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This year’s celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month carries particular poignance for the Kansas City Public Library. In conjunction with the monthlong observance, running from September 15 to October 15, the Library annually highlights a collection of book recommendations, film offerings, and other resources that explore a rich array of the experiences and perspectives of Latino Americans.
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Wow! Summer's here and there are more great books than ever. Have you checked out the Library's Summer Reading Program? Check out lots of books and win prizes for reading them. What a deal! To celebrate great reads, I've made a list. Books about famous and not-so-famous people, books with fantastic adventures, and quiet, get-under-your-skin books for a day of reading in your favorite mud puddle.
Yours with snorts,
Adventures
Orphan Train Rider: One Boy's True Story
By Warren, Andrea
From science fiction to the paranormal to creepy biotechnology scenarios, these books for teens are sure to thrill.
Prism
By Faye and Aliza Kellerman
Prism takes us to a slightly alternate universe in which medicine and health care do not exist, and in which sick people are allowed to die without any care. Set in New Mexico and California, the novel features three teens that fall through a cave at Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico while on a field trip. They are plunged into a frightening parallel universe – seven weeks in the past, in which their "normal" worlds of family and high school remain the same...except for the fact that no medicine exists and when people die in the street they are picked up and disposed of.
From flappers to Prohibition to the upheaval of the Great Depression, these books explore society and culture of 1920s-30s America.
The Devil's Tickets: A Night of Bridge, a Fatal Hand, and a New American Age
By Gary M. Pomerantz
Through larger-than-life characters and a timeless partnership game they played, The Devil's Tickets evokes the last echoes of the Roaring Twenties and the darkness of the pending Depression.
Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern
By Joshua Zeitz
Through the madcap lives of Zelda Fitzgerald, Lois Long, Coco Chanel, Clara Bow, and other Jazz Age luminaries, Flapper tells the fascinating story of the new woman and the making of modern culture.
For National Rose Month this June, pick up some entertaining “rosy” reads at the Library.
Start with a fast-paced mystery. Publishers Weekly states that The Blue Rose by Anthony Eglin “combines just the right amount of horticultural detail with well-drawn characters and an absorbing plot.” In this book, Alex and Kate Sheppard move into a house in the Wiltshire countryside surrounded by a walled garden that contains an impossible, perfect blue rose bush. Death and kidnapping ensue.
Author Leann Sweeney began her Yellow Rose Mystery series with Pick Your Poison. In this novel, the young Texan heiress Abby Rose turns into an amateur sleuth after finding the gardener dead – a victim of murder – in her greenhouse.
These local diet memoirs and urban farming handbooks reveal the best about eating locally.
Plenty: Eating Locally On the 100-Mile Diet
By Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon
Plenty tells the remarkable adventures of a Canadian couple who make a year-long attempt to eat foods grown and produced within a 100-mile radius of their apartment--and learn the simple joys of reconnecting with community and home ground in the process.