20th century

On April 1, 1945 with the battle of Okinawa beginning, fourteen-year-old native Okinawan Hideki, drafted into the Blood and Iron Student Corps, is handed two grenades and told to go kill American soldiers; small for his age Hideki does not really want to kill anyone, he just wants to find his family, and his struggle across the island will finally bring him face-to-face with Ray, a marine in his very first battle--and the choice he makes then will change his life forever.

"The Vietnam War is raging, the US Navy has only recently begun the process of integration, and the country is reeling from racial turmoil and unrest. So why does C?sar, a street-tough kid of Afro-Cuban descent, enlist in the navy? He is on the run from a life of crime and from Mr. Mike, a charismatic, sociopathic gangster who was once a mentor but has now turned on him. Escaping into a navy wrestling with its history of racism and sexism, C?sar soon sees the absurdity of certain prejudices that seem as old as the US Armed Forces. When he is deployed aboard the USS Kitty Hawk, racial tensions are high and are moving quickly toward violence. Through it all, C?sar's ever-growing sense of honor and self-worth force him to make moral decisions he never knew he was capable of. It's a fortitude he will desperately need"--Provided by publisher.

"On a June morning in 1923, Clarissa Dalloway is preparing for a party and remembering her past. Elsewhere in London, Septimus Smith is suffering from shell-shock and on the brink of madness. Their days interweave and their lives converge as the party reaches its . . . climax"--OCLC.

"In 1910 New York City, four years after her Irish immigrant father dies of tuberculosis, ten-year-old Essie's fear and anxiety continue to grow uncontrollably, so much that when her mother, a brave nurse, remarries and the family moves to North Brother Island, where Essie's new stepfather runs a quarantine hospital for the incurably sick, Essie imagines all manner of horrors, including the ghost of a little girl--which might not be imaginary after all"--OCLC.

"In the summer of 1984, twelve-year-old Ebony-Grace of Huntsville, Alabama, visits her father in Harlem, where her fascination with outer space and science fiction interfere with her finding acceptance"--Provided by publisher.

"Caring for a runt lamb helps Pixie gain empathy when, in the 1940s, her family moves to her grandparents' farm and her sister Charlotte contracts polio and is sent away"--Provided by publisher.

In mid-twentieth-century England, fourteen-year-old Velvet Brown, determined to turn the unruly horse she wins in a raffle into a champion, learns that she needs more than hard work and dedication to achieve her goal of riding her horse in the Grand National steeplechase.

"A history of the thinkers, writers, and artists who shaped intellectual culture in Cold War Europe and America"--Provided by publisher.

"A celebrated Irish writer's magisterial, brilliantly insightful chronicle of the wrenching transformations that dragged his homeland into the modern world. Fintan O'Toole was born in the year the revolution began. It was 1958, and the Irish government?in despair, because all the young people were leaving?opened the country to foreign investment and popular culture. So began a decades-long, ongoing experiment with Irish national identity. In We Don't Know Ourselves, O'Toole, one of the Anglophone world's most consummate stylists, weaves his own experiences into Irish social, cultural, and economic change, showing how Ireland, in just one lifetime, has gone from a reactionary "backwater" to an almost totally open society-perhaps the most astonishing national transformation in modern history"--Provided by publisher.

"Essays about 1990s popular culture, politics, sports, literature, music"--Provided by publisher.