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Frederick Douglass: prophet of freedom.David W. Blight. Audio. An account of the life and work of Frederick Douglass, who escaped a life of slavery in Baltimore, Maryland, in the nineteenth century. Describes his work as a writer, his many speeches, his political activism, and his work as an abolitionist. Los Angeles Book Award for Biography, Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. Pulitzer Prize for History.
Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming. László Krasznahorkai. Audio. Baron Béla Wenckheim returns to his hometown in Hungary after running up debts in Argentinian casinos. In the woods outside of town, a philosophical professor lives in a bizarre shack and ponders the nature of existence.
The Overstory. Richard Powers. Audio. A group of nine strangers are tied together by their shared desire to protect one of the last virgin forests in America. They include a wounded Vietnam vet, a student who dies and is revived, and a scientist who learns that trees can communicate.
The Raven and other poems. Edgar Allan Poe. Audio, Braille. A selection of eerie and mysterious poems written by American writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). Includes "The Raven," which made him famous in 1845, and the haunting lilt of "Annabel Lee." Introduction by Philip Pullman. For grades 6-9.
About Us: essays from the disability series of the New York Times.Peter Catapano. Audio, Braille. Sixty-one essays originally published as part of the New York Times Disability column. The essays are organized into the topics of justice, belonging, working, navigating, coping, love, family, and joy. Essayists have physical, motor, sensory, and cognitive differences.
My Heart is Not Blind: on blindness and perception.Michael Nye. Audio, Braille. Profiles of forty-five people who are blind or have low vision, including Larry Johnson, a longtime DJ in Mexico, and Michael Hingson, a 9/11 survivor who wrote about his lifesaving guide dog in Thunder Dog (DB073300). Natalie Watkins, who has retinitis pigmentosa, is profiled twice, six years apart.
Polio: an American story. David M. Oshinsky. Audio. Account of the twentieth-century search for a polio vaccine and the rivalries that developed between competing medical researchers, notably Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin, and Hilary Koprowski. Traces the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis campaigns and the public health experiment involving Salk's vaccine. Evokes the widespread panic over the disease.
Prairie Fires: the American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Caroline Fraser. Audio, Large Print. Draws on unpublished manuscripts, letters, diaries, and more to detail the life of the Ingalls family and contextualize it with concurrent historical events. Pulitzer Prize for Biography, National Book Critics Award for Biography.
Hamlet and Related Readings. William Shakespeare. Braille. Presents the play: The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark and provides literary criticism by famous critics.
