Adult Winter Activity Challenge 2025: Non-Fiction

Created on January 2, 2025, 1:10 pm

Last Updated January 24, 2025, 10:07 am

Week 2 1/27-2/2 challenge: Read (or listen) to any item from one of the Winter Activity Challenge displays! This list is for non-fiction items.

1) Unmasked: My Life Solving America's Cold Cases

Author

Formats

Book, eAudiobook

Description

"From the detective who found The Golden State Killer, a memoir of investigating America's toughest cold cases and the rewards--and toll--of a life solving crime. I order another bourbon, neat. This is the drink that will flip the switch. I don't even know how I got here, to this place, to this point. Something is happening to me lately. I'm drinking too much. My sheets are soaking wet when I wake up from nightmares of decaying corpses. I order another...

2) The girls who stepped out of line: untold stories of the women who changed the course of World War II

Author

Series

Thorndike Press large print history fact and fiction

Formats

Book, Large Print

Description

"For fans of Radium Girls and history and WWII buffs, The Girls Who Stepped Out of Line takes you inside the lives and experiences of 15 unknown women heroes from the Greatest Generation, the women who served, fought, struggled, and made things happen during WWII--in and out of uniform, for theirs is a legacy destined to embolden generations of women to come. The Girls Who Stepped Out of Line are the heroes of the Greatest Generation that you hardly...

3) I like to watch: arguing my way through the TV revolution

Author

Nussbaum, Emily

Description

"From her creation of the first 'Approval Matrix' in New York magazine in 2004 to her Pulitzer Prize-winning columns for The New Yorker, Emily Nussbaum has known all along that what we watch is who we are. In this collection, including several substantive, never-before-published essays, Nussbaum writes about her passion for television beginning with Buffy--as she writes, a show that was so much more than its critical assessment--the evolution of female...

4) Food: a love story

Author

Formats

Book, eBook, Kindle, Pre-loaded Audio, Audiobook CD, eAudiobook

Description

"What are my qualifications to write this book? None really. So why should you read it? Here's why: I'm a little fat. If a thin guy were to write about a love of food and eating I'd highly recommend that you do not read his book." Bacon. McDonalds. Cinnabon. Hot Pockets. Kale. Stand-up comedian and author Jim Gaffigan has made his career rhapsodizing over the most treasured dishes of the American diet ("choking on bacon is like getting murdered by...

5) River of the gods: genius, courage, and betrayal in the search for the source of the Nile

Author

Millard, Candice

Formats

Book, Large Print, Audiobook CD

Description

"From the New York Times bestselling author of RIVER OF DOUBT and DESTINY OF THE REPUBLIC, the stirring story of one of the great feats of exploration of all time, and its complicated legacy The Nile River is the longest in the world. Its fertile floodplain allowed for rise to the great civilization of ancient Egypt, but for millennia the location of its headwaters was shrouded in mystery. Pharaonic and Roman attempts to find it were stymied by a...

6) Manhunters: how we took down Pablo Escobar

Author

Murphy, Steve (Steven E.)

Formats

Book, eBook, eAudiobook

Description

The explosive memoir of legendary DEA agents and the subject of the hit Netflix series Narcos. Readers will go deep inside the inner workings of the Search Bloc, the joint Colombian-US task force that resulted in an intensive 18-month operation that tracked Escobar.

7) The power of habit: why we do what we do in life and business

Author

Duhigg, Charles

Formats

Book, eBook, Kindle, Pre-loaded Audio, Audiobook CD, eAudiobook

Description

"A young woman walks into a laboratory. Over the past two years, she has transformed almost every aspect of her life. She has quit smoking, run a marathon, and been promoted at work. The patterns inside her brain, neurologists discover, have fundamentally changed. Marketers at Procter & Gamble study videos of people making their beds. They are desperately trying to figure out how to sell a new product called Febreze, on track to be one of the biggest...

8) The last castle: the epic story of love, loss, and American royalty in the nation's largest home

Author

Kiernan, Denise

Formats

Book, Large Print, Audiobook CD

Description

Documents the story of the Gilded Age mansion Biltmore, tracing George Vanderbilt's construction of his European-style estate and the efforts of his bride, Edith Stuyvesant Dresser, to become its protector in the face of changing fortunes and times.

9) Book and dagger: how scholars and librarians became the unlikely spies of World War II

Author

Formats

Book, eBook, Kindle, Audiobook CD, eAudiobook

Description

"The untold story of the academics who became OSS spies, invented modern spycraft, and helped turn the tide of the war At the start of WWII, the US found itself in desperate need of an intelligence agency. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor to today's CIA, was quickly formed--and, in an effort to fill its ranks with experts, the OSS turned to academia for recruits. Suddenly, literature professors, librarians, and historians were training...

10) You will get through this: a mental health first-aid kit : help for depression, anxiety, grief, and more

Author

Description

"An all-in-one guide to taking charge of your mental health, with research-proven strategies to alleviate daily struggles such as depression, anxiety, panic disorder, ADHD, and insomnia"-- Provided by publisher.

11) There's always this year: on basketball and ascension

Author

Abdurraqib, Hanif

Formats

Book, eBook, Kindle

Description

"While Hanif Abdurraqib is an acclaimed author, a gifted poet, and one of our culture's most insightful music critics, he is most of all, at heart, an Ohioan. Growing up in Columbus in the '90s, Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron were forged, and countless others weren't. His lifelong love of the game leads Abdurraqib into a lyrical, historical, and emotionally rich exploration of what it means to make...

12) Challenger: a true story of heroism and disaster on the edge of space

Author

Higginbotham, Adam

Formats

Book, Large Print, eBook, Kindle, Audiobook CD, eAudiobook

Description

"On January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger broke apart over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all seven people on board. Like disaster is a defining moment in twentieth-century history--yet the full story of what happened, and why, has never been told. It's a compelling tale of ambition and ingenuity undermined by political cynicism and cost-cutting in the interests of burnishing national prestige. A masterful blend of riveting human drama and fascinating...

13) Filterworld: how algorithms flattened culture

Author

Description

"From New Yorker staff writer and author of The Longing for Less Kyle Chayka comes a timely history and investigation of a world ruled by algorithms, which determine the shape of culture itself. From coffee shops to rental apartments to social media posts the world round, a sleek and deceptively simple aesthetic has come to predominate. It's in the neon signs and exposed brick of an Internet cafe in Nairobi or the skeletal, modern furniture of an...

14) Slow noodles: a Cambodian memoir of love, loss, and family recipes

Author

Formats

Book, eBook, Kindle, eAudiobook

Description

"Chantha Nguon recounts her life as a Cambodia refugee who lost everything and everyone--her house her country, her parents, her siblings, her friends--everything but the memories of her mother's kitchen, the tastes and aromas of the foods her mother made before the dictator Pol Pot tore her country apart"-- Provided by publisher.

15) Recognizing the stranger

Author

Hammad, Isabella

Description

"Isabella Hammad delivered the Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture at Columbia University nine days before October 7, 2023. The text of Hammad's seminal speech and her afterword, written in the early weeks of 2024, together make up a searing appraisal of the war on Palestine during what seems a turning point in the narrative of human history. Profound and moving, Hammad writes from within the moment, giving voice to the Palestinian struggle for freedom....

16) The Achilles trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the origins of America's invasion of Iraq

Author

Formats

Book, eBook, Kindle

Description

"From bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Steve Coll, the definitive story of the decades-long relationship between the United States and Saddam Hussein, and a deeply researched and news breaking investigation into how human error, cultural miscommunication, and hubris led to one of the greatest geopolitical conflicts of our time When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, its message was clear: Iraq, under the control of strongman Saddam...

17) The wide wide sea: imperial ambition, first contact and the fateful final voyage of Captain James Cook

Author

Formats

Book, Large Print, eBook, Kindle, Audiobook CD, eAudiobook

Description

"From New York Times bestselling author Hampton Sides, an epic account of the most momentous voyage of the Age of Exploration, which culminated in Captain James Cook's death in Hawaii, and left a complex and controversial legacy still debated to this day On July 12th, 1776, Captain James Cook, already lionized as the greatest explorer in British history, set off on his third voyage in his ship the HMS Resolution. Two-and-a-half years later, on a beach...

18) From here to the great unknown: a memoir

Author

Presley, Lisa Marie

Formats

Book, Large Print, eBook, Kindle, eAudiobook

Description

In 2022, Lisa Marie Presley asked her daughter to help finally finish her long-gestating memoir. A month later, Lisa Marie was dead, and the world would never know her story in her own words, never know the passionate, joyful, caring and complicated woman that Riley loved and grieved. Riley got the tapes that her mother had recorded for the book, laid in her bed, and listened as Lisa Marie told story after story about smashing golf carts together...

19) Cactus country: a boyhood memoir

Author

Formats

Book, eBook, eAudiobook

Description

"A striking literary memoir of genderfluidity, class, masculinity, and the American Southwest that captures the author's experience coming of age in a Tucson, Arizona, trailer park."--Amazon.com

20) Trail of the lost: the relentless search to bring home the missing hikers of the Pacific Crest Trail

Author

Lankford, Andrea

Formats

Book, Audiobook CD, eAudiobook

Description

"From an award-winning former law enforcement park ranger and investigator, this female-driven true crime adventure follows the author's quest to find missing hikers along the Pacific Crest Trail by pairing up with an eclectic group of unlikely allies"-- Provided by publisher.