Robert Fass
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The first book John Steinbeck read as a child was the Caxton Morte d'Arthur, and he considered it one of the most challenging tasks of his career to modernize the stories of King Arthur. "These stories are alive even in those of us who have not read them, " he says. "And, in our day, we are perhaps impatient with the words and the stately rhythms of [Thomas] Malory. I wanted to set the stories down in meaning as they were written, leaving out nothing...
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In July 1776 a pair of Franciscan friars, Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, were charged by the governor of New Mexico with discovering a route across the unknown Southwest to the new Spanish colony in California. They had other goals as well, some of them secret: converting the indigenous natives along the way to the true faith, discovering a semi-mythical paradise known as Teguayó, hunting for sources of gold and...
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As the Titanic and her passengers sank slowly into the Atlantic Ocean after striking an iceberg late in the evening of April 14, 1912, a nearby ship looked on. Second Officer Herbert Stone, in charge of the midnight watch on the SS Californian sitting idly a few miles north, saw the distress rockets that the Titanic fired. He alerted the captain, Stanley Lord, who was sleeping in the chartroom below, but Lord did not come to the bridge. Eight...
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"A groundbreaking new book from the bestselling author of Shop Class as Soulcraft In his bestselling book Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew B. Crawford explored the ethical and practical importance of manual competence, as expressed through mastery of our physical environment. In his brilliant follow-up, The World Beyond Your Head, Crawford investigates the challenge of mastering one's own mind. We often complain about our fractured mental lives and...
85) The revisionists
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A fast-paced literary thriller that recalls dystopian classics such as 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, from the award-winning author of The Last Town on Earth.
Zed is an agent from the future. A time when the world's problems have been solved. No hunger. No war. No despair.
His mission is to keep it that way. Even if it means ensuring every cataclysm throughout history runs its course-especially The Great Conflagration, an imminent disaster in our own...
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"... [N]arrates the national response to Grant's passing and how his tomb came to be: the intense competition to be the resting place for Grant's remains, the origins of the memorial and its design, the struggle to finance and build it over the course of twelve years, and the vicissitudes of its afterlife in the history of the nation up to recent times." -- From inside jacket flap.
88) Say her name
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In a novel based on the author's real-life tragedy, Goldman, consumed with grief and guilt over the accidental death of his wife just before their second anniversary, obsessively collects every memory of her, especially her writings, with the hope of keeping her alive in his mind.
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The Road to Sparta is the story of the 153-mile run from Athens to Sparta that inspired the marathon and saved democracy, as told-and experienced-by ultra-marathoner and New York Times bestselling author Dean Karnazes. In 490 BCE, Pheidippides ran for thirty-six hours straight from Athens to Sparta to seek help in defending Athens from a Persian invasion in the Battle of Marathon. In doing so, he saved the development of Western civilization and inspired...
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The authors of the best-selling Game Change present an account of the 2012 presidential election that draws on hundreds of insider interviews to illuminate what the election meant to both parties, covering such topics as the dramatic Republican nomination fight, the rise and fall of Mitt Romney and Barack Obama's Election Day triumph.
93) Dead ringers
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"When Tess Devlin runs into her ex-husband Nick on a Boston sidewalk, she's furious at him for pretending he doesn't know her. She calls his cell to have it out with him, only to discover that he's in New Hampshire with his current girlfriend. But if Nick's in New Hampshire...who did she encounter on the street? Frank Lindbergh's dreams have fallen apart. He wanted to get out of the grim neighborhood where he'd grown up and out of the shadow of his...
94) Beyond the wire
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"October 1944: In the long, narrow undressing rooms in Auschwitz-Birkenau, prisoner Jakub Bak toils under the scrutiny of SS guards. Like other members of the Sonderkommando, Jakub was selected on arrival for an unthinkable job: sorting through the clothes of the dead and moving their bodies from the gas chambers to the crematoriums. In this hell within a hell, Jakub clings to the promise he made to his murdered father--to live, at any cost--and to...
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"A thrilling blend of contemporary travelogue and historical narrative about the Alps from 'a graceful and passionate writer' (Washington Post). For centuries the Alps have seen the march of armies, the flow of pilgrims and Crusaders, the feats of mountaineers and the dreams of engineers--and some 14 million people live among their peaks today. In The Alps, Stephen O'Shea takes readers up and down these majestic mountains, journeying through their...
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"Historian and Latin American studies expert Stephen J. C. Andes investigates the legends behind the mask of Zorro, describing how the stories of William Lamport and Joaquín Murrieta influenced the development of the masked hero in black, and revealing Zorro as the Latinx inspiration for today's iconic superheroes"--
97) Cop out: a novel
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To escape a manhunt, a gang of killers takes a cop's daughter hostage After years of toil for Aztec Paper Products, Thomas Howland only makes $112.90 per week. When it comes time for the company to compensate its workers, he is in charge of carrying the payroll: $24,000 in cold hard cash. Eventually, Howland is overcome by temptation. In exchange for a promised cut of the spoils, he hands the payroll over to a gang of thieves-but they reward him with...
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The story of an unlikely friendship between a middle-aged loner and a grieving college student. Howie Jeffries -- avid fisherman, longtime GE wastewater plant worker, social recluse -- lives in isolation, out on rural Rt. 29 in Glen Falls, NY. Well, not alone exactly -- there's one other house adjacent to his own. But although Howie and Emily Phane have been neighbors since the day she was born twenty-odd years earlier, they've never actually spoken....
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For the past decade, an audacious program called Football Dreams has held tryouts for millions of young boys across Africa, looking for soccer's next superstars. Sebastian Abbot follows a small group of the boys, weaving together the drama of the boys' determination to chase their dreams with the latest ideas on talent spotting and predicting sporting success, Abbot memorably explores why some of the boys succeed and chronicles the heartbreak of those...
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A novella and eight stories starring America's most clever detective Is it possible for a man to lift himself off the ground by his shoelaces and fly away? Can a water buffalo transform itself into a little boy? What is science to make of a dead man climbing out of his coffin, escaping his tomb . . . and breaking into song? Such incidents seem impossible, but stranger things have happened at the home of old Sylvester Mayhew. When Ellery Queen, the...