Central Kansas Library System

"From SoulCycle to Scientology, we're all obsessed with cults. Linguist Amanda Montell examines the language cults use to draw us in"-- What causes people to join-- and more importantly, stay in-- extreme groups? The answer, Montell believes, has nothing to do with freaky mind-control wizardry or Kool-Aid. She argues that the key to manufacturing intense ideology, community, and us/them attitudes all comes down to language. In both positive ways...

Li-yan and her family align their lives around the seasons and the farming of tea. There is ritual and routine, and it has been ever thus for generations. Then one day a jeep appears at the village gate the first automobile any of them have seen and a stranger arrives. In this remote Yunnan village, the stranger finds the rare tea he has been seeking and a reticent Akha people. In her biggest seller, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, See introduced...

"Not since Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine has such a powerful and urgent Native American voice exploded onto the landscape of contemporary fiction. Tommy Orange's There There introduces a brilliant new author at the start of a major career. "We all came to the powwow for different reasons. The messy, dangling threads of our lives got pulled into a braid--tied to the back of everything...

When history teacher Ben Ross starts a classroom experiment, with the intention of showing students the processes behind social control in Nazi Germany, things get out of hand and the power of group pressure becomes a frightening reality. This novel dramatizes an incident that took place in a California school in 1969. A teacher creates an experimental movement in his class to help students understand how people could have followed Hitler. The results...

"Digital technology now connects people to each other and to all the world's information everywhere, at all times. This is changing the way people meet each other, fall in love, find jobs, learn new skills, take in news and entertainment, and build personal identities. Learn what these changes mean for society now and in the future."--Page 4 of cover.

Journalist Robbins explores the ways group identity theories play out among cliques--and the students they exclude. She reveals the new labels students stick onto each other today, the long-term effects of this marginalization, and the reasons students in these categories are often shunned. Then she celebrates them. The homogenization of the US education system has made outcasts more important than ever. In this conformist, creativity-stifling society,...

Set in a future under a unified totalitarian state, in a society ruled by conformity and humans are identified by their assigned number, spaceship engineer D-503 must face his beliefs about the One Party head on in this page-turning adventure. "We is an earth shattering dystopian novel that ruffled the feathers of the ruling elite of Russia when it was smuggled out of the country and published in English in 1924. It would not see publication in Russia...

Overview: Reforming the Middle East is not America's fight, argues Lee Smith, nor is it a fight we can win. Soon after the World Trade Center towers fell, leaving ashes floating over journalist Lee Smith's Brooklyn neighborhood, he left for Cairo to find out "why the Arabs hate us." He spent eight years reporting from Cairo, Beirut, and Jerusalem and discovered that the anger and disorder in the Middle East are not caused by a clash of civilizations...