National Network for Equitable Library Service

Strobing lights and dark rooms, drag queens on counters, first kisses, last call; the gay bar has long been a place of solidarity and sexual expression. Now they are closing, a cultural demolition that has Jeremy Atherton Lin wondering: Could this spell the end of gay identity as we know it? In prose as exuberant as a hit of poppers and dazzling as a disco ball, the author embarks on a transatlantic tour of the hangouts that marked his life, with each club, pub and dive revealing itself to be a palimpsest of queer history.

Today, most Westerners still see the war in Afghanistan as a contest between democracy and Islamist fanaticism. That war is real, but it sits atop an older struggle between Kabul and the countryside, between order and chaos, between a modernist impulse to join the world and the pull of an older Afghanistan'a tribal universe of village republics permeated by Islam.

The complete inside story of the shocking steroids scandal that turned the sports world upside down. For years, in the shadowy reaches of the world of sports, there were rumors that some of our nation’s greatest athletes were using steroids, human growth hormone, and other drugs to run faster, jump higher, and hit harder. But as track stars blazed their way to Olympic medals and sluggers brought fans back to baseball, sports officials, the media, and fans looked past the rumors and cheered on the athletes to ever-higher levels of performance.

A reflection on "freedom" in a dramatic, beautifully written memoir of the end of Communism in the Balkans. Lea Ypi grew up in the last Stalinist country in Europe: Albania, a place of queuing and scarcity, of political executions and secret police. While family members disappeared to what she was told were "universities" from which few "graduated", she swore loyalty to the Party. In her eyes, people were equal, neighbors helped each other, and children were expected to build a better world. Then the statues of Stalin and Hoxha were toppled.

In Four Lost Cities, acclaimed science journalist Annalee Newitz takes listeners on an entertaining and mind-bending adventure into the deep history of urban life. Investigating across the centuries and around the world, Newitz explores the rise and fall of four ancient cities, each the center of a sophisticated civilization: the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Central Turkey, the Roman vacation town of Pompeii on Italy's southern coast, the medieval megacity of Angkor in Cambodia, and the indigenous metropolis Cahokia, which stood beside the Mississippi River where East St.

"A rip-roaring tale, Fossil Men is one of those rare books that can be a prism through which to view the world, exposing the fabric of the Earth and illuminating the Tree of Life."--New York Times bestselling author Peter Nichols. A behind-the-scenes account of the shocking discovery of the skeleton of "Ardi," a human ancestor far older than Lucy - a find that shook the world of paleoanthropology and radically altered our understanding of human evolution.

Journalist Sarah Rose presents a dramatic historical narrative of the man who stole the secret of tea from China.

Like Hidden Figures and Girls of Atomic City, Fly Girls celebrates a little-known slice of history wherein tenacious, trail-blazing women braved all obstacles to achieve greatness.

Five hundred years ago, in November 1519, Hernando Cortés walked along a causeway leading to the capital of the Aztec kingdom and came face to face with Moctezuma. That story--and the story of what happened afterwards--has been told many times, but always from the point of view of the Europeans. After all, we have been taught, it was the Europeans who held the pens. But the Native Americans were more intrigued by the Roman alphabet than the Spaniards ever knew. Unbeknownst to the newcomers, the Aztecs took it home and used it to write detailed histories in their own language of Nahuatl.

The justification for the atomic bomb was simple: it would defeat Hitler and end the Second World War faster, saving lives. The reality was different. [This book] dismantles the conventional story of why the atom bomb was built. Peter Watson has found new documents showing that long before the Allied bomb was operational, it was clear that Germany had no atomic weapons of its own and was not likely to.