Central Kansas Library System

Fiercely imagined story of a woman struggling to navigate an America of a not-too-distant future, where the line between church and state has been eradicated and convicted felons are no longer imprisoned and rehabilitated but chromed -- their skin color is genetically altered to match the class of their crime -- and then released back into the population to survive as best they can. Hannah is a Red; her crime is murder.

However repugnant, torture has been practiced, either publicly approved or clandestinely, for thousands of years. From the rack to electrodes, from witch- hunts to the Inquisition to a post-colonial world, torture is something we have always lived with.The History of Torture tells the complete story, from the ancient world to the present day, from physical cruelty to mental torment. The rack may be thought of as something medieval, but was first written...

"From the Chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee comes a gripping look at the most dangerous and unexpected threats to our national security--and the actions needed to protect us. America's inability to foresee the attacks of September 11, 2001, was deemed a collective "failure of imagination." Our political leaders and intelligence professionals failed to anticipate the wide-ranging and unorthodox threats to the...

Nearly three years have passed since that tragic day in September. Since then, our wounds have healed, but our senses and memories have dulled. At first, the nation rallied behind its leader. But by the time the confrontation with Iraq presented itself, our courage and moral certainty seemed to fade in the face of partisan bickering and posturing. Now the political left and the Democratic Party are trying to use the demanding aftermath of the war...

"The simple truth is that we've lost control of our own borders, and no nation can do that and survive." -Ronald Reagan America is under siege, facing a hostile invasion on its own soil that most of its citizens know nothing about: the invaders are illegal immigrants, their battleground is the U.S-Mexico border, and what's at stake is the money, security, and freedom of all Americans. In this chilling exposé, investigative journalist Jon Dougherty...

Eastern Oklahoma, 1928. Eighteen-year-old Maud Nail lives with her rogue father and sensitive brother on one of the allotments parceled out by the U.S. Government to the Cherokees when their land was confiscated for Oklahoma's statehood. Maud's days are filled with hard work and simple pleasures, but often marked by violence and tragedy, a fact that she accepts with determined practicality. Her prospects for a better life are slim, but when a newcomer...

In Our Endangered Values, Jimmy Carter offers a personal consideration of "moral values" as they relate to the important issues of the day. He puts forward a passionate defense of separation of church and state, and a strong warning about where the country is heading as the lines between politics and rigid religious fundamentalism are blurred. Carter describes his reactions to recent disturbing societal trends that involve both religious and political...

Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Christie, and Cory Booker were ready to reform our failing schools. They got an education. When Mark Zuckerberg announced in front of a cheering Oprah audience his $100 million pledge to transform the Newark Schools -- and to solve the education crisis in every city in America -- it looked like a huge win for then-mayor Cory Booker and governor Chris Christie. But their plans soon ran into a constituency not so easily moved...

N.H. Senzai and Shannon Hitchcock expertly craft the intersection of the lives of two girls-one, a Muslim fleeing civil war, the other, an American from the South-as they are forced to examine their beliefs and the true meaning of friendship in the midst of the president's 2017 Muslim ban. Twelve-year-old Noura Alwan's family is granted asylum in the United States, after spending two years in a Turkish refugee camp, having fled war-torn Aleppo. They...

Details the sixteen months of planning and decision making between President Bush, his war council, and key foreign leaders leading up to the 2003 war in Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime.