NCW Libraries

Identifies the qualities of successful people, maintaining that culture, family, and idiosyncratic factors can have a decisive impact on shaping high achievers,

Here are the gods, goddesses, and legendary heroes of Ancient Greece: mighty Zeus, vengeful Hera, wise Athena, powerful Hercules, and many others.

Piano-prodigy Isabella, eleven, whose black father and white mother struggle to share custody, never feels whole, especially as racial tensions affect her school, her parents both become engaged, and she and her stepbrother are stopped by police.

Set after the American Civil War (1861-1865), the novel is inspired by the story of an African American slave, Margaret Garner, who escaped slavery in Kentucky late January 1856 by fleeing to Ohio, a free state. In the novel, the protagonist Sethe is also a slave who escapes slavery, running to Cincinnati, Ohio. After twenty-eight days of freedom, a posse arrives to retrieve her and her children under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which gave slave...

"With her mega-bestseller Quiet, Susan Cain urged our society to cultivate space for the undervalued, indispensable introverts among us, thereby revealing an untapped power hidden in plain sight. Now, she employs the same mix of research, storytelling, and memoir to explore why we experience sorrow and longing, and the surprising lessons these states of mind teach us about creativity, compassion, leadership, spirituality, mortality and love. Bittersweetness...

"Legendary storyteller Stephen King goes into the deepest well of his imagination in this spellbinding novel about a seventeen-year-old boy who inherits the keys to a parallel world where good and evil are at war, and the stakes could not be higher--for that world or ours." -- Charlie Reade looks like a regular high school kid, great at baseball and football, a decent student. But he carries a heavy load. His mom was killed in a hit-and-run accident...

Throughout human history, certain drinks have done much more than just quench thirst. As Tom Standage relates with authority and charm, six of them have had a surprisingly pervasive influence on the course of history during pivotal epochs-from humankind's adoption of agriculture and the birth of cities to the advent of globalization. A History of the World in 6 Glasses presents an original, well-documented vision of world history, telling the story...

"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...

At least one-third of the people we know are introverts. They are the ones who prefer listening to speaking; who innovate and create bit dislike self-promotion, who favor working on their own over working in teams. It is to introverts-Rosa Parks, Chopin, Dr. Seuss, Steve Wozniak-that we owe many of the great contributions to society. In Quiet, Susan Cain argues that we dramatically undervalue introverts and show how much we lose in doing so. She...

"William Wooler is a family man, on the surface. But he's been having an affair, an affair that ended horribly this afternoon at a motel up the road. So when he returns to his house, devastated and angry, to find his difficult nine-year-old daughter, Avery, unexpectedly home from school, William loses his temper. Hours later, Avery's family declares her missing. Who took Avery Wooler?"--