Colorado State Library Book Club Project
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"A rollercoaster ride of a memoir, by turns hilarious and heartbreaking, by the journalist, playwright, and political activist Wajahat Ali. "Go back to where you came from, you terrorist!" This is just one of the many warm, lovely, and helpful tips that Wajahat Ali and other children of immigrants receive on a daily basis. Go back where exactly? His hometown in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he can't afford rent? Awkward, left-handed, suffering...
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"On July 17, 2014, a forty-three-year-old black man named Eric Garner died on a Staten Island sidewalk after a police officer put him in what has been described as an illegal chokehold during an arrest for selling bootleg cigarettes. The final moments of Garner's life were captured on video and seen by millions. His agonized last words, 'I can't breathe,' became a rallying cry for the nascent Black Lives Matter protest movement. A grand jury ultimately...
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CSL - Black Authors
CSL - Identity, Social Justice, and EDI
CSL - Shorter book club reads
CSL - Woman Authors
CSL - Identity, Social Justice, and EDI
CSL - Shorter book club reads
CSL - Woman Authors
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Interweaving American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed, the descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas in the , recounts the origins of Juneteenth and explores the legacies of the holiday that remain with us. From the earliest presence of black people in Texas-in the 1500s, well before enslaved Africans arrived in Jamestown-to the day in Galveston on June 19, 1865, when General Gordon Granger...
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It's Gamache's first day back as head of the homicide department, a job he temporarily shares with his previous second-in-command, Jean-Guy Beauvoir. Flood waters are rising across the province. In the middle of the turmoil a father approaches Gamache, pleading for help in finding his daughter. As crisis piles upon crisis, Gamache tries to hold off the encroaching chaos, and realizes the search for Vivienne Godin should be abandoned. But with a daughter...
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"Anna Koob was born into a middle-class German family in 1566. A bright and spirited girl, she became a favorite of her village of Kleinostheim. As an eight-year-old, she is summoned to the home of a prominent baron. The baron's daughter has asked for her as she lies dying. What happens in the baron's home sets off a chain of events that dictates the flow of Anna's future."--Amazon
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"Candelaria tiene doce años y vive con su excéntrica familia en Parruca, un mítico lugar perdido entre montañas. Su madre habla con las piedras, su hermanastro cultiva hongos alucinógenos y su padre, un artista que esculpe ballenas, los ha abandonado. Mientras la vegetación empieza a devorar la casa, los tres reciben a extraños personajes: una mujer experta en plantas venenosas que lleva más de un muerto a cuestas, un hombre que teme a los...
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"Hope Jahren is an award-winning geobiologist, a brilliant writer, and one of the seven billion people with whom we share this earth. The Story of More is her impassioned open letter to humanity as we stand at the crossroads of survival and extinction. Jahren celebrates the long history of our enterprising spirit--which has tamed wild crops, cured diseases, and sent us to the moon--but also shows how that spirit has created excesses that are quickly...
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It is 1803, six years since Elizabeth and Darcy embarked on their life together at Pemberley, Darcy's magnificent estate. Their peaceful, orderly world seems almost unassailable. Elizabeth has found her footing as the chatelaine of the great house. They have two fine sons, Fitzwilliam and Charles. Elizabeth's sister Jane and her husband, Bingley, live nearby; her father visits often; there is optimistic talk about the prospects of marriage for Darcy's...
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"Set during the waning days of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republica in 1960, this extraordinary novel tells the story the Mirabal sisters, three young wives and mothers who are assassinated after visiting their jailed husbands."--Provided by publisher
"It is November 25, 1960, and three sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state...
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"A towering figure in world literature gives us a tour de force, his first novel in nearly one-half century: a savagely satiric, gleefully irreverent, rollicking, fictional meditation on how power and greed can corrupt the soul of a nation. ("You don't see things the same way when you encounter a voice like that."-Toni Morrison) In an imaginary Nigeria, a cunning entrepreneur is selling body parts stolen from Dr. Menka's hospital for use in ritualistic...
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"In the waning days of the Civil War, brothers Prentiss and Landry, freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, seek refuge on the homestead of George Walker and his wife, Isabelle. The Walkers, wracked by the loss of their only son to the war, hire the brothers to work their farm, hoping through an unexpected friendship to stanch their grief. Prentiss and Landry, meanwhile, plan to save money for the journey north and a chance to reunite with their mother,...
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"Penobscot Indian Molly Ayer is close to 'aging out' out of the foster care system. A community service position helping an elderly woman clean out her home is the only thing keeping Molly out of juvie and worse.... As she helps Vivian sort through her possessions and memories, Molly learns that she and Vivian aren't as different as they seem to be. A young Irish immigrant orphaned in New York City, Vivian was put on a train to the Midwest with hundreds...
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CSL - AAPI Books
CSL - Identity, Social Justice, and EDI
CSL - Longer Book Club Reads
CSL - Woman Authors
CSL - Identity, Social Justice, and EDI
CSL - Longer Book Club Reads
CSL - Woman Authors
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"The definitive history of Asian Americans by one of the nation's preeminent scholars on the subject. In the past fifty years, Asian Americans have helped change the face of America and are now the fastest growing group in the United States. But as award-winning historian Erika Lee reminds us, Asian Americans also have deep roots in the country. The Making of Asian America tells the little-known history of Asian Americans and their role in American...
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CSL - Adapted for Film or Television
CSL - Black Authors
CSL - Identity, Social Justice, and EDI
CSL - Woman Authors
CSL - Black Authors
CSL - Identity, Social Justice, and EDI
CSL - Woman Authors
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"...The Color of Law is a groundbreaking investigation into how U.S. governments in the twentieth century deliberately imposed racial segregation on metropolitan areas nationwide....Richard Rothstein has painstakingly documented how our cities--from San Francisco to Boston--became so divided. Rothstein describes how federal, state, and local governments systematically imposed residential segregation: with undisguised racial zoning, public housing...
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A dazzling novel in the most untraditional fashion, this is the remarkable story of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who travels involuntarily through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare's passionate love affair endures across a sea of time and captures the two lovers in an impossibly romantic trap, and it is Audrey Niffenegger's cinematic storytelling that makes the novel's...
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"In Norse Mythology, Gaiman stays true to the myths in envisioning the major Norse pantheon: Odin, the highest of the high, wise, daring, and cunning; Thor, Odinâs son, incredibly strong yet not the wisest of gods; and Loki, son of a giant, blood brother to Odin and a trickster and unsurpassable manipulator. Gaiman fashions these primeval stories into a novelistic arc that begins with the genesis of the legendary nine worlds and delves into...