The Shame of the Nation
The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America
Written by Jonathan Kozol

Format: Trade Paperback, 432 pages
Publisher: Broadway
On Sale: August 1, 2006
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5245-5 (1-4000-5245-9)

"The Shame of the Nation is a national wake-up call... It should be required reading."--Marian Wright Edelman, CEO and Founder, Children's Defense Fund

Over the last 15 years, the state of inner-city public schools has been in a steep and continuing decline. Since the federal courts began dismantling the landmark ruling in... Read more >

Under the Banner of Heaven
A Story of Violent Faith
Written by Jon Krakauer

Format: Trade Paperback, 432 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: June 8, 2004
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-3280-8 (1-4000-3280-6)

Jon Krakauer’s literary reputation rests on insightful chronicles of lives conducted at the outer limits. He now shifts his focus from extremes of physical adventure to extremes of religious belief within our own borders, taking readers inside isolated American communities where some 40,000 Mormon Fundamentalists still practice polygamy. Defying both civil... Read more >

Under the Banner of Heaven
A Story of Violent Faith
Written by Jon Krakauer

Format: Hardcover, 400 pages
Publisher: Doubleday
On Sale: July 15, 2003
Price: $30.00
ISBN: 978-0-385-50951-0 (0-385-50951-0)

**ALA Notable Book, 2003

Krakauer’s previous books have given insight into lives conducted at the outer limits. In Under the Banner of Heaven, he shifts his focus from the extremes of physical adventure to the extremes of religious fundamentalism within American culture.

At the core of Under the Banner of Heaven is a... Read more >

It's Always Personal
Navigating Emotion in the New Workplace
Written by Anne Kreamer

Format: Trade Paperback, 256 pages
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
On Sale: January 1, 2013
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-8129-7993-0 (0-8129-7993-1)

With women now the majority of the workforce and the lines between office and personal life blurring as never before, the dynamics of work have shifted profoundly. Written by journalist and former corporate executive Anne Kreamer, It's Always Personal combines the latest information on the intricacies of the human brain, candid... Read more >

1968
The Year That Rocked the World
Written by Mark Kurlansky

Format: Trade Paperback, 480 pages
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
On Sale: January 11, 2005
Price: $17.00
ISBN: 978-0-345-45582-6 (0-345-45582-7)

In 1968: The Year That Rocked the World, award-winning author Mark Kurlansky has written his most ambitious work to date: a singular and definitive look at a pivotal moment in history.

With 1968, Mark Kurlansky brings to life the cultural and political history of that world-changing year of social upheaval. 1968 is... Read more >

When the Mind Hears
A History of the Deaf
Written by Harlan Lane

Format: Trade Paperback, 560 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: June 18, 1989
Price: $20.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-72023-2 (0-679-72023-5)

This first comprehensive history of the Deaf is also a powerful and compassionate study of the anatomy of prejudice and the motives and means of oppression.  It is a narrative, told largely from the vantage point of Laurent Clerc, the deaf Frenchman who was an intellectual leader of the Deaf community in... Read more >

Aloft

Written by Willia Langewiesche

Format: Trade Paperback, 272 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: October 19, 2010
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-74148-6 (0-307-74148-6)

More than a decade after the publication of Inside the Sky, Aloft is a completely revised, expanded, and updated edition of this classic text, which is widely regarded as the most lyrical and incisive book on flying.

In these essays, William Langewiesche considers how flying has altered not only how we... Read more >

A Mighty Long Way
My Journey to Justice at Little Rock Central High School
Written by Carlotta Walls Lanier and Lisa Frazier Page
Foreword by Bill Clinton

Format: Trade Paperback, 336 pages
Publisher: One World/Ballantine
On Sale: July 27, 2010
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-345-51101-0 (0-345-51101-8)

Selected for Common Reading at the University of Illinois, Springfield

"Carlotta Walls LaNier's A Mighty Long Way is a riveting account of nine brave high school students and their families in a quest for quality desegregated public education. What happened in Little Rock in 1957 resulted in America's greatest constitutional crisis since... Read more >

A Mighty Long Way
My Journey to Justice at Little Rock Central High School
Written by Carlotta Walls Lanier and Lisa Frazier Page
Foreword by Bill Clinton

Format: Hardcover, 304 pages
Publisher: One World/Ballantine
On Sale: August 25, 2009
Price: $27.00
ISBN: 978-0-345-51100-3 (0-345-51100-X)

"Carlotta Walls LaNier's A Mighty Long Way is a riveting account of nine brave high school students and their families in a quest for quality desegregated public education. What happened in Little Rock in 1957 resulted in America's greatest constitutional crisis since the Civil War. Carlotta's account of events inside and... Read more >

Posterity
Letters of Great Americans to Their Children
Written by Dorie McCullough Lawson

Format: Hardcover, 336 pages
Publisher: Doubleday
On Sale: April 13, 2004
Price: $24.95
ISBN: 978-0-385-50330-3 (0-385-50330-X)

Posterity is at once an epistolary chronicle of America and a fascinating glimpse into the hearts and minds of some of history’s most admired figures. Spanning more than three centuries, these letters contain enduring lessons in life and love, character and compassion that will surprise and enlighten.

Included here are letters from... Read more >

Children First
What Society Must Do--and is Not Doing--for Children Today
Written by Penelope Leach

Format: Trade Paperback, 320 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: April 25, 1995
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-75466-4 (0-679-75466-0)

Leach offers an urgent and powerful argument for the creation of economic and social supports for children in our society, and presents specific steps by which we as individuals and as a society can fashion a new economic priority for our children. Children First is above all a call to action... Read more >

The Worlding Project
Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization
Edited by Christopher Leigh Connery and Rob Wilson

Format: Trade Paperback, 256 pages
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
On Sale: October 30, 2007
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-1-55643-680-2 (1-55643-680-7)

Globalization discourse now presumes that the “world space” is entirely at the mercy of market norms and forms promulgated by reactionary U.S. policies. An academic but accessible set of studies, this wide range of essays by noted scholars challenges this paradigm with diverse and strong arguments. Taking on topics that range... Read more >

Myth and Meaning
Cracking the Code of Culture
Written by Claude Levi-Strauss

Format: Trade Paperback, 80 pages
Publisher: Schocken
On Sale: March 14, 1995
Price: $13.00
ISBN: 978-0-8052-1038-5 (0-8052-1038-5)

With a Foreword by Wendy Doniger. In this expanded collection of five lectures originally delivered on the Canadian radio series "Ideas," Lévi-Strauss offers the insights of a lifetime spent interpreting myths and trying to discover their significance for human understanding.

"Myth and Meaning touches upon all of Lévi-Strauss's great methodological paradoxes: the... Read more >

The Blue Notebook
A Novel
Written by James A. Levine

Format: Trade Paperback, 240 pages
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
On Sale: July 6, 2010
Price: $14.00
ISBN: 978-0-385-52872-6 (0-385-52872-8)

An unforgettable, deeply affecting debut novel, The Blue Notebook tells the story of Batuk, a precocious fifteen-year-old girl from rural India who is sold into sexual slavery by her father. As she navigates the grim realities of Mumbai’s Common Street, Batuk manages to put pen to paper, recording her private thoughts... Read more >

The Seasons of a Man's Life

Written by Daniel J. Levinson

Format: Trade Paperback, 384 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books
On Sale: May 12, 1986
Price: $18.00
ISBN: 978-0-345-33901-0 (0-345-33901-0)

This is the first full report from the team that discovered the patterns of adult development. Ranking in significance with the original works of Kinsey and Erikson, it explores and explains the specific periods of personal development through which all human beings must pass--and which together for a common pattern underlying... Read more >

Guilty by Reason of Insanity
A Psychiatrist Explores the Minds of Killers
Written by Dorothy Otnow Lewis, Ph.D.

Format: Paperback, 352 pages
Publisher: Ivy Books
On Sale: May 1, 1999
Price: $7.99
ISBN: 978-0-8041-1887-3 (0-8041-1887-6)

A psychiatrist and an internationally recognized expert on violence, Dorothy Otnow Lewis has spent the last quarter century studying the minds of killers. Among the notorious murderers she has examined are Ted Bundy, Arthur Shawcross, and Mark David Chapman, the man who shot John Lennon.

Now she shares her groundbreaking discoveries–and... Read more >

Educating for Character
How Our Schools Can Teach Respect and Responsibility
Written by Thomas Lickona

Format: Trade Paperback, 496 pages
Publisher: Bantam
On Sale: September 1, 1992
Price: $20.00
ISBN: 978-0-553-37052-2 (0-553-37052-9)

Winner of the 1992 Christopher Award "for affirming the higest values of the human spirit."

Drawing on 20 years of research and day-to-day classroom management, Dr. Lickona shows how to construct a curriculum that wins parental support and reports on scores of practical, successful programs that are turning schools around... Read more >

Consuming Kids
Protecting Our Children from the Onslaught of Marketing & Advertising
Written by Susan Linn

Format: Trade Paperback, 304 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: August 9, 2005
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-7999-5 (1-4000-7999-3)

The average American child sees about 40,000 television commercials every year. Companies target younger viewers all the time, selling everything from sugar cereals to minivans, and cross-promotional marketing influences everything from the food stocked in school vending machines to the characters who appear in children’s books. Kids are requesting specific brands... Read more >

Absolutely American
Four Years at West Point
Written by David Lipsky

Format: Trade Paperback, 384 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: May 11, 2004
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-1-4000-7693-2 (1-4000-7693-5)

In 1998, West Point made David Lipsky an unprecedented offer: stay at the Academy as long as you like, go wherever you wish, talk to whomever you want, to discover why some of America's most promising young people sacrifice so much to become cadets. Lipsky followed one cadet class into mess... Read more >

Plain Secrets
An Outsider among the Amish
Written by Joe Mackall

Format: Trade Paperback, 248 pages
Publisher: Beacon Press
On Sale: June 1, 2008
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-8070-1065-5 (0-8070-1065-0)

Joe Mackall has lived surrounded by the Swartzentruber Amish community of Ashland County, Ohio, for over sixteen years. They are the most traditional and insular of all the Amish sects: the Swartzentrubers live without gas, electricity, or indoor plumbing; without lights on their buggies or cushioned chairs in their homes; and... Read more >

High Risk
Children Without A Conscience
Written by Ken Magid

Format: Trade Paperback, 384 pages
Publisher: Bantam
On Sale: March 1, 1989
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-553-34667-1 (0-553-34667-9)

Many of today's children are in danger of growing up without a conscience-the neglected children of too-busy parents or the abandoned and abused children from disrupted or violent families. Children in this ever-growing segment of the population pose a threat to themselves, their families, and to the larger community. High Risk... Read more >

Falling Leaves
The Memoir of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter
Written by Adeline Yen Mah

Format: Trade Paperback, 304 pages
Publisher: Broadway
On Sale: April 6, 1999
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-0-7679-0357-8 (0-7679-0357-9)

With a powerful voice that speaks of the harsh realities of growing up female in a family and society that kept girls in emotional chains, Falling Leaves is a rare, authentic portrait of twentieth-century China. A compelling, painful, and ultimately triumphant story of a girl's journey into adulthood, Adeline's story is... Read more >

Homeland

Written by Dale Maharidge
Photographed by Michael Williamson

Format: Trade Paperback, 296 pages
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
On Sale: August 2, 2005
Price: $17.95
ISBN: 978-1-58322-681-0 (1-58322-681-8)

Homeland is Pulitzer Prize winning author Maharidge’s biggest and most ambitious book yet, weaving together the disparate and contradictory strands of contemporary American society-common decency alongside race rage, the range of dissenting voices, and the roots of discontent that defy political affiliation. Here are American families who can no longer pay... Read more >

The Road of Lost Innocence
The True Story of a Cambodian Heroine
Written by Somaly Mam
Foreword by Nicholas D. Kristof
Introduction by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Format: Trade Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
On Sale: July 28, 2009
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-385-52622-7 (0-385-52622-9)

Selected for Common Reading at West Texas A&M University

A riveting and beautiful memoir of tragedy and hope–by a woman named to Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Born in a village deep in the Cambodian forest, Somaly Mam was sold into sexual slavery by her... Read more >

Hard Corps
From Gangster to Marine Hero
Written by Marco Martinez

Format: Trade Paperback, 256 pages
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
On Sale: September 30, 2008
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-38305-1 (0-307-38305-9)

At the age of seventeen, Marco Martinez was a thug
At the age of twenty-two, he was a hero

Hard Corps tells the story of a young man’s incredible transformation from gun-toting gang member to recipient of the Navy Cross, the second-highest honor a U.S. Marine can receive. Gritty, riveting, and ultimately inspiring... Read more >