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The Library will be closed Friday, March 29th and Sunday, March 31st in observance of Good Friday and Easter Sunday. We will be OPEN Saturday, March 30th. Remember, our online resources are always available! 

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The Truths We Hold

Kamala Harris

Senator Kamala Harris's commitment to speaking truth is informed by her upbringing. The daughter of immigrants, she was raised in an Oakland, California community that cared deeply about social justice; her parents--an esteemed economist from Jamaica and an admired cancer researcher from India--met as activists in the civil rights movement when they were graduate students at Berkeley. Growing up, Harris herself never hid her passion for justice, and when she became a prosecutor out of law school, a deputy district attorney, she quickly established herself as one of the most innovative change agents in American law enforcement. She progressed rapidly to become the elected District Attorney for San Francisco, and then the chief law enforcement officer of the state of California as a whole. Known for bringing a voice to the voiceless, she took on the big banks during the foreclosure crisis, winning a historic settlement for California's working families. Her hallmarks were applying a holistic, data-driven approach to many of California's thorniest issues, always eschewing stale "tough on crime" rhetoric as presenting a series of false choices. Neither "tough" nor "soft" but smart on crime became her mantra. Being smart means learning the truths that can make us better as a community, and supporting those truths with all our might. That has been the pole star that guided Harris to a transformational career as the top law enforcement official in California, and it is guiding her now as a transformational United States Senator, grappling with an array of complex issues that affect her state, our country, and the world, from health care and the new economy to immigration, national security, the opioid crisis, and accelerating inequality.

By reckoning with the big challenges we face together, drawing on the hard-won wisdom and insight from her own career and the work of those who have most inspired her, Kamala Harris offers in THE TRUTHS WE HOLD a master class in problem solving, in crisis management, and leadership in challenging times. Through the arc of her own life, on into the great work of our day, she communicates a vision of shared struggle, shared purpose, and shared values. In a book rich in many home truths, not least is that a relatively small number of people work very hard to convince a great many of us that we have less in common than we actually do, but it falls to us to look past them and get on with the good work of living our common truth. When we do, our shared effort will continue to sustain us and this great nation, now and in the years to come.

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The United States of Trump

Bill O'Reilly

Readers around the world have been enthralled by journalist and New York Times bestselling author Bill O’Reilly’s Killing series—riveting works of nonfiction that explore the most famous events in history. Now, O’Reilly turns his razor-sharp observations to his most compelling subject thus far—President Donald J. Trump. In this thrilling narrative, O’Reilly blends primary, never-before-released interview material with a history that recounts Trump’s childhood and family and the factors from his life and career that forged the worldview that the president of the United States has taken to the White House.

Not a partisan pro-Trump or anti-Trump book, this is an up-to-the-minute, intimate view of the man and his sphere of influence—of “how Donald Trump’s view of America was formed, and how it has changed since becoming the most powerful person in the world”— from a writer who has known the president for thirty years. This is an unprecedented, gripping account of the life of a sitting president as he makes history.

As the author will tell you, “If you want some insight into the most unlikely political phenomenon of our lifetimes, you’ll get it here.”

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Barack and Joe

Steven Levingston

The extraordinary partnership of Barack Obama and Joe Biden is unique in American history. The two men, their characters and styles sharply contrasting, formed a dynamic working relationship that evolved into a profound friendship. Their affinity was not predestined. Obama and Biden began wary of each other: Obama an impatient freshman disdainful of the Senate's plodding ways; Biden a veteran of the chamber and proud of its traditions.

Gradually they came to respect each other's values and strengths and rode into the White House together in 2008. Side-by-side through two tension-filled terms, they shared the day-to-day joys and struggles of leading the most powerful nation on earth. They accommodated each other's quirks: Biden's famous miscues kept coming, and Obama overlooked them knowing they were insignificant except as media fodder. With his expertise in foreign affairs and legislative matters, Biden took on an unprecedented role as chief adviser to Obama, reshaping the vice presidency. Together Obama and Biden guided Americans through a range of historic moments: a devastating economic crisis, racial confrontations, war in Afghanistan, and the dawn of same-sex marriage nationwide. They supported each other through highs and lows: Obama provided a welcome shoulder during the illness and death of Biden's son Beau.

As many Americans turn a nostalgic eye toward the Obama presidency, Barack and Joe offers a new look at this administration, its absence of scandal, dedication to truth, and respect for the media. This is the first book to tell the full story of this historic relationship and its substantial impact on the Obama presidency and its legacy.

 

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The Book of Joe

Jeff Wilser

The aviators. The Amtrak train. The ice cream cones. The opoint.o Few politicians are as iconic, or as beloved, as Joe Biden. Now, in The Book of Joe, Biden fans will finally have the definitive look at America's favorite vice president-and what he can teach us.

Structured around key moments in Biden's life and career-and filled with Biden-isms like oThat's a bunch of malarkeyo and oI may be Irish, but I'm not stupido-this blend of biography, advice, and humor will reveal the experiences that forged Joe Biden, and the lessons we can use in our own lives. Along the way, readers will also encounter fun sidebars on his love of muscle cars, his most endearing gaffes, his bromance with President Obama, and much more.

Yet beneath the memorable Biden-isms, the book will reveal an inspirational story of a man who keeps ogetting back up.o We need this right now. Much as Biden has come back from both professional missteps and personal heartbreaks, sometimes we all have to get back up and fight. Given Biden's reputation as a decent, plainspoken, patriotic statesman of integrity, this entertaining and practical book will be both a celebration of great political figure and an essential guide to creating the America he believes in so dearly.

 

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The Method to the Madness

Allen Salkin

A Rosetta Stone for understanding Donald Trump's style, mindset, and every action, made up of over one hundred interviews with his closest associates and adversaries over the last 15 years.

To his critics, Donald Trump is an impulsive, undisciplined crackpot who accidentally lucked into the presidency. But in The Method to the Madness, reporters Allen Salkin and Aaron Short reveal that nothing could be further from the truth. This objective, nonpartisan oral history shows that Trump had carefully planned his bid for the presidency since he launched what many considered to be a joke candidacy in 1999.

Between 2000 and 2015, when he announced his candidacy in the lobby of Trump Tower, he was able to identify an unserved political constituency, hone a persuasive message that appealed to their needs, and deliver it effectively, despite intense media opposition.

Through candid conversations with more than 100 subjects close to the President, Salkin and Short make the case that Donald Trump’s ostensibly erratic approach to politics is consistent with his carefully honed personal and professional style of information gathering, opinion seed-planting, and conclusion sharing. His business, media, and political dealings from this era serve as a guide for understanding the man, his mindset, and his every action.

The Method to the Madness is an accessible and unbiased oral history that brings readers into the private rooms where decisions are made, confidences are broken, strong words fly, and not all eye-witnesses see the same scene in quite the same way. Full of scoops both large and small, this is the first book to bring Trump, the politician, into focus.

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The Year of Voting Dangerously

Maureen Dowd

Trapped between two candidates with the highest recorded unfavorables, Americans are plunged into The Year of Voting Dangerously. In this perilous and shocking campaign season, The New York Times columnist traces the psychologies and pathologies in one of the nastiest and most significant battles of the sexes ever.

Dowd has covered Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton since the '90s. She was with the real estate mogul when he shyly approached his first Presidential rope line in 1999, and she won a Pulitzer prize that same year for her penetrating columns on the Clinton impeachment follies. Like her bestsellers, Bushworld and Are Men Necessary?, The Year of Voting Dangerously will feature Dowd's trademark cocktail of wry humor and acerbic analysis in dispatches from the political madhouse. If America is on the escalator to hell, then The Year of Voting Dangerously is the perfect guide for this surreal, insane ride.

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Unrigged

David Daley

Following Ratf**ked, his "extraordinary timely and undeniably important" (New York Times Book Review) exposé of how a small cadre of Republican operatives rigged American elections, David Daley emerged as one of the nation's leading authorities on gerrymandering. In Unrigged, he charts a vibrant political movement that is rising in the wake of his and other reporters' revelations. With his trademark journalistic rigor and narrative flair, Daley reports on Pennsylvania's dramatic defeat of a gerrymander using the research of ingenious mathematicians and the Michigan millennial who launched a statewide redistricting revolution with a Facebook post. He tells the stories of activist groups that paved the way for 2018's historic blue wave and won crucial battles for voting rights in Florida, Maine, Utah, and nationwide. In an age of polarization, Unrigged offers a vivid portrait of a nation transformed by a new civic awakening, and provides a blueprint for what must be done to keep American democracy afloat.

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Let the People Pick the President

Jesse Wegman

The framers of the Constitution battled over it. Lawmakers have tried to amend or abolish it more than 700 times. To this day, millions of voters, and even members of Congress, misunderstand how it works. It deepens our national divide and distorts the core democratic principles of political equality and majority rule. How can we tolerate the Electoral College when every vote does not count the same, and the candidate who gets the most votes can lose?

Twice in the last five elections, the Electoral College has overridden the popular vote, calling the integrity of the entire system into question—and creating a false picture of a country divided into bright red and blue blocks when in fact we are purple from coast to coast. Even when the popular-vote winner becomes president, tens of millions of Americans—Republicans and Democrats alike—find that their votes didn't matter. And, with statewide winner-take-all rules, only a handful of battleground states ultimately decide who will become president.

Now, as political passions reach a boiling point at the dawn of the 2020 race, the message from the American people is clear: The way we vote for the only official whose job it is to represent all Americans is neither fair nor just. Major reform is needed—now. Isn't it time to let the people pick the president?

In this thoroughly researched and engaging call to arms, Supreme Court journalist and New York Times editorial board member Jesse Wegman draws upon the history of the founding era, as well as information gleaned from campaign managers, field directors, and other officials from twenty-first-century Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns, to make a powerful case for abolishing the antiquated and antidemocratic Electoral College. In Let the People Pick the President he shows how we can at long last make every vote in the United States count—and restore belief in our democratic system.

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The Democracy Fix

Caroline Fredrickson

The former special assistant for legislative affairs to President Clinton, president of the American Constitution Society, and author of the “damn fine” (Elle) Under the Bus shows how the left can undo the right’s damage and take the country back

Despite representing the beliefs of a minority of the American public on many issues, conservatives are in power not just in Washington, DC, but also in state capitals and courtrooms across the country. They got there because, while progressives fought to death over the nuances of policy and to bring attention to specific issues, conservatives focused on simply gaining power by gaming our democracy. They understood that policy follows power, not the other way around.

Now, in a sensational new book, Caroline Fredrickson—who has had a front-row seat on the political drama in DC for decades while working to shape progressive policies as special assistant for legislative affairs to President Clinton, chief of staff to Senator Maria Cantwell, deputy chief of staff to Senator Tom Daschle, and president of the American Constitution Society—argues that it’s time for progressives to focus on winning. She shows us how we can learn from the Right by having the determination to focus on judicial elections, state power, and voter laws without stooping to their dishonest, rule-breaking tactics. We must be ruthless in thinking through how to change the rules of the game to regain power, expand the franchise, end voter suppression, win judicial elections, and fight for transparency and fairness in our political system, and Fredrickson shows us how.

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Suffrage

Ellen Carol DuBois

Honoring the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment to the Constitution, this exciting history explores the full scope of the movement to win the vote for women through portraits of its bold leaders and devoted activists.

Distinguished historian Ellen Carol DuBois begins in the pre-Civil War years with foremothers Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Sojourner Truth as she explores the links of the woman suffrage movement to the abolition of slavery. After the Civil War, Congress granted freed African American men the right to vote but not white and African American women, a crushing disappointment. DuBois shows how suffrage leaders persevered through the Jim Crow years into the reform era of Progressivism. She introduces new champions Carrie Chapman Catt and Alice Paul, who brought the fight into the 20th century, and she shows how African American women, led by Ida B. Wells-Barnett, demanded voting rights even as white suffragists ignored them.

DuBois explains how suffragists built a determined coalition of moderate lobbyists and radical demonstrators in forging a strategy of winning voting rights in crucial states to set the stage for securing suffrage for all American women in the Constitution. In vivid prose DuBois describes suffragists’ final victories in Congress and state legislatures, culminating in the last, most difficult ratification, in Tennessee.

DuBois follows women’s efforts to use their voting rights to win political office, increase their voting strength, and pass laws banning child labor, ensuring maternal health, and securing greater equality for women.

 

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The Women’s Suffrage Movement

Lorijo Metz

While women were part of American history from the outset, they did not win the right to vote until 1920. Readers of this engrossing history of the women’s suffrage movement will discover its roots in the abolitionist movement. They’ll read about the Declaration of Sentiments from the 1848 women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, which stated, “all men and women are created equal.” The book also discusses how the fight for women’s rights continued after the right to vote had been won. An illustrated timeline, map, and treasure trove of historical photos enrich the learning experience.

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Say It Louder!

Tiffany Cross

A breakout media and political analyst delivers a sweeping snapshot of American Democracy and the role that African Americans have played in its shaping while offering concrete information to help harness the electoral power of the country’s rising majority and exposing political forces aligned to subvert and suppress Black voters.

 

 

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How to Read the Constitution--and Why

Kim Wehle

An insightful, urgent, and perennially relevant handbook that lays out in common sense language how the United States Constitution works, and how its protections are eroding before our eyes—essential reading for anyone who wants to understand and parse the constantly breaking news about the backbone of American government.

 

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Thank You for Voting

Erin Geiger Smith

In this concise, lively look at the past, present, and future of voting, a journalist examines the long and continuing fight for voting equality, why so few Americans today vote, and innovative ways to educate and motivate them; included are checklists of what to do before election day to prepare to vote and encourage others.

 

 

 

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The Hidden History of the War on Voting

Thom Hartmann

 

America's #1 progressive radio host looks at how elites have long tried to disenfranchise citizens--particularly people of color, women, and the poor--and shows what we can do to ensure everyone has a voice in this democracy.

In today's America, only a slim majority of people register to vote, and a large percentage of registered voters don't bother to show up: Donald Trump was elected by only 26 percent of eligible voters. Unfortunately, this is not a bug in our system, it's a feature. Thom Hartmann unveils the strategies and tactics that conservative elites in this country have used, from the foundation of the Electoral College to the latest voter ID laws, to protect their interests by preventing "the wrong people"--such as the poor, women, and people of color--from voting while making it more convenient for the wealthy and white. But he also lays out a wide variety of simple, commonsense ways that we the people can fight back and reclaim our right to rule through the ballot box.

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