Spanish Peaks Library District

Explains why the diversity of the Burgess Shale is important in understanding our past and evolution.

Copied out by hand as a young man aspiring to the status of Gentleman, George Washington's 110 rules were based on a set of rules composed by French Jesuits in 1595. The first English edition of these rules was available in Francis Hawkins' Youths Behavior, or Decency in Conversation Amongst Men, which appeared in 1640, and it is from work that Washington seems to have copied. The rules as Washington wrote them out are a simplified version of this...

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...

Traditional areas of civic agreement are vanishing. We can't agree on what makes America special. We can't even agree that America is special. We're coming to the point that we can't even agree what the word America itself means. "Disintegrationists" say we're stronger together, but their assault on America's history, philosophy, and culture will only tear us apart. Who are the disintegrationists? From Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United...

Argues that intention is a force found in the universe that propels an individual into action and includes stories and examples of the prinicples of intention and ways to apply intention to everyday life.

Is change possible? Everyone who has tried and failed, wished they could be happier, or has been told they were too old to learn something, has wondered why we just seem to be stuck with ourselves. But this amazing and hopeful audio book shows us that it is not only possible for us to control our brains but also for us to rewire them. In late 2004, the Mind and Life Institute brought Western Scientists together with the Dalai Lama and other distinguished...

Simple text and "Loopi the Fantastic Line" describe the concept of space in art and architecture.

"Where does math come from? From a textbook? From rules? From deduction? From logic? Not really, Eugenia Cheng writes in Is Math Real?: it comes from curiosity, from instinctive human curiosity, "from people not being satisfied with answers and always wanting to understand more." And most importantly, she says, "it comes from questions": not from answering them, but from posing them. Nothing could seem more at odds from the way most of us were taught...