National Network for Equitable Library Service

A thousand years ago, a young Japanese girl embarked on a journey from deep in the countryside of eastern Japan to the capital. Forty years later, with the long account of that journey as a foundation, the mature woman skillfully created an autobiography that incorporates many moments of heightened awareness from her long life. Married at age thirty-three, she identified herself as a reader and writer more than as a wife and mother; enthralled by fiction, she bore witness to the dangers of romantic fantasy as well as the enduring consolation of self-expression.

A remarkable firsthand view of a lost culture in all its simplicity and violence by renowned writer Peter Matthiessen (1927–2014), author of the National Book Award–winning The Snow Leopard and the novel In Paradise. In the Baliem Valley in central New Guinea live the Kurelu, a Stone Age tribe that survived into the twentieth century.

In 1831, an unknown, horrifying and deadly disease from Asia swept across Continental Europe, killing millions in its path and throwing the medical profession into confusion. Cholera is a killer with little respect for class or wealth. When it arrived in Britain, its repercussions rocked Victorian England - from the filthy lanes of the Sunderland quayside and the squalid streets of Soho, to the great centres of power: the Privy Council, Whitehall and the Royal Medical Colleges.

Since the end of the Cold War, America's national security establishment has been searching for a new operating theory to explain how this seemingly "chaotic" world actually works. Gone is the clash of blocs, but replaced by what? Thomas Barnett has the answers. A senior military analyst with the U.S. Naval War College, he has given a constant stream of briefings over the past few years, and particularly since 9/11, to the highest of high-level civilian and military policymakers—and now he gives it to you.

An innovative, informative, and entertaining history of Roman Britain told through the lives of individuals in all walks of life. The Britain of the Roman Occupation is, in a way, an age that is dark to us. While the main events from 55 BC to AD 410 are little disputed, and the archaeological remains of villas, forts, walls, and cities explain a great deal, we lack a clear sense of individual lives. This book is the first to infuse the story of Britannia with a beating heart, the first to describe in detail who its inhabitants were and their place in our history.

"Honest and insightful, a testament to Japanese Canadian resilience." —Kerri Sakamoto, author of Floating City. When the North American dream meets traditional Japanese conformity, two cultures collide. Does the past define who we are, who we become? In April 1942, Suzanne's mother was an eight-month-old baby when her family was torn from their home in Victoria, British Columbia. Arriving at Vancouver's Hastings Park, they bunked in horse stalls for months before being removed to an incarceration camp in the Slocan Valley.

Her power was rivaled only by her beauty. Her face has become one of the most recognizable images in the world. She was an independent woman and thinker centuries before her time. But who was Egypt’s Queen Nefertiti? After years of intense research, Dr. Joann Fletcher has answered the questions countless researchers before her could not. While studying Egyptian royal wigs, she read a brief mention of an unidentified and mummified body, discovered long ago and believed to belong to an Egyptian of little importance. This body happened to have a wig, which Dr.

Michael Higgins broadens our understanding of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World by bringing science, engineering, and technology together with ancient documentation and archaeological findings. The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (Pyramids of Giza, Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Statue of Zeus at Olympia, Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, Colossus of Rhodes, and the Pharos Lighthouse at Alexandria) have been a source of fascination for more than two thousand years.

What does jazz mean 20 years into the 21st century? Has streaming culture rendered music literally meaningless, thanks to the removal of all context beyond the playlist? Are there any traditions left to explore? Has the destruction of the apprenticeship model (young musicians learning from their elders) changed the music irrevocably? Are any sounds off limits? How far out can you go and still call it jazz? Or should the term be retired? These questions, and many more, are answered in Ugly Beauty, as Phil Freeman digs through his own experiences and conversations with present-day players.

The use of child soldiers in the Sudan Civil War has shattered the accepted understanding of why children join armies. Thousands of children signed up to participate in Africa's longest running civil war, yet so far the international community and the academic world have viewed them as victims rather than participants. In this groundbreaking new study, Christine Emily Ryan challenges preconceptions which have held back aid work and reconstruction in the Sudan region.