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History and Current Events April 2024
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| Latinoland: A Portrait of America's Largest and Least Understood Minority by Marie AranaLatinoLand is an exceptional, all-encompassing overview of Hispanic America based on personal interviews, deep research, and Marie Arana’s life experience as a Latina. At present, Latinos comprise 20 percent of the US population, a number that is growing. By 2050, census reports project that one in every three Americans will claim Latino heritage. But Latinos are not a monolith. They do not represent a single group. The largest numbers are Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Salvadorans, and Cubans. Each has a different cultural and political background. Puerto Ricans, for example, are US citizens, whereas some Mexican Americans never immigrated because the US-Mexico border shifted after the US invasion of 1848, incorporating what is now the entire southwest of the United States. Cubans came in two great waves: those escaping communism in the early years of Castro, many of whom were professionals and wealthy, and those permitted to leave in the Mariel boat lift twenty years later, representing some of the poorest Cubans, including prisoners. As LatinoLand shows, Latinos were some of the earliest immigrants to what is now the US—some of them arriving in the 1500s. They are racially diverse—a random fusion of White, Black, Indigenous, and Asian. Once overwhelmingly Catholic, they are becoming increasingly Protestant and Evangelical. They range from domestic workers and day laborers to successful artists, corporate CEOs, and US senators. Formerly solidly Democratic, they now vote Republican in growing numbers. They are as varied culturally as any immigrants from Europe or Asia. Marie Arana draws on her own experience as the daughter of an American mother and Peruvian father who came to the US at age nine, straddling two worlds, as many Latinos do. LatinoLand unabashedly celebrates Latino resilience and character and shows us why we must understand the fastest-growing minority in America. |
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| The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center by Rhaina CohenIn The Other Significant Others, NPR's Rhaina Cohen invites us into the lives of people who have defied convention by choosing a friend as a life partner-these are friends who are home co-owners, co-parents or each other's caregivers. Their riveting stories unsettle widespread assumptions about relationships, including the idea that sex is a defining feature of partnership and that people who raise kids together should be in a romantic relationship. Platonic partners from different walks of life-spanning age and religion, gender and sexuality and more-reveal how freeing and challenging it can be to embrace a relationship model that society doesn't recognize. And they show that orienting your world around friends isn't limited to daydreams and episodes of The Golden Girls, but actually possible in real life. Based on years of original reporting and striking social science research, Cohen argues that we undermine romantic relationships by expecting too much of them, while we diminish friendships by expecting too little of them. She traces how, throughout history, our society hasn't always fixated on marriage as the greatest source of meaning, or even love. At a time when many Americans are spending large stretches of their lives single, widowed or divorced, or feeling the effects of the "loneliness epidemic," Cohen insists that we recognize the many forms of profound connection that can anchor our lives. A rousing and incisive book, The Other Significant Others challenges us to ask what we want from our relationships-not just what we're supposed to want-and transforms how we define a fulfilling life. |
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A Murder in Hollywood : The Untold Story of Tinseltown's Most Shocking Crime by Casey ShermanHollywood starlet Lana Turner was one Tinseltown's most recognizable faces in the 1940s and 50s. But, when the Academy Award-winning actress began dating mobster Johnny Stompanato-a thug for west coast mob boss Mickey Cohen-all the lights and glamor of Hollywood did not brighten the darkness of her personal life. Johnny's intense jealousy over Lana ruled their relationship from the get-go and Lana's daughter, Cheryl, witnessed her mother's bruises and abuse first-hand. On an infamous night in 1958, Lana attempted to break it off with Johnny but he predictably turned violent and Cheryl tried to protect her mother with a knife, killing him. The subsequent murder trial made for the biggest headlines of the year, its drama eclipsing every Hollywood movie. In Murder in Hollywood, Casey Sherman pulls back Tinseltown's velvet curtain to reveal a dark underbelly of celebrity, rife with toxic masculinity and casual violence against women. But in this case, Lana Turner and her daughter finally stood up, which makes for one of the 20th century's most notorious true crime stories.
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| Attack from Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America by Barbara McQuadeAmerican society is more polarized than ever before. We are strategically being pushed apart by disinformation-the deliberate spreading of lies disguised as truth-and it comes at us from all sides: opportunists on the far right, Russian misinformed social media influencers, among others. It's endangering our democracy and causing havoc in our electoral system, schools, hospitals, workplaces, and in our Capitol. Advances in technology including rapid developments in artificial intelligence threaten to make the problems even worse by amplifying false claims and manufacturing credibility. In Attack from Within, scholar and MSNBC legal expert Barbara McQuade shows us how to identify the ways disinformation is seeping into all facets of our society and how we can fight against it with practical solutions to strengthen the public, media, and truth-based politics. Disinformation is designed to evoke a strong emotional response to push us toward more extreme views, unable to find common ground with others. The false claims that led to the breathtaking attack on our Capitol in 2020 may have been only a dress rehearsal. Attack from Within shows us how to prevent it from happening again, thus preserving our country's hard-won democracy. |
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Our Moon : How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are by Rebecca BoyleFar from being a lifeless ornament in the sky, the Moon holds the answers to some of science's central questions. Silent, dry, and barren, Earth's 4.34-billion-year-old companion is essential to life on earth. Its gravity stabilized the Earth's orbit, and, as it once guided evolution, its tide stirring up nutrients that fostered complex life, it now influences everything from animal migrations and reproduction to the movements of plants' leaves. More than 30,000 years before humans invented writing, they used the Moon's waxing and waning to track the passage of time, and, in a tectonic shift for human consciousness, used it to plan for the future. Unsurprisingly, the Moon was a primary feature of the first religions, written language, and philosophy. But our relationship to the Moon became more concrete when Apollo landed on it in 1969 in a moment of scientific and political triumph. And both engineering and politics promise to shape our relationship with it in the near future. Scientists advocate for a return to the moon to do research; governments and billionaires want to return to turn a profit from its mineral resources. Who gets to decide how we use a celestial body that, Boyle argues, belongs to everyone and no one? How can we learn to protect this beautiful, spectral thing that we all share?
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| American Woman: The Transformation of the Modern First Lady, from Hillary Clinton to Jill... by Katie RogersThe first definitive exploration of the role of the twenty-first century First Lady, painting a comprehensive portrait of Jill Biden and the evolution of the First Lady's role from ceremonial figurehead to political operative-from a White House correspondent for The New York Times. Since the Clinton era, tectonic shifts in media, politics, and pop culture have all redefined expectations of First Ladies, even as the boundaries set upon them have at times remained frustratingly anachronistic. With sharp insights and dozens of firsthand interviews with major players in the Biden, Obama, Trump, Bush, and Clinton orbits, including Jill Biden and Hillary Clinton, New York Times White House correspondent Katie Rogers traces, from the dawn of the twenty-first century, the evolution of the role of First Lady into a modern power broker with the potential to deliver on behalf of the president, while also painting a full portrait of Jill Biden. Through deep reporting and new correspondence, American Woman is the first book to paint a comprehensive portrait of Jill Biden and grapple with the idea of what the role of a modern First Lady should be. |
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American Zion : A New History of Mormonism by Benjamin E. ParkDrawing on sources that have become available only in the last two decades, Park presents a fresh, sweeping account of the Latter-day Saints: from the flight to Utah Territory in 1847 to the public renunciation of polygamy in 1890; from the Mormon leadership's forging of an alliance with the Republican Party in the wake of the New Deal to the "Mormon moment" of 2012, which saw the premiere of The Book of Mormon musical and the presidential candidacy of Mitt Romney; and beyond. In the twentieth century, Park shows, Mormons began to move ever closer to the center of American life, shaping culture, politics, and law along the way. A definitive, character-driven work of history, American Zion is essential to any understanding of the Mormon past, present, and future. But its lessons extend beyond the faith: as Park puts it, the Mormon story is the American story.
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The Blues Brothers : An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv, and the Making of an American Film Classic by Daniel De ViséThe story of the epic friendship between John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, the golden era of improv, and the making of a comedic film classic that helped shape our popular culture. "They're not going to catch us," Dan Aykroyd, as Elwood Blues, tells his brother Jake, played by John Belushi. "We're on a mission from God." So opens the musical action comedy The Blues Brothers, which hit theaters on June 20, 1980. Their scripted mission was to save a local Chicago orphanage. But Aykroyd, who conceived and wrote much of the film, had a greater mission: to honor the then-seemingly forgotten tradition of rhythm and blues, some of whose greatest artists-Aretha Franklin, James Brown, John Lee Hooker, Cab Calloway, Ray Charles-made the film as unforgettable as its wild car chases. Much delayed and vastly over budget, beset by mercurial and oft drugged-out stars, The Blues Brothers opened to outraged reviews. However, in the 44 years since, it has been acknowledged a classic: it has been inducted into the National Film Registry for its cultural significance, even declared a "Catholic classic" by the Church itself, and re-aired thousands of times on television to huge worldwide audiences. It is, undeniably, one of the most significant films of the 20th century. The story behind any classic is rich; the saga behind The Blues Brothers, as Daniel de Visé reveals, is epic, encompassing the colorful childhoods of Belushi and Aykroyd; the comedic revolution sparked by Harvard's Lampoon and Chicago's Second City; the birth and anecdote-rich, drug-filled early years of Saturday Night Live, where the Blues Brothers were born as an act amidst turmoil and rivalry; and, of course, the indelible behind-the-scenes narrative of how the film was made, scene by memorable scene. Based on original research and dozens of interviews probing the memories of principals from director John Landis and producer Bob Weiss to Aykroyd himself, The Blues Brothers illuminates an American masterpiece while vividly portraying the creative geniuses behind modern comedy.
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| The Deerfield Massacre: A Surprise Attack, a Forced March, and the Fight for Survival in... by James L. SwansonOnce it was one of the most famous events in early American history. Today, it has been nearly forgotten. In an obscure, two-hundred-year-old museum in a little village in western Massachusetts, there lies what once was the most revered but now totally forgotten relic from the history of early New England-the massive, tomahawk-scarred door that came to symbolize the notorious Deerfield Massacre. This impregnable barricade-known to early Americans as "The Old Indian Door"-constructed from double-thick planks of Massachusetts oak and studded with hand-wrought iron nails to repel the flailing tomahawk blades of several attacking native tribes, is the sole surviving artifact from the most dramatic moment in colonial American history: Leap Year, February 29, 1704, a cold, snowy night when hundreds of native Americans and their French allies swept down upon an isolated frontier outpost and ruthlessly slaughtered its inhabitants. The sacking of Deerfield led to one of the greatest sagas of adventure, survival, sacrifice, family, honor, and faith ever told in North America. 112 survivors, including their fearless minister, the Reverand John Williams, were captured and led on a 300-mile forced march north, into enemy territory in Canada. Any captive who faltered or became too weak to continue the journey-including Williams's own wife and one of his children-fell under the knife or tomahawk. Survivors of the march willed themselves to live and endured captivity. Ransomed by the King of England's royal governor of Massachusetts, the captives later returned home to Deerfield, rebuilt their town and, for the rest of their lives, told the incredible tale. The memoir of Rev. Williams, The Redeemed Captive, became the first bestselling book in American history and published a few years after his liberation, it remains a literary classic. The old Indian door is a touchstone that conjures up one of the most dramatic and inspiring stories of colonial America-and now, finally, this legendary event is brought to vivid life by popular historian James Swanson. |
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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The Public Library 501 Copper NW Albuquerque, New Mexico 87102 505-768-5141abqlibrary.org |
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