Washoe County Library System

Cleo, scion of a once-prominent Cuban family and a promising young writer in her own right, travels to Spain to collect a prestigious award. There, Cuban expats view her with suspicion--assuming she's an informant for the Castro regime. To Cleo's surprise, that suspicion follows her home to Cuba, where she finds herself under constant surveillance by the government. When she meets and falls in love with a Hollywood filmmaker, she discovers her family...

At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union, to its surprise and delight, found itself in control of a huge swath of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to Communism, a completely new political and moral system. Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were...

"The story of Libya over the last half-century is about as extraordinary as it gets. Following a coup by the 27-year-old Muammar Qaddafi and his fellow junior officers in 1969, what had been a failing monarchical state was transformed into the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriyah. For many years Qaddafi pursued an independent and capricious political course, alienating fellow Arab regimes and Western governments alike by ill-judged interventions...