2024 NATIONAL MEDAL
for Museum and Library Service Finalist
“This traffic stinks. I’ve been inching up for the last 45 minutes and will be really late for my interview. I don’t even have a number to call. I’m gonna be really late. There’s an opening – I could swerve around the two cars in front of me and move up a little. Here goes. Oh S - - t! TRUCK COMING RIGHT TOWARD…"
When I was a kid we played touch football in the street. There were always some parked cars on our “field.” When the ball ended up under a car someone would crawl under it to get the ball. One day after he crawled out and stood up he noticed dog s - - t all over his hand and ball and yelled while dropping the ball: “Holy s - - t!"
An irresistible debut set in London during World War II about an adventurous young woman who becomes a secret advice columnist-a warm, funny, and enormously moving story for fans of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and Lilac Girls
Afflicted with a chronic debilitating condition, Suzette Jensen nevertheless brought Hanna into the world, pleased and proud to start a family with her husband Alex. Estranged from her own mother, Suzette is determined to raise her daughter with the love, care, and support she was denied. Now seven-years-old, Hanna has yet to utter a word, despite being able to read and write. Defiant and anti-social, she refuses to behave in kindergarten classes and must be homeschooled. But Hanna is becoming more aggressive every day-- only behaving when she's with her father.
At the age of nineteen, Lara Prior-Palmer discovered a website devoted to "the world's longest, toughest horse race"--an annual competition of endurance and skill that involves dozens of riders racing a series of twenty-five wild ponies across 1,000 kilometers of Mongolian grassland. On a whim, she decided to enter the race. As she boarded a plane to East Asia, she was utterly unprepared for what awaited her. Riders often spend years preparing to compete in the Mongol Derby, a course that re-creates the horse messenger system developed by Genghis Khan, and many fail to finish.
An exploration of mercy, its elusive presence, and why people ignore or embrace it shares advice for forging deeper self-understanding and how to pursue an honest, meaningful life that involves kindness to others.
In Tom Barren's 2016, humanity thrives in a techno-utopian paradise of flying cars, moving sidewalks, and moon bases, where avocados never go bad and punk rock never existed, because it wasn't necessary. Except Tom just can't seem to find his place in this dazzling, idealistic world, and that's before his life gets turned upside down. Utterly blindsided by an accident of fate, Tom makes a rash decision that drastically changes not only his own life but the very fabric of the universe itself.
In the tradition of Anthony Bourdain and Linda Greenlaw, a long haul mover's rollicking account of life out on the Big Slab.
