National Network for Equitable Library Service

The #1 New York Times bestseller and the true story behind the film: A rugby team resorts to the unthinkable after a plane crash in the Andes. Spirits were high when the Fairchild F-227 took off from Mendoza, Argentina, and headed for Santiago, Chile. On board were forty-five people, including an amateur rugby team from Uruguay and their friends and family. The skies were clear that Friday, October 13, 1972, and at 3:30 p.m., the Fairchild's pilot reported their altitude at 15,000 feet. But one minute later, the Santiago control tower lost all contact with the aircraft.

The dramatic biography of one of the most notorious families in American history. Junius Booth and his sons, Edwin and John Wilkes, were nineteenth-century America's most famous theatrical family. Yet the Booth name is forever etched in the history books for one terrible reason: the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865. In American Gothic, bestselling historian Gene Smith vividly chronicles the triumphs, scandals, and tragedies of this infamous family.

The poignant true story of an American president struck by tragedy at the height of his glory. This New York Times bestseller vividly chronicles the stunning decline in Woodrow Wilson's fortunes after World War I and draws back the curtain on one of the strangest episodes in the history of the American presidency. Author Gene Smith brilliantly captures the drama and excitement of Wilson's efforts at the Paris Peace Conference to forge a lasting concord between enemies, and his remarkable coast-to-coast tour to sway national opinion in favor of the League of Nations.

The power of laughter triumphs over illness in Norman Cousins's bestselling classic memoir that revolutionized medicine. Norman Cousins's iconic firsthand account of victory against terminal disease, Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient inspired a revolution, encouraging patients to take charge of their own treatment. A political journalist and activist, Cousins was also a professor of medical humanities at UCLA, where he studied the biochemistry of human emotions and their relationship to healing.

A true crime account of the old-school New York Police Department from the detective who helped catch the Son of Sam and waged a one-man war against the Mafia. In 1978, a gang war erupted in New York City, and the five boroughs ran red with blood. Men with names like "Matty the Horse" and "Tony Ugly" were found dismembered in garbage dumps, dead on the roadside in the far reaches of the Bronx, or suffocated in the trunks of cars parked at LaGuardia Airport.

A New York Times Notable Book: This national bestseller is a vivid biography of the meteoric rise and tragic death of art star Jean-Michel Basquiat Painter Jean-Michel Basquiat was the Jimi Hendrix of the art world. In less than a decade, he went from being a teenage graffiti artist to an international art star; he was dead of a drug overdose at age twenty-seven. Basquiat's brief career spanned the giddy 1980s art boom and epitomized its outrageous excess. A legend in his own lifetime, Basquiat was a fixture of the downtown scene, a wild nexus of music, fashion, art, and drugs.

The "poet laureate of the New York underground scene" chronicles three decades of electrifying artistic expression Once dominated by Beat Generation writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, by the 1970s and '80s, New York City's creative scene had given way to a punk rock-era defined by figures like Debbie Harry and Richard Hell.

Personal encounters with one of the most influential and iconic figures of the Beat Generation During the 1970s, William Burroughs, author of Junky and Naked Lunch, lived in a loft on the Bowery in New York City's Lower East Side. Christened "The Bunker," his apartment became a modern-day literary salon with people like Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Susan Sontag, and fellow beat poet Allen Ginsberg passing through for a drink or a joint and the promise of stimulating conversation with the ingenious and eccentric Burroughs.

Every kid knows that pirates talk funny, swing a big sword, and seek buried treasure-don't they' What do we really know about Blackbeard, Madame Cheng, Sir Francis Drake, and other men and women of pirate history' What drove them to sail the high seas' What were their bad habits, favorite foods, and silly quirks' And did they actually talk like that' A lively style, lots of surprises, and solid research have made the Lives of...'eries of collective biographies popular with both kids and adults.

From the legendary civil rights activist and author of the million-copy selling Warriors Don't Cry comes an ardent and profound childhood memoir of growing up while facing adversity in the Jim Crow South. Long before she was one of the Little Rock Nine, Melba Pattillo Beals was a warrior. Frustrated by the laws that kept African-Americans separate but very much unequal to whites, she had questions.