Inyo County Free Library - New Acquisitions
May 2021 - July 2021
These are books and media new to the library and cataloged by the Inyo County Free Library.
Additional information about each title can be found in the catalog (click on the title). For older acquisition lists choose from Select another list. To request any of these titles please contact your local library branch.
Non-Fiction | Computer science, information & general worksPhilosophy & psychologyReligionSocial sciencesLanguageScienceTechnologyArts & recreationLiteratureHistory & geography |
Not the girl next door: Joan Crawford, a personal biography By Chandler, Charlotte Publishing Date: 2008 Classification: 700 Call Number: 791.4302 CHA In this new biography, Chandler draws on exclusive and remarkably candid interviews with Crawford herself and with others who knew her, including first husband Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. As a result, this biography is a brand-new look at one of Hollywood's most acclaimed stars. Although her adopted daughter Christina would publish the scathing memoir Mommie Dearest after Crawford's death, Chandler offers a contrasting portrait, drawing in part on reminiscences of younger daughter Cathy among others. The result is an intimate portrait of a great star who was beautiful, talented, glamorous, and surprisingly vulnerable.--From publisher description. |
By Gooley, Tristan Publishing Date: [2015] Classification: 700 Call Number: 796.5 GOO Turn every walk into a game of detection. When writer and navigator Tristan Gooley journeys outside, he sees a natural world filled with clues. The roots of a tree indicate the sun's direction; the Big Dipper tells the time; a passing butterfly hints at the weather; a sand dune reveals prevailing wind; the scent of cinnamon suggests altitude; a budding flower points south. To help you understand nature as he does, Gooley shares more than 850 tips for forecasting, tracking, and more, gathered from decades spent walking the landscape around his home and around the world. Whether you're walking in the country or city, along a coastline, or by night, this is the ultimate resource on what the land, sun, moon, stars, plants, animals, and clouds can reveal - if you only know how to look! -- |
Training for the new Alpinism: a manual for the climber as athlete By House, Steve Publishing Date: [2014] Classification: 700 Call Number: 796.522 HOU Applying training practices from other endurance sports, the authors demonstrate that following a carefully designed regimen is as effective for alpinism as it is for any other endurance sport and leads to better performance. They deliver detailed instruction on how to plan and execute training tailored to your individual circumstances, translating training theory into practice to allow you to coach yourself to any mountaineering goal.--Publisher. |
Beyond possible: one soldier, fourteen peaks - my life in the death zone By Purja, Nirmal Publishing Date: 2020 Classification: 700 Call Number: 796.522 PUR Fourteen mountains on Earth tower over 8,000 metres above sea level, an altitude where the brain and body withers and dies. Until recently, the world record for climbing them all stood at nearly eight years. So I announced I was summiting them in under seven months. People laughed.They told me I was crazy, even though I'd sharpened my climbing skills on the brutal Himalayan peaks of Everest and Dhaulagiri. But I possessed more than enough belief, strength and resilience to nail the job, having taken down enemy gunmen and terrorist bomb makers while serving with the Gurkhas and the UK Special Forces. |
Miles from nowhere: a round-the-world bicycle adventure By Savage, Barbara Publishing Date: [2020] Classification: 700 Call Number: 796.6 SAV "A first-person adventure narrative about a couple's 23,000-mile bicycle odyssey in the late 1970s. Barbara and Larry Savage rode their ten-speeds the long-way "across" the USA and then continued their adventure by bike in Europe, Northern Africa, and New Zealand"-- |
Meat eater: a natural history of an American hunter By Rinella, Steven Publishing Date: ©2012 Classification: 700 Call Number: 799.29 RIN Steven Rinella grew up in rural Michigan, the son of a hunter who taught his sons to love the natural world the way he did. As a child, Rinella devoured stories of the American wilderness. He shot his first squirrel at eight and his first deer at thirteen. He chose the colleges he went to by their proximity to good hunting ground, and he experimented with living solely off wild meat. As an adult, he feeds his family from the food he hunts. Meat Eater chronicles Rinella's lifelong relationship with nature and hunting through the lens of ten hunts in the remotest corners of North America. Through each story, he grapples with themes such as the role of the hunter in shaping America, the vanishing frontier, the ethics of killing, the allure of hunting trophies, the responsibilities that human predators have to their prey, and the disappearance of the hunter himself as Americans lose their connection with the way their food finds its way to their tables.--From publisher description. |
By Gluck, Louise Publishing Date: [1995] Classification: 800 Call Number: 811.54 GLU Louise Gluck says in one of her essays that every end of a book is for her a "conscious diagnostic act, a swearing off" in which she discerns the themes, habits, and preoccupations of the previous volume to define the tasks of the next. The First Four Books of Poems shows this poet in the conscious evolution she describes, marking time in changes. Readers will hear specifics of sequence: where the ferocious tension of her first book, Firstborn, moves towards the more finely-spun lyricism of her second, The House on Marshland. They will also discover how the charged nouns of that book acquire more intimate weight to become the icons in her third, Descending Figure, and then rise to an archetypal mythic scale in The Triumph of Achilles. These poems are as various as the force of Gluck's intelligence is constant. In another essay, she cautions, "the deft skirting of despair is a life lived on the surface, intimidated by depth, a life that refuses to be used by time, which it tries instead to dominate or evade." The First Four Books of Poems attests to how truly Gluck has tested and proven the validity of her own warning. The fierce, austerely beautiful voice that has become Gluck's trademark speaks in these poems of a life lived in unflinching awareness. Always she is moving in and around the achingly real, writing poems adamant in their accuracy and depth. Their progression is proof of her commitment to change; with her first four books of poetry collected in a single volume, Louise Gluck shows herself happily "used by time." |
NEW RELEASE By Bailey, Blake Publishing Date: [2021] Classification: 800 Call Number: 813.54 BAI "The renowned biographer's definitive portrait of a literary titan. Appointed by Philip Roth and granted independence and complete access, Blake Bailey spent years poring over Roth's personal archive, interviewing his friends, lovers, and colleagues, and engaging Roth himself in breathtakingly candid conversations. The result is an indelible portrait of an American master and of the postwar literary scene. Bailey shows how Roth emerged from a lower-middle-class Jewish milieu to achieve the heights of literary fame, how his career was nearly derailed by his catastrophic first marriage, and how he championed the work of dissident novelists behind the Iron Curtain. Bailey examines Roth's rivalrous friendships with Saul Bellow, John Updike, and William Styron, and reveals the truths of his florid love life, culminating in his almost-twenty-year relationship with actress Claire Bloom, who pilloried Roth in her 1996 memoir, Leaving a Doll's House. Tracing Roth's path from realism to farce to metafiction to the tragic masterpieces of the American Trilogy, Bailey explores Roth's engagement with nearly every aspect of postwar American culture"-- |
NEW RELEASE The unquiet Englishman: a life of Graham Greene By Greene, Richard Publishing Date: 2021 Classification: 800 Call Number: 823.912 GRE "A vivid, deeply researched account of the tumultuous life of one of the twentieth century's greatest novelists, the author of The End of the Affair. Graham Greene lived a life as strange and compelling as those in his brilliant novels. A journalist and MI6 officer, Greene sought out the inner narratives of war and politics across the world; he witnessed the Second World War, the Vietnam War, the Mau Mau Rebellion, the rise of Fidel Castro, and the guerrilla wars of Central America. His classic novels, including The Heart of the Matter and The Quiet American, are only pieces of a career that reads like a primer on the twentieth century itself. With wit, keen understanding, and compassion informed by recently surfaced letters and new memoirs from Graham Greene's contemporaries, Richard Greene creates a nuanced portrait of a complicated man. An Unquiet Englishman delves into the conflicts that defined Greene-marriage, promiscuity, faith, and mental illness-to bring fresh insights to his work. This sensitive, fascinating biography sheds new light on one of the foremost modern writers"-- |
By Sisman, Adam Publishing Date: [2015] Classification: 800 Call Number: 823.914 SIS "In this definitive biography Adam Sisman reveals the man behind the bestselling persona. In John le Carré, Sisman shines a spotlight on David Cornwell, an expert at hiding in plain sight. Of course, the pseudonym John le Carré has helped to keep the public at a distance. Sisman probes Cornwell's unusual upbringing, abandoned by his mother at the age of only five and raised by his con man father (when not in prison), and explores his background in British intelligence, as well as his struggle to become a writer, and his personal life. Sisman has benefited from unfettered access to le Carré's private archive, talked to the most important people in his life, and interviewed the man himself at length"-- |
Lectures on Russian literature By Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich Publishing Date: ©1981 Classification: 800 Call Number: 891.7 NAB The acclaimed author presents his unique insights into the works of great Russian authors including Tolstoy, Dostoevski, Gogol, Gorki, and Chekhov. In the 1940s, when Vladimir Nabokov first embarked on his academic career in the United States, he brought with him hundreds of original lectures on the authors he most admired. For two decades those lectures served as the basis for Nabokov's teaching, first at Wellesley and then at Cornell, as he introduced undergraduates to the delights of great fiction. This volume collects Nabokov's famous lectures on 19th century Russian literature, with analysis and commentary on Nikolay Gogol's Dead Souls and "The Overcoat"; Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons; Maxim Gorki's "On the Rafts"; Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and The Death of Ivan Ilych; two short stories and a play by Anton Chekhov; and several works by Fyodor Dostoevski, including Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Possessed. This volume also includes Nabokov's lectures on the art of translation, the nature of Russian censorship, and other topics. Featured throughout the volume are photographic reproductions of Nabokov's original notes. |
By Olson, Sigurd F. Publishing Date: 1963 Classification: 900 Call Number: 917 OLS Essays on the Canadian north and Alaska. |
NEW RELEASE The last layer of the ocean: kayaking through love and loss on Alaska's wild coast By Emerick, Mary Publishing Date: 2021 Classification: 900 Call Number: 917.9804 EME "There are five layers of the ocean, though most of us will only ever see one. The deepest layer is the midnight zone, where the only light comes from bioluminescence, created by animals who live there. In order to see, these creatures must create their own light. They move like solitary suns, encased in their own bubbles of freezing water. This is the most remote, unexplored zone on the planet. Though hostile to humans, it's a source of rapt fascination for Mary Emerick, who would go there in a heartbeat if she could. The year Emerick turned 38, the suicide of a stranger compelled her to uproot her life and strike out for Alaska, taking a chance on love and home. She learned how to travel in a small yellow kayak along the rugged coast, contending with gales, high seas, and bears. She pondered the different meanings of home from the perspectives of people who were born along Alaska's coast, the first peoples who had been there for generations, newcomers who chose this place for themselves, and the many who would eventually, inevitably leave. When she married a man from another island, convinced that love would stick, she soon learned that marriage is just as difficult to navigate as the ocean. Divided into sections detailing the main kayaking strokes, with each stroke serving as metaphor for the lives we all pass through and the tools needed to stay afloat, this eloquent memoir speaks to the human need for connection-connection to place and to our fellow travelers casting their bubbles of light in the depths"-- |
A world beneath the sands: the golden age of Egyptology By Wilkinson, Toby A. H. Publishing Date: 2020 Classification: 900 Call Number: 932.009 WIL "A thrilling history of the West's scramble for the riches of ancient Egypt by the foremost Egyptologist of our time. From the decipherment of hieroglyphics in 1822 to the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb by Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon a hundred years later, the uncovering of Egypt's ancient past took place in an atmosphere of grand adventure and international rivalry. In A World Beneath the Sands, the acclaimed Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson chronicles the ruthless race between the British, French, Germans and Americans to lay claim to its mysteries and treasures. He tells the riveting stories of the men and women whose obsession with Egypt's ancient civilization helped to enrich and transform our understanding of the Nile Valley and its people, and left a lasting impression on Egypt, too. Travelers and treasure-hunters, ethnographers and archaeologists: whatever their motives, whatever their methods, a century of adventure and scholarship revealed a lost world, buried for centuries beneath the sands" |
The Nazi menace: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the road to war By Hett, Benjamin Carter Publishing Date: 2020 Classification: 900 Call Number: 940.532 HET "Berlin, November 1937. In a secret meeting with his top advisors, Adolf Hitler proclaims the urgent necessity for a war of aggression in Europe. Some conservatives are unnerved by this grandiose plan, but they are soon silenced, setting in motion events that will lead to the most calamitous war in history. Benjamin Carter Hett, the author of The Death of Democracy, his acclaimed history of the fall of the Weimar Republic, takes us from Berlin to London, Moscow, and Washington to show how anti-Nazi forces inside and outside Germany came to understand Hitler's true menace to European civilization and learned to oppose him. Drawing on original sources in German, English, French, and Russian, including newly released intelligence documents, he paints a sweeping portrait of governments under siege, populated by larger-than-life figures like Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, Neville Chamberlain, Franklin Roosevelt, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and Vyacheslav Molotov. The Nazi Menace evokes a time when the verities of life were subverted, a time marked by fake news, cultural unrest over refugees, and the challenges of national security in a consumerist democracy. To read Hett's book is to see the 1930s-and our world today-in a new and unnerving light."-- |
1944: FDR and the year that changed history By Winik, Jay Publishing Date: 2015 Classification: 900 Call Number: 940.5373 WIN It was not inevitable that World War II would end as it did, or that it would even end well. 1944 was a year that could have stymied the Allies and cemented Hitler's waning power. Instead, it saved those democracies -- but with a fateful cost. 1944 witnessed a series of titanic events: FDR at the pinnacle of his wartime leadership as well as his reelection, the planning of Operation Overlord with Churchill and Stalin, the unprecedented D-Day invasion and the horrific Battle of the Bulge, and the tumultuous conferences that finally shaped the coming peace. But on the way, millions of more lives were still at stake as President Roosevelt was exposed to mounting evidence of the most grotesque crime in history, the Final Solution. Just as the Allies were landing in Normandy, the Nazis were accelerating the killing of European Jews. Winik shows how escalating pressures fell on Roosevelt, whose rapidly deteriorating health was a closely guarded secret. Was winning the war the best way to rescue the Jews? Was a rescue even possible? Or would it get in the way of defeating Hitler? In a year when even the most audacious undertakings were within the world's reach, including the liberation of Europe, one challenge -- saving Europe's Jews -- seemed to remain beyond Roosevelt's grasp. |
Roller-coaster: Europe, 1950-2017 By Kershaw, Ian Publishing Date: 2018 Classification: 900 Call Number: 940.55 KER "After the overwhelming horrors of the first half of the 20th century, described by Ian Kershaw in his previous book as having gone 'to Hell and back', the years from 1950 to 2017 brought peace and relative prosperity to most of Europe. Enormous economic improvements transformed the continent. The catastrophic era of the world wars receded into an ever more distant past, though its long shadow continued to shape mentalities. Europe was now a divided continent, living under the nuclear threat in a period intermittently fraught with anxiety. Europeans experienced a 'roller-coaster ride', both in the sense that they were flung through a series of events which threatened disaster, but also in that they were no longer in charge of their own destinies: for much of the period the USA and USSR effectively reduced Europeans to helpless figures whose fates were dictated to them depending on the vagaries of the Cold War. There were, by most definitions, striking successes - the Soviet bloc melted away, dictatorships vanished and Germany was successfully reunited. But accelerating globalization brought new fragilities. The impact of interlocking crises after 2008 was the clearest warning to Europeans that there was no guarantee of peace and stability. In this remarkable book, Ian Kershaw has created a grand panorama of the world we live in and where it came from. Drawing on examples from all across Europe, Roller-Coaster will make us all rethink Europe and what it means to be European"--Publisher description. |
By Cerami, Charles A. Publishing Date: ©2005 Classification: 900 Call Number: 973.4 CER A history of the making of the Constitution focuses on Madison and Hamilton's dynamic leadership contributions to the effort to construct a national government. America's great underdog story from New York Times bestselling author Charles Cerami. Seven years after the revolution, America was in crisis. The government didn't work, but the citizens didn't care-or were in a state of rebellion. Then two unknown men, Hamilton and Madison (unknown especially compared to the revered Founding Fathers), envisioned a plan that no one else thought could happen: a truly United States. Against all odds, these men maneuvered and strategized to get the right men to agree on the right ideas. The result: the most brilliant political document ever and a powerful United States. |
NEW RELEASE Landslide: the final days of the Trump White House By Wolff, Michael Publishing Date: 2021 Classification: 900 Call Number: 973.933 WOL "The story of Trump's ... last months at the helm of the country, based on [the author's] ... access to White House aides and to the former president himself, yielding a wealth of new information and insights about what really happened inside the highest office in the land, and the world"-- |
By Woodward, Bob Publishing Date: 2020 Classification: 900 Call Number: 973.933 WOO An account of the Trump presidency draws on interviews with firsthand sources, meeting notes, diaries, and confidential documents to provide details about Trump's moves as he faced a global pandemic, economic disaster, and racial unrest. |