Cranston Public Library

"A British historian looks at the history of twelve famous but controversial statues that were toppled and removed and what that teaches about how society remembers and confronts its past."--

"August Wilson has already given the American theater such spell-binding plays about the black experience in 20th-century America as Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning, Fences. In his second Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Piano Lesson, Wilson has fashioned his most haunting and dramatic work yet. At the heart of the play stands the ornately carved upright piano which, as the Charles family's prized, hard-won...

"As an increasingly polarized America fights over the legacy of racism, Susan Neiman, author of the contemporary philosophical classic Evil in Modern Thought, asks what we can learn from the Germans about confronting the evils of the past." --

Donald Trump's niece, Mary L. Trump, examines America's national trauma, rooted in our history but dramatically exacerbated by the impact of current events and the Trump administration's corrupt and immoral policies. Our failure to acknowledge this trauma, let alone root it out, has allowed it to metastasize. Whether it manifests itself in rising levels of rage and hatred, or hopelessness and apathy, the stress of living in a country we no longer...

"In Looking for the Good War, Elizabeth D. Samet reexamines the literature, art, and culture that emerged after World War II, bringing her expertise as a professor of English at West Point to bear on the complexity of the postwar period in national life. She exposes the confusion about American identity that was expressed during and immediately after the war, and the deep national ambivalence toward war, violence, and veterans--all of which were suppressed...

"A controversial, best-selling polemic in Germany, De-Integrate! is a battle cry against Jewish assimilation into a dominant culture that seeks to paint over the past--and a handbook for minorities on how to embrace their difference and resist rising nationalism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and racism. Max Czollek's De-Integrate! is a polemical, often humorous examination of Jewish life in contemporary Germany that speaks to the position of minorities...

"The destruction of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire in 1915-16 was a brutal mass crime that prefigured other genocides in the 20th century. By various estimates, more than a million Armenians were killed and the survivors were scattered across the world. Although it is now a century old, the issue of what most of the world calls the Armenian Genocide of 1915 has not been consigned to history. It is a live and divisive political issue that mobilizes...

A powerful study of King Philip's War and its enduring effects on histories, memories, and places in Native New England from 1675 to the present "This book moves back and forth across time and place in order to weave together a dense and wide-ranging reconstruction of [King Philip's War] and its many continuing consequences."-Annette Kolodny, Native American and Indigenous Studies "Sure to fascinate readers interested in the long reach of colonial...

"The tectonic plates that form China have left it a checkerboard of mountains and rivers and memories. From the south, the Indian plate pushes up into the Eurasian, creating the Himalayas and the vast Tibetan plateau that almost cuts the country off from the rest of the continent. Rippling outward are smaller mountain ranges that ebb and flow toward the Pacific Ocean, like deep swells heaving through the land"--