Washoe County Library System

"In Two-Step Devil, Quatro delivers a striking and formally inventive story of the unlikely relationship between two strangers on the margins of society and the shadowy forces that threaten their futures. It's 2014 in Lookout Mountain, Alabama, where the Prophet--a seventy-year-old man who paints his visions--lives off the grid in a cabin near the Georgia border. While scrounging for materials at the local dump, the Prophet sees a car pull up to an...

In this monumental new book, award-winning author Mark Kurlansky has written his most ambitious work to date: a singular and ultimately definitive look at a pivotal moment in history.

With 1968, Mark Kurlansky brings to teeming life the cultural and political history of that world-changing year of social upheaval. People think of it as the year of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Yet it was also the year of the Martin Luther...

The religious diplomacy of Saudi Arabia constitutes a strange black hole in the analysis of radicalism that affects Islam and the Middle East today. Why has Salafism, the most intolerant and sectarian movement of Islam, become so prevalent? Of all the religious radicalisms that rot the planet, it is the only one to enjoy the constant support of a country endowed with immense means: the Saudi kingdom. This study, whose collaborators wanted to remain...

"From a smattering of ominous right-wing compounds in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s, to the shocking January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, America has seen the culmination of a long-building war on democracy being waged by a fundamentallyviolent and antidemocratic far-right movement that unironically calls itself the "Patriot" movement. So how did we get here? Award-winning journalist David Neiwert--who has been following the rise...

The riveting story of two sisters' journey to the Islamic State and the father who tries to bring them home. ?sne Seierstad puts the problem of radicalization into painfully human terms, using instant messages and other primary sources to reconstruct a family's crisis from the inside. Eventually, she takes us into the hellscape of the Syrian civil war, as Sadiq risks his life in pursuit of his daughters, refusing to let them disappear into the maelstrom....

"A harrowing tale of how polarization threatened to break apart two American communities and how one found a way back while the other splintered. Donald Trump’s November 2016 electoral victory was the beginning of four years of demagogy, presidential name-calling, and—ten months into a pandemic—an incitement to violence that led a mob of thousands to descend on the Capitol in Washington, DC. Fueled by suspicion, conspiracy, and bigotry, a faction...

A compelling, definitive account of how and why bin Laden's ideology keeps rising from the dead. When Osama bin Laden was killed by a U.S. Navy SEAL, many prophesied al-Qaeda's imminent demise. In reality the opposite has occurred. Why? Watching the Arab Spring from his Pakistani safe house, bin Laden had seen an historic opportunity: "The next stage will be the return of the caliphate." In the six years since bin Laden's death, al-Qaeda's affiliates...

In an era defined by mass incarceration, endless war, economic crisis, catastrophic environmental destruction, and a political system offering more of the same, radical social transformation has never been more urgent--or seemed more remote. A manifesto for movement-makers in extraordinary times, Demand the Impossible! urges us to imagine a world beyond what this rotten system would have us believe is possible. In critiquing the world around us, insurgent...

"At fourteen, Christian Picciolini was recruited by a now notorious skinhead leader and encouraged to fight with the movement to "protect the white race from extinction." Soon, he had become an expert in racist ideology, a neo-Nazi terror who roamed the neighborhood, quick to throw fists. By the time he left the movement years later and was able to see clearly for the first time, Picciolini found that his life was in shambles and the nation around...

The Biden-Harris progressive agenda presents a radical change to the American economy, values, national security, and freedom. From the former Trump White House press secretary and New York Times bestselling author of THE BRIEFING and LEADING AMERICA comes a stark warning: Under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, America is lurching towards economic collapse, runaway inflation, wide-open borders, an all-out assault on human life and religious liberty, a...