The Death and Life of the Great American School System : How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education
Donated to the Lisbon Public Library in memory of John Alioto by the New England Wire Sales Department. The New York Times – Alan Wolfe: Attending high school in Houston in the 1950s, Diane Ravitch came into contact with a teacher named Ruby Ratliff. A passionate lover of literature and a fierce editor of homework, […]
Debt Free For Life : the Finish Rich Plan For Financial Freedom
Synopsis GOODBYE DEBT—HELLO FREEDOM! Most of us grew up with the idea that there is good debt and there is bad debt. Good debts are generally considered to be debts you incur to buy things that can go up in value—like a home or college education. Bad debts are things like credit card balances, where […]
Green Restorations : Sustainable Building and Historic Homes
Donated in memory of Mike Trudell by New England Wire Sales Department. From the Publisher: Some 40 percent of North Americans live in homes built prior to 1940, and when it comes time to remodel or restore our older homes, homeowners and contractors can find themselves lost in a morass of wildly divergent information and […]
The Weiser Field Guide to Witches
Library Journal Illes (Encyclopedia of 5,000 Spells) here wrestles with the thorny issue of what exactly a witch is and points out that some form of witch/wise woman exists in every culture. She also acknowledges that those definitions vary from magical beings that wiggle their noses and turn their husbands into cats to wise women […]
Decision Points
Synopsis: In one of the most arresting memoirs of a United States president, Richard Nixon focused his story on the crises that defined his early career. George W. Bush's new Decision Points breaks the conventions of political autobiography in a similar way, describing his tumultuous presidency through the moments when decisiveness was most essential. Thus, […]
Unbroken : a World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption
The New York Times – Janet Maslin: Just as she demonstrated in Seabiscuit, Ms. Hillenbrand is a muscular, dynamic storyteller…Her command of the action-adventure idiom is more than enough to hold interest. But she happens also to have located a tale full of unforgettable characters, multi-hanky moments and wild turns. And if some of it […]
Women, Food and God : an Unexpected Path to Almost Everything
Library Journal While "God" is in the title of this latest work by best-selling author Roth (When Food Is Love), she touches only lightly on religion, focusing instead on why some people use food to mask their emotions. Overeating numbs feelings and erases unpleasant life experiences, Roth says; eating ends up being about bloating and […]
First Family : Abigail and John
Publishers Weekly: Pulitzer Prize winning historian Ellis (Founding Brothers) gives "the premier husband-wife team in all American history" starring roles in an engrossing romance. His Abigail has an acute intellect, but is not quite a protofeminist heroine: her ambitions are limited to being a mother and helpmeet, and in the iconic correspondence she often strikes […]
Monsoon : the Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power
Library Journal: The Indian Ocean has been a major commercial trading area for many centuries. Kaplan (Imperial Grunts: On the Ground with the American Military, from Mongolia to the Philippines to Iraq and Beyond) asserts that it is the most important such commercial area, carrying half the world's container shipments and even more oil trade. […]
Autobiography of Mark Twain. Volume 1
Library Journal Before his death in 1910, Mark Twain left instructions that his autobiography, on which he'd been working by fits and starts, be left unpublished for 100 years. Now, at the century mark, from the army of Twain scholars at the University of California's Mark Twain Project, comes the dazzling first volume of the […]