Frank Carlson Library

Dive into the dark and pulsating streets of Victorian England with Charles Dickens' timeless masterpiece, "Oliver Twist." Follow the captivating destiny of Oliver Twist, a brave young orphan, as he confronts the injustice, poverty, and cruelty of the world around him. Oliver, mistreated in an orphanage, escapes to London where he becomes entangled with a gang of thieves led by the infamous Fagin. But Oliver is different. His innocence and purity...

In this insightful book, Thomas Cahill, internationally-acclaimed historian and author of the runaway bestseller How the Irish Saved Civilization (RB# 94747), reveals the changes in thinking that made Western civilization possible. A New York Times best-seller, The Gifts of the Jews is his accessible portrait of an ancient society and their vision that would later inspire the concept of individual worth. Until the third millennium, it was a widely-held...

"At a glittering society party in St. Petersburg in 1805, conversations are dominated by the prospect of war. Terror swiftly engulfs the country as Napoleon?s army marches on Russia, and the lives of three young people are changed forever. The stories of quixotic Pierre, cynical Andrey, and impetuous Natasha interweave with a huge cast, from aristocrats and peasants, to soldiers and Napoleon himself. In War and Peace, Tolstoy entwines grand themes--conflict...

A compilation, selected from various sources and arranged chronologically, of the reminiscences of slaves and ex-slaves about their experiences from the leaving of Africa through the Civil War and into the early twentieth century. Paired with historical commentary and powerful paintings, Julius Lester's book presents what it felt like to be a slave in America through the words of black men and women who lived it rather than filtering through the eyes...

One day in 2009, twenty-four-old Susannah Cahalan woke up alone in a strange hospital room, strapped to her bed, under guard, and unable to move or speak. A wristband marked her as a "flight risk," and her medical records, chronicling a monthlong hospital stay of which she had no memory at all, showed hallucinations, violence, and dangerous instability. Only weeks earlier, Susannah had been on the threshold of a new, adult life, a healthy, ambitious...

Since the first humans looked up and saw the sun swallowed by darkness, our species has been captivated by solar eclipses. Astronomer and anthropologist Anthony Aveni explains the history and culture surrounding solar eclipses, from prehistoric Stonehenge to Babylonian creation myths, to a confirmation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, to a spectacle that left New Yorkers in the moon’s shadow, to future eclipses that will capture human...

Emma's opening sentence, which describes the titular heroine's many advantages, is loaded with foreboding. Discomfort and vexation lie on the horizon, triggered by her penchant for matchmaking. Emma's latest scheme involves finding a suitable husband for ingenue Harriet Smith, and to that end she persuades the latter to reject good-natured farmer Robert Martin, despite a mutual attraction. Harriet must set her sights higher, she exhorts, fixing on...

In this the first book ever written about the CIA's Office of Technical Service, former director Robert Wallace (a real-life Q, straight out of the James Bond films) and internationally renowned intelligence historian H. Keith Melton offer an unprecedented look at the CIA's most secretive operations and the devices that made them possible. Against a backdrop of geopolitical tensions including the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the current...

Drawn from letters, diaries, speeches, articles, poems, songs, military reports, legal opinions, and memoirs, this collection brings together over 120 pieces by more than 60 men and women to create a firsthand narrative of the first year of the Civil War. Beginning on the eve of Lincoln's election in 1860 and ending in January 1862 with the appointment of Edwin M. Stanton as Secretary of War, the selections provide a sense of the immediacy, uncertainty,...