History
New Book Alerts is a free online service that showcases the newest titles purchased by your local library. You can select to receive alerts via email and/or RSS feeds. If you see a new title that you are interested in, just click "check catalog" to place a hold on the item right away.
Previous | Last 30 days
-
Dirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Jeremy Scahill
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Nation Books (2013, Apr 23rd).
Pages: 612
In Dirty Wars, Jeremy Scahill, author of the New York Times best-seller Blackwater, takes us inside America’s new covert wars. The foot soldiers in these battles operate globally and inside the United States with orders from the White House to do whatever is necessary to hunt down, capture or kill individuals designated by the president as enemies.Drawn from the ranks of the Navy SEALs, Delta Force, former Blackwater and other private security contractors, the CIA’s Special Activities Division and the Joint Special Operations Command ( JSOC), these elite soldiers operate worldwide, with thousands of secret commandos working in more than one hundred countries. Funded through “black budgets,” Special Operations Forces conduct missions in denied areas, engage in targeted killings, snatch and grab individuals and direct drone, AC-130 and cruise missile strikes. more
More Info | Google Books | Check Availability
-
How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin: The Untold Story of a Noisy Revolution
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Leslie Woodhead
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA; 1 edition (2013, Apr 23rd).
Pages: 304
Imagine a world where Beatlemania was against the law-recordings scratched onto medical X-rays, merchant sailors bringing home contraband LPs, spotty broadcasts taped from western AM radio late in the night. This was no fantasy world populated by Blue Meanies but the USSR, where a vast nation of music fans risked repression to hear the defining band of the British Invasion.The music of John, Paul, George, and Ringo played a part in waking up an entire generation of Soviet youth, opening their eyes to seventy years of bland official culture and rigid authoritarianism. Soviet leaders had suppressed most Western popular music since the days of jazz, but the Beatles and the bands they inspired-both in the West and in Russia-battered down the walls of state culture. more
More Info | Google Books | Check Availability
-
FDR and the Jews
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Allan J. Lichtman
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Belknap Press (2013, Feb 11th).
Pages: 464
Nearly seventy-five years after World War II, a contentious debate lingers over whether Franklin Delano Roosevelt turned his back on the Jews of Hitler’s Europe. Defenders claim that FDR saved millions of potential victims by defeating Nazi Germany. Others revile him as morally indifferent and indict him for keeping America’s gates closed to Jewish refugees and failing to bomb Auschwitz’s gas chambers. In an extensive examination of this impassioned debate, Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman find that the president was neither savior nor bystander. In FDR and the Jews, they draw upon many new primary sources to offer an intriguing portrait of a consummate politician—compassionate but also pragmatic—struggling with opposing priorities under perilous conditions. more
More Info | Google Books | Check Availability
-
Secret History: The Story of Cryptology (Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications)
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Craig P. Bauer
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Chapman and Hall/CRC (2013, Feb 20th).
Pages: 608
Most available cryptology books primarily focus on either mathematics or history. Breaking this mold, Secret History: The Story of Cryptology gives a thorough yet accessible treatment of both the mathematics and history of cryptology. Requiring minimal mathematical prerequisites, the book presents the mathematics in sufficient detail and weaves the history throughout the chapters. In addition to the fascinating historical and political sides of cryptology, the author—a former Scholar-in-Residence at the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) Center for Cryptologic History—includes interesting instances of codes and ciphers in crime, literature, music, and art. Following a mainly chronological development of concepts, the book focuses on classical cryptology in the first part. more
More Info | Google Books | Check Availability
-
The Secret Lives of Baked Goods: Sweet Stories & Recipes for America's Favorite Desserts
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Jessie Oleson Moore
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Sasquatch Books (2013, May 7th).
Pages: 192
Have you ever wondered where the ideas for baking red velvet cupcakes, brownies, birthday cake, Girl Scout cookies, and other dessert recipes came from? Discover the history behind America's most popular and nostalgic desserts with popular CakeSpy blogger and self-proclaimed "dessert detective" Jessie Oleson Moore. Moore has put her sweet-sleuthing skills to work uncovering the fascinating histories and tastiest recipes for America's favorite sweets, including whoopee pies, chocolate chip cookies, Baked Alaska, and New York cheesecake. From romantic musings on how desserts got their names to sugar-fueled scandals, these classic recipes and photographs are guaranteed to offer food for thought and leave you with plenty of room for dessert. . more
More Info | Google Books | Check Availability
-
100 Ideas that Changed Film
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: David Parkinson
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Laurence King Publishers (2012, Apr 18th).
Pages: 216
This inspiring book chronicles the most influential ideas that have shaped film since its inception. Entertaining and intelligent, it is both a concise history and a fascinating resource. Each idea is presented through informed text and arresting visuals paying homage to the medium's great classics. We learn why and how the ideas first evolved and what their impact has been up to the present day. more
More Info | Google Books | Check Availability
-
Murder, Mutiny and Mayhem: The Blackest-Hearted Villains from Irish History
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Joe O'Shea
Format: Paperback
Publisher: O'Brien Press (2013, Jan 21st).
Pages: 232
The Irish are often thought of as a nation of missionaries, explorers, freedom fighters, artists, and writers. But for every Tom Crean or Bernardo O'Higgins, there is a Captain William Cotter or Antoine Walsh wreaking havoc around the world. This dramatic book explores the most obscure and unbelievable stories of the Irish slavers, grave-robbers, duellists, conmen, drug-lords, and killers who wreaked havoc around the world. more
More Info | Google Books | Check Availability
-
Instant: The Story of Polaroid
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Christopher Bonanos
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press (2012, Sep 26th).
Pages: 192
"Instant photography at the push of a button!" During the 1960s and '70s, Polaroid was the coolest technology company on earth. Like Apple, it was an innovation machine that cranked out one must-have product after another. Led by its own visionary genius founder, Edwin Land, Polaroid grew from a 1937 garage start-up into a billion-dollar pop-culture phenomenon. Instant tells the remarkable tale of Land's one-of-a-kind invention-from Polaroid's first instant camera to hit the market in 1948, to its meteoric rise in popularity and adoption by artists such as Ansel Adams, Andy Warhol, and Chuck Close, to the company's dramatic decline into bankruptcy in the late '90s and its unlikely resurrection in the digital age. Instant is both an inspiring tale of American ingenuity and a cautionary business tale about the perils of companies that lose their creative edge. more
More Info | Google Books | Check Availability
-
Permanent Present Tense: The Unforgettable Life of the Amnesic Patient, H. M.
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Suzanne Corkin
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Basic Books (2013, Jan 29th).
Pages: 384
In 1953, 27-year-old Henry Gustave Molaison underwent an experimental “psychosurgical” procedure—a targeted lobotomy—in an effort to alleviate his debilitating epilepsy. The outcome was unexpected—when Henry awoke, he could no longer form new memories, and for the rest of his life would be trapped in the moment. But Henry’s tragedy would prove a gift to humanity. As renowned neuroscientist Suzanne Corkin explains in Permanent Present Tense, she and her colleagues brought to light the sharp contrast between Henry’s crippling memory impairment and his preserved intellect. This new insight that the capacity for remembering is housed in a specific brain area revolutionized the science of memory. The case of Henry—known only by his initials H. more
More Info | Google Books | Check Availability
-
Photography: The Groundbreaking Moments
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Florian Heine
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Prestel (2012, Dec 3rd).
Pages: 208
Chronologically arranged, each chapter focuses on a particular work or idea that changed the course of photography. Presented in beautiful spreads and with informative text, the book opens with photography's genesis in the form of the camera obscura. Centuries later, Daguerre, Niepce, and Talbot invented their own means of capturing light on paper. The book covers groundbreaking genres such as still life, landscape, portraiture, and nudes. Sections on the role of photography in journalism illustrate how the camera's presence on battlefields, on city streets, and in factories helped inform and reform the modern world. Fashion, animals, Surrealism, and staged portraits are also explored. Perfect for perusing or reading from cover to cover, this book illustrates how photography developed from a concept to a world-changing force--one that attempted to shed light on truth yet can also obscure and alter reality in dazzling ways. more
More Info | Google Books | Check Availability
