Ocean State Libraries

President Jimmy Carter has become an acclaimed, best-selling author since his days in the White House. In An Hour Before Daylight, he offers poignant remembrances of his childhood days in Depression-era rural Georgia. With eloquent yet conversational prose, Carter recalls the events and people who shaped his life from his earliest days. He describes the sharecropping economy of the 1930s, where hard farm labor was done by hand and those who worked...

"In the midst of civil unrest in the summer of 2020 following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, one of the great literary voices of our time, Elizabeth Alexander, wrote a moving reflection on the psyche of young Black America, turning a mother's eye to her sons' generation. Originally published in the New Yorker, the essay brilliantly and lovingly observed the lives and attitudes of young people who even as children could...

"On an average day in America, seven young people aged nineteen or under will be shot dead. In Another Day in the Death of America, award-winning Guardian journalist Gary Younge tells the stories of the lives lost during the course of a single day in the United States. It could have been any day, but Younge has chosen November 23, 2013. From Jaiden Dixon (9), shot point-blank by his mother's ex-boyfriend on his doorstep in Ohio, to Pedro Dado Cortez...

"For the majority of young adults today, the transition to independence is a time of excitement and possibility. But 4.5 million young people--or a stunning 11.5 percent of youth aged sixteen to twenty-four--experience entry into adulthood as abrupt abandonment, a time of disconnection from school, work, and family. For this growing population of Americans, which includes kids aging out of foster care and those entangled with the justice system, life...