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Spanning 2,000 miles and traversing six states from Missouri to the Pacific Ocean, the Oregon Trail is the route that made America. In the fifteen years before the Civil War, when 400,000 pioneers used it to emigrate West, the trail united the coasts, doubled the size of the country, and laid the groundwork for the railroads. The trail years also solidified the American character: our plucky determination in the face of adversity, our impetuous...
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Exotic, exciting, and brutally dangerous, bobsledding was the must-see event of the 1932 Winter Olympics at Lake Placid. Speed Kings is story of risk, adventure, and daring as four Americans race to win the gold medal in the most dangerous competition in Olympic history.
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"When NPR's Scott Simon began tweeting from his mother's hospital room in July 2013, he didn't know that his missives would soon spread well beyond his 1.2 million Twitter followers. Squeezing the magnitude of his final days with her into 140-character updates, Simon's ... meditations spread virally. Over the course of a few days, Simon chronicled his mother's death and reminisced about her life, revealing her humor and strength, and celebrating familial...
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On a winter day in 1903, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, two unknown brothers from Ohio changed history. But it would take the world some time to believe what had happened: the age of flight had begun, with the first heavier-than-air, powered machine carrying a pilot. Who were these men and how was it that they achieved what they did? Far more than a couple of unschooled Dayton bicycle mechanics who happened to hit on success, they were men...
26) Year of yes
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Black History Month: Focus on Illinois (SCPL)
RPS Women's History Month: Adults
Uplifting - Inspiring True Stories
Warm and Cozy Reads
RPS Women's History Month: Adults
Uplifting - Inspiring True Stories
Warm and Cozy Reads
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With three hit shows on television and three children at home, Shonda Rhimes had lots of good reasons to say NO when an unexpected invitation arrived. Hollywood party? No. Speaking engagement? No. Media appearances? No. And there was the side-benefit of saying No for an introvert like Shonda: nothing new to fear. Then Shonda's sister laid down a challenge: just for one year, try to say YES to the unexpected invitations that come your way. Shonda reluctantly...
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"This real-life The X-Files and Close Encounters of the Third Kind tells the true story of a computer programmer who tracks paranormal events along a 3,000-mile stretch through the heart of America and is drawn deeper and deeper into a vast conspiracy. Like "Agent Mulder" of The X-Files, computer programmer and sheriff's deputy Zukowski is obsessed with tracking down UFO reports in Colorado. He would take the family with him on weekend trips to look...
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"Based on two decades of reporting, NBC's chief foreign correspondent's riveting story of the Middle East revolutions, the Arab Spring, war, and terrorism seen up-close--sometimes dangerously so. When he was just twenty-three, a recent graduate of Stanford University, Richard Engel set off to Cairo with $2,000 and dreams of being a reporter. Shortly thereafter he was working freelance for Arab news sources and got a call that a busload of Italian...
29) The bad-ass librarians of Timbuktu: and their race to save the world's most precious manuscripts
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In the 1980s, a young adventurer and collector for a government library, Abdel Kader Haidara, journeyed across the Sahara Desert and along the Niger River, tracking down and salvaging tens of thousands of ancient Islamic and secular manuscripts that had fallen into obscurity. The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu tells the story of how Haidara, a mild-mannered archivist and historian from the legendary city of Timbuktu, later became one of the world's...
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"From one of the country's most recognizable journalists: How becoming a grandmother transforms a woman's life. After four decades as a reporter, Lesley Stahl says the most vivid and transforming experience of her life was not covering the White House, interviewing heads of state, or any other of her stories at 60 Minutes. It was becoming a grandmother. She was hit with a jolt of joy so intense and unexpected, she wanted to "investigate" it--as though...
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Alexandra Horowitz, author of the bestseller Inside of a Dog, explores what dogs know in even greater depth, following their lead to learn about the dog's spectacular nose and how we mere humans can improve our underused sense of smell. Here Horowitz, a leading researcher in dog cognition, continues to unpack the mystery of a dog's nose-view, in order to more fully understand our companions. She follows the dog's nose--exploring not only its abilities...
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Saturday, October 10, 1998. Fielding Marshall is hiking on the Appalachian Trail. His beloved dog --a six-year-old golden retriever mix named Gonker -- bolts into the woods. Just like that, he has vanished. And Gonker has Addison's disease. If he's not found in twenty-three days, he will die. The search begins. Fielding and his father, John, are dispatched to the field. They have the family's other dog, Uli, in tow. Combing the trails, Fielding and...
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"The untold and inspiring story of Eric Liddell, hero of Chariots of Fire, from his Olympic medal to his missionary work in China to his last, brave years in a Japanese work camp during WWII, "--Amazon.com.
Eric Liddell ran-- and lived-- for the glory of his God. An Olympic gold medalist, he would not run on Sunday because of his strict observance of the Christian sabbath, and did not compete in his signature event, the 100 meters, at the 1924 Paris...
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The story of the gene begins in earnest in an obscure Augustinian abbey in Moravia in 1856 where Gregor Mendel, a monk working with pea plants, stumbles on the idea of a "unit of heredity." It intersects with Darwin's theory of evolution, and collides with the horrors of Nazi eugenics in the 1940s. The gene transforms postwar biology. It invades discourses concerning race and identity and provides startling answers to some of the most potent questions...
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In unprecedented detail, Farida describes her world as it was at nineteen, she was living at home with her brothers and parents, finishing her schooling and looking forward to becoming a math teacher and the hell it became. Held in a slave market in Syria and sold into the homes of several ISIS soldiers, she stubbornly attempts resistance at every turn. Farida is ultimately brought to an ISIS training camp in the middle of the desert, where she plots...
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As a founding member of The Beach Boys, Mike Love has spent an extraordinary fifty-five years, and counting, as the group's lead singer and one of its principal lyricists. The Beach Boys, from their California roots to their international fame, are a unique American story--one of overnight success and age-defying longevity; of musical genius and reckless self-destruction; of spirituality, betrayal, and forgiveness--and Love is the only band member...
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'Grunt' tackles the science behind some of a soldier's most challenging adversaries -- panic, exhaustion, heat, noise -- and introduces us to the scientists who seek to conquer them. Mary Roach dodges hostile fire with the U.S. Marine Corps Paintball Team as part of a study on hearing loss and survivability in combat. She visits the fashion design studio of U.S. Army Natick Labs and learns why a zipper is a problem for a sniper. She visits a repurposed...
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"By far the most enigmatic leading figure" of World War II. That's how the British military historian John Keegan described Franklin D. Roosevelt, who frequently left his contemporaries guessing, never more so than at the end of his life. Here, author and journalist Joseph Lelyveld untangles the narrative threads of Roosevelt's final months, showing how he juggled the strategic, political, and personal choices he faced as the war, his presidency,...
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"In 1942, social worker Irena Sendler was granted access to the Warsaw ghetto as a public health specialist. She reached out to the trapped Jewish families, asking the parents to trust her with their young children. She started smuggling them out of the walled district, convincing her friends and neighbors to hide them. In a friend's garden, she buried lists of the names and true identities of those children, with the hope that their relatives could...
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