NCW Libraries

Bestselling novelist Tsukiyama moves from Asia to America in this stunning contemporary debut. Set in present day California, "Dreaming Water" is a wrenching portrait of mothers, daughters and friends.

"A monumental and riveting account of how a poet, a physicist, and a philosopher pursued truth to the very limits of human apprehension and revealed the fundamental nature of our place in the universe Spiraling in the wreckage of a failed love affair, Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges channeled his devastation into his work, reassessing the slippery nature of our own identities and the way we perceive reality, ultimately securing his place in the literary...

"Legendary filmmaker and celebrated author Werner Herzog tells in his inimitable voice the story of his epic artistic career in a long-awaited memoir that is as inventive and daring as anything he has done before. Werner Herzog was born in September 1942 in Munich, Germany, at a turning point in the Second World War. Soon Germany would be defeated and a new world would have to be made out the rubble and horrors of the war. Fleeing the Allied bombing...

Magic can be found in the darkest of places... It is the time of the Second World War, and Werner is a boy alone in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Separated from his family, he doesn’t have a friend in the world. He shares his bunk with a quiet man named Herr Levin, who seems too gentle for this terrible place. One night Werner is woken by the sound of prison guards yelling. But it’s not Werner they want, it’s Herr Levin? Do your magic!?...

This film, like many from director Werner Herzog, is a poem of oddness and beauty. Investigating the lives of the "professional dreamers" who conduct research at the bottom of the world in Antarctica, he finds a happily cynical lot, who regard climate change and the potential extinction of Homo sapiens in rather a different light than most people. They study penguins, seals, volcanoes, miniscule underwater creatures, and the shifting ice patterns....

"The New York Times bestselling author of The Spy and the Traitor tells the thrilling true story of the most important female spy in history: an agent code-named "Sonya," who set the stage for the Cold War. In 1942, in a quiet village in the leafy English Cotswolds, a thin, elegant woman lived in a small cottage with her three children and her husband, who worked as a machinist nearby. Ursula Burton was friendly but reserved, and spoke English with...

Galileo, Einstein, Curie, Darwin, Hawking--we know the names, but how much do we really know about these people? Galileo gained notoriety over his battle with the Vatican, but did you know that this "father of modern science" was also an accomplished lute player? And Darwin of course discovered the principle by which new species are formed, but his bold curiosity extended to the dinner table as well. (And how many people can say they've eaten an owl!)...