A forty-year-old schoolteacher from Ohio still reeling from the tragedies of the Great War and the influenza epidemic comes into a modest inheritance that allows her to take the trip of a lifetime to Egypt and the Holy Land. Arriving at the Semiramis Hotel, site of the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference, she meets Winston Churchill, T. E. Lawrence, and Lady Gertrude Bell. With her plainspoken American opinions, she becomes a sounding board for these historic...

One night in an isolated college town in the hills of Southern California, a first-year student stumbles into her dorm room, falls asleep, and doesn't wake up. She sleeps through the morning, into the evening. Her roommate, Mei, cannot rouse her. Neither can the paramedics, nor the perplexed doctors at the hospital. When a second girl falls asleep, and then a third, Mei finds herself thrust together with an eccentric classmate as panic takes hold...

Visionaries, crackpots, fanatics, dreamers, suffragettes, temperance workers, be-sloganned devotees of betterment in marriage, religion, sex, alcohol, labor relations, penal codes and the treatment of mental illness rub shoulders in a book, which encompasses the American dream of Utopia, sobriety and the pursuit of happiness.

When Jende Jonga journeys to New York City from Cameroon in 2004 on a visitors' visa in hopes of obtaining a green card, he's sure his life will only improve. After saving up enough money to bring over Jende's wife, Neni, and six-year-old son, the family moves into an apartment in Harlem. Then Jende hits the jackpot in 2007 when he lands a job as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, a wealthy Lehman Brothers executive. But working for the Edwardses isn't...

"Brief, illustrated bios of women creators around the world"-- Featuring the true stories of women creators and thinkers from around the world, throughout history, this book shows that sometimes seeing things a little differently can lead to big changes. Some names are well known, some are not, but all the women had a lasting effect on the fields they workd in. Whether they were breaking ground for innovative structures or breaking rules and creating...

Rosie Sinclair, who attends an elite arts school where students are contestants on a high stakes reality show, skips her sleeping pill one night and discovers that the school is really a cover-up for the lucrative and sinister practice of dream harvesting.

"In this novel based on real events and people, a young woman arrives on the Greek island of Hydra in 1960 and falls in with a bohemian group of poets, painters, and musicians, including the young Leonard Cohen and his beloved Marianne"-- 1960. The world is dancing on the edge of revolution, and nowhere more so than on the Greek island of Hydra, where a circle of poets, painters and musicians live tangled lives. Forming within this circle is a triangle:...

A panoramic history of liberal politics in America analyzes the impact of major movements throughout the past two centuries, from abolitionism and industrial-age labor disputes to the civil-rights movement and the emergence of alternative political groups.

Includes both nonfiction and fiction reading recommendations for armchair or "real" travelers. This librarian famous for reader's advisory covers places as diverse as Afghanistan, Appalachia, Arizona, Baltimore, Boston, Burma, Congo, Corfu, Detroit, England, Finland, the Galapagos, Guernica, Hawaii, Iceland, Iran, Ireland, Jordan, Korea, Law Vegas, Los Angeles, Maine, Malaysia, Martha's Vineyard, Miami, Nebraska, New York City, New Orleans, Niagara...

"The End of Money is the story of hard currency--its history, conflicts, champions, detractors, and eventual demise. As the role of bills and coins in our everyday lives and in the economy lessens, real money is becoming not merely an abstraction, but an abstraction of an abstraction. What will an increasingly cashless future mean for society, and for the people whose careers are linked to the production, management, and collection of hard currency?...