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Author
Description
In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nations history. Hurston was there to record Cudjos firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade...
Author
Description
"Born a free man in New York State in 1808, Solomon Northup was kidnapped in Washington, D.C., in 1841. He spent the next twelve harrowing years of his life as a slave on a Louisiana cotton plantation. During this time he was frequently abused and often afraid for his life. After regaining his freedom in 1853, Northup decided to publish this gripping autobiographical account of his captivity. As an educated man, Northup was able to present an exceptionally...
Author
Description
" At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade's worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. "When Breath Becomes Air" chronicles Kalanithi's transformation from a naïve medical student "possessed," as he wrote, "by the...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 7.6 - AR Pts: 5
Description
Nearly a half-century into being a feminist and legal pioneer, something funny happened to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: the octogenarian won the internet. Across America, people who weren't even born when Ginsburg made her name are tattooing themselves with her face, setting her famously searing dissents to music, and making viral videos in tribute. In a class of its own, and much to Ginsburg's own amusement, is the Notorious RBG Tumblr,...
Author
Appears on these lists
Description
As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert).
Drawing...
Author
Pub. Date
[2013]
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 8.8 - AR Pts: 30
Description
The author provides a landmark investigation of patient deaths at a New Orleans hospital ravaged by Hurricane Katrina-- and a suspenseful portrayal of the quest for truth and justice. After Katrina struck and the floodwaters rose, the power failed, and the heat climbed, exhausted caregivers chose to designate certain patients last for rescue. Months later, several health professionals faced criminal allegations that they deliberately injected numerous...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.1 - AR Pts: 26
Appears on these lists
Description
In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father, a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man, has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey, first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of...
Author
Description
A unique compilation of stories, richly reported essays, and photographs providing a window into America during a tumultuous era. This powerful book offers an honest, if sometimes uncomfortable, conversation about race and identity, permitting us to eavesdrop on deep-seated thoughts, private discussions, and long submerged memories.
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.8 - AR Pts: 14
Appears on list
Description
Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees "a fortune beyond counting" in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption....
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 8.1 - AR Pts: 20
Description
"In the major-league draft of 1971, the first player chosen from the State of Oklahoma was Ron Williamson. When he signed with the Oakland A's, he said goodbye to his hometown of Ada and left to pursue his dreams of big league glory." "Six years later he was back, his dreams broken by a bad arm and bad habits - drinking, drugs, and women. He began to show signs of mental illness. Unable to keep a job, he moved in with his mother and slept twenty hours...
Author
Description
This program includes a forward written and read by Bryan StevensonThe Sun Does Shine is an extraordinary testament to the power of hope sustained through the darkest times. Destined to be a classic memoir of wrongful imprisonment and freedom won, Hinton's memoir tells his dramatic thirty-year journey and shows how you can take away a man's freedom, but you can't take away his imagination, humor, or joy.
Author
Description
For the last twenty years, Melinda Gates has been on a mission to find solutions for people with the most urgent needs, wherever they live. Throughout this journey, one thing has become increasingly clear to her: If you want to lift a society up, you need to stop keeping women down. In this book, she shares lessons she’s learned from the inspiring people she’s met during her work and travels around the world. Her unforgettable narrative is backed...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 10.2 - AR Pts: 26
Description
The author explores his theory that the food industry's used three essential ingredients to control much of the world's diet.
Traces the rise of the processed food industry and how addictive salt, sugar, and fat have enabled its dominance in the past half century, revealing deliberate corporate practices behind current trends in obesity, diabetes, and other health challenges.
Author
Pub. Date
[2015]
Description
Responding to what he calls the culture of the Big Me, David Brooks challenges us, and himself, to rebalance the scales between our "résumé virtues" achieving wealth, fame, and status; and our "eulogy virtues" kindness, bravery, honesty, and faithfulness. Looking to the world's great thinkers and inpsiring leaders, he explores how through internal struggle and a sense of their own limitations, they built a strong inner character. With wisdom,...
Author
Pub. Date
[2014]
Description
Contents: In her comic, scathing essay, "Men Explain Things to Me," Rebecca Solnit took on what often goes wrong in conversations between men and women. She wrote about men who wrongly assume they know things and wrongly assume women don't, about why this arises, and how this aspect of the gender wars works, airing some of her own hilariously awful encounters. This updated edition with two new essays of this national bestseller book features that...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7 - AR Pts: 21
Description
Full Body Burden is a haunting work of narrative nonfiction about a young woman, Kristen Iversen, growing up in a small Colorado town close to Rocky Flats, a secret nuclear weapons plant once designated "the most contaminated site in America." It's the story of a childhood and adolescence in the shadow of the Cold War, in a landscape at once startlingly beautiful and--unknown to those who lived there--tainted with invisible yet deadly particles of...
Author
Series
Description
"Often cited as Campbell's best book, this classic study traces the story of the hero's journey and transformation through mythologies from across the world, revealing the one archetypal hero in them all. Originally published in 1949, it has inspired generations of students and has become enormously influential. It has sold nearly a million copies. ... Building on the ideas of Freud and Jung, Campbell uses myth, like dream, as a revelation of human...
19) Never cry wolf
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 8.9 - AR Pts: 9
Description
An unforgettable odyssey of self-discovery and startling adventure begins as a young, inexperienced biologist is deposited alone onto the frozen Arctic tundra. Once settled, he struggles not only to endure the forces of nature, but also to learn as much as he can about the mysterious and misconstrued habits of the wolves he has been sent to study.
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 8 - AR Pts: 18
Description
Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer, yet her cells--taken without her knowledge--became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer and viruses; helped lead to in vitro...