Cranston Public Library

"In a letter to his mother in 1954, a young Ernesto Guevara wrote, "The Americas will be the theater of my adventures in a way that is much more significant than I would have believed." In The Awakening of Latin America we have the story of those adventures, charting Che's evolution from an impressionable young medical student to the "heroic guerrilla," assassinated in cold blood in Bolivia. Spanning seventeen years, this anthology draws on from his...

New York Times bestselling author and master of nonfiction spy thrillers Larry Loftis writes the first major biography of Corrie ten Boom, a Dutch watchmaker who saved the lives of hundreds of Jews during WWII-at the cost of losing her family and being sent to a concentration camp, only to survive, forgive her captors, and live the rest of her life as a Christian missionary. The Watchmaker's Daughter is one of the greatest stories of World War II...

"A captivating new history of art told through the storied biographies of colors and pigments. In this refreshing approach to the history of color, Kelly Grovier takes readers on an exciting search for the intriguing and unusual. In Grovier's telling, a color's connotations are never fixed but are endlessly evolving. Knowledge of a pigment and its history can unlock meaning in the works that feature it. Grovier employs the term "artymology" to suggest...

"A comprehensive fifty-year history of the hip-hop genre, from renowned artist and author of MUSIC IS HISTORY, Questlove"--

In an obscure, two-hundred-year-old museum in a little village in western Massachusetts, there lies what once was the most revered but now totally forgotten relic from the history of early New England, the massive, tomahawk-scarred door that came to symbolize the notorious Deerfield Massacre. This impregnable barricade, known to early Americans as "The Old Indian Door," constructed from double-thick planks of Massachusetts oak and studded with hand-wrought...

On August 28, 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood before thousands of Americans who had gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. in the name of civil rights. Including the immortal words, "I have a dream," Dr. King's keynote speech would energize a movement and change the course of history.

"Saying No to Hate grounds readers in the history of antisemitism in America, emphasizing the strategies Jews have used to address threats and thereby preparing us to recognize, understand, and confront hatred today"--

"From beloved New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum comes a groundbreaking narrative detailing the fights, egos, drama, and future presidents of reality television. Cue the Sun is a rollicking, deeply reported story about how the early reality TV business metastasized into an industry that now dominates entertainment in the United States. Starting in 1948, Nussbaum pulls back the curtain on the cultural meat grinder that created a generation-defining...

"A moving and uplifting history set to music that reveals the rich life of one of the first internationally renowned female violinists. Spanning generations, from the shores of the Black Sea to the glittering concert halls of New York, The Nightingale's Sonata is a richly woven tapestry centered around violin virtuoso Lea Luboshutz. Like many poor Jews, music offered an escape from the prejudices that dominated society in the last years of the Russian...

Featuring Field of Dreams, The Bad News Bears, A League of Their Own, and more: a probing and entertaining work at the intersection of pop culture and sports Baseball has always been a symbol as much as a sport. With a blend of individual confrontation and team play, a luxurious pace, and an immaculate urban parkland setting, it offers a sunny rendering of the American Dream, both the hard work that underpins it and the...