National Network for Equitable Library Service

Carolyn Jourdan spent many years as a congressional lawyer in Washington, D.C. Then she was called home to fill in for her mother as receptionist at her father's rural Tennessee doctor's office--assured it would only be for a few days.

After his humiliating election defeat in 1912, Roosevelt set his sights on the most punishing physical challenge he could find, the first descent of an unmapped, rapids-choked tributary of the Amazon. Together with his son Kermit and Brazil's most famous explorer, Candido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Roosevelt accomplished a feat so great that many at the time refused to believe it.

Part love story, part wine-splattered cookbook, a delicious fish-out-of-water story for any woman who has ever suspected that lunch in Paris could change her life.

The last woman executed in this country went to the gallows despite severe doubts about what part she played in the murder of 73-year-old SP bookmaker Pop Kent at Carlton in 1949. The meticulous detail of this book shatters assumptions surrounding one of the century's most legally contentious cases.

Poet, lexicographer, critic, moralist and Great Cham, Dr. Johnson had in his friend Boswell the ideal biographer. Notoriously and self-confessedly intemperate, Boswell shared with Johnson a huge appetite for life and threw equal energy into recording its every aspect in minute but telling detail. This irrepressible Scotsman was 'always studying human nature and making experiments', and the marvelously vivacious Journals he wrote daily furnished him with first-rate material when he came to write his biography. The result is a masterpiece that brims over with wit, anecdote and originality.

Part memoir, part observation. As a young woman Nikki Gemmell wanted to travel and see the world; adventure lay in running away from Australia, where she had grown up. But at 40, after 12 wonderful years in London with her husband and 3 children, she longs to connect with her past to show her children where their parents came from. But can you really go home again? With characteristic candour Nikki Gemmell looks at what it means to be Australian - in the past and right now.

Journalist Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were their curse and their salvation. Rex and Rose Mary and their four children lived like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Rex was a charismatic, brilliant man who, when sober, captured his children's imagination, teaching them how to embrace life fearlessly. Rose Mary painted and wrote and couldn't stand the responsibility of providing for her family. When the money ran out, the Walls retreated to the dismal West Virginia mining town Rex had tried to escape.

Biography of New Zealand theologian Lloyd Geering [1918-]