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On the night of June Fourth, a woman gives birth in a Beijing hospital alone. Thus begins the unraveling of Su Lan, a brilliant physicist who until this moment has successfully erased her past, fighting what she calls the mind's arrow of time. When Su Lan dies unexpectedly seventeen years later, it is her daughter Liya who inherits the silences and contradictions of her life. Liya, who grew up in America, takes her mother's ashes to China--to her,...
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Since his childhood, Benjamin Franklin Gates has known that he is a decendant of a long line of people whose job it has been to guard a treasure hidden by the Founding Fathers. They hid clues to its whereabouts in the country's currency and on the back of the Declaration of Independence. Now, Ben has learned of a plot to steal the Declaration, and has only one option: he had to steal it himself. Even if he pulls off this monumental task, keeping the...
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The great scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois, once wrote about what he called "Double Consciousness," a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. From an early age, Ailey fights a battle for belonging that's made all the more difficult by a hovering trauma. To come to terms with her own identity, Ailey embarks on a journey through her family's past. In doing so Ailey must learn to embrace her full heritage, a legacy of oppression...
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"Sheer entertainment... Bennett infuses wit and an arch sensibility into her prose... This is not mere froth, it is pure confection." – New York Times Book Review
"[A] pitch-perfect murder mystery... If The Crown were crossed with Miss Marple..., the result would probably be something like this charming whodunnit." – Ruth Ware, author of One by One
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"A fascinating account of both the historical and current struggle of Native Americans to recover sacred objects that have been plundered and sold to museums. Museum curator and anthropologist Chip Colwell asks the all-important question: Who owns the past? Museums that care for the objects of history or the communities whose ancestors made them?"--Provided by the publisher.
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As Adolf Hitler attempted to take over the western world, his armies were methodically seeking the finest art treasures in Europe. The Fuehrer had begun cataloguing the art he would collect and the "degenerate" works he would destroy. Behind enemy lines, often unarmed, a special force of American and British museum directors, curators, and art historians raced against time to prevent the destruction of thousands of years of culture. (Bestseller)
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An unlikely World War II platoon has been tasked by FDR with going into Germany to rescue artistic masterpieces from Nazi thieves and returning them to their rightful owners. With the art trapped behind enemy lines, and with the German army under orders to destroy everything as the Reich fell, how could they possibly succeed? But as the Monuments Men, as they were called, found themselves in a race against time, they would risk their lives to protect...
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"The destruction of ancient monuments and artworks by the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has shocked observers worldwide. Yet iconoclastic erasures of the past date back at least to the mid-1300s BCE, during the Amarna Period of ancient Egypt's 18th dynasty. Far more damage to the past has been inflicted by natural disasters, looters, and public works. Art historian Maxwell Anderson's Antiquities: What Everyone Needs...
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Opening with the notorious bonfires of &;un-German; and Jewish literature in 1933 that offered such a clear signal of Nazi intentions, Burning the Books takes us on a 3000-year journey through the destruction of knowledge and the fight against all the odds to preserve it. Richard Ovenden, director of the world-famous Bodleian Library, explains how attacks on libraries and archives have been a feature of history since ancient times but have increased...
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"A curator for the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, Doug Owsley painstakingly rebuilds skeletons, helping to identify them and determine their cause of death. He has worked on several notorious cases--from mass graves uncovered in Croatia to the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon--and has examined historic skeletons tens of thousands of years old. But the discovery of Kennewick Man, a 9,600-year-old human skeleton found along the banks of Washington's...
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"During the twentieth century, dozens of protests - large and small - occurred across North America as American Indians asserted their anger and displayed their disappointment regarding traditional museum behaviors. In response, due to public embarrassment and an awakening of sensitivities, museums began to change their methods and, additionally, laws were enacted in support of American Indian requests for change. The result is that American museums...