Washoe County Library System

Winter is coming. Such is the stern motto of House Stark, the northernmost of the fiefdoms that owe allegiance to King Robert Baratheon in far-off King’s Landing. There Eddard Stark of Winterfell rules in Robert’s name. There his family dwells in peace and comfort: his proud wife, Catelyn; his sons Robb, Brandon, and Rickon; his daughters Sansa and Arya; and his bastard son, Jon Snow. Far to the north, behind the towering Wall, lie savage Wildings...

Journalist, scholar, and chess enthusiast Daniel Johnson is our guide to one of history's most remarkable periods, when chess matches were front-page news and captured the world's imagination. The Cold War played out in many areas: geopolitical alliances, military coalitions, espionage, the arms race, proxy wars--and chess. An essential pastime of Russian intellectuals and revolutionaries, later adopted by the Communists as a symbol of Soviet power,...

THE ACCLAIMED INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER. The unbelievable true story of the Cold Wars strangest proxy war, fought between the zoos on either side of the Berlin Wall. Living in West Berlin in the 1960s often felt like living in a zoo, everyone packed together behind a wall, with the world always watching. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the East Berlin zoo was spacious and lush, a socialist utopia where everything was perfectly planned...and...

Follows a fourteen-year-old American girl whose life unexpectedly transforms when she moves to London in 1952 and gets swept up in a race to save the world from nuclear war.

On May 20, 1969, the thirty-story-high Apollo 11-Saturn V spaceship was trundled from Cape Kennedy’s Vehicle Assembly Building to Pad 39A for its final inspection and countdown. The nearly 1 million spectators who began gathering at Cape Kennedy for launch on July 16, 1969, were kept at least 3.5 miles away from the pad because, in an explosion, hundred-pound chunks of shrapnel would be hurled in a 3-mile radius. Finally, at 9:32 a.m., Neil...

"A novel set in 1970s Moscow following a group of Jewish dissidents"-- "A thrilling, witty, and slyly original Cold War mystery about a ragtag group of Jewish refuseniks in Moscow. On his wedding day in 1976, Viktor Moroz stumbles upon a murder scene: two gay men, one of them a U.S. official, have been axed to death in Moscow. Viktor, a Jewish refusenik, is stuck in the Soviet Union because the government has denied his application to leave for...

Historian Fergusson provides a revolutionary reinterpretation of the modern era that resolves its central paradox: why unprecedented progress coincided with unprecedented violence, and why the seeming triumph of the West bore the seeds of its undoing. From the conflicts that presaged the First World War to the aftershocks of the Cold War, the twentieth century was by far the bloodiest in all of human history. How can we explain the astonishing scale...