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Click on the images to see more detail and if interested you can place a hold on the book or DVD and we will have it ready to pick up. Don't forget to
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Click on the images to see more detail and if interested you can place a hold on the book or DVD and we will have it ready to pick up. Don't forget to recommend books and DVDs that you would like to see in the collection here, we are always interested in what you want to read. |
 How to travel around the world |
The Practical Nomad
The Practical Nomad provides a global perspective that's necessary whether you're a first-time trekker or an experienced explorer. Now more than ever it is important to understand other cultures and Edward Hasbrouck's guide makes the ever-changing world more accessible. The fully updated fifth edition includes important information on new airport security procedures, travel documents, entry requirements, and border crossings. |
 A painful, personal record of Cambodia's holocaust. |
In the shadow of the banyan
Ratner's avowedly autobiographical first novel describes her family's travails during the genocide carried out by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the late 1970s. Despite the lingering effects of childhood polio, 7-year-old Raami is living a charmed existence. Her father is a minor royal prince and a sensitive, even saintly, poet, a member of the wealthy intelligentsia. Raami and her baby sister, Radana, are cared for by their beautiful young mother and a household of kindly, devoted servants in an atmosphere of privilege and also spiritual grace. Then comes the government overthrow. At first Raami's father is hopeful that the new leaders will solve the injustice, but soon the new government's true nature reveals itself. Like most of the city's residents, Raami's extended family, including aunts, uncle, cousins and grandmother, are soon ordered out of Phnom Penh. They seek refuge at their weekend house but are driven from there as well. Part of the mass exodus, they try not to draw attention to their royal background, but Raami's father is recognized and taken away, never to be seen again. Raami, her mother and Radana end up in a rural community staying in the primitive shack of a kindly, childless couple. There is little food and the work is backbreaking. During monsoon season, Radana perishes from malaria, and Raami blames herself because she did not protect her adequately from the mosquitoes. Raami and her mother are ordered to another community. For four years, one terrible event follows another, with small moments of hope followed by cruelty and despair. But her mother never stops protecting Raami, and although both grieve deeply for their lost loved ones, both find untapped stores of resilience. While names are changed (though not Ratner's father's name, which she keeps to honor his memory) and events are conflated, an author's note clarifies how little Ratner's novel has strayed from her actual memory of events. Often lyrical, sometimes a bit ponderous: a painful, personal record of Cambodia's holocaust. --Kirkus Reviews |
 At war to the last day |
Duty : memoirs of a Secretary at war
In relating his personal journey as secretary, Gates draws us into the innermost sanctums of government and military power during the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, illuminating iconic figures, vital negotiations, and critical situations in revealing, intimate detail. Offering unvarnished appraisals of Dick Cheney, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Presidents Bush and Obama among other key players, Gates exposes the full spectrum of behind-closed-doors politicking within both the Bush and Obama administrations. He discusses the great controversies of his tenure surges in both Iraq and Afghanistan, how to deal with Iran and Syria, Don t Ask Don t Tell, Guantǹamo Bay, WikiLeaks as they played out behind the television cameras. He brings to life the Situation Room during the Bin Laden raid. And, searingly, he shows how congressional debate and action or inaction on everything from equipment budgeting to troop withdrawals was often motivated, to his increasing despair and anger, more by party politics and media impact than by members desires to protect our soldiers and ensure their success. |
 Three-dimensional manipulation of fabric |
The art of manipulating fabric
The possibilities for three-dimensional manipulation of fabric - gathering, pleating, tucking, shirring, and quilting woven materials - are seemingly endless. In this book, Colette Wolff works from the simplest form - a flat piece of cloth and a threaded needle - she categorizes all major dimensional techniques, shows how they are related, and gives examples of variations both traditional and modern. The result is an encyclopedia of techniques that resurface, reshape, restructure and reconstruct fabric. More than 350 diagrams support the extensive how tos, organized into broad general categories, then specific sub-techniques. Textile artists and quilters, as well as garment and home decor sewers, will expand their design horizons with the almost limitless effects that can be achieved. |
 Synthesis of art history, detective story and memoir. |
The hare with amber eyes : a hidden inheritance
A nimble history of one of the richest European families at the turn of the century. De Waal, a notable London potter, is a descendent of the wealthy Ephrussi family. He seized on an inherited collection of Japanese netsuke --small decorative figures made out of wood or ivory--and traced its ownership down the family line, from patriarch Charles Ephrussi, originally from Odessa, to Great-Uncle Iggie, of Tokyo, who left the 264 elegant figures to the author upon his death in 1993. The family's fabulous wealth derived from the grain-trading business, operating between Paris and Vienna. Charles, who assembled the collection, was a dandyish art collector who settled in Paris at the age of 21, wrote art criticism and a book on D rer and patronized the early Impressionists. He was quite possibly the real-life character on whom Proust modeled his Charles Swann. Subsequently, the netsuke was given to Charles's cousin Viktor on the occasion of his wedding in 1899--just at the height of the Dreyfus Affair, when French anti-Semitism burst forth in full force--and the collection passed to Vienna, where the family resided at the surpassingly beautiful Ephrussi Palais on the Ringstrasse. Anti-Jewish feeling pervaded all facets of their lives, and two world wars wreaked havoc on the Ephrussi fortune. Eventually the netsuke was saved from the rapacious hands of the Nazis by a servant who stuffed it in her mattress. De Waal keeps a pleasantly ironic tone throughout this remarkable journey and nicely handles the clutter of objects and relatives. The roster of characters is daunting at first, but this narrative proves a marvelously absorbing synthesis of art history, detective story and memoir. --Kirkus Reviews |
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60-Second Adventures in Thought Video Clip Collection
Can a cat be both alive and dead? Can a computer actually think? How can a tortoise beat Achilles in a race? Voiced by comedian David Mitchell, these fast-paced animations explain six famous thought experiments, from antiquity to the 20th century, that have changed the way we see the world. |
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CIA Secret Experiments: History’s Secrets
On November 28, 1953, a U.S. Army scientist working on biological weapons, Dr. Frank Olson, falls to his death from his hotel window under suspicious circumstances. On June 5, 1968, at a public event, Sirhan Sirhan fires eight rounds from a .22 caliber revolver into Robert Kennedy, striking him dead. Yet after arrest, Sirhan claims he has no memory of the crime—even hypnosis fails to stir his memory. In 1975, the U.S. government offers Olson’s family a $750,000 payout, revealing that he died because of his involvement in “Operation Artichoke,” a secret CIA experiment studying the use of LSD and interrogation—an offshoot of a series of mind-control experiments called MKUltra. What was the true extent of these secret CIA experiments and their casualties? Could Sirhan Sirhan, as some claim, have been the product of MKUltra and the CIA’s efforts to build the perfect assassin? This episode of History's Secrets investigates. A National Geographic Production. (51 minutes) |
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Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac, cult writer of the Beat generation, remains an American icon. This documentary focuses on the creative pinnacle of his life-63 days spent as a fire warden on Desolation Peak in Washington State. Examining the time through photos and the commentary of those who knew him, the program illuminates Kerouac's previous work, while prefiguring his later spiral into alcoholism. This is a moving film essay on the unfulfilled ambitions of one of America's great avant-garde literary figures. (51 minutes) |
Johann Sebastian Bach: The St. Matthew Passion
Filmed at St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, where Bach himself was the organist; the placement of choirs makes Bach's choral intentions clear in a way no recording or concert performance can. With Regina Werner, Rosemarie Lang, Peter Schreier, Siegfried Lorenz, Theo Adam, and the Choir of St. Thomas Church, Leipzig. (180 minutes) |
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Immigration: Who Has Access to the American Dream?
To most Americans, the debate over immigration policy remains an abstraction in the headlines. But for new immigrants, such policy dictates the terms of their survival in a new society. This program examines the hard-core questions surrounding current U.S. immigration. How many should we allow in? Who, if anyone, should receive preferential treatment? How should illegal immigration be handled? All of the issues are examined through the eyes of those seeking entry, and the organizations assisting them. Those interviewed include an immigration judge, an immigrant from Kenya, and the owner of a New York City deli from Korea. (29 minutes) |
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Klimt: A Kiss Cashes In
Although his contemporaries deemed Gustav Klimt’s output “painted pornography suitable for pagan orgies,” reproductions of his work are now booming in popularity. The Klimt Museum in Vienna sells an almost infinite variety of merchandise bearing his famous Kiss: along with the customary posters and coffee mugs, tourists can buy Klimt dog blankets, chocolates, Barbie dolls, umbrellas, and cookbooks. This program offers theories about why The Kiss is so well-suited to commercialization and contrasts Klimt’s current success to the shocked reviews he garnered in his time. The video goes to the Klimt Museum; the Klimt Center, built to commemorate the site where the artist brought his mistresses; and a Klimt-themed nursing home in Vienna. (30 minutes) |
 Just click on the image..1923-Present |
Time
National and international news, behavior, books, business, cinema, law, education, environment, modern living, music, nation, press, religion, theater, video and world. |
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Purple Hibiscus
Fifteen-year-old Kambili and her older brother Jaja lead a privileged life in Enugu, Nigeria. They live in beautiful house, with a caring family, and attend an exclusive missionary school. They're completely shielded from the troubles of the world. Yet, as Kambili reveals in her tender-voiced account, things are less perfect than they appear. Although her Papa is generous and well respected, he is fanatically religious and tyrannical at home—a home that is silent and suffocating.
As the country begins to fall apart under a military coup, Kambili and Jaja are sent to their aunt, a university professor outside the city, where they discover a life beyond the confines of their father's authority. Books cram the shelves, curry and nutmeg permeate the air, and their cousins' laughter rings throughout the house. When they return home, tensions within the family escalate, and Kambili must find the strength to keep her loved ones together. |
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J.R.R. Tolkien's classic prelude to his Lord of the Rings trilogy
Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit who enjoys a comfortable, unambitious life, rarely traveling any farther than his pantry or cellar. But his contentment is disturbed when the wizard Gandalf and a company of dwarves arrive on his doorstep one day to whisk him away on an adventure. They have launched a plot to raid the treasure hoard guarded by Smaug the Magnificent, a large and very dangerous dragon. Bilbo reluctantly joins their quest, unaware that on his journey to the Lonely Mountain he will encounter both a magic ring and a frightening creature known as Gollum. |
Divergent
In Beatrice Prior's dystopian Chicago, society is divided into five factions, each dedicated to the cultivation of a particular virtue—Candor (the honest), Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), and Erudite (the intelligent). On an appointed day of every year, all sixteen-year-olds must select the faction to which they will devote the rest of their lives. For Beatrice, the decision is between staying with her family and being who she really is—she can't have both. So she makes a choice that surprises everyone, including herself.
During the highly competitive initiation that follows, Beatrice renames herself Tris and struggles to determine who her friends really are—and where, exactly, a romance with a sometimes fascinating, sometimes infuriating boy fits into the life she's chosen. But Tris also has a secret, one she's kept hidden from everyone because she's been warned it can mean death. And as she discovers a growing conflict that threatens to unravel her seemingly perfect society, she also learns that her secret might help her save those she loves . . . or it might destroy her. |
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The Oxford African American Studies Center combines the authority of carefully edited reference works with sophisticated technology to create the most comprehensive collection of scholarship available online to focus on the lives and events which have shaped African American and African history and culture.
The Oxford African American Studies Center provides students, scholars and librarians with more than 10,000 articles by top scholars in the field. The core content includes: |
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