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History and Current Events August 2022 |
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Nocturnal Admissions: Behind the Scenes at Tunnel, Limelight, Avalon, and Other Legendary Nightclubs
by Steve Adelman
Wearing the multiple hats of ringmaster, entrepreneur, guidance counselor, multimillion-dollar dealmaker, and music soothsayer, Adelman chronicles an improbable journey from small town to big city, filled with a cast of characters he could never have imagined: People named Hedda Lettuce, Jenetalia, Maxi Min, and Jiggy, who collide with and around the likes of Jack Nicholson, Bruce Willis, Sir Richard Branson, Leonardo DiCaprio, RuPaul, Rudy Giuliani, and Snoop Dogg, among many, many others.
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| The Earth Is All That Lasts: Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and the Last Stand of the Great Sioux... by Mark Lee GardnerWhat it is: a fast-paced dual portrait of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, the Lakota chiefs who helped defeat George Armstrong Custer's forces at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876.
Why you should read it: Award-winning historian Mark Lee Gardner's evocative latest is "a strong work of Western history that strives to bring the Native American view to center stage" (Kirkus Reviews). |
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Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington
by James Kirchick
Drawing on declassified documents, interviews and materials unearthed from presidential libraries and archives around the country, this chronicle of American politics illuminates how homosexuality shaped each successive presidential administration through the end of the 20th century.
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| Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden: Two Sisters Separated by China's Civil War by Zhuqing LiStarring: Hong and Jun Chen, two close-knit sisters who became separated during the Chinese Civil War and who were unable to reunite for decades.
Author alert: Zhuqing Li is a professor of East Asian Studies at Brown University and the niece of Hong and Jun.
Further reading: For more books on how the tumultuous changes of 20th-century China impacted family relationships, read The House of Yan by Lan Yan or Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister by Jung Chang. |
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| Sisters in Resistance: How a German Spy, a Banker's Wife, and Mussolini's Daughter... by Tilar J. MazzeoHow it began: After he became disillusioned with the Third Reich, Italian foreign minister Galeazzo Ciano began pouring his frustrations into his diaries, documenting numerous state secrets.
What happened next: An unlikely trio of women helped deliver Ciano's diaries to the Allies; these documents later became crucial evidence during the Nuremberg trials.
Read it for: a pulse-pounding narrative worthy of a John le Carré novel. |
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| Cabin Fever: The Harrowing Journey of a Cruise Ship at the Dawn of a Pandemic by Michael Smith and Jonathan FranklinWhat it's about: the ill-fated journey of the Zaandam, the Holland America cruise ship which set sail from Buenos Aires on March 7, 2020 and quickly became stranded during the early days of COVID-19.
What's inside: a vivid you-are-there narrative offering firsthand accounts from passengers and crew who fought to maintain hope in the midst of illness, isolation, and dwindling provisions.
Reviewers say: "A harrowing thriller that brings the wide-ranging impacts of the COVID pandemic into the microcosmic enclosed world of a cruise ship" (Library Journal). |
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The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and the War Against the Human
by Naomi Wolf
Our pre-March 2020 world is gone forever. Irretrievable. For in league with mass surrender to all-powerful technology, the "restrictions" against human assembly, speech and gathering, culture and worship brought on by pandemic panic have brought new cultural norms frighteningly at odds with traditional Western notions of freedom and independent thought. Indeed, in our fear of public ostracism and shaming and our ready abandonment of free, open, spontaneous, individualistic, egalitarian and tolerant expression, we in the West today live in a world of CCP-style regimentation and conformity. It is a world in which all human endeavor--all human joy, all human fellowship, all human advancement, all human culture, all human song, all human drama, all worship, all surprise, all flirtation, all celebration--is behind a digital pay wall. A world in which we must ask permission of technology to be human. This is a world we must challenge and change.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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Michigan City Public Library
100 E. 4th Street
Michigan City, Indiana 46360
219-873-3044mclib.org/ |
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