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Book reviews for teens by library staff and guest contributors
Somewhere in the Nevada desert, Rose Colter hears her best friend’s last voicemail message broadcasted on the radio. With her car broken down, she runs towards the broadcast tower into a town called Lotus Valley. The townspeople have been waiting for her; in fact, she was prophesied to arrive and in doing so would bring about a great flood within the next three days. Is Rose the cause of the flood and if so, why?
Albert Marrin has crafted a gripping narrative of the life and death of Janusz Korczak, a Polish Jewish doctor in the Warsaw Ghetto. He was not only a physician, he ran an orphanage in Warsaw for Jewish children. As the horrors of the Nazi regime moved closer, Dr. Korczak was given numerous opportunities to escape, but he would not go without his charges. Ultimately, he led them to Treblinka Camp, dying by gas along with the children in 1942.
Author Jason Reynolds teamed up with artist Danica Norgorodoff to rework his 2017 novel in verse Long Way Down into a graphic novel. The result it perfect - and haunting.
In 1951 two British government officials, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, left on a boat sailing from Southampton to France and then disappeared. Though there were suspicions that they had defected to the Soviet Union, this wasn't confirmed until five years later when they appeard at a press conference in Moscow. In the years after this it became clear that they were not the only two British "gentlemen" to have been recruited by the KGB, there were at least 3 others and they all became known as the Cambridge Five.
Jim Agnihotri can’t shake the image of the two women falling from his mind. A former captain in Her Majesty’s forces, Agnihotri has read of the case while recuperating from terrible injuries to mind and body from a skirmish in 1891 Karachi, but it is the perplexing mystery surrounding the deaths of two wealthy Parsee women who apparently jumped from a Bombay clock tower on their own accord that haunts him. Why would the Framji women jump at such an interval apart? And why would two young women seemingly happy with their lives choose to end them so violently?
I'm frequently asked to name my favorite book or to list my top ten, and mostly I just get stumped by that question. I love so many books for so many different reasons and they shift in my estimation as this one moves up or that one moves down and all fully dependent on what has wowed me recently. But there is one book I read seven years ago that has consistently been a go-to for me when asked for a favorite.
This audiobook provides a treasured portal to the past. It features original recordings from 1908-1946 of speeches by Booker T. Washington, the poems of Langston Hughes and Paul Laurence Dunbar recited by the poets, comedy routines, and more. All told, there's approximately 1 hour and 47 minutes of content.
To hear these famous voices is very special. The sound quality is on par with other historical recordings I've heard. That takes a moment to get used to, but feels intimate, like you've gone back in time and are witnessing the moment.
Wisconsin's Digital Library just got bigger. There are now 300 magazine titles that have been added for you to check out from home. They range from popular and venerable (Us Weekly, The New Yorker, National Geographic, Cooks Illustrated) to the obscure (Cricket Skills and Secrets). The magazines include current issues and back issues.
Famous for his pioneering flight from New York to Paris, Charles Lindbergh was lionized in his lifetime. Fleming’s well-researched biography is a rags-to riches story that doesn’t side-step Lindbergh’s Nazi sympathies and white supremacist activities, but rather portrays the path of eugenics pseudo-science paired with disinformation that he followed to get there.
For a thousand year old castle, it’s certainly not the first time a violent death has happened within its walls. But it’s still shocking when Windsor Castle staff discover the body of a young Russian pianist in the wardrobe of a guest room deep within what is one of the most secure citadels in the world—and more so when that death is revealed as a murder. Her Majesty the Queen is of course horrified to hear the news—she had danced with the man only the previous night—but when police and MI-6 suspects that Russia is behind the crime with a possible mole, she knows what she has to do.
