Central Kansas Library System

If you love your country, sing! Since 1931, "The Star-Spangled Banner" has been the national anthem of the United States. Journey back to 1814, and join Francis Scott Key, the man who wrote the words to the anthem, for a close look at this song of freedom.

A finalist for the 2016 Philip K. Dick Award, Windswept is the gonzo noir you didn't know you needed until now. Newly reissued, this Author's Preferred Edition features essays, stories, and, for the first time, a mouth-watering recipe for chicken tacos. Two-fisted labor organizer Padma Mehta is on the edge of space and the edge of burnout. All she wants is to retire, buy a rum distillery, and spend the rest of her life on the beach. To do that, she...

"Winner of the Silver Medal in Business Theory, Axiom Business Book Awards" Martin Sandbu has been writing about economics for the Financial Times since 2009. Having started out as the newspaper's economics leader writer, he is currently FT's European economics commentator and writes its Free Lunch premium economics newsletter. Previously, he was a senior research fellow at the Zicklin Center for Business Ethics Research at the Wharton School of the...

Daniel Cohen (1953–2023) was director of the Economics Department at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and a founding member of the Paris School of Economics. His many books include The Inglorious Years: The Collapse of the Industrial Order and the Rise of Digital Society (Princeton), Globalization and Its Enemies, and The Prosperity of Vice: A Worried View of Economics. Why society's expectation of economic growth is no longer realistic Economic...

Deadly plagues have ripped across the globe for centuries and will continue to do so in the future. From the Black Death to Smallpox and the Hong Kong flu, seven of the ten worst plagues in history originated in China. But, the Covid-19 pandemic was something entirely new: a genetically engineered pathogen that was deliberately released upon the world for the geopolitical profit of a Communist government. In The Politically Incorrect Guide® to Pandemics,...

Beware of doorways through time… and dark alleys Author Amelia Murray and her family travels to Edinburgh, Scotland, before their move to Washington DC. While picking up an overpriced cloak, she is chased into a close where she steps through a door and is thrust back to the late 17th Century. Amelia, believing she is somehow stuck in the middle of a renaissance fair, visits Edinburgh Castle, helps thwart a kidnapping, and finds herself in a pub...

On a daily basis, author and LGBTQ advocate Amber Cantorna receives emails asking the same question: How does one reconcile their sexuality with their faith? Depression, despair, and thoughts of suicide often haunt LGBTQ Christians as they feel unable to imagine the possibility of living a happy, fulfilling life as an LGBTQ person of faith. As the gay daughter of a thirty-plus-year executive of conservative Christian organization Focus on the Family,...

RAINWALKERS is a story set in the not-so-distant future in a crumbling version of John Steinbeck's Salinas Valley, after the breakup of the United States. A once rich and prosperous agricultural land is now a war-torn nation-state known only as The Valley. To combat chronic droughts, scientists seeded clouds with genetically engineered bacteria that created regular rains but unintentionally made the rains lethal to humans. Anyone caught in the rain...

A deadly flu epidemic sweeps across the stricken nationBraving the Storms, is the third book of the Strengthen What Remains series. In the first book, Through Many Fires, nuclear terrorism strikes the nation's capital and six other American cities. In the second book, A Time to Endure, society continues to unravel, and civil war threatens the divided and economically-crippled land.Now a new and even more lethal problem emerges. A swift and deadly...

Why do Americans love a bell that no longer rings? It is the Liberty Bell, and it once rang to announce the birth of a new country, the United States. Find out why Americans still treasure the bell, along with its famous crack.