Spanish Peaks Library District

Why did Eurasians conquer, displace, or decimate Native Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of the reverse? In this groundbreaking book, evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for history's broadest patterns. Here, at last, is a world history that really is a history of all the world's peoples, a unified narrative of human...

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...

In 1888 London's Whitechapel slums, poor women like Mary Kelly and her friends walk the streets for a living. When the streetwalkers begin to be murdered one by one, it attracts the attention of Inspector Abberline, who takes a personal interest in the case, and Mary Kelly. Now he must use his psychic abilities to stop the most notorious serial killer in history--Jack the Ripper--before Mary is killed.

A fully documented history of the Soviet camp system, from its origins in the Russian Revolution to its collapse in the era of glasnost. Anne Applebaum first lays out the chronological history of the camps and the logic behind their creation, enlargement, and maintenance. Applebaum also examines how life was lived within this shadow country: how prisoners worked, how they ate, where they lived, how they died, how they survived. She examines their...

The story of mariners' centuries-long search for ways of determining longitude that tells not only of the scientific advances but of the perseverance, pettiness, politics, & interesting anecdotes involved. Longitude is the dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest, and of John Harrison's forty-year obsession with building his perfect timekeeper, known today as the chronometer. Full of heroism and chicanery, brilliance and the absurd, it is...

The Greater Journey is the enthralling, inspiring-and until now, untold-story of the adventurous American artists, writers, doctors, politicians, architects, and others of high aspiration who set off for Paris in the years between 1830 and 1900, ambitious to excel in their work.

The hot-headed young D'Artagnan joins forces with three veteran Musketeers to prevent the villainous Cardinal Richelieu from seizing the French throne and engulfing Europe in war.

James Gleick brings us a revelatory chronicle and meditation that shows how information has become the modern era's defining quality - the blood. the fuel, the vital principle of our world.

A photo-essay featuring patterns that appear in nature, from animal colorings to physical phenomena. Sumario en español: Un foto-ensayo que ofrece los patrones que aparecen en naturaleza, de los colorantes animales a los fenómenos físicos.

We live in a time of tremendous religious awareness, when both believers and non-believers are deeply engaged by questions of religion and tradition. This ambitious book ranges back to the origins of the Hebrew Bible and covers the world, following the three main strands of the Christian faith, to teach modern readers how Jesus' message spread and how the New Testament was formed. We follow the Christian story to all corners of the globe, filling...