Flagrant conduct: the story of Lawrence v. Texas : how a bedroom arrest decriminalized gay Americans

By Carpenter, Dale

Publishing Date: c2012

Classification: 300

Call Number: 342.7308 CAR

Provides a detailed legal history and examines the motives of all players involved with the landmark Supreme Court gay rights case that protected consenting adults' rights, regardless of sexual preference, in the bedroom.

NEW RELEASE

The Supreme Court

Publishing Date: 2015

Classification: 300

Call Number: 347.73

(Sic): a memoir

By Cody, Joshua

Publishing Date: c2011

Classification: 300

Call Number: 362.196 COD

The author, a young composer, tells the story of his diagnosis with an aggressive form of cancer and the aftermath.

Seven myths about education

By Christodoulou, Daisy

Publishing Date: 2014

Classification: 300

Call Number: 370.7 CHR

In this controversial new book, Daisy Christodoulou offers a thought-provoking critique of educational orthodoxy. Drawing on her recent experience of teaching in challenging schools, she shows through a wide range of examples and case studies just how much classroom practice contradicts basic scientific principles. She examines seven widely-held beliefs which are holding back pupils and teachers: - Facts prevent understanding - Teacher-led instruction is passive - The 21st century fundamentally changes everything - You can always just look it up -We should teach transferable skills - Projects and activities are the best way to learn - Teaching knowledge is indoctrination. In each accessible and engaging chapter, Christodoulou sets out the theory of each myth, considers its practical implications and shows the worrying prevalence of such practice. Then, she explains exactly why it is a myth, with reference to the principles of modern cognitive science. She builds a powerful case explaining how governments and educational organisations around the world have let down teachers and pupils by promoting and even mandating evidence-less theory and bad practice. This blisteringly incisive and urgent text is essential reading for all teachers, teacher training students, policy makers, head teachers, researchers and academics around the world. - (Taylor & Francis Publishing)

The smartest kids in the world: and how they got that way

By Ripley, Amanda

Publishing Date: 2013

Classification: 300

Call Number: 370.9 RIP

In a handful of nations, virtually all children are learning to make complex arguments and solve problems they've never seen before. They are learning to think, in other words, and to thrive in the modern economy. What is it like to be a child in the world's new education superpowers? In a global quest to find answers for our own children, author and Time magazine journalist Amanda Ripley follows three Americans embedded in Finland, South Korea, and Poland for one year. Their stories, along with groundbreaking research into learning in other cultures, reveal a pattern of startling transformation: none of these countries had many "smart" kids a few decades ago. Things had changed. Teaching had become more rigorous; parents had focused on things that mattered; and children had bought into the promise of education.--From publisher description.

Route 66: America's first main street

By Crump, Spencer

Publishing Date: 1996

Classification: 300

Call Number: 388.1 CRU

Cuentos: tales from the Hispanic Southwest : based on stories originally collected by Juan B. Rael

By Griego y Maestas, José

Publishing Date: c1980

Classification: 300

Call Number: 398.2 GRI

The people of Northern New Mexico have survived for more than 380 years virtually isolated from other Spanish speaking centers. The preservation of their language and customs became dependent on memory and the adoption of the ways and words of the people living around them. Influenced by sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Spanish; Mexican Indians; indigenous Rio Grande Indians; the Spanish of Mexico; and the American settlers, rural New Mexicans created a delightlyfully singular and complex variety of folklore that is unparalleled in Spanish North America.

Winter tale: how raven gave light to the world

By Turner, Mark

Publishing Date: 2013

Classification: 300

Call Number: 398.2 TUR

Mark Turner’s beautiful children’s book, A Winter’s Tale: How Raven Gave Light to the World, is a sensitive retelling of the Native American creation myth, of how Raven, transformed into a child, stole light from the mythical grandfather who held it as a treasure, and bestowed it upon a world encased in darkness. Shared among numerous Native American tribes, the Raven’s trickery is well-known. However, what makes Turner’s contemporary narrative so compelling is the role the child plays in retrieving light from the loving metaphorical grandfather, the empowerment the child receives from that love, and how, transforming into the Raven, the child takes flight into a world that needed the penultimate gift: light itself.A Winter’s Tale is beautifully presented, with 33 wonderful full-color illustrations by Emily Graves and Mark Turner’s accompanying musical score on compact disc. Children will delight not only in the story retold but in the combined visual and auditory interpretations of the Raven myth. - (Texas A & M Univ)

The Everything learning French book: speak, write, and understand basic French in no time

By Sallee, Bruce

Publishing Date: c2002

Classification: 400

Call Number: 448.2 SAL

The complete idiot's guide to learning French

By Stein, Gail

Publishing Date: 2003

Classification: 400

Call Number: 448.2 STE

This book, revised and updated, consists of thematically constructed chapters that tie together vocabulary, useful phrases, grammar, and activities to give you an understanding of French-speaking people and their culture.

Galileo's finger: the ten great ideas of science

By Atkins, P. W.

Publishing Date: 2004

Classification: 500

Call Number: 500 ATK

Why Galileo's finger? Galileo, one of whose fingers is preserved in a vessel displayed in Florence, provided much of the impetus for modern science, pointing the way out of medieval ignorance. In this brilliant account of the central ideas of contemporary science, Peter Atkins celebrates the effectiveness of Galileo's symbolic finger for revealing the nature of our universe, our world, and ourselves. Galileo's Finger takes the reader on an extraordinary journey that embraces the ten central ideas of current science. "By a great idea," writes Peter Atkins, "I mean a simple concept of great reach, an acorn of an idea that ramifies into a great oak tree of application, a spider of an idea that can spin a great web and draw in a feast of explanation and elucidation." With wit, charm, and patience, Atkins leads the reader to an understanding of the essence of the whole of science, from evolution and the emergence of complexity, to entropy, the spring of all change in the universe; from energy, the universalization of accountancy, to symmetry, the quantification of beauty; and from cosmology, the globalization of reality, to spacetime, the arena of all action. "My intention is for us to travel to the high ridges of science," Atkins tells us. "As the journey progresses and I lead you carefully to the summit of understanding, you will experience the deep joy of illumination that science alone provides." Galileo's Finger breaks new ground in communicating science to the general reader. Here are the essential ideas of today's science, explained in magical prose. - (Oxford University Press)

The beginning of infinity: explanations that transform the world

By Deutsch, David

Publishing Date: 2011

Classification: 500

Call Number: 501 DEU

"A bold and all-embracing exploration of the nature and progress of knowledge from one of today's great thinkers. Throughout history, mankind has struggled to understand life's mysteries, from the mundane to the seemingly miraculous. In this important new book, David Deutsch, an award-winning pioneer in the field of quantum computation, argues that explanations have a fundamental place in the universe. They have unlimited scope and power to cause change, and the quest to improve them is the basic regulating principle not only of science but of all successful human endeavor. This stream of ever improving explanations has infinite reach, according to Deutsch: we are subject only to the laws of physics, and they impose no upper boundary to what we can eventually understand, control, and achieve. In his previous book, The Fabric of Reality, Deutsch describe the four deepest strands of existing knowledge-the theories of evolution, quantum physics, knowledge, and computation-arguing jointly they reveal a unified fabric of reality. In this new book, he applies that worldview to a wide range of issues and unsolved problems, from creativity and free will to the origin and future of the human species. Filled with startling new conclusions about human choice, optimism, scientific explanation, and the evolution of culture, The Beginning of Infinity is a groundbreaking book that will become a classic of its kind"--

The lion's eye: seeing in the wild

By Greenfield, Joanna

Publishing Date: 2009

Classification: 500

Call Number: 508.6761 GRE

Joanna Greenfield dreamed of traveling to East Africa to study one of the last known populations of wild chimpanzees. When she was offered a once-in-a-lifetime chance, the young student set off from peaceful Kenya into politically hazardous Uganda . From there, a small team of guides led her into the mountains. In stunningly evocative language, Greenfield depicts the beauty of the rainforest and the determination required to wait for one transcendent encounter in the wild. But even one of the most remote places in the world is not immune to terrifying man-made conflict. Greenfield and her team are robbed by poachers and harassed by soldiers.

The walker's companion

Publishing Date: c1995

Classification: 500

Call Number: 508.7

A handbook for amateur naturalists that explains what to look and listen for, what to touch and what to smell on your walks, while describing the various flora and fauna you may discover.

Women in wilderness: writings and photographs

Publishing Date: 1995

Classification: 500

Call Number: 508.73

Full-page color nature and wilderness photos by six women photographers are interspersed with selections (1,500 or so words) from the writings of seven women writers, each introduced by the editors. Among the contributors: Jan DeBlieu ( Meant to be Wild ), Terry Tempest Williams ( Coyote's Canyon ), Margaret E. Murie ( Journeys to the Far North ), and Gretel Ehrlich ( Yellowstone: Land of Fire and Ice . No scholarly trappings. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or. - (Book News)

Atlas of the skies: journeying between the stars and planets in the discovery of the universe

Publishing Date: 2003

Classification: 500

Call Number: 523

Journeying between the stars and planets in the discovery of the universe.

A universe from nothing: why there is something rather than nothing

By Krauss, Lawrence Maxwell

Publishing Date: 2012

Classification: 500

Call Number: 523.18 KRA

"Internationally known theoretical physicist and bestselling author Lawrence Krauss offers provocative, revelatory answers to the most basic philosophical questions: Where did our universe come from? Why is there something rather than nothing? And how is it all going to end? Why is there something rather than nothing?" is asked of anyone who says there is no God. Yet this is not so much a philosophical or religious question as it is a question about the natural world--and until now there has not been a satisfying scientific answer. Today, exciting scientific advances provide new insight into this cosmological mystery: Not only can something arise from nothing, something will always arise from nothing. With his wonderfully clear arguments and wry humor, pioneering physicist Lawrence Krauss explains how in this fascinating antidote to outmoded philosophical and religious thinking. As he puts it in his entertaining video of the same title, which has received over 675,000 hits, "Forget Jesus. The stars died so you could be born." A mind-bending trip back to the beginning of the beginning, A Universe from Nothing authoritatively presents the most recent evidence that explains how our universe evolved--and the implications for how it's going to end. It will provoke, challenge, and delight readers to look at the most basic underpinnings of existence in a whole new way. And this knowledge that our universe will be quite different in the future from today has profound implications and directly affects how we live in the present. As Richard Dawkins has described it: This could potentially be the most important scientific book with implications for atheism since Darwin"--

Dreams of a final theory

By Weinberg, Steven

Publishing Date: c1992

Classification: 500

Call Number: 530 WEI

Weinberg, the 1979 Nobel Prize-winner in physics, imagines the shape of a final theory and the effect its discovery would have on the human spirit. He gives a defense of reductionism--the impulse to trace explanations of natural phenomena to deeper and deeper levels--and examines the curious relevance of beauty and symmetry in scientific theories. Weinberg gives a personal account of the search for the laws of nature, and shares glimpses scientists have had from time to time that there is a deeper truth foreshadowing a final theory. For another side of the discussion, see David Lindley's The End of Physics. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Secrets of the oak woodlands: plants and animals among California's oaks

By Marianchild, Kate

Publishing Date: [2014]

Classification: 500

Call Number: 577.3097 MAR

The plant lover's guide to sedums

By Horvath, Brent

Publishing Date: 2014

Classification: 500

Call Number: 583.72 HOR

Sedums are fabulously versatile. With their flamboyant flower heads, graphic shapes, and stunning succulent foliage, these hardy plants thrive in almost any climate and with almost no attention. Their colorful leaves cover the spectrum - from icy whites and blues to rich fuchsia and deep purple. Sedum breeder and nurseryman Brent Horvath dispenses growing tips and design advice for using these rewarding plants in every part of your garden.