National Network for Equitable Library Service

In the 1920s, the young J. R. Ackerley spent several months in India as the personal secretary to the maharajah of a small Indian principality. In his journals, Ackerley recorded the Maharajah's fantastically eccentric habits and riddling conversations, and the odd shambling day-to-day life of his court. Hindoo Holiday is an intimate and very funny account of an exceedingly strange place, and one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century travel literature.

Starting in 1964, writes Margot Adler in this dazzling memoir, "I found myself mysteriously at the center of extraordinary events." Now a correspondent for National Public Radio, Adler was a young woman determined to be taken seriously and to be an agent of change—on her own terms, free from dogma and authoritarian constraints. From campus activism at the University of California at Berkeley to civil rights work in Mississippi, from antiwar protests to observing the socialist revolution in Cuba, she found those chances in the 1960s.

The dramatic story of the rise and collapse of Europe's first great urban experiment. The growth of cities around the world in the last two centuries is the greatest episode in our urban history, but it is not the first. Three thousand years ago most of the Mediterranean basin was a world of villages; a world without money or writing, without temples for the gods or palaces for the mighty.

“A milestone in Western studies of China.” (John K. Fairbank). In this masterful, highly original approach to modern Chinese history, Jonathan D. Spence shows us the Chinese revolution through the eyes of its most articulate participants—the writers, historians, philosophers, and insurrectionists who shaped and were shaped by the turbulent events of the twentieth century.

Robert Carter III, the grandson of Tidewater legend Robert "King" Carter, was born into the highest circles of Virginia's Colonial aristocracy. He was neighbor and kin to the Washingtons and Lees and a friend and peer to Thomas Jefferson and George Mason. But on September 5, 1791, Carter severed his ties with this glamorous elite at the stroke of a pen. In a document he called his Deed of Gift, Carter declared his intent to set free nearly five hundred slaves in the largest single act of liberation in the history of American slavery before the Emancipation Proclamation.

A compelling history of the Ptolemies, the decline of Egypt, and the rising power of the Roman Empire. The Ptolemaic era, Egypt’s last and one of its longest dynasties, was in many ways a gilded age. Its early rulers restored and even expanded Egyptian power. Over a span of 300 years the period was witness to intellectual enlightenment, imaginative state-building, and some of the most memorable characters in ancient history, including Alexander the Great and Cleopatra VII.

From Andrew X. Pham, the award-winning author of *Catfish and Mandala*, a son’s searing memoir of his Vietnamese father’s experiences over the course of three wars. *The Philadelphia Inquirer* hailed Andrew Pham’s debut, *Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam*, for evoking “the full sadness of the human condition...

The Diary recorded by Lady Murasaki (c. 973–c. 1020), author of *The Tale of Genji*, is an intimate picture of her life as tutor and companion to the young Empress Shoshi. Told in a series of vignettes, it offers revealing glimpses of the Japanese imperial palace—the auspicious birth of a prince, rivalries between the Emperor's consorts, sharp criticism of Murasaki's fellow ladies-in-waiting and drunken courtiers, and telling remarks about the timid Empress and her powerful father, Michinaga.

In The Devil’s Horn, Michael Segell traces the 160-year history of the saxophone—a horn that created a sound never before heard in nature, and that from the moment it debuted has aroused both positive and negative passions among all who hear it. The saxophone has insinuated itself into virtually every musical idiom that has come along since its birth as well as into music with traditions thousands of years old.

A former public defender testifies to the vivid human suffering at the heart of America's criminal justice system. As a public defender, Allen Goodman faced cross-examination from family and friends every day: How could he work to help criminals? How could he live with himself? Presumed guilty by association, Goodman quickly learned that people didn’t really want an answer; they wanted a justification, perhaps even an apology. Ever the idealist, Goodman answered anyway: Everyone deserves justice. Everyone against Us is Goodman’s testimony of his life as a public defender.