Displaying the top 100 results that match your query. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/rssapi.jsp?browse=true&Ne=7236&N=3+7241 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1645455 In 1949, Floridas orange industry was booming with cheap Jim Crow labor. When a white seventeen-year-old Groveland girl cried rape, vicious Sheriff McCall was fast on the trail of four young blacks who dared to envision a future for themselves. Then the Ku Klux Klan rolled into town, burning homes and chasing hundreds of blacks into the swamps. So began the chain of events that would bring Thurgood Marshall, the man known as Mr. Civil Rights, into the fray. Associates thought it was suicidal for him to wade into the Florida Terror at a time when he was irreplaceable to the burgeoning civil rights movement, but the lawyer would not shrink from the fight--not after the Klan had murdered one of Marshalls NAACP associates and Marshall had endured threats that he would be next. Drawing on a wealth of never-before-published material, including the FBIs unredacted Groveland case files, as well as the NAACPs Legal Defense Fund files, King shines new light on this remarkable civil rights crusader against a heroic backdrop.--From publisher description. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1189058 A magnificently written biography of cancer--from its origins to the epic battle to cure, control, and conquer it. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1007144 During the Cold War, superpowers amassed nuclear arsenals containing the explosive power of one million Hiroshimas. The Soviet Union secretly plotted to create the Dead Hand, a system designed to launch an automatic retaliatory nuclear strike on the United States, and developed a fearsome biological warfare machine. President Ronald Reagan, hoping to awe the Soviets into submission, pushed hard for the creation of space-based missile defenses. This, the first full account of how the arms race finally ended, provides an unprecedented look at the inner motives and secret decisions of each side. Drawing on top-secret documents from deep inside the Kremlin, memoirs, and interviews in both Russia and the United States, David Hoffman introduces the scientists, soldiers, diplomats, and spies who saw the world sliding toward disaster and tells the gripping story of how Reagan, Gorbachev, and many others struggled to bring the madness to an end.--From publisher description. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=751628 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=697723 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=652812 A sweeping narrative history of the events leading to 9/11, a groundbreaking look at the people and ideas, the terrorist plans and the Western intelligence failures that culminated in the assault on America. Lawrence Wrights book is based on five years of research and hundreds of interviews that he conducted in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan, England, France, Germany, Spain, and the United States.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=551371 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=481711 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=441113 The Gulag entered the worlds historical consciousness in 1972 with the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyns epic oral history of the Soviet camps, The Gulag Archipelago. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, dozens of memoirs and new studies covering aspects of that system have been published in Russia and the West. Using these new resources as well as her own original historical research, Ann Applebaum has now undertaken, for the first time, a fully documented history of the Soviet camp system, from its origins in the Russian Revolution to its collapse in the era of glasnost. Anne Applebaum first lays out the chronological history of the camps and the logic behind their creation, enlargement, and maintenance. The Gulag was first put in place in 1918 after the Russian Revolution. In 1929, Stalin personally decided to expand the camp system, both to use forced labor to accelerate Soviet industrialization and to exploit the natural resources of the countrys barely inhabitable far northern regions. By the end of the 1930s, labor camps could be found in all twelve of the Soviet Unions time zones. The system continued to expand throughout the war years, reaching its height only in the early 1950s. From 1929 until the death of Stalin in 1953, some 18 million people passed through this massive system. Of these 18 million, it is estimated that 4.5 million never returned. But the Gulag was not just an economic institution. It also became, over time, a country within a country, almost a separate civilization, with its own laws, customs, literature, folklore, slang, and morality. Topic by topic, Anne Applebaum also examines how life was lived within this shadow country: how prisoners worked, how they ate, where they lived, how they died, how they survived. She examines their guards and their jailers, the horrors of transportation in empty cattle cars, the strange nature of Soviet arrests and trials, the impact of World War II, the relations between different national and religious groups, and the escapes, as well as the extraordinary rebellions that took place in the 1950s. She concludes by examining the disturbing question why the Gulag has remained relatively obscure in the historical memory of both the former Soviet Union and the West.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=412239 A Problem from Hell is a path-breaking interrogation of the last century of American history. Samantha Power poses a question that haunts our nations past: Why do American leaders who vow never again repeatedly fail to marhsal the will and the might to stop genocide? She provides the answer in the form of the suspenseful story of courageous individuals who risked their careers and lives in an effort to get the United States to act. Drawing upon exclusive interviews with Washingtons top policymakers, access to thousands of pages of newly declassified documents, and her own reporting from the modern killing fields, Power shows how those who urged U.S. action were thwarted again and again by ignorance, indifference, and, above all, a failure of imagination.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=327146 In this biography of the Japanese emperor Hirohito, Herbert P. Bix offers the first complete look at the enigmatic leader whose sixty-three-year reign ushered Japan into the modern world. Bix shows what is was like to be trained from birth for a lone position at the apex of the nations political hierarchy and as a revered symbol of divine status. Influenced by an unusual combination of the Japanese imperial tradition and a modern scientific worldview, the young emperor gradually evolves into his preeminent role, aligning himself with the growing ultra-nationalist movement, perpetuating a cult of religious emperor worship, resisting attempts to curb his power, and all the while burnishing his image as a reluctant, passive monarch. Here we see Hirohito as he truly was: a man of strong will and real authority. Supported by previously untapped primary documents, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan is perhaps most illuminating in lifting the veil on the mythology surrounding the emperors impact on the world stage. Focusing closely on Hirohitos interactions with his advisers and successive Japanese governments, Bix sheds new light on the causes of the China War in 1937 and the start of the Asia-Pacific War in 1941. Bix documents in detail the strong, decisive role Hirohito played in wartime operations, from the takeover of Manchuria in 1931 through the attack on Pearl Harbor and ultimately the fateful decision in 1945 to accede to an unconditional surrender.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=268271 John Dower, distinguished historian of modern Japan, casts his eye on the immediate aftermath of World War II. Drawing on a vast range of Japanese sources, this new study illuminates how shattering defeat followed by over six years of American military occupation affected every level of Japanese society in ways that neither the victor nor the vanquished could anticipate. The great achievement of Embracing Defeat lies in its vivid portrayal of the countless ways in which the Japanese met the challenge of starting over - from top-level manipulations concerning the fate of Emperor Hirohito to the hopes, fears, and activities of ordinary men and women in every walk of life. This is a fascinating portrait of an extraordinary moment in history, when new values warred with old and early ideals of demilitarization and radical reform were soon challenged by the United Statess decision to incorporate Japan into the Cold War Pax Americana.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=79970 Twenty years ago, when John McPhee began his journeys back and forth across the United States, he planned to describe a cross-section of North America at about the fortieth parallel and, in the process, come to an understanding not only of the science but of the style of the geologists he traveled with. Like the terrain it covers, Annals of the Former World tells a many-layered tale, and the reader may choose one of many paths through it, guided by twenty-five new maps and the Narrative Table of Contents (an essay outlining the history and structure of the project). Read sequentially, the book is an organic succession of set pieces, flashbacks, biographical sketches, and histories of the human and lithic kind; approached systematically, it can be a North American geology primer, an exploration of plate tectonics, or a study of geologic time and the development of the time scale.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=119424 The Haunted Land is a look at how four newly democratic eastern European nations are dealing with the memories of forty years of communism. As one official orthodoxy replaces another, the people and governments of Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia face ethical dilemmas as complex and wrenching as anything out of Kafka or Orwell. In the greatest moral drama of our time, Communist totalitarianism drew well-intentioned, even idealistic people into horrible crimes. Now, as formerly Communist nations attempt to atone for the past, there is the everpresent temptation to rewrite history to suit the demands of the present. Tina Rosenberg s journalistic triumph is to put a human face on the abstractions of intrigue and betrayal, memory and ideology. The stories in this book take place not just in the highest councils of government and courts of law, but also in smoky pubs and the most private chambers of the soul. The Haunted Land shows how people struggle with their own definitions of guilt as they learn their betrayers were their husbands, fathers, and best friends.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=84254