Spanish Peaks Library District

Set in an Edwardian country house in 1912, Downton Abbey portrays the lives of the Crawley family and the servants who work for them. In the drawing rooms, library, and beautiful bedrooms, with their tall windows looking across the park, lives the family, but below stairs are other residents, the servants, as fiercely possessive of their ranks as anyone above.

Publisher's description: From an award-winning historian, a stirring (and timely) narrative history of American labor from the dawn of the industrial age to the present day.

Yeonmi Park has told the harrowing story of her escape from North Korea as a child many times, but never before has she revealed the most intimate and devastating details of the repressive society she was raised in and the enormous price she paid to escape.Parks family was loving and close-knit, but life in North Korea was brutal, practically medieval. Park would regularly go without food and was made to believe that, Kim Jong Il, the countrys dictator,...

Set during the 1950s in West Virginia and Korea, this is the story of two children--Lark, on the verge of adulthood, and her brother, Termite, a child unable to walk and talk but filled with radiance--who grow up with their mother and aunt while their soldier-father fights for his life during the chaotic early months of the Korean War.

Ken Burns documents the worst human-made ecological disaster in American history, when a frenzied wheat boom on the southern Plains, followed by a decade-long drought during the 1930s, nearly swept away the breadbasket of the nation. Menacing black blizzards killed farmers' crops and livestock, threatened the lives of their children, and forced thousands of desperate families to pick up and move elsewhere. Vivid interviews, dramatic photographs, and...

"At a time when anti-immigrant vitriol substitutes for US immigration policy, No Option But North deftly blends heartbreaking accounts of the journey north with cogent insights into the systemic causes that make the trek north an almost impossible option if you're poor and from south of the border. Essential reading for anyone who cares about the human rights implications of US immigration politics."'Antonio Villaraigosa, 41st Mayor of Los Angeles...

"During the Great Depression, wretched labor camps crop up in remote areas of the expansive pine forests throughout the American South. Destitute workers live and toil under terrible conditions to harvest pine gum, hacking into tree trunks, drawing out the sticky sap that gives the Tar Heel State its nickname, and hauling it to stills to be refined into turpentine. Subsistence living means racking up huge debts they are forced to work off, creating...

As the old axiom goes: Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime.But . . . teach a woman to fish, and everyone eats for a lifetime. In this firsthand account, Ritu Sharma shares how women can, and are, overcoming the forces that keep them in poverty. She chronicles her travels through four countries: Sri Lanka, Burkina Faso, Honduras, and Nicaragua, and the intimate interactions she had with the women...