Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award

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  Three Plays: The Indolent Boys, Children of the Sun, and the Moon in Two Windows

  N. Scott Momaday

  The Indolent Boys recounts the 1891 tragedy of runaways from the Kiowa Boarding School who froze to death while trying to return to their families. The play explores the consequences, for Indian students and their white teachers, of the federal program to “kill the Indian and save the Man.” A joyous counterpoint to this tragedy, Children of the Sun is a short children’s play that explains the people’s relationship to the sun. The Moon in Two Windows, a screenplay set in the early 1900s, centers on the children of defeated Indian tribes, who are forced into assimilation at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where the U.S. government established the first off-reservation boarding school.

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  The Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History

  Marysa Navarro, Gwendolyn Mink, Gloria Steinem, Wilma Mankiller, and Barbara Smith

  Contains articles on fashion and style, household workers, images of women, jazz and blues, maternity homes, Native American women, Phillis Wheatley, homes, picture brides, single women, and teaching.

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  Dad's Maybe Book

  Tim O'Brien

  Best-selling author Tim O'Brien shares wisdom from a life in letters, lessons learned in wartime, and the challenges, humor, and rewards of raising two sons

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  Going after Cacciato: A Novel

  Tim O'Brien

  In a blend of reality and fantasy, this novel tells the story of a young soldier who one day lays down his rifle and sets off on a quixotic journey from the jungles of Indochina to the streets of Paris. In its memorable evocation of men both fleeing from and meeting the demands of battle, Going After Cacciato stands as much more than just a great war novel. Ultimately it's about the forces of fear and heroism that do battle in the hearts of us all.

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  If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home

  Tim O'Brien

  O'Brien's searing memoir of his years as a soldier in Vietnam takes readers with him through the ghostly ambiguities of manhood and morality in a war gone terribly wrong.

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  In the Lake of the Woods

  Tim O'Brien

  John Wade, a senatorial candidate, is accused of participating in a massacre during the Vietnam War. Hounded by the press, he flees with his wife to a cottage and his wife disappears. Did she desert him, or did he kill her?

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  July, July

  Tim O'Brien

  Old friends share memories of the past, current regrets, and future plans as they gather on a July weekend for the thirtieth reunion of Darton Hall College's class of 1969.

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  Northern Lights

  Tim O'Brien

  Set in the Arrowhead country of Minnesota, Paul and Harvey Perry act out the dreams of their dead father. Their rivalry spins out of control and ends in a final test of endurance and survival.

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  The Nuclear Age

  Tim O'Brien

  At the age of forty-nine, William Cowling decides to dig a gigantic hole in his backyard in order to protect himself and his family from "the very real threat of nuclear annihilation that everyone evades and denies."

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  The Things They Carried

  Tim O'Brien

  A sequence of stories about the Vietnam War, this book also has the unity of a novel, with recurring characters and interwoven strands of plot and theme. It aims to summarize America's involvement in Vietnam, and her coming to terms with that experience in the years that followed.

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  Tomcat in Love

  Tim O'Brien

  Even as he plots revenge on his wife for abandoning him for another man Thomas Chippering, a professor of linguistics cannot free himself of his obsession with women. He makes a pass at a student who blackmails him into giving her good marks. A look at a womanizer.

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  Dubliners

  Tony O'Shea and Colm Tóibín

  A recording of a single year in Dublin which captures celebrations, sporting events and the lives of Dubliners. The book transcends social strata and explores the city's various communities.

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  Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self

  Marilynne Robinson

  In this ambitious book, acclaimed writer Marilynne Robinson applies her astute intellect to some of the most vexing topics in the history of human thought-- science, religion, and consciousness. Crafted with the same care and insight as her award-winning novels, Absence of Mind challenges postmodern atheists who crusade against religion under the banner of science. In Robinson's view, scientific reasoning does not denote a sense of logical infallibility, as thinkers like Richard Dawkins might suggest. Instead, in its purest form, science represents a search for answers. It engages the problem of knowledge, an aspect of the mystery of consciousness, rather than providing a simple and final model of reality.

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  Gilead: A Novel

  Marilynne Robinson

  As the Reverend John Ames approaches the hour of his own death, he writes a letter to his son chronicling three previous generations of his family, a story that stretches back to the Civil War and reveals uncomfortable family secrets.

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  Home: A Novel

  Marilynne Robinson

  Glory Boughton, aged thirty-eight, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father. Soon her brother, Jack--the prodigal son of the family, gone for twenty years--comes home too, looking for refuge and trying to make peace with a past littered with tormenting trouble and pain.

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  Housekeeping: A Novel

  Marilynne Robinson

  A modern classic, Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, their eccentric and remote aunt. The family house is in the small Far West town of Fingerbone set on a glacial lake, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck, and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transience.

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  Jack: A Novel

  Marilynne Robinson

  Marilynne Robinson’s mythical world of Gilead, Iowa—the setting of her novels Gilead, Home, and Lila, and now Jack—and its beloved characters have illuminated and interrogated the complexities of American history, the power of our emotions, and the wonders of a sacred world. Jack is Robinson’s fourth novel in this now-classic series. In it, Robinson tells the story of John Ames Boughton, the prodigal son of Gilead’s Presbyterian minister, and his romance with Della Miles, a high school teacher who is also the child of a preacher. Their deeply felt, tormented, star-crossed interracial romance resonates with all the paradoxes of American life, then and now.

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  Lila: A Novel

  Marilynne Robinson

  Lila, homeless and alone after years of roaming the countryside, steps inside a small-town Iowa church -- the only available shelter from the rain -- and ignites a romance and a debate that will reshape her life. She becomes the wife of a minister, John Ames, and begins a new existence while trying to make sense of the days of suffering that preceded her newfound security. Neglected as a toddler, Lila was rescued by Doll, a canny young drifter, and brought up by her in a hardscrabble childhood. Together they crafted a life on the run, living hand-to-mouth with nothing but their sisterly bond and a ragged blade to protect them. But despite bouts of petty violence and moments of desperation, their shared life is laced with moments of joy and love. When Lila arrives in Gilead, she struggles to harmonize the life of her makeshift family and their days of hardship with the gentle Christian worldview of her husband that paradoxically judges those she loves.

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  Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution

  Marilynne Robinson

  At the time when Robinson wrote this book, the largest known source of radioactive contamination of the world's environment was a government-owned nuclear plant called Sellafield, not far from Wordsworth's cottage in the Lakes District; one child in sixty was dying from leukemia in the village closest to the plant. The central question of this eloquently impassioned book is: How can a country that we persist in calling a welfare state consciously risk the lives of its people for profit?

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  The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought

  Marilynne Robinson

  In the tradition of nineteenth-century novelists who turned to the essay, Marilynne Robinson offers an authoritative approach to refining the ideas our culture has handed down to us. Whether considering how the McGuffey readers were inspired by Midwestern abolitionists; how creationism, "long owned by the Religious Right," has spurred on contemporary Darwinism; or how John Calvin, who was a Frenchman in Geneva, points to America's continental origins, Robinson writes with great conviction.

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  The Givenness of Things: Essays

  Marilynne Robinson

  The spirit of our times can appear to be one of joyless urgency. As a culture we have become less interested in the exploration of the glorious mind, and more interested in creating technologies for material well-being. But while cultural pessimism is always fashionable, there is still much to give us hope. In The Givenness of Things, Marilynne Robinson delivers an impassioned critique of our contemporary society while arguing that reverence must be given to who we are and what we are: creatures of singular interest and value, despite our errors and depredations. Robinson has plumbed the depths of the human spirit in her award-winning novels, and in her new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern predicament and the mysteries of faith. These seventeen essays examine the ideas that have inspired and provoked one of our finest writers throughout her life. Whether she is investigating how the work of the great thinkers of the past--Calvin, Locke, Bonhoeffer, and Shakespeare--can infuse our lives, or calling attention to the rise of the self-declared élite in American religious and political life, Robinson's peerless prose and boundless humanity are on display.

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  What Are We Doing Here?

  Marilynne Robinson

  A new essay collection assesses today's political climate and the mysteries of faith, from the influence of intellectual minds on society's political consciousness to the way that beauty informs and disciplines daily life.

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  When I Was a Child I Read Books: Essays

  Marilynne Robinson

  In this new collection of incisive essays, Robinson returns to the themes which have preoccupied her work: the role of faith in modern life, the inadequacy of fact, the contradictions inherent in human nature.

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  Second Wind: The Memoirs of an Opinionated Man

  William F. Russell and Taylor Branch

  Autobiography of the star basketball player who was voted Most Valuable Player in the NBA five times.

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  Sean Scully: Walls of Aran

  Sean Scully and Colm Tóibín

  Sean Scully is one of the best-loved abstract painters. This book brings together his photographs of the dry stone walls found on the Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland.