Search Results: Returned 10 Results, Displaying Titles 1 - 10
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-- Nineteen sixty-eight :c2004., Ballantine Call No: 909.82 K96n Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: It was the year of sex and drugs and rock and roll. Yet it was also the year of the Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy assassinations. "1968" encompasses the diverse realms of youth and music, politics and war, economics and the media - and shows us how one restless volatile year has helped shape us into who we are today.
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2020., Adult, McClelland & Stewart Call No: Fic Maj Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: " For readers of Tommy Orange, Yaa Gyasi, and Jhumpa Lahiri, an electrifying debut novel about three unforgettable characters who seek to rise--to the middle class, to politcal power, to fame in the movies--and find their lives entangled in the wake of a catastrophe in contemporary India. Jivan is a Muslim girl from the slums, determined to move up in life, who is accused of executing a terrorist attack on a train because of a careless comment on Facebook. PT Sir is an opportunistic gym teacher who hitches his aspirations to a right-wing political party, and finds that his own ascent becomes linked to Jivan's fall. Lovely--an irresistible outcast whose exuberant voice and dreams of glory fill the novel with warmth and hope and humour--has the alibi that can set Jivan free, but it will cost her everything she holds dear. Taut, symphonic, propulsive, and riveting from its opening lines, A Burning has the force of an epic while being so masterfully compressed it can be read in a single sitting. Majumdar writes with dazzling assurance at a breakneck pace on complex themes that read here as the components of a thriller: class, fate, corruption, justice, and what it feels like to face profound obstacles and yet nurture big dreams in a country spinning toward extremism. An extraordinary debut. A novel about fate, power, opportunity, and class; about innocence and guilt, betrayal and love, and the corrosive media cycle that manufactures falsehoods masquerading as truths--A Burning is a debut novel of exceptional power and urgency, haunting and beautiful, brutal, vibrant, impossible to forget."--
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By Mayer, Jane[2016], Adult, Doubleday, an imprint of Penguin Random House Call No: 320 M468d Edition: First Edition. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "A network of exceedingly wealthy people with extreme libertarian views have bankrolled a systematic, step-by-step plan to fundamentally alter the American political system. The network has brought together some of the richest people on the planet. Their core beliefs - that taxes are a form of tyranny; that government oversight of business is an assault on freedom - are sincerely held. But these beliefs also advance their personal and corporate interests: Many of their companies have run afoul of federal pollution, worker safety, securities, and tax laws. The chief figures in the network are Charles and David Koch, whose father made his fortune in part by building oil refineries in Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany. The patriarch later was a founding member of the John Birch Society, whose politics were so radical it believed Dwight Eisenhower was a communist. The brothers were schooled in a political philosophy that asserted the only role of government is to provide security and to enforce property rights. When libertarian ideas proved decidedly unpopular with voters, the Koch brothers and their allies chose another path. If they pooled their vast resources, they could fund an interlocking array of organizations that could work in tandem to influence and ultimately control academic institutions, think tanks, the courts, statehouses, Congress, and, they hoped, the presidency. Richard Mellon Scaife, the mercurial heir to banking and oil fortunes, had the brilliant insight that most of their political activities could be written off as tax-deductible "philanthropy." These organizations were given innocuous names such as Americans for Prosperity. Funding sources were hidden whenever possible. This process reached its apotheosis with the allegedly populist Tea Party movement, abetted mightily by the Citizens United decision - a case conceived of by legal advocates funded by the network. Mayer documents instances in which people affiliated with these groups hired private detectives to impugn whistle-blowers, journalists, and even government investigators. And their efforts have been remarkably successful. Libertarian views on taxes and regulation, once far outside the mainstream and still rejected by most Americans, are ascendant in the majority of state governments, the Supreme Court, and Congress. Meaningful environmental, labor, finance, and tax reforms have been stymied. In a taut and utterly convincing narrative, the author traces the byzantine trail of the billions of dollars spent by the network and provides vivid portraits of the colorful figures behind the new American oligarchy. Jane Mayer is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984<U+2013>1988, with Doyle McManus, Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas, with Jill Abramson, and The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals."--Provided by publisher.
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c2010., McGill-Queen's University Press Call No: QWF 971.428 M657e Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Series Title: Studies on the history of Quebec Volume: 23.Summary Note: "This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada." "McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities."--BOOK JACKET.
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2020., Biteback Publishing Call No: SC 320.53 M113r Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: The French Revolution provided a spare which lit the fire of radicalism in Scotland. In the late eighteenth century, discontented workers took to the streets and united in opposition to the King and the government. Brave men such as Thomas Muir, Thomas Fyshe Palmer and William Skirving attempted to organise the Scottish people in pursuit of widespread political reform. Uprisings spread across the country and the authorities responded with violent brutality, but the radical flame could not be extinguished and would only burn more fiercely into the nineteenth century. Tracing events from the 1780's to the 1820's, Radical Scotland tells the widely forgotten story of the country's revolutionary heroes who courageously gave up their liberty and even their lives to fight for the rights of the people. The story starts with the French Revolution and sheds light on decisive events, including the massacre of Tranent, before culminating in the 1820 rising. Kenny MacAskill draws on archival sources to vividly recount the pivotal moments during this tumultuous time. This is Scotland's radical history.
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2016., Adult, Random House Canada Call No: Bio L318r Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "From hardscrabble Milwaukee to dreamy Hawaii, from turbulent Montreal to free-spirited California, Red Star Tattoo is Sonja Larsen's memoir of a young life spent on the move. By the age of 16, Sonja joins a cult-like communist organization in Brooklyn in a spirit of idealism and hope -- unaware of the dark nature of what awaits her. A small, skinny 8-year-old-girl holding a teddy bear stands by the side of a country road with a young man she barely knows. They're hitchhiking from a commune in Quebec to one in California. It is 1973 and somehow the girl's parents think this is a good idea. Sonja Larsen's is a childhood in which family members come and go and where radical politics take over her mother's life and her own. As a pregnant teen her mother had been thrown out of home in Milwaukee by her evangelical preacher father. Her aunt Suzie is gripped by schizophrenia, her behaviour so erratic she eventually loses custody of her daughter. And then there is her cousin Dana, shunted back and forth long-distance between her parents -- Dana, whose own need to escape leads to unspeakable tragedy. Looking for a sense of family, searching to belong, to have your life mean something--this is what all these girls and young women have in common. As a teenager, Sonja finds herself embracing her mother's commitment to an organization known publicly as the National Labor Federation and privately as the Communist Party USA Provisional Wing. Over her three years embedded within the NLF's national headquarters in Brooklyn, Sonja becomes the youngest member of the organization's militia and part of its inner circle. She works sixteen-hour days and is not allowed to leave. She soon becomes a mistress of a man who called himself Gino Perente, whose actual name was Gerald William Doeden, but who everyone called the Old Man, the organization's charismatic leader. As she and the other members count down the days until their American revolution is set to begin, Sonja's doubts about the cause and the Old Man become increasingly difficult to ignore. Red Star Tattoo explores the seductions and dangers of extremism and, in prose that is both poetic and unsentimental, asks what it takes to survive a childhood scarred by loss, abuse and the sometimes violent struggle for belonging. Sonja Larsen is a graduate of teh Simon Fraser University Writer's Studio. She works with youth in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside."--Provided by publisher.
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2018., The New Press Call No: 973.93 B621s Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: Almost everything has been invoked to account for Trump’s victory and the rise of the alt-right, from job loss to racism to demography—everything, that is, except popular culture. In The Sky Is Falling bestselling cultural journalist Peter Biskind dives headlong into two decades of popular culture—from superhero franchises such as the Dark Knight, X-Men, and the Avengers and series like The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones to thrillers like Homeland and 24—and emerges to argue that these shows are saturated with the values that are currently animating our extreme politics. Where once centrist institutions and their agents—cops and docs, soldiers and scientists, as well as educators, politicians, and “experts” of every stripe—were glorified by mainstream Hollywood, the heroes of today’s movies and TV, whether far right or far left, have overthrown this quaint ideological consensus. Many of our shows dramatize extreme circumstances—an apocalypse of one sort or another—that require extreme behaviour to deal with, behaviour such as revenge, torture, lying, and even the vigilante violence traditionally discouraged in mainstream entertainment. In this bold, provocative, and witty investigation, Biskind shows how extreme culture now calls the shots. It has become, in effect, the new mainstream.
