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History and Current Events May 2020
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| Faster: How a Jewish Driver, an American Heiress, and a Legendary Car Beat Hitler's Best by Neal BascombWhat it is: A dramatic account of the 1938 Pau Grand Prix, when French Jewish driver René Dreyfus bested Rudi Caracciola, the driver hand-picked by Hitler to secure a German victory and fuel Nazi propaganda.
Featuring: American heiress Lucy Schell, who bankrolled Dreyfus' efforts after he was banned from all major teams because of his heritage.
Read it for: a compelling underdog story of triumphing over adversity. |
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Eminent historian Paul Strathern opens the history of Empire with the Akkadian civilization, which ruled over a vast expanse of the region of ancient Mesopotamia, then turns to the immense Roman Empire, where we trace back our Western and Eastern roots. Next the narrative describes how a great deal of Western Classical culture was developed in the Abbasid and Umayyad Caliphates. Then, while Europe was beginning to emerge from a period of cultural stagnation, it almost fell to a whirlwind invasion from the East, at which point we meet the Emperors of the Mongol Empire... Combining breathtaking scope with masterful narrative control, Paul Strathern traces these connections across five millenia and sheds new light on these major civilizations, from the Mongol Empire and the Yuan Dynasty to the Aztec and Ottoman, through to the most recent and biggest empires: the British, Russo-Soviet, and American.
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Red Sea Spies : The True Story of Mossad's Fake Diving Resort
by Raffi Berg
The true story that inspired the Netflix film The Red Sea Diving Resort: In the early 1980s on a remote part of the Sudanese coast, a new luxury holiday resort opened for business. Catering for divers, it attracted guests from around the world. Little did the holidaymakers know that the staff were undercover spies, working for the Mossad - the Israeli secret service.
Providing a front for covert night-time activities, the holiday village allowed the agents to carry out an operation unlike any seen before. What began with one cryptic message pleading for help, turned into the secret evacuation of thousands of Ethiopian Jews who had been languishing in refugee camps, and the spiriting of them to Israel.
Written in collaboration with operatives involved in the mission, endorsed as the definitive account and including an afterword from the then Mossad director, this is the complete, never-before-heard, gripping tale of a top-secret and often hazardous operation.
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Chinatown is the Holy Grail of 1970s cinema. Its twist ending is the most notorious in American film and its closing line of dialogue the most haunting. Here for the first time is the incredible true story of its making. In Sam Wasson's telling, it becomes the defining story of the most colorful characters in the most colorful period of Hollywood history. Here is Jack Nicholson at the height of his powers, as compelling a movie star as there has ever been, embarking on his great, doomed love affair with Anjelica Huston. Here is director Roman Polanski, both predator and prey, haunted by the savage death of his wife, returning to Los Angeles, the scene of the crime, where the seeds of his own self-destruction are quickly planted. Here is the fevered dealmaking of "The Kid" Robert Evans, the most consummate of producers. Here too is Robert Towne's fabled script, widely considered the greatest original screenplay ever written. Wasson for the first time peels off layers of myth to provide the true account of its creation.
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Describes the outbreak of the Spanish Flu 100 years ago that killed more than 50 million people around the world, including 550,000 in the United States, right in the middle of World War I.
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Asian Pacific American Heritage Month |
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| Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental... by Gordon H. ChangWhat it is: an ambitious chronicle of the mid-19th century Chinese laborers who endured meager wages, dangerous working conditions, and racist hostility to build the Transcontinental Railroad.
What sets it apart: With no firsthand accounts available for study, historian Gordon H. Chang utilized census data, payroll information, newspaper articles, photographs, and archaeological findings to craft this impassioned own voices history.
Book buzz: Ghosts of Gold Mountain won the Asian/Pacific American Award for Adult Nonfiction earlier this year. |
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| The Not-Quite States of America: Dispatches from the Territories and Other Far-Flung... by Doug MackWhat it is: a thought-provoking blend of history and travelogue that explores several United States territories including American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands.
Read it for: island residents' insights on their relationship to the U.S.
Reviewers say: "An entertaining, informative guidebook to some cool places populated by people to whom attention should be paid" (Kirkus Reviews). |
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| Aloha Rodeo: Three Hawaiian Cowboys, the World's Greatest Rodeo, and a Hidden History... by David Wolman and Julian SmithWhat it's about: A decade after the United States' annexation of Hawaii, three Hawaiian cowboys (or paniolos) defied skepticism and scorn to dominate the competition at the 1908 Cheyenne Frontier Days rodeo.
Why it matters: This engaging history upends mythic conceptions of the American West by spotlighting the ways paniolos shaped cowboy culture and fought to maintain their identity after annexation. |
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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