Search:

We don't know ourselves : a personal history of modern Ireland / by O'Toole, Fintan,1958-author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."A celebrated Irish writer's magisterial, brilliantly insightful chronicle of the wrenching transformations that dragged his homeland into the modern world. Fintan O'Toole was born in the year the revolution began. It was 1958, and the Irish government?in despair, because all the young people were leaving?opened the country to foreign investment and popular culture. So began a decades-long, ongoing experiment with Irish national identity. In We Don't Know Ourselves, O'Toole, one of the Anglophone world's most consummate stylists, weaves his own experiences into Irish social, cultural, and economic change, showing how Ireland, in just one lifetime, has gone from a reactionary "backwater" to an almost totally open society-perhaps the most astonishing national transformation in modern history. Born to a working-class family in the Dublin suburbs, O'Toole served as an altar boy and attended a Christian Brothers school, much as his forebears did. He was enthralled by American Westerns suddenly appearing on Irish television, which were not that far from his own experience, given that Ireland's main export was beef and it was still not unknown for herds of cattle to clatter down Dublin's streets. Yet the Westerns were a sign of what was to come. O'Toole narrates the once unthinkable collapse of the all-powerful Catholic Church, brought down by scandal and by the activism of ordinary Irish, women in particular. He relates the horrific violence of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which led most Irish to reject violent nationalism. In O'Toole's telling, America became a lodestar, from John F. Kennedy's 1963 visit, when the soon-to-be martyred American president was welcomed as a native son, to the emergence of the Irish technology sector in the late 1990s, driven by American corporations, which set Ireland on the path toward particular disaster during the 2008 financial crisis. A remarkably compassionate yet exacting observer, O'Toole in coruscating prose captures the peculiar Irish habit of "deliberate unknowing," which allowed myths of national greatness to persist even as the foundations were crumbling. Forty years in the making, We Don't Know Ourselves is a landmark work, a memoir and a national history that ultimately reveals how the two modes are entwined for all of us"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Personal narratives.; O'Toole, Fintan, 1958-;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

The confessions of young Nero [sound recording] / by George, Margaret,1943-author.; West, Steve(Actor),narrator.; Denaker, Susan,narrator.; McEwan, Katharine,narrator.; Penguin Audio (Firm),publisher.;
Read by Steve West, Susan Denaker, and Katharine McEwan."Built on the backs of those who fell before it, Julius Caesar's imperial dynasty is only as strong as the next person who seeks to control it. In the Roman Empire no one is safe from the sting of betrayal: man, woman--or child. As a boy, Nero's royal heritage becomes a threat to his very life, first when the mad emperor Caligula tries to drown him, then when his great aunt attempts to secure her own son's inheritance. Faced with shocking acts of treachery, young Nero is dealt a harsh lesson: it is better to be cruel than dead. While Nero idealizes the artistic and athletic principles of Greece, his very survival rests on his ability to navigate the sea of vipers that is Rome. The most lethal of all is his own mother, a cold-blooded woman whose singular goal is to control the empire. With cunning and poison, the obstacles fall one by one. But as Agrippina's machinations earn her son a title he is both tempted and terrified to assume, Nero's determination to escape her thrall will shape him into the man he was fated to become--an Emperor who became legendary. With impeccable research and captivating prose, The Confessions of Young Nero is the story of a boy's ruthless ascension to the throne. Detailing his journey from innocent youth to infamous ruler, it is an epic tale of the lengths to which man will go in the ultimate quest for power and survival"--Provided by publisher.
Subjects: Audiobooks.; Biographical fiction.; Historical fiction.; Nero, Emperor of Rome, 37-68; Emperors;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

Mind Games A Novel [electronic resource] : by Roberts, Nora.aut; cloudLibrary;
The #1 New York Times-bestselling author of Identity presents a suspenseful new novel of tragedy and trauma, love and family, and the evil that awaits. As they do each June, the Foxes have driven the winding roads of Appalachia to drop off their children for a two-week stay at their grandmother’s. Here, twelve-year-old Thea can run free and breathe in the smells of pine and fresh bread and Grammie’s handmade candles. But as her parents head back to suburban Virginia, they have no idea they’re about to cross paths with a ticking time bomb. Back in Kentucky, Thea and her grandmother Lucy both awaken from the same nightmare. And though the two have never discussed the special kind of sight they share, they know as soon as their tearful eyes meet that something terrible has happened. The kids will be staying with Grammie now in Redbud Hollow, and thanks to Thea’s vision, their parents’ killer will spend his life in supermax. Over time, Thea will make friends, build a career, find love. But that ability to see into minds and souls still lurks within her, and though Grammie calls it a gift, it feels more like a curse—because the inmate who shattered her childhood has the same ability. Thea can hear his twisted thoughts and witness his evil acts from miles away. He knows it, and hungers for vengeance. A long, silent battle will be waged between them—and eventually bring them face to face, and head to head…General adult.
Subjects: Electronic books.; Contemporary Women;
© 2024., St. Martin's Publishing Group,
unAPI

Pixel flesh : how toxic beauty culture harms women / by Atlanta, Ellen,author.;
Includes bibliographical references."A generation-defining exposé of toxic beauty culture -- from Botox and Instagram filters to lip flips and editing apps -- and the realities of coming of age online. We live in a new age of beauty. With advancements in cosmetic surgery, walk-in treatments, augmented reality face filters, photo editing apps, and exposure to more images than ever, we have the ability to craft the image we want everyone to see. We pinch, pull, squeeze, tweeze, smooth and slice ourselves beyond recognition. But is our beauty culture truly empowering? Are we really in control? In Pixel Flesh, Ellen Atlanta holds a mirror up to our modern beauty ideal, as well as the pressure to present a perfect image, to live in an age of constant comparison and curated feeds. She weaves in her personal story with others' to reconfigure our obsession with the cult of beauty and explore the reality of living in a world of paradoxes: we know our standards are unhealthy, but understand it's a way to succeed. We resent social media but continue to scroll. We know digital beauty is artificial, but we still strive for it. From Love Island to lip filler, blackfishing to the beauty tax, Pixel Flesh is a fascinating account of what young women face under a dominant industry. Nuanced, unflinching, and razor sharp, this book unmasks the absurdities of the standards we suddenly find ourselves upholding, and acts as a rallying cry and a refusal to suffer in silence, forming the definitive book about what it truly feels like to exist as a woman today"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Personal narratives.; Atlanta, Ellen; Beauty culture.; Beauty, Personal; Feminine beauty (Aesthetics); Social media.;
Available copies: 0 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

The Goddess of Warsaw : a novel / by Barr, Lisa,author.;
"From the New York Times bestselling author of Woman on Fire, the harrowing and ultimately triumphant tale of a Jewish WWII assassin turned Hollywood star. In 2005, Siena Hayes is Hollywood's latest It Girl, but she has her sights set higher than the screen, she wants to be behind the camera. So when Siena meets Lena Browning, the enormously mysterious and famous actor from decades past, Siena sees her big break. Siena wants to direct Lena's biopic-but Lena's past may turn out to be more than Siena bargained for. Before she was a "Living Legend," Lena Browning was Bina Blonski, a member of Warsaw's Jewish elite whose life and family were destroyed by the Nazis. In 1943, in the ghettos of Warsaw, Bina lives with her husband, Jakub. Determined to fight back against Nazi rule, beautiful, blonde Bina acts as a spy on the Aryan side fearlessly protecting the remaining Warsaw Jews, gaining intel, and stealing weapons. Along the way, her feelings grow more complicated as she falls in love with Aleksander, an ally to her in resistance ... and Jakub's brother. But the cause prevails-and Lena accomplishes amazing feats of bravery, though she can't help but sacrifice so much in the process ... Over a decade after escaping the ghetto, Bina, who now goes by Lena, has risen to fame in Hollywood. She sees her old life at every turn and hungers for revenge against the Nazis who are still everywhere around her. This is Lena's chance to right the past's wrongs and perhaps even find the happy ending she never had."--
Subjects: Thrillers (Fiction); Novels.; Actresses; Man-woman relationships; Nazis; Revenge; Secrecy; World War, 1939-1945;
Available copies: 2 / Total copies: 2
unAPI

My absolute darling : a novel / by Tallent, Gabriel,author.;
"A brilliant and immersive, all-consuming read about one fourteen-year-old girl's heart-stopping fight for her own soul. Turtle Alveston is a survivor. At fourteen, she roams the woods along the northern California coast. The creeks, tide pools, and rocky islands are her haunts and her hiding grounds, and she is known to wander for miles. But while her physical world is expansive, her personal one is small and treacherous: Turtle has grown up isolated since the death of her mother, in the thrall of her tortured and charismatic father, Martin. Her social existence is confined to the middle school (where she fends off the interest of anyone, student or teacher, who might penetrate her shell) and to her life with her father. Then Turtle meets Jacob, a high-school boy who tells jokes, lives in a big clean house, and looks at Turtle as if she is the sunrise. And for the first time, the larger world begins to come into focus: her life with Martin is neither safe nor sustainable. Motivated by her first experience with real friendship and a teenage crush, Turtle starts to imagine escape, using the very survival skills her father devoted himself to teaching her. The reader tracks Turtle's escalating acts of physical and emotional courage, and watches, heart in throat, as she struggles to become her own hero -- band in the process, becomes ours as well. Shot through with striking language in afierce natural setting, My absolute darling is an urgently told, profoundly moving read that marks the debut of an extraordinary new writer"--
Subjects: Bildungsromans.; Teenage girls;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

The last million : Europe's displaced persons from World War to Cold War / by Nasaw, David,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."In May of 1945, German forces surrendered to the Allied powers, effectively putting an end to World War II in Europe. But the aftershocks of this global military conflict did not cease with the signing of truces and peace treaties. Millions of lost and homeless POWs, slave laborers, political prisoners, and concentration camp survivors overwhelmed Germany, a country in complete disarray. British and American soldiers gathered the malnourished and desperate foreigners, and attempted to repatriate them to Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, and the USSR. But after exhaustive efforts, there remained over a million displaced persons who either refused to go home or, in the case of many, had no home to which to return. They would spend the next three to five years in displaced persons camps, divided by nationalities, temporary homelands in exile, with their own police forces, churches, schools, newspapers, and medical facilities. The international community couldn't agree on the fate of the Last Million, and after a year of fruitless debate and inaction, an International Refugee Organization was created to resettle them in lands suffering from labor shortages. But no nations were willing to accept the 200,000 to 250,000 Jewish men, women, and children who remained trapped in Germany. In 1948, the United States, among the last countries to accept anyone for resettlement, finally passed a Displaced Persons Bill - but as Cold War fears supplanted memories of WWII atrocities, the bill only granted visas to those who were reliably anti-communist, including thousands of former Nazi collaborators, Waffen-SS members, and war criminals, while barring the Jews who were suspected of being Communist sympathizers or agents because they had been recent residents of Soviet-dominated Poland. Only after the passage of the controversial UN resolution for the partition of Palestine and Israel's declaration of independence were the remaining Jewish survivors finally able to leave their displaced persons camps in Germany."--
Subjects: United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.; International Refugee Organization.; World War, 1939-1945; Refugees; Refugees; Jewish refugees; Political refugees; Jews; Humanitarianism; World War, 1939-1945;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

Where's my Roy Cohn? [videorecording] / by Stone, Roger,1952-on-screen participant.; Tyrnauer, Matt,film director.; Walters, Barbara,1929-on-screen participant.; Sony Pictures Classics (Firm),production company.; Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (Firm),publisher.;
Roy M. Cohn, Roger Stone, Barbara Walters.Roy Cohn was a ruthless and unscrupulous lawyer and political power broker whose 28-year career ranged from acting as chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy's Communist-hunting subcommittee to molding the career of a young Queens real estate developer named Donald Trump.Canadian Home Video Rating: PG.MPAA rating: PG-13.DVD ; widescreen presentation ; Dolby Digital 5.1 DVS.
Subjects: Documentary films.; Biographical films.; Video recordings for the hearing impaired.; Video recordings for people with visual disabilities.; Cohn, Roy M.; Lawyers; Politics, Practical;
For private home use only.
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

The Goddess of Warsaw [text (large print)] : a novel / by Barr, Lisa,author.;
"From the New York Times bestselling author of Woman on Fire, the harrowing and ultimately triumphant tale of a Jewish WWII assassin turned Hollywood star. In 2005, Siena Hayes is Hollywood's latest It Girl, but she has her sights set higher than the screen, she wants to be behind the camera. So when Siena meets Lena Browning, the enormously mysterious and famous actor from decades past, Siena sees her big break. Siena wants to direct Lena's biopic-but Lena's past may turn out to be more than Siena bargained for. Before she was a "Living Legend," Lena Browning was Bina Blonski, a member of Warsaw's Jewish elite whose life and family were destroyed by the Nazis. In 1943, in the ghettos of Warsaw, Bina lives with her husband, Jakub. Determined to fight back against Nazi rule, beautiful, blonde Bina acts as a spy on the Aryan side fearlessly protecting the remaining Warsaw Jews, gaining intel, and stealing weapons. Along the way, her feelings grow more complicated as she falls in love with Aleksander, an ally to her in resistance ... and Jakub's brother. But the cause prevails-and Lena accomplishes amazing feats of bravery, though she can't help but sacrifice so much in the process ... Over a decade after escaping the ghetto, Bina, who now goes by Lena, has risen to fame in Hollywood. She sees her old life at every turn and hungers for revenge against the Nazis who are still everywhere around her. This is Lena's chance to right the past's wrongs and perhaps even find the happy ending she never had."--
Subjects: Thrillers (Fiction); Large print books.; Novels.; Actresses; Man-woman relationships; Nazis; Revenge; Secrecy; World War, 1939-1945;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

The lost art of Scripture : rescuing the sacred texts / by Armstrong, Karen,1944-author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."Today the Quran is used by some to justify war and acts of terrorism, the Torah to deny Palestinians the right to live in the Land of Israel, and the Bible to condemn homosexuality and contraception. The significance of Scripture--the holy texts at the centre of all religious traditions--may not be immediately obvious in our secular world but its misunderstanding is perhaps the root cause of most of today's controversies over religion. In this timely and important book, one of the world's leading commentators on religious affairs examines the meaning of Scripture. Today holy texts are not only used selectively to underwrite sometimes arbitrary and subjective views: they are seen to prescribe ethical norms and codes of behaviour that are divinely ordained--they are believed to contain eternal truths. But as Karen Armstrong shows in this fascinating trawl through millennia of religious history, this peculiar reading of Scripture is a relatively recent, modern phenomenon--and in many ways, a reaction to a hostile secular world. For most of their history, the world's religious traditions have regarded these texts as tools for the individual to connect with the divine, to transcend their physical existence, and to experience a higher level of consciousness that helped them to engage with the world in more meaningful and compassionate ways. Scripture was not a 'truth' that had to be 'believed.' Armstrong argues that only if the world's religious faiths rediscover such an open and spiritual engagement with their holy texts can they curtail the arrogance, intolerance and violence that flows from a narrow reading of Scripture as truth."--
Subjects: Religion and culture.; Religions.; Sacred books;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI