Washoe County Library System

The tranquility of Mars is disrupted by the earthmen who have come to conquer space, colonize the planet, and escape a doomed Earth. "Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles is a must-read for any fan of science fiction or fantasy, a crucial precursor to films like Avatar and Alien and books like Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars and Dan Simmons' Hyperion, and a haunting prophesy of humanity's destiny to bring our old dreams and follies along with us...

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.

"Its theme is political fanaticism, with which it deals severely and brilliantly." —New Yorker

The famous bestseller with "concise insight into what drives the mind of the fanatic and the dynamics of a mass movement" (Wall Street Journal) by the legendary San Francisco longshoreman.

A stevedore on the San Francisco docks in the 1940s, Eric Hoffer wrote philosophical treatises in his spare time

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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....

The Gulag Archipelago is Solzhenitsyn's masterwork, a history of the Soviet forced labor and concentration camp system: a vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators and also of heroism, a Stalinist anti-world at the heart of the Soviet Union where the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair. Written between 1958 and 1968, it was published in the West in 1973, thereafter circulating...

Describes individual escapes and attempted escapes from Stalin's camps.

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's famous investigations of "optimal experience" have revealed that what makes an experience genuinely satisfying is a state of consciousness called flow. During flow, people typically experience deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement with life. In this new edition of his groundbreaking classic work, Csikszentmihalyi demonstrates the ways this positive state can be controlled, not just left to chance....

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...