Staff Picks

Snyder asserts that we actually can learn from history instead of repeating it. This book is a call to small actions in these troubling political times.

 

Publisher's description:

The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.

 

A heartbreaking story of loss and isolation. There is no happy ending, just the consequences of people's choices and the curves that life throws at them. This Australian novel shows how a "simple life" as a lighthouse keeper is not so simple after all.

 

Publisher's description:

After four harrowing years on the Western Front, Tom Sherbourne returns to Australia and takes a job as the lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, nearly half a day’s journey from the coast. To this isolated island, where the supply boat comes once a season, Tom brings a young, bold, and loving wife, Isabel. Years later, after two miscarriages and one stillbirth, the grieving Isabel hears a baby’s cries on the wind. A boat has washed up onshore carrying a dead man and a living baby.

Tom, who keeps meticulous records and whose moral principles have withstood a horrific war, wants to report the man and infant immediately. But Isabel insists the baby is a “gift from God,” and against Tom’s judgment, they claim her as their own and name her Lucy. When she is two, Tom and Isabel return to the mainland and are reminded that there are other people in the world. Their choice has devastated one of them.

 

A small collection of essays about how Michelle Obama's "grace in power" was inspirational in many ways for many people.

 

Publisher's description:

A collection of 19 essays inspired by the memorable tribute, "To the First Lady with Love," includes contributions by a range of award-winning writers, celebrities, designers and chefs ranging from Chimamanda Ngochi Adichie and Tracee Ellis Ross to Alice Walters and Gloria Steinem, in a volume complemented by two essays by eighth-grade students.

 

If you enjoy watching the interactions of bugs in your backyard, this book is for you. This fascinating natural history of the world's 20,000 types of bees is beautifully told.

 

Publisher's description:

From the award-winning author of The Triumph of Seeds and Feathers comes a natural and cultural history of the buzzing beasties that make the world go round.  A conservation biologist presents a natural and cultural history of the bee that traces its evolution and varieties while evaluating the environmental hazards placing them at risk.

 

If you like hiking, outdoor education, and parents trying to teach life lessons as they unfold in nature, this book is for you. As a mother of a daughter who loves being outside, this book resonated with me.

 

Publishers description

When Trish Herr became pregnant with her first daughter, Alex, she and her husband, Hugh, vowed to instill a bond with nature in their children. By the time Alex was five, her over-the-top energy levels led Trish to believe that her very young daughter might be capable of hiking adult-sized mountains.

In Up, Trish recounts their always exhilarating--and sometimes harrowing--adventures climbing all forty-eight of New Hampshire's highest mountains. Readers will delight in the expansive views and fresh air that only peakbaggers are afforded, and will laugh out loud as Trish urges herself to "mother up" when she and Alex meet an ornery--and alarmingly bold--spruce grouse on the trail. This is, at heart, a resonant, emotionally honest account of a mother's determination to foster independence and fearlessness in her daughter, to teach her "that small doesn't necessarily mean weak; that girls can be strong; and that big, bold things are possible."

Find Up:a mother and daughter's peakbagging adventure in our online catalog

I am not a gamer, but I found this novel touching and beautiful. Although the book is about the complexities of love, relationships, and a true friendship that spans decades, it also helped me gain a little understanding about the world of gaming and play and its redemptive and healing possibilities.

 

Publisher's description: On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn’t heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won’t protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.

 

Her Last Flight shifts between the 1947 story of a young photographer and the 1928-1937 story of an aviation sensation inspired by Amelia Earhart. Williams imagines a different ending to Amelia Earhart's disappearance and reveals the story through well-crafted character development of our two female protagonists. We get to know the women through their unfolding relationship as they get to know each other on a remote Hawaiian island. Bit by bit, Williams reveals the mystery in this engrossing work of historical fiction.

 

Publisher's description:

In 1947, photographer and war correspondent Janey Everett arrives at a remote surfing village on the Hawaiian island of Kauai to research a planned biography of forgotten aviation pioneer Sam Mallory, who joined the loyalist forces in the Spanish Civil War and never returned. Obsessed with Sam's fate, Janey has tracked down Irene Lindquist, the owner of a local island-hopping airline, whom she believes might actually be the legendary Irene Foster, Mallory's onetime student and flying partner. Foster's disappearance during a round-the-world flight in 1937 remains one of the world's greatest unsolved mysteries. At first, the flinty Mrs. Lindquist denies any connection to Foster. But Janey informs her that the wreck of Sam Mallory's airplane has recently been discovered in a Spanish desert, and piece by piece, the details of Foster's extraordinary life emerge: from the beginnings of her flying career in Southern California, to her complicated, passionate relationship with Mallory, to the collapse of her marriage to her aggressive career manager, the publishing scion George Morrow. As Irene spins her tale to its searing conclusion, Janey's past gathers its own power. The duel between the two women takes a heartstopping turn. To whom does Mallory rightfully belong? Can we ever come to terms with the loss of those we love, and the lives we might have lived?

Mostly through historic letters and news articles, Chris Enss reconstructs the adventurous 19th century world travels of Isabella Bird, focusing on her time spent in the Rocky Mountains and particularly the Estes Park area of Colorado, where we meet Jim Nugent, the notorious mountain man she fell in love with. The unlikely pairing should not be a surprise from what we know of Bird, a woman who defied the scope of what was expected of women in the mid-1800s. Overlaying much of the book are the ever-present Rockies and the splendor of the old Mountain West, along with its undercurrent of frontier conflicts. Interesting to read what it was like traversing the local terrain and climbing Long's Peak over 160 years ago.

 

Publisher description: 

Isabella Bird was a proper Victorian lady expected to marry a man of means and position. Instead she was drawn to a gruff mountain man, a desperado named Jim Nugent. This book reveals the true story of Bird's relationship with Nugent as they traveled through the dramatic wilderness of the Rocky Mountains.

 

A beautifully written and heart-wrenching book, The Sweetness of Water sometimes reads like a dreamscape. Setting his story in a recently-emancipated Southern town, Nathan Harris shows how the reality of change is slow to come for individuals and gives us a glimpse into the chaos this sudden emancipation proclamation could cause. All the main characters in this novel are looking for direction in their lives, including George and Isabelle, who employ two newly-freed slaves, Prentiss and Landry, found camping in their woods. Their stories weave together and unfold in surprising directions as their refreshing sincerity is met with the harshness of other viewpoints and actions.

 

Publisher description:

In the waning days of the Civil War, brothers Prentiss and Landry, freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, seek refuge on the homestead of George Walker and his wife, Isabelle. The Walkers, wracked by the loss of their only son to the war, hire the brothers to work their farm, hoping through an unexpected friendship to stanch their grief. Prentiss and Landry, meanwhile, plan to save money for the journey north and a chance to reunite with their mother, who was sold away when they were boys. Parallel to their story runs a forbidden romance between two Confederate soldiers. The young men, recently returned from the war to the town of Old Ox, hold their trysts in the woods. But when their secret is discovered, the resulting chaos, including a murder, unleashes convulsive repercussions on the entire community. In the aftermath of so much turmoil, it is Isabelle who emerges as an unlikely leader, proffering a healing vision for the land and for the newly free citizens of Old Ox.

 

The title The Sentence takes on several meanings throughout the book, from a prison sentence to an actual sentence that our indigenous protagonist, Tookie, thinks can kill people. Louise Erdrich's characters are living through early COVID times in Minneapolis, trying to figure out what was happening at the time of George Floyd's murder. If you like books and bookstores, you will enjoy reading about the survival of a small independent bookstore based on the real Birchbark Books. Oh, by the way, the main theme is solving the mystery of a haunting at this fictional bookstore.

 

Publisher's description:

A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading with murderous attention, must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning.