding schools that claimed to help create opportunity for these children to pursue professions outside their communities and otherwise 'assimilate' into American life. In reality, these boarding schools--sponsored by the US Government but often run by various religious orders with little to no regulation--were an insidious attempt to destroy tribes, break up families, and stamp out the traditions of generations of Native people. ... Ojibwe journalist Mary Pember's mother was forced to attend one of these institutions, ... and the impacts of her experience have cast a pall over Mary's own childhood and her relationship with her mother. Highlighting both her mother's experience and the experiences of countless other students at such schools, their families, and their children, [this book] paints a stark portrait of communities still reckoning with the legacy of acculturation that has affected generations of Native communities--
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Raising Hare: A Memoir
by Chloe Dalton
A moving and fascinating meditation on freedom, trust, loss, and our relationship with the natural world, explored through the story of one woman's unlikely friendship with a wild hare.
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Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
by John Green
In 2019, John Green met Henry, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone while traveling with Partners in Health. John became fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal and dynamic advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, treatable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing 1.5 million people every year. In Everything is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry's story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis. --]cProvided by publisher.
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The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage
by Richard Rohr
Drawing on a century of Biblical scholarship and written in the warm, pastoral voice that has endeared millions to Rohr, The Tears of Things breathes new life into ancient wisdom and paves a path of enlightenment for anyone seeking a wholehearted way of living in a hurting world.--
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Yoko: A Biography
by David Sheff
John Lennon once described Yoko Ono as the world's most famous unknown artist. 'Everybody knows her name, but no one knows what she does.' ... Throughout her life, Yoko has been a caricature, curiosity, and, often, a villain--an inscrutable seductress, manipulating con artist, and caterwauling fraud. The Lennon/Beatles saga is one of the greatest stories ever told, but Yoko's part has been missing--hidden in the Beatles' formidable shadow. ... This ... biography of Yoko Ono's life will change that. In this book, Yoko Ono takes center stage. [Her] life, independent of Lennon, was an amazing journey. Yoko spans from her birth to wealthy parents in pre-war Tokyo, her harrowing experience as a child during the war, her arrival in avant-garde art scene in London, Tokyo, and New York City. It delves into her groundbreaking art, music, feminism, and activism. We see how she coped under the most intense, relentless, and cynical microscope as she was falsely vilified for the most heinous cultural crime imaginable: breaking up the greatest rock-and-roll band in history--
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Looking at Women Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary
by Victoria Amelina
When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Victoria Amelina was busy writing a novel, taking part in the country's literary scene, and parenting her son. Now she became someone new: a war crimes researcher and the chronicler of extraordinary women like herself who joined the resistance. These heroines include Evgenia, a prominent lawyer turned soldier; Oleksandra, who documented tens of thousands of war crimes and won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2022; and Yulia, a librarian who helped uncover the abduction and murder of a children's book author. Everyone in Ukraine knew that Amelina was documenting the war. She photographed the ruins of schools and cultural centers; she recorded the testimonies of survivors and eyewitnesses to atrocities. And she slowly turned back into a storyteller, writing what would become this book--
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One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This: National Book Award
by Omar El Akkad
On October 25th, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: 'One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.' This tweet was viewed more than ten million times. [This book] chronicles the deep fracture that has occurred for Black, brown, [and] Indigenous Americans, as well as the upcoming generation, many of whom had clung to a thread of faith in Western ideals, in the idea that their countries, or the countries of their adoption, actually attempted to live up to the values they espouse--
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Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People
by Imani Perry
A vast, multifaceted and enchanting (Minneapolis Star-Tribune) meditation on the color blue and its fascinating role in Black history and culture, from National Book Award winner Imani Perry, the most important interpreter of Black life in our time (Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.)Throughout history, the concept of Blackness has been remarkably intertwined with another color: blue. In daily life, it is evoked in countless ways. Blue skies and blue water offer hope for that which lies beyond the current conditions. But blue is also the color of deep melancholy and heartache, echoing Louis Armstrong's question, What did I do to be so Black and blue? In this book, celebrated author Imani Perry uses the world's favorite color as a springboard for a riveting emotional, cultural, and spiritual journey--an examination of race and Blackness that transcends politics or ideology.Perry traces both blue and Blackness from their earliest roots to their many embodiments of contemporary culture, drawing deeply from her own life as well as art and history: The dyed indigo cloths of West Africa that were traded for human life in the 16th century. The mixture of awe and aversion in the old-fashioned characterization of dark-skinned people as Blue Black. The fundamentally American art form of blues music, sitting at the crossroads of pain and pleasure. The blue flowers Perry plants to honor a loved one gone too soon.Poignant, spellbinding, and utterly original, Black in Blues is a brilliant new work that could only have come from the mind of one of our greatest writers and thinkers. Attuned to the harrowing and the sublime aspects of the human experience, it is every bit as vivid, rich, and striking as blue itself.
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