New Non-Fiction: Thursday, March 28

If you frequently read fiction books, you might want to consider a nonfiction text for a change of pace. The library is constantly receiving new nonfiction and biography books, including the items below. Why not stop by and check out a book, CD, movie, or other material that you find interesting. We will continue to offer “Grab and Go” services for those who prefer to place their books on hold online and then pick them up in the cabinet inside the library.

Here are a few of the new nonfiction books that have arrived at the library recently. We invite you to check them out!

American Eclipse: A Nation’s Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win Glory of the World

In vibrant historical detail, American Eclipse animates the fierce jockeying that came to dominate late nineteenth-century American astronomy, revealing the challenges faced by three of the most determined eclipse chasers who participated in this adventure. James Craig Watson, in his day a renowned asteroid hunter; Vassar astronomer Maria Mitchell, who fought to demonstrate that science and higher learning were not anathema to femininity; and Thomas Edison, a young inventor and irrepressible showman. With vivid accounts of train robberies and Indian skirmishes, Baron’s page-turning drama not only brings to life the mythologized age of the Wild West in a totally unexpected way but forever memorializes an historic eclipse that would come to symbolize American science in its ascendance.

The Deerfield Massacre

The sacking of Deerfield led to one of the greatest sagas of adventure, survival, sacrifice, family, honor, and faith ever told in North America. 112 survivors, including their fearless minister, the Reverend John Williams, were captured and led on a 300-mile forced march north, into enemy territory in Canada. Any captive who faltered or became too weak to continue the journey—including Williams’s own wife and one of his children—fell under the knife or tomahawk. Survivors of the march willed themselves to live and endured captivity. Ransomed by the King of England’s royal governor of Massachusetts, the captives later returned home to Deerfield, rebuilt their town and, for the rest of their lives, told the incredible tale.

Normal Women: 900 Years of Making History

Did you know that the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was started and propelled by women who were protesting a tax on women? Or that celebrated naturalist Charles Darwin believed not just that women were naturally inferior to men, but that they’d evolve to become ever more inferior? These are just a few of the startling findings you will learn from reading Philippa Gregory’s Normal Women. In this ambitious and groundbreaking book, she tells the story of England over 900 years, for the very first time placing women—some fifty per cent of the population—center stage. Using research skills honed in her work as one of our foremost historical novelists, Gregory trawled through court records, newspapers, and journals to find highwaywomen and beggars, murderers and brides, housewives and pirates, female husbands and hermits.