Author Chats & Book Recommendations
Authors in blue available for phone chats
Additional recommendations in black
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Chasing Grace Sanya Richards-Ross "For as long as I can remember, life has been measured in seconds. The fewer, the better." Most people equate success with having more, but Sanya’s quest was always for less. She started running track as a little girl in Jamaica and began competing when she was only seven. At 31 she's had... |
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The Nordic Theory of Everything A Finnish journalist, now a naturalized American citizen, asks Americans to draw on elements of the Nordic way of life to nurture a fairer, happier, more secure, and less stressful society for themselves and their children. Moving to America in 2008, Anu Partanen quickly went... |
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The Housewife Loved a Bandit Larry Baran My mother is the only woman to escape from the Sarasota County Jail. That begs the question "What was your ma doing in jail?" In 1953, she left her husband and six kids in the Hyde Park Chicago neighborhood for a 7 month coast-to-coast crime spree. Flo Baran and Bill Gaskell... |
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Reconstruction: Unfinished Revolution Foner chronicles the way in which Americans responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the war and the end of slavery, addressing the ways in which the emancipated slaves' quest for economic autonomy and equal citizenship shaped the political agenda of... |
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Teenagers Playing Grown-Ups Karen Chaston An unplanned pregnancy can be stressful, complex and a difficult situation at any age. Though what if you are a teenager, too young to understand that no matter what choice you decide upon you truly are at the cross-roads to your future life. Every woman's experience of... |
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Some Rain Must Fall The fifth book of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s powerful My Struggle series is written with tremendous force and sincerity. As a nineteen-year-old, Karl Ove moves to Bergen and invests all of himself in his writing. But his efforts get the opposite effect — he wants it so much that he gets... |
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My Flight Through Cancer Kenny Tipton This book is about more than cancer; it is about letting ego go and sharing life in intimate details. It is about love and passion, about being humbled, making mistakes, finding the right path, relying on others to help in the simplest of tasks, and keeping and finding... |
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The Shock of the Anthropocene The Earth has entered a new epoch: the Anthropocene. What we are facing is not only an environmental crisis, but a geological revolution of human origin. In two centuries, our planet has tipped into a state unknown for millions of years. How did we get to this point? Refuting... |
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Night Rhythms Shalanda R. Sims Zora can't go back to sleep. Her brain keeps thinking about the bad dream she had and her heart feels as though it’s beating out of her pajamas. That’s when her mother, Mrs. Johnson, gives her a unique blanket called a quilt. Before Zora can figure out what makes the quilt special, it... |
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Black Earth In this epic history of extermination and survival, Timothy Snyder presents a new explanation of the great atrocity of the twentieth century, and reveals the risks that we face in the twenty-first. Based on new sources from eastern Europe and forgotten testimonies from Jewish survivors... |
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Goodbye, Europe? Hello, Chaos? J. Michael Springmann They come from across the Middle East, South Asia, North Africa—floods of refugees seeking sanctuary in Europe. Most are men. Some are terrorists. And all represent an ethnopolitical nightmare for the European Union. What drives these migrants? Why... |
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Alienation The Hegelian-Marxist idea of alienation fell out of favor after the postmetaphysical rejection of humanism and essentialist views of human nature. Jaeggi draws on the Hegelian philosophical tradition, phenomenological analyses grounded in modern conceptions of agency, and recent... |
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Godmother Odile Atthalin Odile Atthalin was a young woman from a prominent, bourgeois family in Paris when she decided to leave home in search of meaning. All she knew was that she wanted to go East; but once she had separated from France and committed to creating a new life for herself, opportunities fell into... |
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Karl Marx As the 19th century unfolded, its inhabitants had to come to terms with an unparalleled range of economic, political, religious and intellectual challenges. Distances shrank, new towns sprang up, and inventions transformed the industrial landscape. In the aftermath of Waterloo, a European... |
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Zulu Way Robert M. Murphy The year is 1858. Zulu Way is the story of Danny, a young man sent on an adventure by his father up the Mississippi on his Uncle's new steamship to sell his family crops to the mills in Baton Rouge. Circumstances take him past Baton Rouge up to Vicksburg, then up the Mississippi to Memphis... |
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Faith as an Option Many people these days regard religion as outdated and are unable to understand how believers can intellectually justify their faith. Nonbelievers have long assumed that progress in technology and the sciences renders religion irrelevant. Believers, in contrast, see religion as vital to... |
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A Little Sammy Music Suzanne Lane A Little Sammy Music is a dog book. Author Suzanne Lane is, by her own admission, a "born rescuer," having taken in, at various times, dogs, cats, a pigeon, a fiancé, and a husband. As one by one the objects of her rescue die or move out, she becomes determined to spare herself the... |
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The Fire Next Time At once an evocation of Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of racial injustice, this book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two "letters," written on the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, exhorting Americans to attack the legacy of racism... |
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My Heart Beats V. Maree Childhood trauma versus poor adult choices. What's the connection? Emotional and behavioral problems are among the most prevalent chronic health conditions of childhood that largely go unrecognized and undiagnosed until a child grows into adulthood. My Heart Beats is a... |
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The Idea of Socialism The idea of socialism has given normative grounding and orientation to the outrage over capitalism for more than 150 years, and yet today it seems to have lost much of its appeal. Despite growing discontent, many would hesitate to invoke socialism when it comes to envisioning life... |
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Wicked Game of the Hunter Tracey L. Ryan Finally, everything seems to be falling into place for Emma Sharpeton. Her new marketing company has just won the bid for the Boston Children’s Hospital Gala event. Little does she suspect that this good fortune will bring her face-to-face with her past... |
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The New Jim Crow Once in a great while a book comes along that changes the way we see the world and helps to fuel a nationwide social movement. The New Jim Crow is such a book. Praised by Harvard Law professor Lani Guinier as "brave and bold," this book directly challenges the notion that the election of Barack... |
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Hotel Moscow Talia Carner From the author of Jerusalem Maiden comes a mesmerizing, thought-provoking novel that tells the riveting story of an American woman—the daughter of Holocaust survivors—who travels to Russia shortly after the fall of communism, and finds herself embroiled in a perilous mafia... |
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Fuel on the Fire The departure of the last U.S. troops from Iraq at the end of 2011 left a broken country and a host of unanswered questions. What was the war really about? Why did the occupation drag on for nearly nine years, while most Iraqis, Britons, and Americans desperately wanted it to end? And why did the... |
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Beneath the Shadow of the Cross Geoffrey A. Cratch Brody James Edwards thought the worst thing that could happen to him was to lose his dream of playing major league baseball, because of surgery on his pitching arm. He drops out of college and joins the Marine Corps. In Afghanistan the horrors of war proved even... |
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A New View of Society In his early works Owen argues that, since individuals are wholly formed by their environment, education is the crucial factor in transforming them. Later he came to adopt far more radical positions, proposing nothing less than 'the emancipation of mankind' and the creation of a 'new... |
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The Hours Between Us Carol Graf Kai Ingersohn was motivated to become a psychiatrist after a childhood of dysfunction with her tempestuous and manic-depressive grandmother, Dumpling. Now divorced, in private practice, and raising two teenagers, she starts work with Stephanie, a young grad student with acute leukemia, who... |
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Capital in the Twenty-First Century What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But... |
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The Monk Woman's Daughter Susan Storer Clark "My mother said she was a nun. That may have been a lie." So begins the eye-opening and entertaining tale of Vera St. John’s chaotic upbringing amid the turbulence of 19th-century urban America. Sometimes rollicking and sometimes terrifying, Vera’s story features a... |
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America's War for the Greater Middle East From the end of World War II until 1980, virtually no American soldiers were killed in action while serving in the Greater Middle East. Since 1990, virtually no American soldiers have been killed in action anywhere else. What caused this shift? Bacevich, one of the... |
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Second Coming D. B. Borton Hank Jones isn’t your typical alien abductee. There were no tractor beams, probes, or government conspiracies involved—no, Hank met his kidnappers at a bar. They weren’t exactly hard to miss—Elvis, a seven-foot tall Elvis clone, and Lawrence, a grounded European gent, were the only... |
