Black Klansman

In 1978 the community of Colorado Springs, Colorado experienced a growth of Ku Klux Klan (KKK) membership. One man dared to challenge their effort and thwart attempts to take over the city, Police Detective Ron Stallworth. He launched an undercover investigation into the Klan, gained membership into the organization, briefly served as Duke's bodyguard, and was eventually asked to be the leader of the Colorado Springs chapter. The irony of this investigation was that Stallworth is… A Black man. In the process he battled internal departmental politics to successfully pull off this "sting." Black Klansman explains how he overcame these obstacles and accomplished this almost unbelievable unique achievement.

Recently released as a movie: BlackKkKlansman

News Story Video

more about

Ron Stallworth

see Movie Trailer

Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery

     Kelly's humanity, compassion, humor, and determination resonate throughout, as he recalls his rough-and-tumble New Jersey childhood and the youthful inspiration that sparked his astounding career, and as he makes clear his belief that Mars will be the next, ultimately challenging, step in spaceflight.

     In Endurance, we see the triumph of the human imagination, the strength of the human will, and the infinite wonder of the galaxy.

NATIONAL BEST SELLER

A stunning, personal memoir from the astronaut and modern-day hero who spent a record-breaking year aboard the International Space Station—a message of hope for the future that will inspire for generations to come.

The veteran of four spaceflights and the American record holder for consecutive days spent in space, Scott Kelly has experienced things very few have. Now, he takes us inside a sphere utterly hostile to human life. He describes navigating the extreme challenge of long-term spaceflight, both life-threatening and mundane: the devastating effects on the body; the isolation from everyone he loves and the comforts of Earth; the catastrophic risks of colliding with space junk; and the still more haunting threat of being unable to help should tragedy strike at home--an agonizing situation Kelly faced when, on a previous mission, his twin brother's wife, American Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, was shot while he still had two months in space.

Waterloo : The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles

From the internationally bestselling author and in the bicentenary year of the battle - this is the true story of Waterloo. On the 18th June, 1815 the armies of France, Britain and Prussia descended upon a quiet valley south of Brussels. In the previous three days the French army had beaten the British at Quatre Bras and the Prussians at Ligny. The Allies were in retreat. The blood-soaked battle of Waterloo would become a landmark in European history, to be examined over and again, not least because until the evening of the 18th, the French army was close to prevailing on the battlefield.

Now, brought to life by the celebrated novelist Bernard Cornwell, this is the chronicle of the four days leading up to the actual battle and a thrilling hour by hour account of that fateful day. In his first work of non-fiction, Cornwell combines his storytelling skills with a meticulously researched history to give a riveting account of every dramatic moment, from Napoleon's escape from Elba to the smoke and gore of the battlefields. Through letters and diaries he also sheds new light on the private thoughts of Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington, as well as the ordinary officers and soldiers. Published to coincide with the bicentenary., Waterloo is a tense and gripping story of heroism and tragedy - and of the final battle that determined the fate of Europe.

Think Like A Freak

The Freakonomics books have come to stand for something: challenging conventional wisdom; using data rather than emotion to answer questions; and learning to unravel the world's secret codes. Now Levitt and Dubner have gathered up what they have learned and turned it into a practical toolkit for thinking differently -- thinking, that is, like a Freak. Whether you are interested in the best way to improve your odds in penalty kicks, or in major global reforms, here is a blueprint for an entirely new way to solve problems. Along the way, you'll learn how the techniques of a Japanese hot-dog-eating champion can help you, the reason an Australian doctor swallowed a batch of dangerous bacteria, why Nigerian email scammers make a point of saying they're from Nigeria, and why Van Halen's demanding tour contract banning brown M & Ms was really a safety measure. You'll learn why sometimes it's best to put away your moral compass, and smarter to think like a child. You will be given a master class in incentives -- because for better or worse, incentives rule our world. And you will learn to quit before you fail, because you can't solve tomorrow's problem if you aren't willing to abandon today's dud.

Also in the Library: Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything  by Steven Levitt.

TED talks by Steven Levit

This Is Your Brain On Sports

This is Your Brain on Sports is the book for sports fans searching for a deeper understanding of the games they watch and the people who play them. Sports Illustrated executive editor and bestselling author L. Jon Wertheim teams up with Tufts psychologist Sam Sommers to take readers on a wild ride into the inner world of sports. Through the prism of behavioral economics, neuroscience, and psychology, they reveal the hidden influences and surprising cues that inspire and derail us--on the field and in the stands--and by extension, in corporate board rooms, office settings, and our daily lives.  - TitlePeek

Listen: NPR interview with the Authors "This Is Your Brain On Sports' Gets Inside Minds Of Players, Coaches And Fans

League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth

“PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL PLAYERS DO NOT SUSTAIN FREQUENT REPETITIVE BLOWS TO THE BRAIN ON A REGULAR BASIS.”

So concluded the National Football League in a December 2005 scientific paper on concussions in America’s most popular sport. That judgment, implausible even to a casual fan, also contradicted the opinion of a growing cadre of neuroscientists who worked in vain to convince the NFL that it was facing a deadly new scourge: A chronic brain disease that was driving an alarming number of players -- including some of the all-time greats -- to madness.

League of Denial reveals how the NFL, over a period of nearly two decades, sought to cover up and deny mounting evidence of the connection between football and brain damage. - Goodreads

The terrorist's Son by Zak Ebrahim

This short 96 page book tells an extraordinary story, never before told: The intimate, behind-the-scenes life of an American boy raised by his terrorist father—the man who planned the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

What is it like to grow up with a terrorist in your home? Zak Ebrahim was only seven years old when, on November 5th, 1990, his father El-Sayyid Nosair shot and killed the leader of the Jewish Defense League. While in prison, Nosair helped plan the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. In one of his infamous video messages, Osama bin Laden urged the world to “Remember El-Sayyid Nosair.”

In this book, Ebrahim dispels the myth that terrorism is a foregone conclusion for people trained to hate. Based on his own remarkable journey, he shows that hate is always a choice—but so is tolerance. - Goodreads 

Quantum Shift: Theological Implications of Contemporary Developments in Science

While the field of science has made incredible advances in the past century, and more and more scientists have gone to great lengths to make these developments accessible to the public, we still rarely hear ministers and communities of faith discussing the implications of these developments for the life of faith. Quantum Shift explores recent developments in science from relativity to quantum mechanics to cosmology and then suggests ways in which people of faith might engage these scientific developments to foster their understanding of God and what it means to be part of the world we believe God created. Heidi Ann Russell demonstrates how these scientific developments offer us new and exciting images that spark our theological imaginations and reinvigorate our spiritual lives.
Includes Illustrations - Goodreads Author's Site

Table of Contents: Relativity and Our Understanding of Space and Time – Particle Wave Complementarity – Entanglement – Chaos and complexity – Cosmology and the Big Bang – The Possibility of a Multiverse – Cosmic death and Resurrection – Strings or Loops.

Thing Explainer by Randall Munroe

In Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words, things are explained in the style of Up Goer Five, using only drawings and a vocabulary of the 1,000 (or "ten hundred") most common words. Explore computer buildings (datacenters), the flat rocks we live on (tectonic plates), the things you use to steer a plane (airliner cockpit controls), and the little bags of water you're made of (cells).

Author's Website 

Watch a "Thing Explainer" video below:

Also in the library by Randall Munroe

What IF?

Killing Reagan: The Violent Assault That Changed a Presidency

From the bestselling team of Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard comes Killing Reagan, a page-turning epic account of the career of President Ronald Reagan that tells the vivid story of his rise to power -- and the forces of evil that conspired to bring him down.

Just two months into his presidency, Ronald Reagan lay near death after a gunman's bullet came within inches of his heart. His recovery was nothing short of remarkable -- or so it seemed. But Reagan was grievously injured, forcing him to encounter a challenge that few men ever face. Could he silently overcome his traumatic experience while at the same time carrying out the duties of the most powerful man in the world?

Told in the same riveting fashion as Killing Lincoln, Killing Kennedy, Killing Jesus, and Killing Patton,Killing Reagan reaches back to the golden days of Hollywood, where Reagan found both fame and heartbreak, up through the years in the California governor's mansion, and finally to the White House, where he presided over boom years and the fall of the Iron Curtain. But it was John Hinckley Jr.'s attack on him that precipitated President Reagan's most heroic actions. In Killing Reagan, O'Reilly and Dugard take readers behind the scenes, creating an unforgettable portrait of a great man operating in violent times.

Other Books in the Library from the series by Bill O'Reilly

Jeter Unfiltered

The only authorized full-color book commemorating Derek Jeter’s iconic baseball career with the New York Yankees, featuring archival images and original photos of his final 2014 season from renowned photographer Christopher Anderson.

Derek Jeter’s twentieth and final season in Major League Baseball truly marks the end of a sports era. The New York Yankees’ shortstop—a five-time World Series victor, team captain since 2003, and one of the greatest ballplayers of all time—is a beloved and inspiring role model who displays the indefinable qualities of a champion, on and off the field.

Jeter Unfiltered is a powerful collection of never-before-published images taken over the course of Derek’s final season. Fans will have unprecedented access to “The Captain,” as the famously private baseball legend takes us behind the scenes—inside his home, the stadium, the gym, at his Turn 2 Foundation events, fortieth birthday party, and more—as he looks back with candor and gratitude on his baseball career. The result is an intimate portrait bursting with personality, professionalism, and pride.

Jeter Unfiltered is Jeter as you have never seen him before: unguarded, unapologetic…unfiltered.

The Keeper by Tim Howard

In the summer of 2014, Tim Howard became an overnight sensation after more than ten years as one of America's leading professional soccer players. His record-breaking 15 saves for the United States national team against Belgium in the World Cup electrified a nation that had only recently woken up to the Beautiful Game after decades of hibernation.

An estimated TV audience of 21 million viewers in the U.S.—larger than those of the NBA and NHL finals—watched Howard's heroic performance against the heavily favored Belgians in which he repelled shots with his hands, feet, legs, knees, and even his signature long beard.

Suddenly an athlete who had toiled in relative anonymity for much of his career became the star of his own Internet meme ("Things Tim Howard Could Save": from Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" to the Titanic), and fielded personal calls from the likes of President Barack Obama ("You guys did us proud. . . . I don't know how you are going to survive the mobs when you come back home, man. You'll have to shave your beard so they don't know who you are").

In this inspiring and candid memoir, the beloved U.S. and Everton goalkeeper finally allows himself to do something that he would never do on the field: he drops his guard. - Goodreads

To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party

When Abraham Lincoln helped create the Republican Party on the eve of the Civil War, his goal was to promote economic opportunity for all Americans, not just the slaveholding Southern planters who steered national politics. Yet while visionary Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower shared Lincoln’s egalitarian dream, their attempts to use government to guard against the concentration of wealth have repeatedly been undone by the country’s moneyed interests and members of their own party. Ronald Reagan’s embrace of big business—and the ensuing financial crisis—is the latest example of this calamitous cycle, but it is by no means the first.

In To Make Men Free, celebrated historian Heather Cox Richardson traces the shifting ideology of the Grand Old Party from the antebellum era to the Great Recession, showing how Republicans’ ideological vacillations have had terrible repercussions for minorities, the middle class, and America at large. Expansive and authoritative, To Make Men Free explains how a relatively young party became America’s greatest political hope—and, time and time again, its greatest disappointment. - Goodreads

Introducing _________ Graphic Guides

To Locate Guides
Search "Graphic Guide" on Our library's Catalog!

Introducing Website

Girls vs. guys : surprising differences between the sexes

Kirkus Review

Bite-sized pieces of scientific research seek to illuminate the gender gap.

Taking a mostly humorous approach, Rosen examines the stereotypes that paint men as the ones who never ask for directions and women as the ones who talk all the time. Some of these stereotypes turn out to be rooted in biology and can be demonstrated scientifically, such as how room temperature affects how men and women learn. Others are more a product of society and culture, such as women smiling more than men due to sex roles in the media. Each stereotype is covered in a short, two-page spread, featuring full-color photos and well-written text that doesn't try too hard to be cool. In a few instances, Rosen doesn't make enough of a connection between nature and nurture, though—like not pointing out the societal impact of boys’ demonstrated tendency to equate girls with power tools when looking them at the beach. Without going deeper into these stereotypes, this title remains on the surface.

Readers will learn some basic facts about sex differences, but it'll take some extra leaps on their parts to connect all the dots to understand just what it all means.

Code Name: Johnny Walker by Jim DeFelice with Johnny Walker

This is the unforgettable story of how an ordinary Iraqi became a hero to America's elite warriors--and how that debt was repaid with the gift of freedom. He was the seals' most trusted interpreter . . . and more night after night, while his homeland was being destroyed around him, he guided the U.S. Navy SEALs through Iraq's most dangerous regions. Operating under the code name "Johnny Walker," he risked his life on more than a thousand missions and became a legend in the U.S. special-ops community, many of whose members credit him with saving their lives. But in the eyes of Iraq's terrorists and insurgents, he and his family were marked for death because he worked with the Americans. . . NPR interview with Johnny Walker 

Skeletons on the Zahara

Everywhere hailed as a masterpiece of historical adventure, this enthralling narrative recounts the experiences of twelve American sailors who were shipwrecked off the coast of Africa in 1815, captured by desert nomads, sold into slavery, and subjected to a hellish two-month journey through the bone-dry heart of the Sahara. The ordeal of these men - who found themselves tested by barbarism, murder, starvation, death, dehydration, and hostile tribes that roamed the desert on camelback - is made indelibly vivid in this gripping account of courage, brotherhood, and survival. - Goodreads