Iowa City Public Library | Virtual Branch

Featured Collections On the shelf & ready to reserve

Check out these award-winning books from the past few years.

Djinn patrol on the purple line : a novel

Battle ground : a novel of the Dresden files

Darkness at Chancellorsville : a novel of Stonewall Jackson's triumph and tragedy

Devolution : a firsthand account of the Rainier Sasquatch massacre

A people's future of the United States : speculative fiction from 25 extraordinary writers

A boy and his dog at the end of the world

Elderhood : redefining medicine, life, and aging in America

The impeachers : the of trial of Andrew Johnson and the dream of a just nation

Beneath the tamarind tree : a story of courage, family, and the lost schoolgirls of Boko Haram

Margaret Thatcher : the authorized biography

The trial of Lizzie Borden : a true story

The dreamt land : chasing water and dust across California

The crowded hour : Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Riders, and the dawn of the American century

I like to watch : arguing my way through the TV revolution

Go ahead in the rain : notes to A Tribe Called Quest

The volunteer : one man, an underground army, and the secret mission to destroy Auschwitz

The less people know about us : a mystery of betrayal, family secrets, and stolen identity

Fallout : the Hiroshima cover-up and the reporter who revealed it to the world

Volume control : hearing in a deafening world

The inevitability of tragedy : Henry Kissinger and his world

The source of self-regard : selected essays, speeches, and meditations

Black wave : Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the forty-year rivalry that unraveled culture, religion, and collective memory in the Middle East

The queens of animation : the untold story of the women who transformed the world of Disney and made cinematic history

Inheritance : a memoir of genealogy, paternity, and love

Stony the road : Reconstruction, white supremacy, and the rise of Jim Crow

The Club : Johnson, Boswell, and the friends who shaped an age

Wagnerism : art and politics in the shadow of music

Superman smashes the Klan : the graphic novel

The strange fascinations of Noah Hypnotik

Thirteen doorways, wolves behind them all

More featured collections

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ICPL Recommends

The sky atlas : the greatest maps, myths and discoveries of the universe book cover

The office : the untold story of the greatest sitcom of the 2000s book cover

Sisters in hate : American women on the front lines of white nationalism

Seyward Darby

322.42 /Darby
Political

"After the election of Donald J. Trump, journalist Seyward Darby went looking for the women of the so-called "alt-right" -- really just white nationalism with a new label. The mainstream media depicted the alt-right as a bastion of angry white men, but was it? As women headlined resistance to the Trump administration's bigotry and sexism, most notably at the Women's Marches, Darby wanted to know why others were joining a movement espousing racism and anti-feminism. Who were these women, and what did their activism reveal about America's past, present, and future? Darby researched dozens of women across the country before settling on three -- Corinna Olsen, Ayla Stewart, and Lana Lokteff. Each was born in 1979, and became a white nationalist in the post-9/11 era. Their respective stories of radicalization upend much of what we assume about women, politics, and political extremism. Corinna, a professional embalmer who was once a body builder, found community in white nationalism before it was the alt-right, while she was grieving the death of her brother and the end of her marriage. For Corinna, hate was more than just personal animus -- it could also bring people together. Eventually, she decided to leave the movement and served as an informant for the FBI. Ayla, a devoutly Christian mother of six, underwent a personal transformation from self-professed feminist to far-right online personality. Her identification with the burgeoning "tradwife" movement reveals how white nationalism traffics in society's preferred, retrograde ways of seeing women. Lana, who runs a right-wing media company with her husband, enjoys greater fame and notoriety than many of her sisters in hate. Her work disseminating and monetizing far-right dogma is a testament to the power of disinformation. With acute psychological insight and eye-opening reporting, Darby steps inside the contemporary hate movement and draws connections to precursors like the Ku Klux Klan. Far more than mere helpmeets, women like Corinna, Ayla, and Lana have been sustaining features of white nationalism. Sisters in Hate shows how the work women do to normalize and propagate racist extremism has consequences well beyond the hate movement."--Amazon.

This book shows how easily a person can be seduced by racism and white nationalism, how innocuous it can seem, and how deep a person can get into it. One of the main women featured is no longer a participant in the culture, and has found a different way to belong, and I really wish the best for her. This was a fascinating and engaging read, and I highly recommend it. -Amanda

Sometimes you have to lie : the life and times of Louise Fitzhugh, renegade author of Harriet the spy

Leslie Brody

BIOGRAPHY Fitzhugh, Louise
Biographies

"The protagonist and anti-heroine of Louise Fitzhugh's masterpiece Harriet the Spy, first published first in 1964, continues to mesmerize generation after generation of readers. Harriet is an erratic, unsentimental, and endearing prototype--someone very like the woman who dreamed her up, author and artist Louise Fitzhugh. Born in 1928, Fitzhugh was raised in a wealthy home in segregated Memphis, and she escaped her cloistered world and made a beeline for New York as soon as she could. Her expanded milieu stretched from the lesbian bars of Greenwich Village to the dance clubs of Harlem, on to the resurgent artist studios of post-war New York, France, and Italy. Her circle of friends included artists like Maurice Sendak and playwrights like Lorraine Hansberry. In the 1960s, Fitzhugh wrote Harriet the Spy, and in doing so she introduced "new realism" into children's books-she launched a genre of children's books that allowed characters to experience authentic feelings and acknowledged topics that were formerly considered taboo. Fitzhugh's books are full of resistance: to liars, to conformity, to authority, and even (radically, for a children's author) to make-believe. As a commercial children's author and lesbian, Fitzhugh often had to disguise the nature of her most intimate relationships. She lived her life as a dissenter--a friend to underdogs, outsiders, and artists--and her masterpiece remains long after her death to influence and provoke new generations of readers. Harriet is massively influential among girls and women in contemporary culture; she is the missing link between Jo March and Scout Finch, and it's not surprising that writers have thought of her as a kind of patron saint for misfit writers and unfeminine girls. This lively, rich biography brings Harriet's creator into the frame, shedding new light on an extraordinary author and her marvelous creation"--

An absolutely delightful and engaging biography on the woman behind one of my favorite books, Harriet the Spy. I knew absolutely nothing about Louise Fitzhugh prior to reading this, and found her a truly wonderful artist who knew so many people and had a genuine talent that Harriet the Spy was able to exemplify... but she had so much more to offer. I highly recommend this to fans of Harriet, anyone who appreciates LGBTQ+ history, and fans of midcentury literature in general. -Amanda