Washoe County Library System

"Essays about 1990s popular culture, politics, sports, literature, music. In The Nineties, Chuck Klosterman makes a home in all of it: the film, the music, the sports, the TV, the politics, the changes regarding race and class and sexuality, the yin/yang of Oprah and Alan Greenspan. In perhaps no other book ever written would a sentence like, “The video for ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was not more consequential than the reunification...

"What is the value of a liberal education? Traditionally characterized by a rigorous engagement with the classics of Western thought and literature, this approach to education is all but extinct in American universities, replaced by flexible distribution requirements and ever-narrower academic specialization. Many academics attack the very idea of a Western canon as chauvinistic, while the general public increasingly doubts the value of the humanities....

"The architect Le Corbusier once called Buenos Aires 'the capital of an imaginary empire.' From its foundation in the sixteenth century, Argentina's main city has been a place of the imagination as well as the scene of many striking historical events. This cultural guide looks at the impact of history and the efforts of men and women to build a city that would fulfill their dreams, as well as bringing today's Buenos Aires vividly to life for the visitor....

"A brilliantly constructed popular history of the world careening toward the Second World War, as told through the love lives of some of the most famous and fascinating figures of the era. As the Roaring Twenties wind down, the great minds of the time have their minds on other concerns besides art and war. Jean-Paul Sartre waits anxiously in a Parisian cafae for his first date with Simone de Beauvoir, who stands him up. Marlene Dietrich slips from...

Describes how some of Paris's famous artists and writers, such as Pablo Picasso, Max Jacob, and Guillaume Apollinaire, spend their day before preparing to attend a party at Gertrude Stein's apartment.

"From the best-selling author behind My Weird School: a quirky new biography series that casts fresh light on high-interest historic figures. Did you know that Albert Einstein was a high school dropout, and that he failed his physics class when he finally made it to college? Or that when he died, his brain and eyeballs were removed from his body? Ever wondered why his hair looked so wild? Siblings Paige and Turner do-and they've collected some of...

"A magnificent, foundational reckoning with how Black Americans have used the written word to define and redefine themselves, in resistance to the lies of racism and often in heated disagreement with each other, over the course of the country's history. Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s legendary Harvard introductory course in African American Studies, The Black Box: Writing the Race, is the story of Black self-definition in...