Ocean State Libraries

"Jane Austen's first novel--published posthumously in 1818--tells the story of Catherine Morland and her dangerously sweet nature, innocence, and sometime self-delusion. Though Austen's fallible heroine is repeatedly drawn into scrapes while vacationing at Bath and during her subsequent visit to Northanger Abbey, Catherine eventually triumphs, blossoming into a discerning woman who learns truths about love, life, and the heady power of literature....

"This book explains how Billy Beene, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, is using a new kind of thinking to build a successful and winning baseball team without spending enormous sums of money. The author examines the fallacy behind the major league baseball refrain that the team with the biggest wallet is supposed to win. Over the past four years the Oakland Athletics, a major league team with a minor league payroll, have had one of the...

"From the author of 1491--the best-selling study of the pre-Columbian Americas--a deeply engaging new history that explores the most momentous biological event since the death of the dinosaurs. More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two halves of the world developed totally different suites of plants and animals. Columbus's voyages brought them back together--and marked the beginning...

The author explores his theory that the food industry's used three essential ingredients to control much of the world's diet. Traces the rise of the processed food industry and how addictive salt, sugar, and fat have enabled its dominance in the past half century, revealing deliberate corporate practices behind current trends in obesity, diabetes, and other health challenges.

Now available: Nudge: The Final Edition

The original edition of the multimillion-copy New York Times bestseller by the winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Richard H. Thaler, and Cass R. Sunstein: a revelatory look at how we make decisions—for fans of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, James Clear’s Atomic Habits, and Daniel Kahneman’s...

"Klein argues that climate change isn't just another issue to be neatly filed between taxes and health care. It's an alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already failing us in many ways. Klein ... builds the case for how massively reducing our greenhouse emissions is our best chance to simultaneously reduce gaping inequalities, re-imagine our broken democracies, and rebuild our gutted local economies"--

Historian Edward Baptist reveals how the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States.

A “sharply funny and sobering . . . portrait of a family in financial free fall” from the New York Times–bestselling author of Young Jane Young (People).
 
With The Hole We’re In—a bold, timeless, yet all too timely novel about a troubled American family navigating an even more troubled America—award-winning author and screenwriter,...

It all ends with a bang! In the final episodes, Emmy winners Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul bring the saga of Breaking Bad to a bloody conclusion in their roles as meth kingpin, Walter White and his guilt-ridden partner, Jesse Pinkman. As each tries to get clear of the wreckage they left behind in the meth world, DEA agent Hank Schrader's obsessive pursuit of "Heisenberg" gains steam, leading up to a shattering finale that will leave no one in Walt's...

"After serving time for a crime she didn't commit, Evangeline returns home to a cold welcome. Her mother blames her for her father's death, and her brothers want her out of their way. When Evangeline learns she's solely responsible for their failing ranch, putting her family's future squarely on her shoulders, she'll have to find a creative way to save their home before they lose it all. Her only ally: the cop who sent her away. Chris Chambers is...