Real Reads, Non-Fiction Book Club for Adults

1) Becoming

Author

Obama, Michelle

Notes

April 1, 2023 Selection

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle, Large Print

Description

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"An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States. When she was a little girl, Michelle Robinson's world was the South Side of Chicago, where she and her brother, Craig, shared a bedroom in their family's upstairs apartment and played catch in the park, and where her parents, Fraser and Marian Robinson, raised her to be outspoken and unafraid. But life soon took her much further afield, from the halls of Princeton,...

2) The unfit heiress: the tragic life and scandalous sterilization of Ann Cooper Hewitt

Author

Farley, Audrey Clare

Notes

April 29, 2023 Selection

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD

Description

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"At the turn of the twentieth century, American women began to reject Victorian propriety in favor of passion and livelihood outside the home. This alarmed authorities, who feared certain "over-sexed" women could destroy civilization if allowed to reproduce and pass on their defects. Set against this backdrop, THE UNFIT HEIRESS chronicles the fight for inheritance, both genetic and monetary, between Ann Cooper Hewitt and her mother Maryon. In 1934,...

3) Escape from Camp 14: one man's remarkable odyssey from North Korea to freedom in the West

Author

Harden, Blaine

Notes

July 2023 Selection

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

Description

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"Twenty-seven years ago, Shin Dong-hyuk was born inside Camp 14, one of five sprawling political prisions in the mountains of North Korea. Located about 55 miles north of Pyongyang, the labour camp is a 'complete control district', a no-exit prison where the only sentence is life. No one born in Camp 14 or in any North Korean political prison camp has escaped. No one except Shin. This is his story." --Back cover.

4) The warmth of other suns: the epic story of America's great migration

Author

Wilkerson, Isabel

Notes

June 2023 Selection

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD, eBook, Kindle

Description

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In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America.

5) Behind the beautiful forevers: life, death, and hope in a Mumbai undercity

Author

Boo, Katherine

Notes

August 2023 Selection

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD, eAudiobook, eBook, Large Print

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The dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking story of families striving toward a better life in one of the twenty-first century's great, unequal cities. In this fast-paced book, based on three years of uncompromising reporting, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human. Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul,...

6) Far from the tree: parents, children and the search for identity

Author

Solomon, Andrew

Notes

October 2023 Selection

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook

Description

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Explores the consequences of extreme personal differences between parents and children, describing his own experiences as a gay child of straight parents while evaluating the circumstances of people affected by physical, developmental, or cultural factors that divide families.

7) The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

Author

Carr, Nicholas

Notes

March 2024 Selection

Formats:

eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

Description

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Finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction: "Nicholas Carr has written a Silent Spring for the literary mind."—Michael Agger, Slate

"Is Google making us stupid?" When Nicholas Carr posed that question, in a celebrated Atlantic Monthly cover story, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing us. He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: As we enjoy the Net's...

8) The new Jim Crow: mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness

Author

Alexander, Michelle

Notes

November 2023 Selection

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD, eBook, Kindle

Description

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Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New...

9) Fast food nation: the dark side of the all-American meal

Author

Schlosser, Eric

Notes

Feb 2024 Selection

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle, Large Print

Description

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A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
The jaw-dropping exposé on how America's fast food industry has shaped the landscape of America.
This fascinating study reveals how the fast food industry has altered the landscape of America, widened the gap between rich and poor, fueled an epidemic of obesity, and transformed food production throughout the world. Eric Schlosser inspires readers to look beneath the surface of our food system,...

10) The Nazi conspiracy: the secret plot to kill Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill

Author

Meltzer, Brad

Notes

April 2024 Selection

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle, Large Print

Description

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INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
"An absolute home run! You will never look at WWII the same way again." —Brad Thor, #1 bestselling author
"Meltzer and Mensch are masters." —Jon Meacham, author The Soul of America
"A true story that reads like a thriller." —Alexander S. Vindman, LT. Col., U.S. Army (Ret.)
"An outstanding and memorable reading experience....a true page-turner

...

11) Fatherland: a memoir of war, conscience, and family secrets

Author

Bilger, Burkhard

Notes

March 2024 Selections

Formats:

Book, eBook, Kindle

Description

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"What do we owe the past? How to make peace with a dark family history? Burkhard Bilger hardly knew his grandfather growing up. His parents immigrated to Oklahoma from Germany after World War II, and though his mother was an historian, she rarely talked about her father or what he did during the war. Then one day a packet of letters arrived from Germany, yellowing with age, and a secret history began to unfold. Karl Gönner was a schoolteacher and...

12) The 1619 Project: a new origin story

Notes

September 2023 Selection

Formats:

Book, Large Print

Description

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"The animating idea of The 1619 Project is that our national narrative is more accurately told if we begin not on July 4, 1776, but in late August of 1619, when a ship arrived in Jamestown bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric and unprecedented system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country's original sin, but it is more...

13) The identity trap: a story of ideas and power in our time

Author

Mounk, Yascha

Notes

May 2024 Selection

Description

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"One of our leading public intellectuals traces the origin of a set of ideas about identity and social justice that is rapidly transforming America-and explains why it will fail to accomplish its noble goals"--