Spanish Peaks Library District

"Two years after walking out of Dublin with little more than the boots on his feet, Henry Smart has tossed his passport into New York Harbor and reinvented himself as an American. With a well-cut suit and a pearl gray fedora, Henry is by turns a marketing impresario, jazz enthusiast, and partner in crime as he skips from New York to Chicago and back again, only steps ahead of the death warrant that followed him across the Atlantic. At once a history...

Hart's war: Honor, courage, and sacrifice are revealed in unexpected ways as a ranking U.S. prisoner in a Nazi POW camp is joined in December 1944 by a law-student lieutenant who'd been captured despite his father's powerful military connections. When a black pilot from the famous Tuskeegee airmen is falsely accused of murdering a fellow prisoner, Lt. Hart tries his case and discovers the real motivation behind the ranking officer's kangaroo court....

"On July 17, 2014, a forty-three-year-old black man named Eric Garner died on a Staten Island sidewalk after a police officer put him in what has been described as an illegal chokehold during an arrest for selling bootleg cigarettes. The final moments of Garner's life were captured on video and seen by millions. His agonized last words, 'I can't breathe,' became a rallying cry for the nascent Black Lives Matter protest movement. A grand jury ultimately...

From award-winning, bestselling author Ibi Zoboi and prison reform activist Yusef Salaam of the Exonerated Five comes a powerful YA novel in verse about a boy who is wrongfully incarcerated. "The story that I thought was my life didn't start on the day I was born." Amal Shahid has always been an artist and a poet. But even in a diverse art school, he's seen as disruptive and unmotivated by a biased system. Then one fateful night, an altercation in...

"The definitive history of Asian Americans by one of the nation's preeminent scholars on the subject. In the past fifty years, Asian Americans have helped change the face of America and are now the fastest growing group in the United States. But as award-winning historian Erika Lee reminds us, Asian Americans also have deep roots in the country. The Making of Asian America tells the little-known history of Asian Americans and their role in American...

When a law student and lieutenant during WWII is captured and asked to defend an African American soldier who is falsly accused of a crime he finds that the trial is a front for secret plans brewing in the prison camp.

This inspirational documentary is about a band of courageous civil-rights activists calling themselves the Freedom Riders. Gaining impressive access to influential figures on both sides of the issue, it chronicles a chapter of American history that stands as an astonishing testament to the accomplishment of youth and what can result from the incredible combination of personal conviction and the courage to organize against all odds.

A graphic memoir recounting actor/author/activist George Takei's childhood imprisoned within American concentration camps during World War II. Experience the forces that shaped an American icon -- and America itself -- in this gripping tale of courage, country, loyalty, and love. George Takei has captured hearts and minds worldwide with his captivating stage presence and outspoken commitment to equal rights. But long before he braved new frontiers...