Central Skagit Library District

"From the acclaimed author of Dreaming in Cuban, a new novel that follows three generations of a divided family against the tumultuous backdrops of Cuba, America, Germany, and Russia in the new millennium"-- "Celia del Pino, matriarch of a far-flung Cuban family, has watched her descendants spread out across the globe, struggling to make sense of their transnational identities and strained relationships with one another. In Berlin, the charismatic...

Rebuffed by the princess after retrieving her golden ball, a noble frog sets out to find a more suitable mate.

"Paddington Station, present day. A young woman boards the sleeper train to Cornwall with only a beautiful emerald silk evening dress and an old, well-read diary full of sketches. Ellie Nightingale is a shy violinist who plays like her heart is broken. But when she meets fellow passenger Joe she feels like she has been given that rarest of gifts - a second chance. ... Paddington Station, 1944. Beneath the shadow of the war which rages across Europe,...

The "German question" haunts the modern world: How could so civilized a nation be responsible for the greatest horror in Western history? In this unusual fusion of personal memoir and history, the celebrated scholar Fritz Stern refracts the question through the prism of his own life. Born in the Weimar Republic, exposed to five years of National Socialism before being forced into exile in 1938 in America, he became a world-renowned historian whose...

On October 3, 1990, West Germany and East Germany became one state again after 45 years of post-war division. Just one year earlier, many East Germans could not imagine that the socialist dictatorship would soon come to an end. Head of state Erich Honecker had claimed that the Berlin Wall would still be standing in a hundred years. Many were happy about the freedom, about being able to visit their relatives and friends in the West, and also about...

Get the Summary of Andrew Nagorski's 1941 in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. "1941" delves into the pivotal year of World War II, examining the strategic miscalculations and ideological obsessions of Hitler and Stalin. As the Soviet ambassador in London, Ivan Maisky, predicted a decisive German move, Stalin ignored warnings of a German invasion, leading to a catastrophic underestimation of the threat. Hitler and...

How did Germany's Christians respond to Nazism? In Twisted Cross, Doris Bergen addresses one important element of this response by focusing on the 600,000 self-described 'German Christians,' who sought to expunge all Jewish elements from the Christian church. In a process that became more daring as Nazi plans for genocide unfolded, this group of Protestant lay people and clergy rejected the Old Testament, ousted people defined as non-Aryans from their...

The French political philosopher Raymond Aron once observed that the twentieth century "could have been Germany's century." In 1900, the country was Europe's preeminent power, its material strength and strident militaristic ethos apparently balanced by a vital culture and extraordinary scientific achievement. It was poised to achieve greatness. In Einstein's German World, the eminent historian Fritz Stern explores the ambiguous promise of Germany...

In November 1893, Daniel Paul Schreber, recently named presiding judge of the Saxon Supreme Court, was on the verge of a psychotic breakdown and entered a Leipzig psychiatric clinic. He would spend the rest of the nineteenth century in mental institutions. Once released, he published his Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903), a harrowing account of real and delusional persecution, political intrigue, and states of sexual ecstasy as God's private concubine....

In 1530, Holy Roman emperor Charles V called an imperial council in Augsburg, hoping to resolve religious dissention in the empire introduced by Martin Luther, whose 95 Theses, criticized the church's practice of offering promises of forgiveness from sins in exchange for money. Luther's allies in the town of Wittenberg presented the emperor with their theological positions. Another faction, aligned with Swiss reformer Ulrich Zwingli, offered more...