National Network for Equitable Library Service

A compelling story of two intertwined journeys: a Jewish refugee family fleeing persecution and a young man seeking to reclaim a shattered past. In the twilight of the Cold War, nine-year-old Lev Golinkin and his family cross the Soviet border with only ten suitcases,

A New York Times Critics' Best Nonfiction Book of 2021 - Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Biography - From a gifted young writer, the story of his quest to reclaim his family's apartment building in Poland - and of the astonishing entanglement with Nazi treasure hunters that follows. Menachem Kaiser's brilliantly told story, woven from improbable events and profound revelations, is set in motion when the author takes up his Holocaust-survivor grandfather's former battle to reclaim the family's apartment building in Sosnowiec, Poland.

From the #1 bestselling author of The Boys in the Boat and Facing the Mountain comes an unforgettable epic of family, tragedy, and survival on the American frontier - "An ideal pairing of talent and material.... Engrossing.... A deft and ambitious storyteller." — Mary Roach, New York Times Book Review. In April of 1846, twenty-one-year-old Sarah Graves, intent on a better future, set out west from Illinois with her new husband, her parents, and eight siblings.

The extraordinary true story of four women pioneers in physics during World War II and their daring escape out of Nazi Germany. In the 1930s, Germany was a hotbed of scientific thought. But after the Nazis took power, Jewish and female citizens were forced out of their academic positions. Hedwig Kohn, Lise Meitner, Hertha Sponer, and Hildegard Stücklen were eminent in their fields, but they had no choice but to flee due to their Jewish ancestry or anti-Nazi sentiments.

How identity politics failed one particular identity. "A must read and if you think you don't need to read it, that's just the clue to know you do" —Sarah Silverman. "A masterpiece" —Stephen Fry. Jews Don't Count is a book for people who consider themselves on the right side of history—people fighting the good fight against homophobia, disablism, transphobia, and particularly racism. People, possibly, like you. It is the comedian and writer David Baddiel's contention that one type of racism has been left out of this fight.

Heroin is an illustrated history of Canadian heroin regulation over two centuries. Through the lens of harm reduction, Susan Boyd points to our failure to address the illegal overdose death epidemic caused by criminalizing drug users and to the decades of resistance to these policies. Heroin, discovered in 1898, was heralded as an important medicine and successfully marketed as a pain reliever and cough suppressant. Until the early 1950s, heroin was prescribed for therapeutic use in Canada.

In this annotated translation and study of an early fourteenth-century Japanese devotional picture scroll set, Royall Tyler illuminates the complex relationships between medieval Japanese religion and politics, text, and art. The Kasuga Gongen genki ("The Miracles of the Kasuga Deity") mingles text and painting on silk to tell the tale of miraculous events at the Kasuga shrine in Nara, a site favored by the dominant Fujiwara clan for centuries.

Finalist for Toronto Book Awards. The inside story of the grassroots fight to have a suicide barrier erected on Toronto's "bridge of death." Most Torontonians have no idea their city once hosted the second most popular suicide magnet in North America, behind the Golden Gate Bridge. Since its completion in 1918, more than four hundred people jumped to their death from the Bloor Viaduct, which spans the cavernous Don Valley.

In this unconventional and accessible history, Italian best-seller Alberto Angela literally follows the money to map the reach and power of the Roman Empire. To see a map of the Roman Empire at the height of its territorial expansion is to be struck by its size, stretching from Scotland to Kuwait, from the Sahara to the North Sea. What was life like in the Empire, and how were such diverse peoples and places united under one rule?

Shortlisted for the Toronto Book Awards. "A hospital ... is like a roosting box: a communal space that provides ideal but temporary shelter for [the] vulnerable." In the aftermath of the First World War, a cash register factory in the west end of Toronto was renovated to treat wounded soldiers returning from war. From 1919 to the 1940s, thousands of soldiers passed through its doors. Some spent the remainder of their lives there. The Roosting Box is an exquisitely written history of the early years of the Christie Street Hospital and how war reshaped Canadian society.