Catalog Search Results
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
Often revealingly autobiographical, Du Bois explores topics as diverse as the death of his infant son and the politics of Booker T. Washington. In every essay, he shows the consequences of both a political color line and an internal one, as he grapples with the contradictions of being black and being American.--Publisher's description.
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
An award-winning historian presents an absorbing account of the French mind, shedding light on France's famous tradition of intellectual life.
Why are the French such an exceptional nation? Why do they think they are so exceptional? The French take pride in the fact that their history and culture have decisively shaped the values and ideals of the modern world. French ideas are no less distinct in their form: while French thought is abstract, stylish...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
A seminal work as melodious and haunting as the era it chronicles.
First published in 1968, Weimar Culture is one of the masterworks of Peter Gay's distinguished career. A study of German culture between the two wars, the book brilliantly traces the rise of the artistic, literary, and musical culture that bloomed ever so briefly in the 1920s amid the chaos of Germany's tenuous post-World War I democracy, and crashed violently in the wake of Hitler's...
Author
Language
English
Description
Journalist Masha Gessen follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers, and writers, sexual and social beings. Gessen charts their paths against the machinations of the regime that would crush...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Freedom To Read!
Frequently banned or challenged books from 1990-1999
Frequently banned or challenged books from 2000-2009
Frequently banned or challenged books from 2010-2019
Frequently banned or challenged books from 1990-1999
Frequently banned or challenged books from 2000-2009
Frequently banned or challenged books from 2010-2019
Description
This autobiography captures the life of Maya Angelou. Readers learn how she survived rape, the painful discovery of the true nature of her father, how she found independence, and how she coped with having a baby out of wedlock, which she loved and kept. First book of an autobiographical series.
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Spanning a variety of disciplines, from religion, philosophy, and political thought, to cultural criticism, social theory, and the arts, Ideas That Made America: A Brief History shows how ideas have been major forces in American history, driving movements such as transcendentalism, Social Darwinism, conservatism, and postmodernism"--
10) Roughing it
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
Mark Twain's account of his transformation into a Westerner after he went to join his brother, a newly appointed federal official, in Nevada.
"Though known throughout the world for his fictional novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain was also a skilled chronicler of his own life and experiences. In his youth, Twain traveled extensively throughout the untamed American West with his brother, working his...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
Will in the World interweaves a searching account of Elizabethan England with a vivid narrative of the playwright's life. We see Shakespeare learning his craft, starting a family, and forging a career for himself in the wildly competitive London theater world, while at the same time grappling with dangerous religious and political forces that took less-agile figures to the scaffold. The basic biographical facts of Shakespeare's life have been known...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Over the last four centuries, a small group of thinkers attempted to answer a series of remarkably challenging questions: In a world having a history of untold suffering - especially, it seemed, for Jews - was the existence of an all-powerful and comforting God still tenable? What were the purpose and meaning of Jewish practices and customs? Could Jews still justify the notion of a chosen people in a social climate in which Jewish integration and...
Author
Language
English
Description
Founded by Alexander the Great and built by self-styled Greek pharaohs, the city of Alexandria at its height dwarfed both Athens and Rome. It was the marvel of its age, legendary for its vast palaces, safe harbors, and magnificent lighthouse. But it was most famous for the astonishing intellectual efflorescence it fostered and the library it produced. If the European Renaissance was the "rebirth" of Western culture, then Alexandria, Egypt, was its...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"A myth-shattering view of the medieval Islamic world's myriad scientific innovations, which preceded-and enabled-the European Renaissance. The Arabic legacy of science and philosophy has long been hidden from the West. British-Iraqi physicist Jim Al-Khalili unveils that legacy to fascinating effect by returning to its roots in the hubs of Arab innovation that would advance science and jump-start the European Renaissance. Inspired by the Koranic injunction...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
In The Slaveholders' Dilemma, Eugene D. Genovese explores the efforts of American slaveholders to reconcile the intellectual dilemma in which they found themselves as supporters of freedom but defenders of slavery. In the American South slaveholders perceived themselves as thoroughly modern, moral men who protected human progress against the perversions of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Surprisingly, they also accepted the widespread...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
More than just a huge #1 best seller, this is one of the great and vitally important books of our time. Allan Bloom, a professor of social thought at the University of Chicago and a noted translator of Plato and Rousseau, argues that the social and political crisis of modern America is really an intellectual crisis. From the universities' lack of purpose to their students' lack of learning, from the jargon of liberation to the supplanting of reason...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Roosevelt Montás is senior lecturer at Columbia University's Center for American Studies and director of its Freedom and Citizenship Program, which introduces low-income high school students to the Western political tradition through the study of foundational texts. From 2008 to 2018, he was director of Columbia's Center for the Core Curriculum. He lives in New York City. Twitter @rooseveltmontas
A Dominican-born academic tells the story of how...
Author
Language
English
Description
A wise and witty compendium of the greatest thoughts, greatest minds, and greatest books of all time-listed in accessible and succinct form-by one of the world's greatest scholars. From the "Hundred Best Books" to the "Ten Greatest Thinkers" to the "Ten Greatest Poets," here is a concise collection of the world's most significant knowledge. For the better part of a century, Will Durant dwelled upon-and wrote about-the most significant eras, individuals,...
Author
Language
English
Description
In 1882, Emily Dickinson's brother Austin began a passionate love affair with Mabel Todd, a young Amherst faculty wife, setting in motion a series of events that would forever change the lives of the Dickinson family. The feud that erupted as a result has continued for over a century. Lyndall Gordon, an award-winning biographer, tells the riveting story of the Dickinsons, and reveals Emily as a very different woman from the pale, lovelorn recluse...
20) Madame Bovary
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
Emma Bovary becomes bored with her life and embarks on an affair.
In ILL (Inter-Library Loan) Services
Didn't find what you needed? Items not owned by the member libraries of the Westchester Library System can be requested via Inter-library Loan from other libraries to be delivered to your local library for pickup.