National Network for Equitable Library Service

Mark Salzman was graduated summa cum laude from Yale in 1982. With his degree in his pocket, he and his cello took to China for a two-year stint teaching English.

Two generations of Civil Rights activists tell their stories in alternating chapters, spanning the 60s and 70s. During the course of their seperate and remarkable journeys, the two women find themselves incarcerated and on the front lines as the struggle for equality rages in the segregated South.

Born into slavery, Callie House helped create the Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association in 1899 as a freedwoman. The organization, one of the first of its kind, campaigned for the reparations promised to African American freedmen by petitioning the government. Callie, their leader and voice of the movement, defied conventions of race, class, and gender with her ideas.

Conant delivers a stunning account of Julia Child's early life as an Office of Special Services agent in the Far East. Who would ever suspect that Julia Child--TV's popular cooking show host and master of French cuisine--was once a covert British operative?

Titone's first book is an eyeopening new look at the man who assassinated Abraham Lincoln. By asking why John Wilkes Booth did what he did, Titone explores fresh ground--and in so doing reveals a sibling rivalry of shocking consequence.

A revealing and intimate biography about Janis Joplin, the Queen of Classic Rock, written by her younger sister. Janis Joplin blazed across the sixties music scene, electrifying audiences with her staggering voice and the way she seems to pour her very soul into her music. By the time her life and artistry were cut tragically short by a heroin overdose, Joplin had become the stuff of rock-and-roll legend. Through the eyes of her family and closest friends, we see Janis as a young girl, already rebelling against injustice, racism, and hypocrisy in society.

Xiaolu Guo is one of the most acclaimed Chinese-born writers of her generation, an iconoclastic and completely contemporary voice. Her vivid, poignant memoir, Nine Continents is the story of a curious mind coming of age in an inhospitable country, and her determination to seek a life beyond the limits of its borders. Xiaolu Guo has traveled further than most to become who she needed to be. Now, as she experiences the birth of her daughter in a London maternity ward surrounded by women from all over the world, she looks back on that journey.

As a working mother whose livelihood as a poet-lecturer depended on travel, Camille T. Dungy crisscrossed America with her infant, then a toddler. As they travel, Dungy is intensely aware of how they are seen, not just as mother and child but as black females. With a poet's eye, she celebrates the particular in the universal, such as a child's acquisition of language and what to pack in a diaper bag.

A powerfully built man more than six feet tall, Amundsen's career of adventure began at the age of fifteen (he was born in Norway in 1872 to a family of merchant sea captains and rich ship owners). Twenty-five years later he was the first man to reach both the North and South Poles. The author, an adventurer and swimmer, author of Swimming to Antarctica, gives us in this new work a full-scale account of Amundsen's life and expeditions.

The first and definitive biography of one of America's bestselling, notorious, and influential writers of the twentieth century: Iceberg Slim, ne Robert Beck, author of the multimillion-copy memoir Pimp and such equally popular novels as Trick Baby and Mama Black Widow. For a career as a, yes, ruthless pimp in the '40s and '50s, Iceberg Slim refashioned himself as the first and still the greatest of "street lit" masters, whose vivid books have made him an icon to such rappers as Ice-T, Jay-Z, and Snoop Dogg and a presiding spirit of blaxploitation" culture.