Catalog Search Results
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 12.3 - AR Pts: 48
Formats
Description
Who Hasn't Gazed upon the abandoned temples of Angkor Wat or the jungle-choked cities of the Maya and wondered, could the same fate happen to us? In this riveting book, Jared Diamond--whose Guns, Germs, and Steel revolutionized our understanding of history--explores how humankind's use and abuse of the environment reveal the truth behind the world's great collapses, from the Anasazi of North America to the Vikings of Greenland to modern Montana. What...
Author
Series
Formats
Description
"Early Warning opens in 1953 with the Langdons at a crossroads. Their stalwart patriarch Walter, who with his wife had sustained their Iowa farm for three decades, has suddenly died, leaving their five children looking to the future. Only one will remain to work the land, while the others scatter to Washington, DC, California, and everywhere in between. As the country moves out of postwar optimism through the Cold War, the social and sexual revolutions...
Author
Formats
Description
How could two hardworking people do everything right in life, a woman asks, and end up destitute? Willa Knox and her husband followed all the rules as responsible parents and professionals, and have nothing to show for it but debts and an inherited brick house that is falling apart. The magazine where Willa worked has folded; the college where her husband had tenure has closed. Their dubious shelter is also the only option for a disabled father-in-law...
4) Golden Age
Author
Series
Last hundred years trilogy volume 3
Formats
Description
"From the Pulitzer Prize-winner: the much-anticipated final volume of her magnificent, best-selling American trilogy, which brings the beloved Langdon family into our present times and beyond. A lot can happen in 100 years, as Jane Smiley has shown to dazzling effect in her astonishing, critically acclaimed Last Hundred Years Trilogy. When Golden Age, its last installment, opens in 1987, the next generation of the Langdon family is facing economic,...
Author
Pub. Date
2021.
Description
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming human society fundamentally and profoundly. Three of our most accomplished and deep thinkers come together to explore how A.I. could affect our relationship with knowledge, impact our worldviews, and change society and politics as profoundly as the ideas of the Enlightenment.
Author
Series
Formats
Description
On their farm in Denby, Iowa, Rosanna and Walter Langdon abide by time-honored values that they pass on to their five wildly different yet equally remarkable children: Frank, the brilliant, stubborn first-born; Joe, whose love of animals makes him the natural heir to his family's land; Lillian, an angelic child who enters a fairy-tale marriage with a man only she will fully know; Henry, the bookworm who's not afraid to be different; and Claire, who...
Author
Series
To kill a mockingbird volume 2
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.9 - AR Pts: 10
Formats
Description
Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch, "Scout", returns home from New York City to visit her aging father, Atticus. Set against the backdrop of the civil rights tensions and political turmoil that were transforming the South, Jean Louise's homecoming becomes bittersweet when she learns disturbing truths about her close-knit family, the town and the people dearest to her.
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 9.1 - AR Pts: 15
Formats
Description
Ideas, products, messages and behaviors "spread just like viruses do." Behavior can ripple outward until a critical mass or "tipping point" is reached, changing the world. Gladwell develops these and other concepts (such as the "stickiness" of ideas or the effect of population size on information dispersal) through simple, clear explanations and entertainingly illustrative anecdotes.
Author
Pub. Date
[2018]
Description
Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the headlines and prophecies of doom and instead follow the data. In seventy-five graphs, he posits that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. It is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction...
Author
Formats
Description
Psychologists have discovered that our minds are ruled by two different systems, the rational mind and the emotional mind, that compete for control. The rational mind wants a beach body; the emotional mind wants that Oreo cookie. This tension can doom a change effort but if it is overcome, change can come quickly. The Heaths show how everyday people have united both minds and achieved dramatic results.
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: LG - BL: 6 - AR Pts: 1
Appears on list
Description
"A nonfiction picture book compilation of the stories of 13 American women who persisted in overcoming obstacles and changing the world"--Provided by publisher.
"Chelsea Clinton introduces tiny feminists, mini activists and little kids who are ready to take on the world to thirteen inspirational women who never took no for an answer, and who always, inevitably and without fail, persisted. Throughout American history, there have always been women...
Author
Series
Pub. Date
[2021]
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.7 - AR Pts: 7
Formats
Description
"Juliette and Warner fought hard to take down the Reestablishment once and for all. Life in the aftermath isn't easy, as they and their friends at the Sanctuary work with their limited resources to stabilize the world. Warner has his sights set on more than just politics. Since he proposed to Juliette two weeks ago, he's been eager to finally marry her, the person he loves more than anything and has endured so much to be with. But with so much chaos...
15) The people speak
Pub. Date
[2010]
Description
"Using dramatic and musical performances of the letters, diaries and speeches of everyday Americans, the documentary feature film The People Speak gives voice to those who spoke up for social change throughout U.S. history, forging a nation from the bottom up with their insistence on equality and justice. Narrated by acclaimed historian Howard Zinn and based on his best-selling books, A People's History of the United States and, with Anthony Arnove,...
16) Future shock
Author
Pub. Date
c1970
Description
Describes some of the problems our technology has created for society and suggests some strategies for coping in the future.
Author
Formats
Description
"That skinny Indian teenager has that mysterious something that comes along once a generation. He is one of those rare chefs who is simply born. He is an artist." And so begins the rise of Hassan Haji, the unlikely gourmand who recounts his life's journey in this novel. Lively and brimming with the colors, flavors, and scents of the kitchen, it is a succulent treat about family, nationality, and the mysteries of good taste. Born above his grandfather's...
18) Lyddie
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 5.6 - AR Pts: 9
Description
Gr 5-9 --In this superb novel, Paterson deftly depicts a Lowell, Massachusetts fabric mill in the 1840s and a factory girl whose life is changed by her experiences there. Readers first meet 13-year-old Lyddie Worthen staring down a bear on her family' debt-ridden farm in the Vermont mountains. With her fierce spirit, she stares down a series of metaphorical bears in her year as a servant girl at an inn and then in her months under grueling conditions...
19) Two boys kissing
Author
Pub. Date
2013.
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5 - AR Pts: 8
Appears on list
Description
A chorus of men who died of AIDS observes and yearns to help a cross-section of today's gay teens who navigate new love, long-term relationships, coming out, self-acceptance, and more in a society that has changed in many ways.
Based on true events—and narrated by a Greek Chorus of the generation of gay men lost to AIDS— Two Boys Kissing follows Harry and Craig, two seventeen-year-olds who are about to take part in a 32-hour marathon of kissing...
20) Birdcage walk
Author
Pub. Date
2017.
Description
Weaving a deeply personal and moving story with a historical moment of critical and complex importance, Birdcage Walk is an unsettling and brilliantly tense drama of public and private violence, resistance and terror from one of our greatest storytellers