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Sunday, December 2, 2018

You CAN Handle the Truth: Nonfiction Book Picks

Posted by the Information Services Department (Gwen B., Emily W., Lisa E., & Joyce D.)


Here's the latest list of our new nonfiction book picks! Listed below, along with their Dewey Decimal classification, are our top picks of the nonfiction books that looked most interesting, ultra-informative, or just plain fun. Many of these are so new that we're still working on getting them out on the shelf, but you can request them now by clicking on the titles and placing a hold.



211.80973 MOO Godless Citizens in a Godly Republic : Atheists in American Public Life by R. Laurence Moore and Isaac Kramnick
God occupies our nation’s consciousness, even defining to many what it means to be American. Nonbelievers have often had second-class legal status and have had to fight for their rights as citizens.
As R. Laurence Moore and Isaac Kramnick demonstrate in their sharp and convincing work, avowed atheists were derided since the founding of the nation. Even Thomas Paine fell into disfavor and his role as a patriot forgotten. Popular Republican Robert Ingersoll could not be elected in the nineteenth century due to his atheism, and the suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton was shunned when she questioned biblical precepts about women’s roles.





270.092 PAG Why Religion?: A Personal Story by Elaine Pagels
Why is religion still around in the twenty-first century? Why do so many still believe? And how do various traditions still shape the way people experience everything from sexuality to politics, whether they are religious or not? In Why Religion? Elaine Pagels looks to her own life to help address these questions.
These questions took on a new urgency for Pagels when dealing with unimaginable loss—the death of her young son, followed a year later by the shocking loss of her husband. Here she interweaves a personal story with the work that she loves, illuminating how, for better and worse, religious traditions have shaped how we understand ourselves; how we relate to one another; and, most importantly, how to get through the most difficult challenges we face.


 


323.092 MCK On the Other Side of Freedom : The Case for Hope by DeRay McKesson
From the internationally recognized civil rights activist/organizer and host of the podcast Pod Save the People, a meditation on resistance, justice, and freedom, and an intimate portrait of a movement from the front lines.

Honest, courageous, and imaginative, On the Other Side of Freedom is a work brimming with hope. Drawing from his own experiences as an activist, organizer, educator, and public official, Mckesson exhorts all Americans to work to dismantle the legacy of racism and to imagine the best of what is possible. Honoring the voices of a new generation of activists, On the Other Side of Freedom is a visionary's call to take responsibility for imagining, and then building, the world we want to live in.


 
362.734089 ROO In Their Voices: Black Americans on Transracial Adoption by Rhonda M. Roorda
While many proponents of transracial adoption claim that American society is increasingly becoming "color-blind," a growing body of research reveals that for transracial adoptees of all backgrounds, racial identity does matter. Rhonda M. Roorda elaborates significantly on that finding, specifically studying the effects of the adoption of black and biracial children by white parents. She incorporates diverse perspectives on transracial adoption by concerned black Americans of various ages, including those who lived through Jim Crow and the Civil Rights era. All her interviewees have been involved either personally or professionally in the lives of transracial adoptees, and they offer strategies for navigating systemic racial inequalities while affirming the importance of black communities in the lives of transracial adoptive families. 



641.5612 ALL All Time Best Dinners for Two
Leave it to America's Test Kitchen to help you get a perfectly scaled dinner for two on the table--no guesswork required.
Because small households, newlyweds, empty nesters, college students, and other two-person families shouldn't have to rely on recipes meant to serve four or six, we've re-engineered our favorite dinner recipes from the ground up. We used equipment in unexpected ways, such as ramekins to make individual Chicken Pot Pies, and also found clever techniques for scaling recipes with ease, such as swapping in smaller blade steaks for a large chuck roast to make a streamlined Yankee Pot Roast for just two. An appendix with 15 side dish recipes offers fuss-free options for rounding out your meals, while an introduction full of tips and tricks will help you avoid waste and shop for small-scale recipes more efficiently. (less)



746.443 FLE Feminist Icon Cross-Stitch by Anna Fleiss
Trailblazing women take center stage in Feminist Icon Cross-Stitch, a collection of stylish patterns and capsule biographies that celebrates some of our favorite lady heroes.
With an introduction on the rise of modern feminism, and instructions on the basics of cross-stitch, this book features patterns for embroidering twenty iconic women -- like suffragette Susan B. Anthony, author Virginia Woolf, political icon Hillary Rodham Clinton, and pop superstar Beyoncé -- and ten empowering feminist sayings. This charming book gives today's nasty women everything they need to begin crafting hip, feminist works of art.


786.2092 KIL Chopin’s Piano: In Search of the Instrument that Transformed Music by Paul Kildea
The captivating story of Frédéric Chopin and the fate of both his Mallorquin piano and musical Romanticism from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. 
Chopin’s Piano traces the history of Chopin’s twenty-four Preludes through the instruments on which they were played, the pianists who interpreted them, and the traditions they came to represent. Yet it begins and ends with the Majorcan pianino, which assumed an astonishing cultural potency during the Second World War as it became, for the Nazis, a symbol of the man and music they were determined to appropriate as their own.

 



 

794.8 QUI Crash Override: How Gamergate (nearly) destroyed y life, and how we can win the fight against online hate by Zoë Quinn 
You've heard the stories about the dark side of the internet-hackers, anonymous hoards attacking an unlucky target, and revenge porn-but they remain just that: stories. Surely these things would never happen to you.
Zoe Quinn used to feel the same way. Zoe is a video game developer whose ex-boyfriend published a crazed blog post cobbled together from private information, half-truths, and outright fictions, along with a rallying cry to the online hordes to go after her. The hordes answered in the form of a so-called movement known as #gamergate--they hacked her accounts, stole nude photos of her, harassed her family, friends and colleagues, and threatened to rape and murder her. But instead of shrinking into silence as the online mobs wanted her to, she has raised her voice and speaks out against this vicious online culture and for making the internet a safer place for everyone.


 

796.33264 LEI Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times by Mark Leibovich
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of This Town, an equally merciless probing of America's biggest cultural force, pro football, at a moment of peak success and high anxiety.
Like millions of Americans, Mark Leibovich has spent more of his life than he'd care to admit tuned into pro football. Being a lifelong New England Patriots fan meant growing up with a steady diet of lovable loserdom. That is until the Tom Brady/Bill Belichick era made the Pats the most ruthlessly efficient sports dynasty of the 21st century, its organization the most polarizing in the NFL, and its fans the most irritating in all of Pigskin America. Leibovich kept his obsession relatively private, in the meantime making a nice career for himself covering that other playground for rich and overgrown children, American politics. Still, every now and then Leibovich would reach out to Tom Brady to gauge his willingness to subject himself to a profile in the New York Times Magazine. He figured that the chances of Brady agreeing to this were a Hail Mary at best, but Leibovich kept trying, at least to indulge his fan-boy within. To his surprise, Brady returned the call, in the summer of 2014. He agreed to let Mark spend time with him through the coming season, which proved to be a fateful one for all parties. It included another epic Patriots Super Bowl win and, yes, a scandal involving Brady--Deflategate--whose grip on sports media was as profound as its true significance was ridiculous.

942.045092 LEW The Survival of the Princes in the Tower by Matthew Lewis 
The murder of the Princes in the Tower is the most famous cold case in English or British history. Traditionally considered victims of a ruthless uncle, there are other suspects too often and too easily discounted. There may be no definitive answer, but by delving into the context of their disappearance and the characters of the suspects, Matthew Lewis will examine the motives and opportunities afresh as well as ask a crucial but often overlooked question: what if there was no murder? What if Edward V and his brother Richard, Duke of York, survived their uncle’s reign and even that of their brother-in-law Henry VII? There are glimpses of their possible survival and compelling evidence to give weight to those theories which is considered alongside the possibility of their deaths to provide a rounded and complete assessment of the most fascinating mystery in history.
 


B GINSBURG Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life by Jane Sherron DeHart 
The first full life—private, public, legal, philosophical—of the 107th Supreme Court Justice, one of the most profound and profoundly transformative legal minds of our time; a book fifteen years in work, written with the cooperation of Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself and based on many interviews with the justice, her husband, her children, her friends, and her associates.
In this large, comprehensive, revelatory biography, Jane De Hart explores the central experiences that crucially shaped Ginsburg’s passion for justice, her advocacy for gender equality, her meticulous jurisprudence: her desire to make We the People more united and our union more perfect. At the heart of her story and abiding beliefs—her Jewish background. Tikkun olam, the Hebrew injunction to “repair the world,” with its profound meaning for a young girl who grew up during the Holocaust and World War II. We see the influence of her mother, Celia Amster Bader, whose intellect inspired her daughter’s feminism, insisting that Ruth become independent, as she witnessed her mother coping with terminal cervical cancer (Celia died the day before Ruth, at seventeen, graduated from high school).

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