National Network for Equitable Library Service

Named a Top 100 Must-Read Book of the Year by Time and a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker. Winner of the 2024 Writers' Prize for Nonfiction. Shortlisted for the Inaugural Women's Prize for Nonfiction.

Alice Randall, award-winning professor, songwriter, and author with a "lively, engaging, and often wise" ( The New York Times Book Review ) voice, offers a lyrical, introspective, and unforgettable account of her past and her search for the first family of Black country music. Country music had brought Randall and her activist mother together and even gave Randall a singular distinction in American music history: she is the first Black woman to cowrite a number one country hit, Trisha Yearwood's "XXX's and OOO's".

Paced like a thriller and full of insider information on the history and science of Crime Scene Investigation, In Light of All Darkness embeds readers in one of the most famous true-crime stories of our generation - the kidnapping of Polly Klaas - a case as pivotal in the history of the FBI as the Unabomber or Oklahoma City bombing. On October 1, 1993, a 12-year-old girl was kidnapped at knifepoint from her bedroom in Petaluma, California, during a sleepover with two friends, while her mother slept soundly in the room next door.

A leading public intellectual's timely reckoning with how Jews can and should make sense of their tradition and each other. What does it mean to be a Jew? At a time of worldwide crisis, venerable answers to this question have become unsettled. In To Be a Jew Today, the legal scholar and columnist Noah Feldman draws on a lifelong engagement with his religion to offer a wide-ranging interpretation of Judaism in its current varieties. How do Jews today understand their relationship to God, to Israel, and to each other-and live their lives accordingly?

Immersive and gripping, an intimate story of a deadly accident outside Jerusalem that unravels a tangle of lives, loves, enmities, and histories over the course of one revealing, heartbreaking day. Five-year-old Milad Salama is excited for a school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem. On the way, his bus collides with a semitrailer. His father, Abed, gets word of the crash and rushes to the site. The scene is chaos - the children have been taken to different hospitals in Jerusalem and the West Bank; some are missing, others cannot be identified.

A writer's travels along the legendary yet contested Jordan River-exploring the long conflict over water supply. Access to water has played a pivotal role in the Israel-Palestine dispute. Israel has diverted the River Jordan via pipes and canals to build a successful modern state. But this has been at the expense of the region's cohabitants.

The Viking warship of King Cnut the Great. Henry VIII's the Mary Rose. Captain John Franklin's doomed HMS Terror. The SS Gairsoppa, destroyed by a Nazi U-boat in the Atlantic during World War II. Since we first set sail on the open sea, ships and their wrecks have been an inevitable part of human history. Archaeologists have made spectacular discoveries excavating these sunken ships, their protective underwater cocoon keeping evidence of past civilizations preserved.

A moving true story for children ages 6 to 9 about growing up in Japanese American incarceration camps during World War II - from the iconic Star Trek actor, activist, and author of the New York Times bestselling graphic memoir They Called Us Enemy. February 19, 1942. George Takei is four years old when his world changes forever. Two months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declares anyone of Japanese descent an enemy of the United States. George and his family were American in every way. They had done nothing wrong.

The inaugural title from Alchemy by Knopf Canada: a searing account by an exquisite writer who came to Canada as a baby, escaping war in Cambodia. In 1980, Y-Dang Troeung and her family were among the last of the 60,000 refugees from Cambodia that then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau pledged to relocate to Canada. As the final arrivals, their landing was widely documented in newspapers, with photographs of the PM shaking Y-Dang's father's hand, reaching out to pat baby Y-Dang's head.

Longlisted for the National Book Award - A "vivid and frank" (NPR) account of the crack cocaine era and a community's ultimate resilience, told through a cast of characters whose lives illuminate the dramatic rise and fall of the epidemic. "A master class in disrupting a stubborn narrative, a monumental feat for the fraught subject of addiction in Black communities." - The Washington Post.