Washoe County Library System

A time-and-motion expert and his engineer wife use scientific principles to raise their twelve children. What do you get when you put twelve lively kids together with a father -- a famous efficiency expert -- who believes families can run like factories, and a mother who is his partner in everything except discipline? You get a hilarious tale of growing up that has made generations of kids and adults alike laugh along with the Gilbreths in "Cheaper...

The only authorized translation of the bestselling masterpiece by one of the greatest authors of our time, "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" is part fairy tale, part literary criticism, part political tract, part musicology, and part autobiography.

A beautiful, yet disturbing, tale of two people traveling into the Sahara. Although the couple appear to be smart, independent travelers, they are not equipped to travel into the desert. Thus, each time hardship strikes, pieces of their comfortable lives and the identities they had constructed seem to peel away. The shifting sands and unforgiving sun are metaphors for the shocking and vulgar circumstances that befall them.

Ex-Green Beret George Hayduke has returned from war to find his beloved southwestern desert threatened by industrial development. Joining with Bronx exile and feminist saboteur Bonnie Abzug, wilderness guide and outcast Mormon Seldom Seen Smith, and libertarian billboard torcher Doc Sarvis, M.D., Hayduke is ready to fight the powertaking on the strip miners, clear-cutters, and the highway, dam, and bridge builders who are threatening the natural habitat....

This work, a collection of essays on the natural world during a year spent in the Blue Ridge valley of Virginia, reflects the author's interactions with her wilderness surroundings. The author takes us through a year of on-foot explorations through her own landscape, bringing anecdotes, curiosities, and insights about all she observes and experiences. In the summer, she stalks muskrats in the creek and thinks about wave mechanics; in the fall, she...

Reconstruction chronicles the way in which Americans, black and white, responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the war and the end of slavery. It addresses the quest of emancipated slaves&; searching for economic autonomy and equal citizenship, and describes the remodeling of Southern society; the evolution of racial attitudes and patterns of race relations; and the emergence of a national state possessing vastly expanded authority and...