Staff Picks

Through her early childhood, adolescence and up through her famous appearance on Saturday Night Live, then into her later life, Sinéad O'Connor shares her life story with raw honesty, compassion, grit, and charm. An insightful read, with lots of musical references--I read it with YouTube at hand and watched moments, music videos, and performances as they came up in the book for a full featured multimedia reading experience!

 

Publisher's description:

Blessed with a singular voice and a fiery temperament, Sinéad O’Connor rose to massive fame in the late 1980s and 1990s with a string of gold records. By the time she was twenty, she was world famous -- living a rock star life out loud. From her trademark shaved head to her 1992 appearance on Saturday Night Live when she tore up Pope John Paul II’s photograph, Sinéad has fascinated and outraged millions. In Rememberings, O’Connor recounts her painful tale of growing up in Dublin in a dysfunctional, abusive household. Inspired by a brother’s Bob Dylan records, she escaped into music. She relates her early forays with local Irish bands; we see Sinéad completing her first album while eight months pregnant, hanging with Rastas in the East Village, and soaring to unimaginable popularity with her cover of Prince’s 'Nothing Compares 2U.' Intimate, replete with candid anecdotes and told in a singular form true to her unconventional career, Sinéad’s memoir is a remarkable chronicle of an enduring and influential artist.

 

This witty, well-written book explores how beavers and their decimation drastically altered the landscape of the American continent and what folks are doing to bring them back. Eager made me laugh, cry, and look at our environment in a whole new way. Now I can't stop thinking about beavers!

 

Publisher's description:

Environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb reveals that our modern idea of what a healthy landscape looks like and how it functions is wrong, distorted by the fur trade that once trapped out millions of beavers from North America’s lakes and rivers. The consequences of losing beavers were profound: streams eroded, wetlands dried up, and species from salmon to swans lost vital habitat. Today, a growing coalition of “Beaver Believers”—including scientists, ranchers, and passionate citizens—recognizes that ecosystems with beavers are far healthier, for humans and non-humans alike, than those without them. From the Nevada deserts to the Scottish highlands, Believers are now hard at work restoring these industrious rodents to their former haunts. This is a powerful story about one of the world’s most influential species, how North America was colonized, how our landscapes have changed over the centuries, and how beavers can help us fight drought, flooding, wildfire, extinction, and the ravages of climate change. Ultimately, it’s about how we can learn to coexist, harmoniously and even beneficially, with our fellow travelers on this planet.

 

I love reading about scams, history, and the history of scams, and I am pleased to report that this is simply the finest book about pyramid schemes that I have ever read. This book considers pyramid schemes within the full context of American business history, bringing the propulsive energy and weird details of a novel while remaining almost comprehensively informative and engaging. If you only read one book about pyramid schemes, ever, in your life, make it this one.

 

Publisher's description: 
A groundbreaking work of history and reportage that unveils the stranger-than-fiction world of multilevel marketing, from the shadowy cabals at the top to the strivers at the bottom, whose deferred dreams churn a massive money-making scam that has remade American society. Multilevel marketing companies like Amway, Mary Kay, and Herbalife advertise the ultimate business opportunity: the chance to be your own boss. In exchange for peddling their wares, they offer a world of pink Cadillacs, white-columned mansions, tropical vacations, and-most precious of all-financial freedom. If, that is, you're willing to shell out for expensive products, recruit everyone you know to buy them, and make them recruit everyone they know to do the same-thus creating the "multiple levels" of multilevel marketing, or MLM. Despite overwhelming evidence that multilevel marketing causes most of its participants to lose their money, and that many MLM companies are pyramid schemes, the industry's dubious origins, inextricably tied to well-known ideological figures like Ronald Reagan, have escaped public scrutiny. Behind the scenes of American life, MLM has slithered in the wake of every economic crisis of the last century, from the Depression to the pandemic, ensnaring laid-off workers, stay-at-home moms, teachers, nurses-anyone who has been left behind by inequality. In Little Bosses Everywhere, journalist Bridget Read tells the gripping story of multilevel marketing in full for the first time, winding from sunny post-war California, where a failed salesman started a vitamin business, through the suburbs of Michigan and North Carolina, where MLM bought its political protection, to the stadium-sized conventions where top sellers today preach to die-hard recruits. MLM has been endorsed by multiple American presidents, has its own Congressional caucus, and enriched powerful people, like the DeVos and Van Andel families, Warren Buffet, and Donald Trump. Along the way, Read delves into the heartbreaking stories of those enmeshed in the majority-female industry: a veteran in Florida searching for healing; a young mom in Texas struggling to feed her children; a waitress scraping by in Brooklyn. A wild trip down an endless rabbit hole of greed and exploitation, Little Bosses Everywhere exposes multilevel marketing as American capitalism's stealthiest PR campaign: a cunning right-wing political project that has shaped nearly everything about how we live.

 

For those that are fans of Macolm Gladwell or listeners to his podcast, "Revisionist History," this sequel to The Tipping Point delivers big time. Gladwell is a master of revisiting historical moments and encourages his readers to approach critical moments from new perspectives. His work is a reminder that headlines often do not tell the full story; it is crucial that we allow time to pass to be able to really look at and absorb the full picture.

 

Publisher’s description
Twenty-five years after the publication of his groundbreaking first book, Malcolm Gladwell returns with a brand-new volume that reframes the lessons of The Tipping Point in a startling and revealing light. Why is Miami… Miami? What does the heartbreaking fate of the cheetah tell us about the way we raise our children? Why do Ivy League schools care so much about sports? What is the Magic Third, and what does it mean for racial harmony? In this provocative new work, Malcolm Gladwell returns for the first time in twenty-five years to the subject of social epidemics and tipping points, this time with the aim of explaining the dark side of contagious phenomena. Through a series of riveting stories, Gladwell traces the rise of a new and troubling form of social engineering. He takes us to the streets of Los Angeles to meet the world’s most successful bank robbers, rediscovers a forgotten television show from the 1970s that changed the world, visits the site of a historic experiment on a tiny cul-de-sac in northern California, and offers an alternate history of two of the biggest epidemics of our day: COVID and the opioid crisis. Revenge of the Tipping Point is Gladwell’s most personal book yet. With his characteristic mix of storytelling and social science, he offers a guide to making sense of the contagions of modern world. It’s time we took tipping points seriously.

Find Revenge of the tipping point by Malcolm Gladwell

I had never heard of Jennifer Boylan before, and after reading Cleavage, she is a name to remember for sure! She fosters a safe space to learn about, hear, and understand transgender perspectives. A great book to explore the different experiences of transgender people, but also to become acquainted with the similarities! Boylan offers really unique insight to her life and lived experiences and captivates the reader to continue reading until the book is done!

 

Publishers description:

What is the difference between men and women? Jennifer Finney Boylan examines the divisions-as well as the common ground-between the genders, and reflects on her own experiences, both difficult and joyful, as a transgender American. Jennifer Finney Boylan's She's Not There was the first bestselling work written by a transgender American. Since its publication twenty years ago, she has become the go-to person for insight into the impact of gender on our lives, from the food we eat to the dreams we dream, both for ourselves and for our children. But Cleavage is more than a deep dive into gender identity; it's also a look at the difference between coming out as trans in 2000-when many people reacted to Boylan's transition with love-and the present era of blowback and fear. How does gender affect our sense of self? Our body image? The passage of time? The friends we lose-and keep? Boylan considers her womanhood, reflects on the boys and men who shaped her, and reconceives of herself as a writer, activist, parent, and spouse. With heart-wrenching honesty, she illustrates the feeling of liminality that followed her to adulthood, but demonstrates the redemptive power of love through it all. With Boylan's trademark humor and poignancy, Cleavage is a sharp, witty, and captivating look at the triumphs and losses of a life lived in two genders. Cleavage provides hope for a future in which we all have the freedom to live joyfully as men, as women, and in the space between us.

 

I have always found that when I name my fears, when I tell someone how I feel, the fear, the feeling gets more manageable. Atlas of the Heart helps us identify 85 emotions and "shows us that naming an experience doesn't give the experience more power, it gives us the power of understanding, meaning, and choice."

Publisher description:

Brené Brown takes us on a journey through 85 of the emotions and experiences that define what it means to be human. As she maps the necessary skills and lays out an actionable framework for meaningful connection, she gives us the language and tools to access a universe of new choices and second chances - a universe where we can share and steward the stories of our bravest and most heartbreaking moments with one another in a way that builds connection. Over the past two decades, Brown's extensive research into the experiences that make us who we are has shaped the cultural conversation and helped define what it means to be courageous with our lives. Atlas of the Heart draws on this research, as well as Brown's singular skills as a researcher/storyteller, to lay out an invaluable, research-based framework that shows us that naming an experience doesn't give the experience more power, it gives us the power of understanding, meaning, and choice. Brown shares, "I want this to be an atlas for all of us, because I believe that, with an adventurous heart and the right maps, we can travel anywhere and never fear losing ourselves. Even when we have no idea where we are.

 

Dungy, a CSU professor and poet, writes about the flower garden and native prairie space at her home in Fort Collins. Dungy, who is African American, shares stories along with the scientific names of her plants. A chapter might begin with rabbits living in her yard, then shift to the history of how plants and seeds arrived with Africans who survived the Middle Passage to be sold into slavery. She weaves modern events with family history and historical research about the United States.

 

Publisher’s description
Poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominately white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013, with her husband and daughter, the community held strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens. In resistance to the homogenous policies that limited the possibility and wonder that grows from the earth, Dungy employs the various plants, herbs, vegetables, and flowers she grows in her garden as metaphor and treatise for how homogeneity threatens the future of our planet, and why cultivating diverse and intersectional language in our national discourse about the environment is the best means of protecting it.

Find Soil  in our online catalog

If you grew up in the era when emo music exploded and ever wondered how the bands started out and later found success, this in-depth history is for you. Told exclusively through interviews with the members of the biggest bands and those who worked closely with them, this is an interesting look back at a time when wearing skinny jeans and writing heartbreaking lyrics was all the rage. Nostalgic and honest.

 

Publisher's description:

Told through interview with more than 150 people, including bands, producers, managers and fans, a music journalist offers an authoritative, impassioned and occasionally absurd account of the turn-of-the-millennium emo subculture that took over the American music scene from 1999 to 2008.

 

Beautifully written and so interesting, this exploration of muscle (both physical and metaphorical) weaves together the clinical, the cultural, and the personal to describe our relationship with "the stuff that moves us." It will make you fall back in love with your own body in motion--and inspire you through the stories of others fully living that relationship.

 

Publisher’s description:

Cardiac, smooth, skeletal--these three different types of muscle in our bodies make our hearts beat; push food through our intestines, blood through our vessels, babies out the uterus; attach to our bones and allow for motion. Tsui also traces how muscles have defined beauty--and how they have distorted it--through the ages, and how they play an essential role in our physical and mental health.

 

This wonderful book explores the loss of dark skies to light pollution and what we gain when we get back to them. Childs, who embarks on a bike trip from Las Vegas to a truly dark basin north of the city, is a fabulous storyteller and brings in memories of other dark skies he's seen, Native American legends about the role of the sky in creation, the science of how the loss of real dark affects our circadian rhythms, and more. If you can't get to a dark sky, this is the next best thing.

 

Publisher's description:
A night sky is not an absence of light; it is the presence of the universe. In The Wild Dark, master storyteller Craig Childs embarks on a quest to bike from the blinding lights of the Las Vegas Strip to one of the darkest spots in North America. Childs is a fearless explorer of both the natural world and the human imagination, making him the perfect guide to help us rediscover the heavens and to ask: “What does it do to us to not see the night sky?” In a book that is at once an adventure story, a field guide, and a celebration of wonder, Childs invites us to look up and to look inward, eyes wide and sparkling with stars.

Find The Wild Dark: Finding the Night Sky in the Age of Light in our online catalog