Akron Public Library

"With a specially commissioned Introduction and Notes by Kathryn White, Assistant Curator/Librarian of the Brontë Museum, Haworth, Yorkshire This novel is a trenchant expose of the frequently isolated, intellectually stagnant and emotionally-starved conditions under which many governesses worked in the mid-19th century. This is a deeply personal novel written from the author's own experience and as such Agnes Grey has a power and poignancy which...

The dust storms that terrorized America's High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since, and the stories of the people that held on have never been fully told. Pulitzer Prize-winning New York times journalist and author Timothy Egan follows a half-dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, going from sod huts to new framed houses to huddling in basements with the windows...

Probably Garcia Marquez's finest and most famous work, One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendia family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad, alive with unforgettable men and women, and with a truth and understanding that strike the soul, "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is a masterpiece of the art of fiction.

"During the Great Depression, wretched labor camps crop up in remote areas of the expansive pine forests throughout the American South. Destitute workers live and toil under terrible conditions to harvest pine gum, hacking into tree trunks, drawing out the sticky sap that gives the Tar Heel State its nickname, and hauling it to stills to be refined into turpentine. Subsistence living means racking up huge debts they are forced to work off, creating...

Keiko Furukura had always been considered a strange child, and her parents always worried how she would get on in the real world, so when she takes on a job in a convenience store while at university, they are delighted for her. For her part, in the convenience store she finds a predictable world mandated by the store manual, which dictates how the workers should act and what they should say, and she copies her coworkers' style of dress and speech...

"Over one hundred and fifty years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French nobleman and an astute political scientist, came to the United States to evaluate the meaning and actual functioning of democracy. Democracy in America is the classic treatise on the American way of life that he wrote as a result of his visit." "Tocqueville discusses the advantages and dangers of the majority rule -- which he thought could be as tyrannical as the rule of...

While serving as a juror at the trial of a prostitute, Prince Nekhlyudov recognizes the defendant as a young servant girl he once loved and abandoned and tries to rectify the situation.

An in-depth look at life for girls and women in America in 1904, discussing city and town life, social reform, new inventions, amusements, and more.

In time for the 150th anniversary of Les Misérables and a star-studded film adaptation, a stunning edition of Victor Hugo's masterpieceVictor Hugo's timeless story of injustice, heroism, and love in nineteenth-century Paris comes to Penguin Classics in an eye-catching new hardcover edition with cover art by Coralie Bickford-Smith. Wildly popular since its first publication in 1862, Les Misérables comes to theaters this December in a new film adaptation...