Mark your calendars for the Friends of the O’Neal Library annual
book sale!The invitation-only Preview
Party takes place on Thursday, February 19th, then the sale is open
to the public Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.For more information about the Preview Party, click here https://oneallibrary.org/support-friends
The next Books & Beyond Discussion Club will be on
Tuesday, February 24th at 6:30pm.A slight venue change will be in effect as we’ll be meeting in the 2nd
floor Quiet Room.As always, if you’d
rather attend online, register an email address to receive a Zoom link: https://oneallibrary.org/support-friends
Enjoyable:
Golden Omegaverse duology by R. L. Randolph, Gold Rush and
Gold Mine
Gold Rush is book one in a why choose (MMMMF)
omegaverse duology set in the Golden Omegaverse. Part one ends on a
cliffhanger, June's happily ever after is guaranteed in part two.Juniper Walden has lived a life of
quiet obscurity as a Beta and romance author. When one of her novels gains
traction and she's suddenly trapped in a broken elevator with two strangers the
night before her UK book tour, she realizes her future might not be so
clear-cut.
The Poker Bride vividly reconstructs a lost
period of history when the first Chinese sojourners flooded into the country
and left only glimmering traces of their presence scattered across the American
West.
In the spring of 1848, rumors began to spread that gold had
been discovered in a remote spot in the Sacramento Valley. A year later,
newspaper headlines declared "Gold Fever!" as hundreds of thousands
of men and women borrowed money, quit their jobs, and allowed themselves- for
the first time ever-to imagine a future of ease and splendor. In The
Rush, Edward Dolnick brilliantly recounts their treacherous westward
journeys by wagon and on foot and takes us to the frenzied gold fields and the
rowdy cities that sprang from nothing to jam-packed chaos.
In 1897, gold fever sweeps the world. The promise of untold
riches lures thousands of dreamers from all walks of life on a perilous trek
toward fortune, failure—or death. Journey is an immersive
account of the adventures of four English aristocrats and their Irish servant
as they haul across cruel Canadian terrain toward the Klondike gold fields.
It's 1851, and Charlie and Eli Sisters are both brothers and
assassins, boys grown to men in a savage and hostile world. The Sisters
brothers find themselves on a journey through the Northwest, bringing them to
the mountains of Oregon, a dangerous brothel in the small town of Mayfield, and
eventually, the gold rush land of California -- an adventure that tests the
deadly family ties that bind.
In 1978 Canada, a bulldozer digs up a long-lost collection
of 533 nitrate film prints from the early 1900s. Streams free with a valid
library card for residents of cities that subscribe to Kanopy and/or Hoopla.Streams on Tubi with free account.
“A riveting feat of science writing that recasts that
most familiar of celestial objects into something eerily extraordinary, pivotal
to our history, and awesome in the original sense of the word.”—Ed Yong, New
York Times bestselling author of An Immense World
The National Book Award–winning epic chronicle of the
creation of the Panama Canal, a first-rate drama of the bold and brilliant
engineering feat that transformed global trade routes and shaped modern
American history, as told by Pulitzer Prize–winning author and master historian
David McCullough.
In the early 1900s, at the dawn of the “American Century,”
few knew the intoxicating power of greed better than white men on the forefront
of the black gold rush. When oil was discovered in Oklahoma, these counterfeit
tycoons impersonated, defrauded, and murdered Native property owners to snatch
up hundreds of acres of oil-rich land.
Writer and fourth-generation Oklahoman Russell Cobb sets the stage for one such
oilman’s chicanery: Tulsa entrepreneur Charles Page’s campaign for a young
Muscogee boy’s land in Creek County. Problem was, “Tommy Atkins,” the boy in
question, had died years prior—if he ever lived at all. Ghosts of Crook
County traces Tommy’s mythologized life through Page’s relentless
pursuit of his land.
Originally published in 1999, this hasn’t aged well. BAB
reader described it as “boring.”
“A hotbed of activity for far-sighted thinkers and determined doers, the high
technology industry has given rise to a pioneering group of entrepreneurs and
executives which is not only behind today's most innovative technological
advances, but at the forefront of a dynamic new movement in business.”
General Discussion:
CBS 42: “Alabama’s Gold Rush: A Tiny Town Once Worth
Millions”
A pioneering and groundbreaking work of narrative nonfiction
that offers a dramatic new perspective on the history of humankind, showing how
through millennia, the mosquito has been the single most powerful force in
determining humanity’s fate.
This podcast might not actually kill you, but Erin Welsh and
Erin Allmann Updyke cover so many things that can. In each episode, they tackle
a different topic, teaching listeners about the biology, history, and
epidemiology of a different disease or medical mystery. The do the scientific
research, so you don’t have to.
BAB member (ME) shared information and a couple of published
articles about controversies surrounding fanfiction and current evolutions in
the subject.
In his journal, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck
called East of Eden "the first book," and indeed it
has the primordial power and simplicity of myth. Set in the rich farmland of
California's Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the
intertwined destinies of two families—the Trasks and the Hamiltons—whose
generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous
rivalry of Cain and Abel.
In Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party, celebrated
storyteller and historian Edward Dolnick leads us through a compelling true
adventure as the paleontologists of the early 19th century puzzled their way
through the fossil record to create the story of dinosaurs we kn ow today.
A rollicking debut novel about a cautious daughter and her
eccentric, estranged mother venturing west in search of buried treasure—and a
way back to each other—before they run out of patience, money, and options.
Seems loosely inspired by the real 2010 hunt for buried treasure as explored in
the Netflix docuseries, Gold & Greed: The Hunt for Fenn’s Treasure (An eccentric man named Forrest Fenn sets off a real-life
treasure hunt when he hides a chest of gold in the Rockies and leaves clues in
a cryptic poem. https://www.netflix.com/title/81636832)
Book and DVD descriptions pulled from Amazon and Rotten
Tomatoes.
The next Books & Beyond Discussion Group (BAB) meeting
will be Tuesday, January 27 at 6:30pm and the topic up for discussion is gold
rushes.Don’t get too bogged down in
what that means!If you’re looking for
ideas, click here to find the BAB area on our Shelf Care page to see some of the books out on
display at the 2nd floor service desk.
Last week, BAB met for our final chat of 2025 and there was
no assigned topic. I’m always surprised
and pleased at the great variety of information our members bring to the table!
As any reader or listener of murder mysteries can tell you,
poison is one of the most enduring—and popular—weapons of choice for a scheming
murderer. It can be slipped into a drink, smeared onto the tip of an arrow or
the handle of a door, even filtered through the air we breathe. But how exactly
do these poisons work to break our bodies down, and what can we learn from the
damage they inflict? In a fascinating blend of popular science, medical
history, and true crime, Dr. Neil Bradbury explores this most morbidly
captivating method of murder from a cellular level.
The first in a series of outlandishly clever adventures
featuring the resourceful, fearless literary detective, Thursday Next. In
Jasper Fforde's Great Britain, circa 1985, time travel is routine, cloning is a
reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken
very, very seriously. England is a virtual police state where an aunt can get
lost (literally) in a Wordsworth poem and forging Byronic verse is a punishable
offense. All this is business as usual for Thursday Next, renowned Special
Operative in literary detection. But when someone begins kidnapping characters
from works of literature and plucks Jane Eyre from the pages of Brontë's novel,
Thursday is faced with the challenge of her career. Fforde's ingenious fantasy unites
intrigue with English literature in a delightfully witty mix.
Celebrating a new generation of bestselling and acclaimed
Black writers, The Black Girl Survives in This One makes space
for Black girls in horror. Fifteen chilling and thought-provoking stories place
Black girls front and center as heroes and survivors who slay monsters, battle
spirits, and face down death. Prepare to be terrified and left breathless by the
pieces in this anthology.
It’s been a quiet year for the Thursday Murder Club. Joyce
is busy with table plans and first dances. Elizabeth is grieving. Ron is
dealing with family troubles, and Ibrahim is still providing therapy to his
favorite criminal. But when Elizabeth meets Nick, a wedding guest asking for
her help, she finds the thrill of the chase is ignited once again. And when
Nick disappears without a trace, his cagey business partner becomes the gang’s
next stop. It seems the duo have something valuable—something worth killing
for.
December 1952. While the young Queen Elizabeth II
finds her feet as the new monarch, she must also find the right words to
continue the tradition of her late father’s Christmas Day radio broadcast. But
even traditions must evolve with the times, and the queen faces a postwar
Britain hungry for change.
As preparations begin for the royal Christmas at Sandringham
House in Norfolk, old friends—Jack Devereux and Olive Carter—are unexpectedly
reunited by the occasion. Olive, a single mother and aspiring reporter at the
BBC, leaps at the opportunity to cover the holiday celebration, but even a
chance encounter with the queen doesn’t go as planned and Olive wonders if she
will ever be taken seriously.
Jack, a recently widowed chef, reluctantly takes up a new
role in the royal kitchens at Sandringham. Lacking in purpose and direction,
Jack has abandoned his dream to have his own restaurant, but his talents are
soon noticed and while he might not believe in himself, others do, and a chance
encounter with an old friend helps to reignite the spark of his passion and
ambition. As Jack and Olive’s paths continue to cross over the
following five Christmases, they grow ever closer. Yet Olive carries the burden
of a heavy secret that threatens to destroy everything.
Christmas Day, December 1957. As the
nation eagerly awaits the Queen’s first televised Christmas speech, there is
one final gift for the Christmas season to deliver…
An enthralling historical novel about one of the most famous
wedding dresses of the twentieth century—Queen Elizabeth’s wedding gown—and the
fascinating women who made it.
At Christmastime, the Sullivans are missing someone dear to
them ... until unexpected guests begin to arrive at their empty brownstone in
Harlem—and they keep coming. And they stay. For twelve long, hard, topsy-turvy,
messy days. But that’s when the Sullivans discover that the moments in life
that defy hope, expectation, or even imagination, might be the best gifts of
all.
Subscribe for weekly reading vlogs and seasonal living
inspiration in the English countryside. I especially enjoy reading golden age
mysteries, classic literature, vintage books and nature writing. Join me as I
share reading vlogs, literary adventures, book hauls and reviews.
Lords and Ladles feature three of Ireland's top chefs -
Derry Clarke, Catherine Fulvio and Paul Flynn - who are challenged to recreate
elaborate menus from different centuries in some of Ireland's grandest Country
Homes.
Ian Fleming. John le Carré. Len Deighton. Mick Herron. The
brilliant plotting of Herron’s twice CWA Dagger Award-winning Slough House
series of spy novels is matched only by his storytelling gift and an ear for
viciously funny political satire.
Crackling with the personalities, conflicts, and ambitions
that transformed the media from something that followed the news to something
that formed it, The Powers That Be is David Halberstam's
forceful account of the rise of modern media as an instrument of political
power, published here with a new introduction by the author.
Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon by Michael
Adams (not available in the JCLC, request from Interlibrary Loan)
In its seven years on television, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
has earned critical acclaim and a massive cult following among teen viewers.
One of the most distinguishing features of the program is the innovative way
the show's writers play with language: fabricating new words, morphing existing
ones, and throwing usage on its head. The result has been a strikingly resonant
lexicon that reflects the power of both youth culture and television in the
evolution of American slang. Using the show to illustrate how new slang is
formed, transformed, and transmitted, Slayer Slang is one of
those rare books that combines a serious explanation of a pop culture phenomena
with an engrossing read for fans of the show, word geeks, and language
professionals.
Meg Mackworth’s hand-lettering skill has made her famous as
the Planner of Park Slope, designing custom journals for her New York City
clientele. She has another skill too: reading signs that other people miss.
Knowing the upcoming marriage of Reid Sutherland and his polished fiancée was
doomed to fail is one thing, but weaving a secret word of warning into their
wedding program is another. Meg may have thought no one would spot it, but she
hadn’t counted on sharp-eyed, pattern-obsessed Reid. A year later, Reid has
tracked Meg down to find out how she knew that his meticulously planned future
was about to implode.
Law & Order (tv show)
A BAB member reports that all 25 seasons have dropped for streaming on Hulu! Lives hang in the balance as detectives and prosecutors pursue justice in
New York City. In cases ripped from the headlines, police investigate serious
and often deadly crimes, weighing the evidence and questioning the suspects
until someone is taken into custody. The district attorney's office then builds
a case to convict the perpetrator by proving the person guilty beyond a
reasonable doubt. Working together, these expert teams navigate all sides of
the complex criminal justice system to make New York a safer place -- and keep
the worst offenders off the streets.
Set in London of the 1660s and of the early twenty-first
century, The Weight of Ink is the interwoven tale of two women
of remarkable intellect: Ester Velasquez, an emigrant from Amsterdam who
is permitted to scribe for a blind rabbi, just before the plague hits the city;
and Helen Watt, an ailing historian with a love of Jewish
history. Electrifying and ambitious, The Weight of Ink is
about women separated by centuries—and the choices and sacrifices they must
make in order to reconcile the life of the heart and mind.
Inspired by a true story, People of the Book is
a novel of sweeping historical grandeur and intimate emotional intensity by an
acclaimed and beloved author. Called “a tour de force” by the San
Francisco Chronicle, this ambitious, electrifying work traces the harrowing
journey of the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, a beautifully illuminated Hebrew
manuscript created in fifteenth-century Spain. When it falls to Hanna Heath, an
Australian rare-book expert, to conserve this priceless work, the series of
tiny artifacts she discovers in its ancient binding—an insect wing fragment,
wine stains, salt crystals, a white hair—only begin to unlock its deep
mysteries and unexpectedly plunges Hanna into the intrigues of fine art forgers
and ultranationalist fanatics.
When Eugenie Davies is killed by a driver on a quiet London
street, her death is clearly no accident. Someone struck her with a car and
then deliberately ran over her body before driving off, leaving nothing behind
but questions.
What brought Eugenie Davies to London on a rainy autumn night? Why was she
carrying the name of the man who found her body? Who among the many
acquaintances in her complicated and tragic life could have wanted her dead?
And could her murder have some connection to a twenty-eight-year-old musical
wunderkind, a virtuoso violinist who several months earlier suddenly and
inexplicably lost the ability to play a single note? For Detective Inspector
Thomas Lynley, whose own domestic life is about to change radically, these
questions are only the first in an investigation that leads him to walk a fine
line between personal loyalty and professional honor.
As children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at
Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It
was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were
constantly reminding their charges of how special they were. Now, years later,
Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life. And for the
first time she is beginning to look back at their shared past and understand
just what it is that makes them special—and how that gift will shape the rest
of their time together.
For fans of Cloud Atlasand Station Eleven, a spellbinding and profoundly prescient debut that follows a cast
of intricately linked characters over hundreds of years as humanity
struggles to rebuild itself in the aftermath of a climate plague—a daring and
deeply heartfelt work of mind-bending imagination from a singular new
voice.
Civilization itself is crumbling as suicide and despair
become commonplace. Oxford historian Theodore Faron, apathetic toward a future
without a future, spends most of his time reminiscing. Then he is approached by
Julian, a bright, attractive woman who wants him to help get her an audience
with his cousin, the powerful Warden of England. She and her band of unlikely
revolutionaries may just awaken his desire to live . . . and they may also hold
the key to survival for the human race. Told with P. D. James’s trademark
suspense, insightful characterization, and riveting storytelling, The
Children of Men is a story of a world with no children and no future.
This prequel spinoff from the Yellowstone series follows an
earlier generation of The Duttons as they face a new set of challenges in the
early 20th century, including the rise of Western expansion, Prohibition, and
the Great Depression.
In We Don't Know Ourselves, Fintan O'Toole
weaves his own experiences into Irish social, cultural, and economic change,
showing how Ireland, in just one lifetime, has gone from a reactionary
"backwater" to an almost totally open society - perhaps the most
astonishing national transformation in modern history.
It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading
up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his
busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local
convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and
the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.
Built on the testimony of those who worked in Ireland's
notorious Magdalene Laundries, this documentary tells the full, shocking story
of a shameful system, created by the Irish State but supported by all levels of
Irish society, which enslaved over 10,000 women for decades. The film bears
witness to the women's experiences in their own words, before during and after
their time in the laundries, and show how, even today, attempts are being made
to try to silence them. We examine not only why and how the Magdalene
phenomenon arose, but also how it was allowed to continue unchallenged for so
long. At every level - family, parish and state - Irish society, at best,
turned a blind eye; at worst, it supported, facilitated and even profited from
the operation of these institutions, while perpetuating the stigma and shame of
the women imprisoned there.
Journey with The Chieftains to the special places and people
of the home counties that formed the band’s musical soul. Derek Bell, Kevin
Conneff, Martin Fay, Sean Keane, Matt Molloy, and Paddy Moloney tell the tales
of their earliest memories of Irish music. Their thoughtful and often amusing
stories capture the emotion behind the scenes of every performance.
In 1974, while on the way home from a gig, the apolitical Irish
rock group, The Miami Showband, fell into the crosshairs of a Protestant
unionist paramilitary group that planted explosives on their bus when it was
stopped at a fake checkpoint.
A world-weary political journalist picks up the story of a
woman's search for her son, who was taken away from her decades ago after she
became pregnant and was forced to live in a convent.
Bound by Jackson Avenue and Delachaise, Magazine, and
Tchoupitoulas streets, New Orleans’ Irish Channel is a quaint neighborhood
named in honor of the wave of Irish immigrants who first settled there in the
1830s. Then, it was known for its shotgun homes, working-class community, and
the ports and breweries where many residents worked. Today, the Irish Channel
remains a mainly residential neighborhood with a thriving brewery scene and a
number of local hangouts and restaurants.
Item descriptions pulled from Amazon, Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB,
and Youtube.
Posts
