Helen Plum Library

"In 1967, Sireen Sawalha's mother, with her young children, walked back to Palestine against the traffic of exile. My Brother, My Land is the story of Sireen's family in the decades that followed and their lives in the Palestinian village of Kufr Ra'i. From Sireen's early life growing up in the shadow of the '67 War and her family's work as farmers caring for their land, to the involvement of her brother Iyad in armed resistance in the First and Second...

An investigative journalist chronicles his twenty-year obsession with the 1969 Manson murders and describes how he discovered evidence of a cover-up, carelessness from police, misconduct by prosecutors, and potential surveillance by intelligence agents "What really happened in 1969? Over two grim nights in Los Angeles, the young followers of Charles Manson murdered seven people, including the actress Sharon Tate, then eight months pregnant. With...

"Columnist and author Charles Blow never wanted to write a "race book." But as violence against Black people--both physical and psychological--seemed only to increase in recent years, culminating in the historic pandemic and protests of the summer of 2020, he felt compelled to write a new story for Black Americans. He envisioned a succinct, counterintuitive, and impassioned corrective to the myths that have for too long governed our thinking about...

"Decades before Elvis Presley was dubbed the King of Rock and Roll, before Billy Haley played 'Rock Around the Clock,' and before the Beatles revolutionized popular music, there was Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a Black guitar player from Cotton Plant, Arkansas."--

All William Ellsworth Hoy wanted to do was play baseball. After losing out on a spot on the local deaf team, William practiced even harder--eventually earning a position on a professional team. But his struggle was far from over. In addition to the prejudice Hoy faced, he could not hear the umpires' calls. One day he asked the umpire to use hand signals: strike, ball, out. That day he not only got on base but also changed the way the game was played...

"The memoir of a German-Nigerian woman who learns that her grandfather was the brutal Nazi commandant depicted [by Ralph Fiennes] in Schindler's List, Amon Goeth"--Provided by publisher

A warm, intimate account of the love between Eleanor Roosevelt and reporter Lorena Hickok--a relationship that, over more than three decades, transformed both women's lives and empowered them to play significant roles in one of the most tumultuous periods in American history "In 1933, as her husband assumed the presidency, Eleanor Roosevelt embarked on the claustrophobic, duty-bound existence of the First Lady with dread. By that time, she had put...

"In 2006, Osa Atoe was inspired to create an expression out of the experience of being the only Black kid at the punk show - and Shotgun Seamstress was born. Like a great mixtape of radical politics and art, Shotgun Seamstress was a fanzine by and for Black punks that explored and documented the individual and collective possibilities of being outside of mainstream culture. Originally laid out by hand, photocopied, and distributed in small batches,...

"The astonishing story of Dr. Josephine Janina Mehlberg--a Jewish mathematician who saved thousands of lives in Nazi-occupied Poland by masquerading as a Polish aristocrat--drawing on Mehlberg's own unpublished memoir. World War II and the Holocaust have given rise to many stories of resistance and rescue, but The Counterfeit Countess is unique. It tells the remarkable, unknown story of "Countess Janina Suchodolska," a Jewish woman who rescued more...

Presents the life of the first female pilot to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, who mysteriously disappeared in 1937 while attempting to fly around the world