True Facts

Quench your thirst for information.

March is Music in our Schools Month. Music makers come from all cultures and backgrounds, and sometimes the music we enjoy the most comes from surprising sources. Check out some of the musicians and composers featured below. When possible, links to their music are also listed. 

A one-hundredth birthday tribute to the late jazz artist explores his observations about humanity's discriminatory and violent behaviors as well as his efforts to forge world peace through music with the Sun Ra Arkestra.

Listen: The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra

Describes how Juan García Esquivel, a Mexican composer popular in the 1950s and 1960s, developed his experimental style of music, based on mariachi and other Mexican music, jazz, the human voice, and the use of unusual instruments.

Listen: Nuevo (featuring Jean Garcia Esquivel)

Today the American Library Association announced its Youth Book & Media Awards, including the Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Award and the YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults. The Young Adult Library Services Association bestows the Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults annually to the best nonfiction book published for young adults (ages 12-18). The Sibert Award is given by the Association for Library Service to Children to the most distinguished informational book for children.

For more information about other awards and their recipients, check the ALA website.

Help us recognize these honorees and winners by checking one out today.

2017 Sibert and YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Winner

March. Book 3 by John Lewis

Yes, the same book won both awards!

Welcome to the stunning conclusion of the award-winning and best-selling MARCH trilogy. Congressman John Lewis, an American icon and one of the key figures of the civil rights movement, joins co-writer Andrew Aydin and artist Nate Powell to bring the lessons of history to vivid life for a new generation, urgently relevant for today's world. By the fall of 1963, the Civil Rights Movement has penetrated deep into the American consciousness, and for every step forward, the danger grows more intense: Jim Crow strikes back through legal tricks, intimidation, violence, and death. The only hope for lasting change is to give voice to the millions of Americans silenced by voter suppression:"One Man, One Vote."

To carry out their nonviolent revolution, Lewis and an army of young activists launch a series of innovative campaigns, including the Freedom Vote, Mississippi Freedom Summer, and an all-out battle for the soul of the Democratic Party waged live on national television. With these new struggles come new allies, new opponents, and an unpredictable new president who might be both at once. But fractures within the movement are deepening ... even as 25-year-old John Lewis prepares to risk everything in a historic showdown high above the Alabama river, in a town called Selma.

Our JBIO collection features a wide variety of great stories about real people. These subjects might be well-known, or relatively ordinary. They might be extroverted and exuberant or shy and passionate. Maybe the people in these tales look just like you, or maybe they're like no one you know. Meet someone new in 2017 by checking out some of the following biographies. The list begins with books for younger readers and ends with more advanced titles, but each story might hold wider appeal than its first impression.

A biography of the scientist known as the "Shark Lady," reveals how she turned a childhood passion into her life's work, devoting herself to studying sharks and educating the public on the graceful, clever sea creatures.

Recounts the life and accomplishments of the environmentalist and Nobel Peace Prize winner.

The following Adult non-fiction titles were chosen as CPL librarians' favorites of 2016. Check them out today!

Also available in: e-book

Advances in technology are creating the next economy and enabling us to make things/do things/connect with others in smarter, cheaper, faster, more effective ways. But the price of this progress has been a de-coupling of the engine of prosperity from jobs that have been the means by which people have ascended to (and stayed in) the middle class. Andy Stern, the former president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) spent four years traveling the country and asking economists, futurists, labor leaders, CEOs, investment bankers, entrepreneurs, and political leaders to help picture the U.S. economy 25 to 30 years from now. He vividly reports on people who are analyzing and creating this new economy--such as investment banker Steve Berkenfeld; David Cote, the CEO of Honeywell International; Andy Grove of Intel; Carl Camden, the CEO of Kelly Services; and Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children's Zone. Through these stories, we come to a stark and deeper understanding of the toll technological progress will continue to take on jobs and income and its inevitable effect on tens of millions of people. But there is hope for our economy and future. The foundation of economic prosperity for all Americans, Stern believes, is a universal basic income. The idea of a universal basic income for all Americans is controversial but American attitudes are shifting. Stern has been a game changer throughout his career, and his next goal is to create a movement that will force the political establishment to take action against s
omething that many on both the right and the left believe is inevitable. Stern's plan is bold, idealistic, and challenging--and its time has come.
 

Ancient Rome was an imposing city even by modern standards, a sprawling imperial metropolis of more than a million inhabitants, a "mixture of luxury and filth, liberty and exploitation, civic pride and murderous civil war" that served as the seat of power for an empire that spanned from Spain to Syria. Yet how did all this emerge from what was once an insignificant village in central Italy? In S.P.Q.R., world-renowned classicist Mary Beard narrates the unprecedented rise of a civilization that even two thousand years later still shapes many of our most fundamental assumptions about power, citizenship, responsibility, political violence, empire, luxury, and beauty.

The following children's nonfiction titles were chosen as CPL librarians' favorites of 2016. Check them out today!

A picture book biography of mathematician Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer, by the award-winning author/illustrator Fiona Robinson.

Shares the childhood of the famous artist as she apprenticed in her family's tapestry shop and was inspired by her mother's work as a weaver.

Music can inspire us during our worst times, or be the backbone of a celebration. Check out some of these stories about the people behind the music, and check the links for where to listen to their tunes.

Little Melba and her big trombone by Katheryn Russell-Brown

A biography of African American musician Melba Doretta Liston, a virtuoso musician who played the trombone and composed and arranged music for many of the great jazz musicians of the twentieth century. Includes afterword, discography, and sources. Her music can be interloaned through MeL.

With rhythmic swirls of words and pictures, Suzanne Slade and Stacy Innerst beautifully reveal just how brilliantly Gershwin reached inside his head to create his masterpiece, Rhapsody in Blue. It's a surprising and whirlwind composition of notes and sounds and one long wail of a clarinet-dazzling and daring, just like George Gershwin himself!

Learn more about your favorite people in sports, or find out about someone new. 

Laila Ali : champion boxer by Norman D Graubart

The daughter of famous boxing legend Muhammad Ali, Laila Ali is a boxing icon in her own right. But she is also a television personality and an advocate for health and fitness for women. Learn all about this inspiring woman and her amazing life.

Describes the life and accomplishments of the professional baseball player, from his early career to World Series triumph with the Florida Marlins to winning Major League Baseball's triple crown.

The extraordinary true story of the downfall of one of England's wealthiest families. When the sixth Earl Fitzwilliam died in 1902, he left behind the second largest estate in twentieth-century England -- a lifeline to the tens of thousands of people who worked either in the family's coal mines or on their expansive estate. The earl also left behind four sons, and the family line seemed assured. But was it?

When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bill Dedman noticed a property listing for a grand estate that had been unoccupied for nearly sixty years, he stumbled into one of the most surprising American stories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Empty Mansions is a rich tale of wealth and loss, complete with copper barons, Gilded Age opulence, and backdoor politics. At its heart is a reclusive 104-year-old heiress named Huguette Clark.

After the Ninth Duke of Rutland, one of the wealthiest men in Britain, died alone in a cramped room in the servants' quarters of Belvoir Castle on April 21, 1940, his son and heir ordered the room, which contained the Rutland family archives, sealed. Sixty years later, Catherine Bailey became the first historian given access. What she discovered was a mystery: the Duke had painstakingly erased three periods of his life from all family records-but why? As Bailey uncovers the answers, she also provides an intimate portrait of the very top of British society in the turbulent days leading up to World War I.

Use these resources as inspiration to get outside, observe your own backyard, and complete challenges this summer.

Describes the physical characteristics, life cycle, and behavior of honeybees.

Planting the wild garden by Kathryn Osebold Galbraith

An exploration of the different ways seeds are dispersed into the environment.

Pages