Washoe County Library System

Shares the story of the author's family and upbringing, describing how they moved from poverty to an upwardly mobile clan that included the author, a Yale Law School graduate, while navigating the demands of middle class life and the collective demons of the past.

A young North Korean defector and activist describes her father's imprisonment by the regime of Kim Jong-Il, her enslavement in China, and her walk through the freezing Gobi Desert to freedom in South Korea.

"...the dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking story of families striving toward a better life in one of the twenty-first century's great, unequal cities"--Jacket.

"Why is America living in an age of profound economic inequality?...as Jane Mayer shows in this powerful, meticulously reported history, a network of exceedingly wealthy people with extreme libertarian views bankrolled a systematic, step-by-step plan to fundamentally alter the American political system...Their core beliefs--that taxes are a form of tyranny; that government oversight of business is an assault on freedom--are sincerely held. But these...

A celebrated foreign policy expert and key Trump impeachment witness, drawing on her own personal journey out of poverty, shares what she has learned and shows why expanding opportunity is the only long-term hope for our democracy.

"In 1946, Günther Quandt—patriarch of Germany’s most iconic industrial empire, a dynasty that today controls BMW—was arrested for suspected Nazi collaboration. Quandt claimed that he had been forced to join the party by his archrival, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, and the courts acquitted him. But Quandt lied. And his heirs, and those of other Nazi billionaires, have only grown wealthier in the generations since, while their reckoning...

"Explores the history, culture, and politics of Texas, while holding the stereotypes up for rigorous scrutiny. God Save Texas is a journey through the most controversial state in America. It is a red state in the heart of Trumpland that hasn't elected a Democrat to a statewide office in more than twenty years; but it is also a state in which minorities already form a majority (including the largest number of Muslim adherents). The cities are blue...

"How did a single manhunt spark the modern era of multinational capitalism? Henry Avery was the seventeenth century's most notorious pirate. The press published wildly popular--and wildly inaccurate--reports of his nefarious adventures. The British government offered enormous bounties for his capture, alive or (preferably) dead. But Steven Johnson argues that Avery's most lasting legacy was his inadvertent triggering of a new model for the global...

The financial meltdown from the perspective of a number of players: Michael Burry, a bizarre autistic-like stock-picking genius, and the first to realize that the market's housing boom is based on a "house of cards" sham; Mark Baum, self-loathing fictional character whose firm picks up insider trading information from a wrong number phone call; Jared Vennet, a smart-aleck broker who confirms the ominous suspicion; and Charlie Gellar and Jamie Shipley,...

Celebrated economic policy maker and political theorist Robert B. Reich argues that the nation's 2008 economic collapse is the result of an increasing concentration of income and wealth at the top--and a middle class that had to go deeply into debt to maintain a decent standard of living. To ensure that prosperity is widely shared, he continues, requires the implementation of a much broader safety net for the middle class financed by higher marginal...