Catalog Search Results
Author
Description
"Thousands of books have examined the effects of parents on their children. In asking what the effects are of children on their parents, journalist Jennifer Senior analyzes the many ways in which children reshape their parents' lives, whether it's their marriages, their jobs, their habits, their hobbies, their friendships, or their internal senses of self. She argues that changes in the last half century have radically altered the roles of today's...
Author
Description
Drawing from the fields of psychology and neuroscience and from the worlds of theater, philosophy, history and education, one of the nation's leading writers and commentators helps us become more understanding considerate toward others, and to find the joy that comes from being seen.
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.4 - AR Pts: 15
Description
As an idealistic twenty-three-year-old English teacher at Wilson High School in Long Beach, California. Erin Gruwell confronted a room of "unteachable, at-risk" students. One day she intercepted a note with an ugly racial caricature, and angrily declared that this was precisely the sort of thing that led to the Holocaust - only to be met by uncomprehending looks ... With powerful entries from the students' own diaries and a narrative text by [her,...
Author
Pub. Date
[2006]
Description
"The distinguished sociologist Richard Sennett surveys major differences between earlier forms of industrial capitalism and the more global, more febrile, ever more mutable version of capitalism that is taking its place. He shows how these changes affect everyday life - how the work ethic is changing; how new beliefs about merit and talent displace old values of craftsmanship and achievement; how what Sennett calls "the specter of uselessness" haunts...
Author
Description
In this book the author reverses three decades of thinking about what creates successful children, solving the mysteries of why some succeed and others fail, and of how to move individual children toward their full potential for success. The story we usually tell about childhood and success is the one about intelligence: success comes to those who score highest on tests, from preschool admissions to SATs. But in this book the author argues that the...
Author
Pub. Date
[2015]
Description
Responding to what he calls the culture of the Big Me, David Brooks challenges us, and himself, to rebalance the scales between our "résumé virtues" achieving wealth, fame, and status; and our "eulogy virtues" kindness, bravery, honesty, and faithfulness. Looking to the world's great thinkers and inpsiring leaders, he explores how through internal struggle and a sense of their own limitations, they built a strong inner character. With wisdom,...
Author
Pub. Date
[2005]
Description
"Since when did believing in God and having moral values make you pro-war, pro-rich, and pro-Republican? And since when did promoting and pursuing a progressive social agenda with a concern for economic security, health care, and educational opportunity mean you had to put faith in God aside?" "God's Politics offers a clarion call to make both our religious communities and our government more accountable to key values of the prophetic religious tradition...
10) Bunny
Author
Description
"Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other "Bunny," and are often found entangled in a group hug so tight they become one. But everything...
11) The Namesake
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.2 - AR Pts: 18
Description
"With a new afterword from Jhumpa Lahiri, a new edition of the contemporary classic. Meet the Ganguli family, new arrivals from Calcutta, trying their best to become Americans even as they pine for home. The name they bestow on their firstborn, Gogol, betrays all the conflicts of honoring tradition in a new world--conflicts that will haunt Gogol on his own winding path through divided loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. In The Namesake,...
Author
Description
Poses a case against organized religion that documents the myriad ways in which religion reflects human agendas and distorts sexuality and the perception of the origins of the universe, in a science-based analysis that considers the benefits of a secular world of the "Old" Testament -- The "New" Testament exceeds the evil of the "Old" one -- The Koran is borrowed from both Jewish and Christian myths -- The tawdriness of the miraculous and the decline...
Author
Pub. Date
[2016]
Appears on list
Description
"[The author] takes us into the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee to tell the story of eight families on the edge. Arleen is a single mother trying to raise her two sons on the 20 dollars a month she has left after paying for their rundown apartment. Scott is a gentle nurse consumed by a heroin addiction. Lamar, a man with no legs and a neighborhood full of boys to look after, tries to work his way out of debt. Vanetta participates in a botched stickup...
Author
Description
"Vance, a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, provides an account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 10 - AR Pts: 23
Description
"Extremes of religious belief within our own borders, taking readers inside isolated American communities where some 40,000 Mormon Fundamentalists still practice polygamy. Defying both civil authorities and the Mormon establishment in Salt Lake City, the renegade leaders of these Taliban-like theocracies are zealots who answer only to God. At the core of Krakauer's book are brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty, who insist they received a commandment from...
Author
Pub. Date
2006
Description
A light-hearted look at the history and practice of "the ultimate human-interest story," the obituary.
"What a wonderful surprise-a charming, lyrical book about the men and women who write obituaries. The Dead Beat is sly, droll, and completely winning."- David Halberstam
Where can readers celebrate the life of the pharmacist who moonlighted as a spy, the genius behind Sea Monkeys, the school lunch lady who spent her evenings as a ballroom hostess?...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.8 - AR Pts: 14
Appears on list
Description
Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees "a fortune beyond counting" in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption....
Author
Pub. Date
[2020]
Appears on list
Description
"In this book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people's lives and behavior and the nation's fate. Linking...
Author
Pub. Date
2018
Description
"We often think of our capacity to experience the suffering of others as the ultimate source of goodness. Many of our wisest policy-makers, activists, scientists, and philosophers agree that the only problem with empathy is that we don't have enough of it. Nothing could be farther from the truth, argues Yale researcher Paul Bloom. In [this book], Bloom reveals empathy to be one of the leading motivators of inequality and immorality in society. Far...