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History and Current Events February 2019
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Code Name: Lise - The True Story of the Woman Who Became WWII's Most Highly Decorated Spy
by Larry Loftis
The year is 1942, and World War II is in full swing. Odette Sansom decides to follow in her war hero father’s footsteps by becoming an SOE agent to aid Britain and her beloved homeland, France. Five failed attempts and one plane crash later, she finally lands in occupied France to begin her mission. It is here that she meets her commanding officer Captain Peter Churchill.
As they successfully complete mission after mission, Peter and Odette fall in love. All the while, they are being hunted by the cunning German secret police sergeant, Hugo Bleicher, who finally succeeds in capturing them. They are sent to Paris’s Fresnes prison, and from there to concentration camps in Germany where they are starved, beaten, and tortured. But in the face of despair, they never give up hope, their love for each other, or the whereabouts of their colleagues.
In Code Name: Lise, Larry Loftis paints a portrait of true courage, patriotism, and love—of two incredibly heroic people who endured unimaginable horrors and degradations. He seamlessly weaves together the touching romance between Odette and Peter and the thrilling cat and mouse game between them and Sergeant Bleicher. With this amazing testament to the human spirit, Loftis proves once again that he is adept at writing “nonfiction that reads like a page-turning novel” (Parade).
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Parkland: Birth of a Movement
by Dave Cullen
Nineteen years ago, Dave Cullen was among the first to arrive at Columbine High, even before most of the SWAT teams went in. While writing his acclaimed account of the tragedy, he suffered two bouts of secondary PTSD. He covered all the later tragedies from a distance, working with a cadre of experts cultivated from academia and the FBI, but swore he would never return to the scene of a ghastly crime.
But in March 2018, Cullen went to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School because something radically different was happening. In nearly twenty years witnessing the mass shootings epidemic escalate, he was stunned and awed by the courage, anger, and conviction of the high school’s students. Refusing to allow adults and the media to shape their story, these remarkable adolescents took control, using their grief as a catalyst for change, transforming tragedy into a movement of astonishing hope that has galvanized a nation.
Cullen unfolds the story of Parkland through the voices of key participants whose diverse personalities and outlooks comprise every facet of the movement.
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Denmark Vesey's Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy
by Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts
In the tradition of James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me, a deeply researched book that uncovers competing histories of how slavery is remembered in Charleston, South Carolina—the heart of Dixie.
A book that strikes at the heart of the recent flare-ups over Confederate symbols in Charlottesville, New Orleans, and elsewhere, Denmark Vesey’s Garden reveals the deep roots of these controversies and traces them to the heart of slavery in the United States: Charleston, South Carolina, where almost half of the U.S. slave population stepped onto our shores, where the first shot at Fort Sumter began the Civil War, and where Dylann Roof shot nine people at Emanuel A.M.E. Church, the congregation of Denmark Vesey, a black revolutionary who plotted a massive slave insurrection in 1822.
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The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother's Life in the Detroit Numbers
by Bridgett M. Davis
In 1958, the very same year that an unknown songwriter named Berry Gordy borrowed $800 to found Motown Records, a pretty young mother from Nashville, Tennessee borrowed $100 from her brother to run a Numbers racket out of her tattered apartment on Delaware Street, in one of Detroit's worst sections. That woman was Fannie Davis, Bridgett M. Davis' mother.
Part bookie, part banker, mother, wife, granddaughter of slaves, Fannie became more than a numbers runner: she was a kind of Ulysses, guiding both her husbands, five children and a grandson through the decimation of a once-proud city using her wit, style, guts, and even gun. She ran her numbers business for 34 years, doing what it took to survive in a legitimate business that just happened to be illegal. She created a loving, joyful home, sent her children to the best schools, bought them the best clothes, mothered them to the highest standard, and when the tragedy of urban life struck, soldiered on with her stated belief: "Dying is easy. Living takes guts."
A daughter's moving homage to an extraordinary parent, The World According to Fannie Davis is also the suspenseful, unforgettable story about the lengths to which a mother will go to "make a way out of no way" to provide a prosperous life for her family -- and how those sacrifices resonate over time.
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| Lighting the Fires of Freedom: African American Women in the Civil Rights Movement by Janet Dewart BellAn illuminating oral history of the civil rights movement as told by nine influential female activists whose accomplishments have often gone unrecognized.
Featuring reflective insights from Kathleen Cleaver, Myrlie Evers, Diane Nash, Gloria Richardson, and others.
Reviewers say: "An important book that should be read in all schools and wherever discussion of social issues takes place" (Library Journal). |
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| 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.An engaging, meticulously researched compendium that updates journalist Joel A. Rogers' groundbreaking 1934 book 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro with Complete Proof.
Wide-ranging and unique topics are presented in a concise question-and-answer format, perfect for quick reading.
Chapters include: "Who was the first black saint?"; "Who was the first black woman to be a self-made millionaire?"; "What is Juneteenth?" |
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| Blood Brothers: The Fatal Friendship Between Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X by Randy Roberts and Johnny SmithExamines Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X's brief but tumultuous friendship, which was initially strengthened -- though later torn apart -- by their involvement in the Nation of Islam (NOI).
Read it for the sobering contrast between Ali's ascent in the NOI and Malcolm's fall from it, culminating in the latter's 1965 assassination.
Includes previously unseen sources, including FBI records and Malcolm's personal papers. |
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| Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance by Mark WhitakerA history of Pittsburgh's Smoketown community, which from the 1920s-1950s had a "glorious stretch" of black cultural achievement.
Claims to fame: Smoketown boasted America's most widely read black newspaper, two Negro League baseball teams, and the childhood homes of playwright August Wilson and jazz composer Billy Strayhorn.
Reviewers say: "It’s thanks to such a gifted storyteller as Whitaker that this forgotten chapter of American history can finally be told in all its vibrancy and glory" (The New York Times). |
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