National Network for Equitable Library Service

The Enlightenment is the fountainhead of modern secular Western values: religious tolerance, freedom of thought, speech, and the press, of rationality and evidence based argument. Yet why, over three hundred years later is the Enlightenment so profoundly misunderstood as the expression of soulless calculation? Ritchie Robertson goes back from approximately 1680 to 1790 to reveal what this much-debated period was really about.

Margaret Coker provides an account of how a covert Iraqi intelligence unit came together against all odds to defeat ISIS.

A powerful collection of never-before-told war stories crafted from hundreds of interviews by James Patterson and First Sergeant US Army (Ret.) Matt Eversmann.

Briefly allies during World War II, Adolph Hitler and Josef Stalin then tried to exterminate each other. Millions of miles of Eastern Europe were ruined in their fight to the death, millions of lives sacrificed. Laurence Rees has pieced together a comparative portrait of evil, in which idealism is polluted by bloody pragmatism, and human suffering is a political tool.

“ The Map of Knowledge  is an endlessly fascinating book, rich in detail, capacious and humane in vision.” —Stephen Greenblatt, author of  The Swerve: How the World Became Modern , winner of the Pulitzer Prize After the Fall of Rome, when many of the great ideas of the ancient world were lost to the ravages of the Dark Ages, three crucial manuscripts passed hand to hand through seven Mediterranean cities and survived to fuel the revival of the Renaissance-an exciting debut history.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - A leading political scientist examines the dramatic rise in violent extremism around the globe and sounds the alarm on the increasing likelihood of a second civil war in the United States "Like those who spoke up clearly about the dangers of global warming decades ago, Walter delivers a grave message that we ignore at our peril."-David Remnick, The New Yorker Political violence rips apart several towns in southwest Texas. A far-right militia plots to kidnap the governor of Michigan and try her for treason.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER Spellbinding adventure from Canada's most beloved modern-day explorer. Traverspine is not a place you will find on most maps. A century ago, it stood near the foothills of the remote Mealy Mountains in central Labrador. Today it is an abandoned ghost town, almost all trace of it swallowed up by dark spruce woods that cloak millions of acres. In the early 1900s, this isolated little settlement was the scene of an extraordinary haunting by large creatures none could identify. Strange tracks were found in the woods. Unearthly cries were heard in the night.

When foster carer, Cathy Glass, is asked to foster Darcy-May, a two-day old baby, she is very concerned. The baby is coming to her straight from hospital and will have no contact with her teenage mother, Haylea. Even more worrying, she will be brought to Cathy with a police escort as it's vital her extended family don't know where she is. Abandoned at birth, Cathy and her family quickly bond with little Darcy-May although they have to accept she will eventually leave them to be adopted.

The incredible true story of the last ship to carry enslaved people to America, the remarkable town its survivors founded after emancipation, and the complicated legacy their descendants carry with them to this day-by the journalist who discovered the ship's remains. Fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed, the Clotilda became the last ship in history to bring enslaved Africans to the United States. The ship was scuttled and burned on arrival to hide evidence of the crime, allowing the wealthy perpetrators to escape prosecution.

"Traveling easily through a thousand years of history, The Bright Ages reminds us society never collapsed when the Roman Empire fell, nor did the modern world did wake civilization from a thousand year hibernation.