Frank Carlson Library

Her name is Barbara - in Russian, Varvara. Nimble-witted and attentive, she's allowed into the employ of the Empress Elizabeth amid the glitter and cruelty of the world's most eminent court. Under the tutelage of Count Bestuzhev, Chancellor and spymaster, Varvara will learn to listen and to wait for opportunity. That opportunity arrives in a slender young princess from Zerbst named Sophie, a playful teenager destined to become the indomitable Catherine...

"Before there was Catherine the Great, there was Catherine Alexeyevna: the first woman to rule Russia in her own right. Ellen Alpsten's rich, sweeping first-person narrative is the story of her rise to power. St. Petersburg, 1725. Peter the Great lies dying in his magnificent Winter Palace. The weakness and treachery of his only son has driven his father to an appalling act of cruelty and left the empire without an heir. Russia risks falling into...

Dr. Brian Weiss is a highly respected psychiatrist from the mainstream of the medical establishment. Catherine is one of his most difficult cases, a twenty-seven year old woman racked by phobias and anxieties. In the course of Catherine's treatment, Dr. Weiss makes a startling discovery. Under hypnosis, she recollects, in vivid detail, events from past lives ranging from the prehistoric times and ancient Egypt to the 20th Century and the fires of...

Poisoner, besotted mother, despot, necromancer, engineer of a massacre: the dark legend of Catherine de Medici is centuries old. In this critically hailed biography, Leonie Frieda reclaims the story of this unjustly maligned queen of France to reveal a skilled ruler battling extraordinary political and personal odds. Based on comprehensive research including thousands of Catherine's own letters, Frieda unfurls Catherine's story from her troubled childhood...

An intimate portrait of Louisa Catherine Adams, the wife of John Quincy Adams, who witnessed firsthand the greatest transformations of her time. Born in London to an American father and a British mother on the eve of the Revolutionary War, Louisa Catherine Johnson was raised in circumstances very different from the New England upbringing of the future president John Quincy Adams, whose life had been dedicated to public service from the earliest...

A fascinating story of spirits and conjurors, skeptics and converts in the second half of nineteenth century America viewed through the lives of Kate and Maggie Fox, the sisters whose purported communication with the dead gave rise to the Spiritualism movement – and whose recanting forty years later is still shrouded in mystery. In March of 1848, Kate and Maggie Fox – sisters aged 11 and 14 – anxiously reported to a neighbor that they had...

A Catherine LeVendeur mystery Catherine LeVendeur is a creature of twelfth-century France. Her life is a mirror of that time but she is a unique spirit, determined to make her way in the world and armed with a keen mind and a curiosity that often puts her in peril. Her life is both a reflection of the bonds placed upon a woman in her society and the ways in which a strong personality can triumph and succeed in spite of those strictures. Catherine...

"Close-Up on War tells the story of French-born Catherine Leroy, one of the Vietnam War's few woman photographers, who documented some of the fiercest fighting in the 20-year conflict. Despite being told that women didn't belong in a "man's world," she was cool under fire, gravitated toward the thickest battles, went along on the soldiers' slogs through the heat and mud of the jungle, crawled through rice paddies, and became the only official photojournalist...