Trust a librarian to help you find books you’ll want to read Library Lin’s Curated Collection of Superlative Nonfiction is a librarian’s A-list of nonfiction books organized by subject area—just like a library. Linda Maxie (Library Lin) combed through 65 best books lists going back a century. She reviewed tens of thousands of books, sorted them according to the Dewey Decimal Classification system, and selected an entire library’s worth for you to browse without leaving home. Here you’ll find • Summaries of outstanding titles in every subject • Suggestions for locating reading material specific to your needs and interests In this broad survey of all the nonfiction categories, you will find titles on everything from the A-bomb to Zen Buddhism. You might find yourself immersed in whole subject areas that you never thought you’d be interested in.
"An endearing ballad of the struggle for existence and understanding." – Booklist Ten-year-old Pearl Wallace is living in the mountains of rural Tennessee in the depths of the Great Depression and several years into Prohibition. Pearl struggles with her moral dilemmas: What can she do to protect her best friend Darlene from an abusive stepfather? And, especially, how much does she need to tithe on the money she has earned from stealing her daddy’s moonshine and selling it? Meanwhile, Emily Weston, a missionary, has come to “lift the poor hillbillies of the region out of their ignorance and misery.” Coming from a place of affluence and privilege, she is quickly overwhelmed by the social and racial issues facing her students and their families. When murder, fire, and heartbreak threaten those they love, Pearl and Emily must confront the hate and bigotry of their neighbors. Emily’s time in the mountains will be one not of saving souls, but of personal reckoning. "Deborah Hining is a remarkable talent.” – Elizabeth Hein, author of How to Climb the Eiffel Tower
Philip Hayward is a teacher who thinks of himself as 'Mr Nice Guy'. However, due to his brother's cheating him out of his home, he fantasized about fratricide. When a serendipitous meeting reveals his brother's whereabouts, he stumbles into his brother's new house to discover a body.With his brother dead, he feels duty bound to find out who killed him. The police want him 'to help them with their enquiries' because he has left a bloody footprint on the floor.Phil sees himself like the fugitive, Hannay, in 'The 39 Steps', the only way he can stop running is to find the culprit and clear his name.It's time to call in some favours, but has he really been good enough for people to help him; a known murderer who had motive and who was the last person at the crime scene?Can he prove his innocence before the police move in and who is Diana Deverill who signs herself "Deadly nightshade" and pursues Phil at every opportunity?
At the turn of the thirteenth century, a tolerant, wealthy, and cultured society blossomed in what is now southwestern France. Occitania was the domain of the Counts of Toulouse. Its people valued poetry, music, and literature over warfare. Their language Occitan, was the lingua franca of the courts of Europe. Their troubadours traveled widely and were popular sources of news and entertainment. Tragically, their success struck fear in the minds of the pope and kings, so a brutal crusade was launched to destroy a people that sought only peace. Seven hundred years later, as the battles raged on the Normandy beaches, a sleepy little town in the Limousin woke up to what they expected to be like any other. But this day they were to have unwelcome visitors, the Waffen SS. The Chrysalis of Oc is a sweeping historical tale that links thirteenth and twentieth century France and the bloody crusades that changed the course of the world forever.
Winner of the Crime Writers of America Historical Award London, June 1940. When the body of silent screen star Mabel Morgan is found impaled on a wrought-iron fence, the coroner rules her death as suicide. Detective Ted Stratton is not convinced and suspects that Morgan's fatal fall may have been the work of one of Soho's most notorious gangsters. Meanwhile, MI5 agent Diana Calthrop is leading a covert operation when she discovers that her boss is involved in espionage. Only when Stratton's path crosses Diana's does the pair start to uncover the truth. And soon they also begin to realize they like each other a little too much. . . .
Philip Hayward is a mathematics teacher who is 'Mr Nice Guy'. He tries to be generous and giving, but he harbours a guilty secret, he wants his brother, Patrick, dead. Ten years previously they had bought a flat together but when Patrick lost his job through shady deals, a year later, they were forced sell. As the elder brother, Patrick was the principal name on the mortgage and he held the account. When they sold, the capital payment for the flat was paid into his bank, and he disappeared to America with all the money. The mortgage company came after Phil for the whole debt, leaving him with a huge sum of money to pay off and nowhere to live. He had even contemplated fratricide; the bitterness at his unfair treatment had become greater as time passed and as his poverty weighed more heavily on him. When a serendipitous meeting reveals his brother's whereabouts, he stumbles into his brother's new house to discover a body. With help, he can find his brother's killer but will he be in time?
Significant change usually comes about not by introduction of something new but by reinterpretation of something old. Among the more interesting illustrations of this premise is that of Arthur C. Clarke, who in 2001: A Space Odyssey uses it to account for no less than the evolution of mankind. Back eons of time, so the story goes, herbivorous man-apes roamed the parched savannas of Africa in search of food, a search that had brought them to the brink of extinction. Their miraculous transformation from man-apes to ape-men did not come about until they realized that they were slowly starving to death in the midst of plenty, that the grassy plain on which they search in vain for berries and fruit was overrun with succulent meat. Such meat was not so much beyond mankinds reach as it was beyond his imagination. To negotiate the necessary transition, the man-apes had to reinterpret their environment. The history of education can also be viewed as a sustained series of reinterpretations, which, because they remain human, retain remnants of the man-apes primeval flaw a certain primordial rigidity of the imagination that renders us unable to grasp what lies immediately at hand because it fails to correspond with what comes habitually to mind. When it comes time to characterize the educational environment of the past few decades, it will undoubtedly be remembered as an era of reform. Cries for reform in education are by no means new to schools, of course, but seldom are they the focus of such prolonged and concerted attention as they have lately received. Not since the days of Sputnik have we witnessed such massive concern about what was happening or not happening in the nations classrooms. In the sixties the thrust of reform focussed on the teaching of science and mathematics and spawned a period of curricular innovation that carried us well through the seventies. It was an exciting time to teach, a time filled with openness and optimism and plentiful support. But with the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983 by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, a new interpretation struck. Suddenly, it seemed, everything had gone awry: the schools had somehow fallen derelict in their duty to prepare the nations youth to meet the manifold challenges that awaited them. Schools had degenerated into Shopping Malls, SAT scores had plummeted to new lows, teachers had descended to shocking levels of incompetence, and content had turned to jelly. Subsequent reports by other foundations, commissions, and blue ribbon panels confirmed the assessment. American schools are in trouble, said John Goodlad. After years of shameful neglect, according to Ernest Boyer, educators and politicians have taken the pulse of the public school and found it faint. Horace Smith Ted Sizers mythical English teacher was forced to compromise, but dares not express his bitterness to the visitor conducting a study of high schools, because he fears he will be portrayed as a whining hypocrite." Today, with the No Child Left Behind act, schools are embroiled in the tribulations of accountability, with high stakes testing roiling instruction that must teach to the test and urban communities that must struggle just to keep their schools open. Meanwhile, as vouchers swell enrollments in private schools, charter schools have begun to siphon off students and teachers from the public schools. As a schoolmaster for the past forty-five years, I view these changes with trepidation.. A little too close to Horace Smith for comfort, I am nonetheless in no mood to compromise. Although I do not doubt that I am biased, it doesnt seem to me that my students have changed significantly over the years, nor for that matter the fundamental problems of education across continents and decades. And while I am thankful that my country is worried about its teachers and its schools, my
Brutally honest, unflinching, exhaustively researched, and compulsively readable, 2"Until Proven Innocent"2excoriates those who led the stampede [in the Duke Lacrosse rape case] but it also exposes the cowardice of Duke's administration and faculty--John Grisham.
De and Beth work at a school with a secret. Bit by bit the truth emerges until they take over and force the issue. What they find is more shocking than they could ever have imagined....
