Library News

Michelle lecturing our Ale Together Now program in the Community Room.
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Ale Together Now: T’ales from the Pub

This month's Ale Together Now program focused on the wonderfully malty beer styles of English bitters, mild ales, and old/stock ales.

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A graphic of an orange cookbook with a measuring cup and a wooden spoon.
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Recipe Club and Potluck: February 2025

There was a fantastic variety of dishes at this month's Recipe Club and Potluck. We enjoyed savory goodies, comforting soup, and plenty of sweet treats!

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Black History Month: The Laborer
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Celebrate Black History Month!

February is Black History Month, with the 2025 theme of African Americans and Labor. Join us this month in learning key stories of Black people's often invisible labor and their time, energy, and talent that has changed the course of history.

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New at Cromaine

Book cover for "The Technological Republic"

The Technological Republic

INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A cri de coeur that takes aim at the tech industry for abandoning its history of helping America and its allies.”—The Wall Street Journal

From the Palantir co-founder, one of tech’s boldest thinkers and The Economist’s “best CEO of 2024,” and his deputy, a sweeping indictment of the West’s culture of complacency, arguing that timid leadership, intellectual fragility, and an unambitious view of technology’s potential in Silicon Valley have made the U.S. vulnerable in an era of mounting global threats.

“Not since Allan Bloom’s astonishingly successful 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind—more than one million copies sold—has there been a cultural critique as sweeping as Karp’s.”—George F. Will, The Washington Post

Silicon Valley has lost its way.

Our most brilliant engineering minds once collaborated with government to advance world-changing technologies. Their efforts secured the West’s dominant place in the geopolitical order. But that relationship has now eroded, with perilous repercussions.

Today, the market rewards shallow engagement with the potential of technology. Engineers and founders build photo-sharing apps and marketing algorithms, unwittingly becoming vessels for the ambitions of others. This complacency has spread into academia, politics, and the boardroom. The result? An entire generation for whom the narrow-minded pursuit of the demands of a late capitalist economy has become their calling.

In this groundbreaking treatise, Palantir co-founder and CEO Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska offer a searing critique of our collective abandonment of ambition, arguing that in order for the U.S. and its allies to retain their global edge—and preserve the freedoms we take for granted—the software industry must renew its commitment to addressing our most urgent challenges, including the new arms race of artificial intelligence. The government, in turn, must embrace the most effective features of the engineering mindset that has propelled Silicon Valley’s success.

Above all, our leaders must reject intellectual fragility and preserve space for ideological confrontation. A willingness to risk the disapproval of the crowd, Karp and Zamiska contend, has everything to do with technological and economic outperformance.

At once iconoclastic and rigorous, this book will also lift the veil on Palantir and its broader political project from the inside, offering a passionate call for the West to wake up to our new reality.

Book cover for "Saint of the Narrows Street"

Saint of the Narrows Street

As an Italian American family's decades-old secret begins to unravel, they will have to bear the consequences—and face each other—in this thrilling south Brooklyn-set tragic opera of the highest caliber from crime fiction luminary William Boyle.

William Boyle is the master of Brooklyn-set crime fiction and Saint of the Narrows Street is his magnum opus. For fans of The Sopranos, Jonathan Lethem, and Dennis Lehane.

Gravesend, Brooklyn, 1986: Risa Franzone lives in a ground-floor apartment on Saint of the Narrows Street with her bad-seed husband, Saverio, and their eight-month-old baby, Fabrizio. On the night Risa’s younger sister, Giulia, moves in to recover from a bad breakup, a fateful accident occurs: Risa, boiled over with anger and fear, strikes a drunk, erratic Sav with a cast-iron pan, killing him on the spot.

The sisters are left with a choice: notify the authorities and make a case for self-defense, or bury the man’s body and go on with their lives as best they can. In a moment of panic, in the late hours of the night, they call upon Sav’s childhood friend—the sweet, loyal Christopher “Chooch” Gardini—to help them, hoping they can trust him to carry a secret like this.

Over the vast expanse of the next eighteen years, life goes on in the working-class Italian neighborhood of Gravesend as Risa, Giulia, Chooch, and eventually Fabrizio grapple with what happened that night. A standout work of character-driven crime fiction from a celebrated author of the form, Saint of the Narrows Street is a searing and richly drawn novel about the choices we make and how they shape our lives.

Book cover of The Pardon

The Pardon

“A splendid narrative about political power and mercy.” —David Grann, #1 best-selling author of The Wager

The power of the presidential pardon has our national attention now more than ever before. In The Pardon, New York Times bestselling author and CNN legal commentator Jeffrey Toobin provides a timely and compelling narrative of the most controversial presidential pardon in American history—Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon, revealing the profound implications for our current political landscape, and how it is already affecting the legacies of both Presidents Biden and Trump.

In this deeply reported book, Toobin explores why the Founding Fathers gave the power of pardon to the President and recreates the behind-the-scenes political melodrama during the tumultuous period around Nixon’s resignation. The story features a rich cast of characters, including Alexander Haig, Nixon’s last chief of staff, who pushed for the pardon, and a young Justice Department lawyer named Antonin Scalia, who provided the legal justification. 

Ford’s shocking decision to pardon Nixon was widely criticized at the time, yet it has since been reevaluated as a healing gesture for a divided country. But Toobin argues that Ford’s pardon was an unwise gift to an undeserving recipient and an unsettling political precedent. The Pardon explores those that followed: Jimmy Carter’s amnesty for Vietnam draft resisters, Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich, and the extraordinary story of Trump’s unprecedented pardons at the end of his first term.

The Pardon is a must-read for anyone interested in American history, the complex dynamics of power within the highest office in the nation, and the implications of presidential mercy.

Book cover for "Mind Your Body"

Mind Your Body

Learn how to free yourself from chronic pain, anxiety, fatigue, and myriad debilitating conditions through the transformative process of nervous system regulation in this accessible guide from psychotherapist and leading Mindbody clinician Nicole Sachs.

At a time when chronic pain and other conditions have reached epidemic proportions, and the medical model is coming up short for so many of us, Mind Your Body shares the evidence-based practices that can help deliver readers from hopelessness to freedom. Most people who come to Nicole Sachs have exhausted all other paths to cope with their chronic back and bodily pain, IBS, sciatica, pelvic pain, long COVID, migraines, fibromyalgia, nerve inflammation, skin conditions, anxiety and panic disorders, and many more health conditions. Maybe they’re considering surgery or other interventions, with no real promise of a cure, or maybe the surgeries and treatments they’ve already attempted have proved disappointing and they are desperate for relief.

Sachs knows that these kinds of syndromes often don’t originate from a physical source. Rather, they are fueled by trauma responses associated with deeply rooted psychological and emotional triggers that send the brain and the nervous system into fight or flight.

In Mind Your Body, Sachs teaches readers about Mindbody medicine—which helped her overcome her own debilitating pain and dark prognosis. She explains the essential practice of turning inward, using her revolutionary JournalSpeak method, which has enabled countless people to achieve striking mental, emotional, and physical healing. Mind Your Body takes chronic pain recovery into its next stage, for a new generation of readers who have been so underserved by our medical system.

Book cover for "People of Means"

People of Means

One of People magazine's most anticipated books of 2025!

From the acclaimed author of The Kindest Lie, a propulsive novel about a mother and daughter each seeking justice and following their dreams during moments of social reckoning--1960s Nashville and 1992 Chicago; perfect for readers of Brit Bennett and Tayari Jones.

"People of Means left me breathless! A beautifully crafted story...profound and sharp."--Sadeqa Johnson New York Times bestselling author of The House of Eve

Two women. Two pivotal moments. One dream for justice and equality.

In the fall of 1959, Freda Gilroy arrives on the campus of Fisk University full of hope, carrying a suitcase and the voice of her father telling her she's part of a family legacy of greatness. Soon, the ugliness of the Jim Crow South intrudes, and she's thrust into a movement for social change. Freda is reluctant to get involved, torn between a soon-to-be doctor her parents approve of and an audacious young man willing to risk it all in the name of justice. Freda finds herself caught between two worlds, and two loves, and must decide how much she's willing to sacrifice for the advancement of her people.

In 1992 Chicago, Freda's daughter Tulip is an ambitious PR professional on track for an exciting career, if workplace politics and racial microaggressions don't get in her way. But with the ruling in the Rodney King trial weighing heavily on her, Tulip feels called to action. When she makes an irreversible professional misstep as she seeks to uplift her community, she must decide, just like her mother had three decades prior, what she's willing to risk in the name of justice and equality.

Insightful, evocative, and richly imagined with stories of hidden history, People of Means is an emotional tour de force that offers a glimpse into the quest for racial equality, the pursuit of personal and communal success, and the power of love and family ties.

"A memorable story of mothers and daughters, family dynamics, the complicated meaning of success, the pull of love, and the fight for racial equality, People of Means is a timely look at who we are as a nation--and who we can become, if only we have the courage to follow our hearts." --Kristin Harmel, New York Times bestselling author of The Paris Daughter