Special Collections

Word Beta Test Reading List

Description: These titles were used during our Beta testing phase. Please feel free to try any of them now, while we convert the rest of the Bookshare library. #general


Showing 1 through 25 of 58 results

Spelling and Vocabulary

by Shane Templeton and Donald R. Bear and Brenda Sabey and Sylvia Linan-Thompson

NIMAC-sourced textbook

Date Added: 08/21/2017


Practice Book Grade 4

by Harcourt School Publishers

NIMAC-sourced textbook

Date Added: 08/21/2017


Así Se Dice! Spanish 2

by Conrad J. Schmitt

NIMAC-sourced textbook

Date Added: 08/21/2017


The Everything Family Guide to Northern California and Lake Tahoe

by Kim Kavin

From the beautiful coastline of Monterey to historic Fort Bragg to the spectacular scenery of Lake Tahoe, northern California has something for everyone. In this book, readers will find up-to-date information on the entire area, including: San Francisco's popular family-friendly attractions; annual events in Napa Valley and Sonoma County; the natural beauty of redwood forests, beachside cliffs, and stunning mountains; the Gold Country, scene of California's famous Gold Rush; national and state parks, from Big Sur to Redwood National Forest, and more! This travel guide gives readers all they need to plan a vacation to remember--California style!

Date Added: 08/21/2017


Elements of Language

by Holt Rinehart Winston

Here's your chance to step out of the grammar book and into the real world. You may not notice parts of sentences, but you and the people around you use them every day. The following activities challenge you to find a connection between sentences and the world around you. Do the activity below that suits your personality best, and then share your discoveries with your class.

Date Added: 08/21/2017


Writing Today

by Donald Pharr and Santi Buscemi

Writing Today begins with a chapter helping students learn the skills they will need to thrive throughout college and continues to promote reading and writing as practical tools both in college and in the work world. Full chapters on Group Projects and Oral Presentations teach students how to not only be successful in the classroom, but in the world of work as well. Students are sure to be engaged as they focus on the both the academic and professional contexts of writing.

Date Added: 08/21/2017


Aventuras de Arthur Gordon Pym

by Edgar Allan Poe

Aquí encontraremos una serie de aventuras con el toque característico de Poe. Artur es un incansable joven lleno de deseos de viajar y conocer, pero en todos sus viajes debe enfrentar peligros, carencias y estar al borde de la muerte. El terror que nos transmite Poe no es el típico del siglo veinte, sangre, desmembramientos, ni nada por el estilo; es una manera más exquisita de encaminarnos al sufrimiento por zozobra. El peligro es el ingrediente principal pues coloca a sus personajes en lucha contra la naturaleza, el hambre, la inclemencia y por supuesto los seres reales e imaginarios que toda historia de terror debe contener.

Date Added: 08/21/2017


Twister on Tuesday

by Sal Murdocca and Mary Pope Osborne

An adventure to blow you away! That's what Jack and Annie get when the Magic Tree House whisks them back to the 1870s. They land on the prairie near a one-room schoolhouse, where they meet a teenage schoolteacher, some cool kids, and one big, scary bully. But the biggest and scariest thing is yet to come!

Date Added: 08/21/2017


Critical Learning for Social Work Students

by Mrs Sue Jones

Social work agencies want newly-qualified workers who can practice as highly motivated and self-flourishing professionals. To get to this stage, social work degree students need to be critical, analytical and evaluative in their thinking, reading and writing. And while lecturers may highlight this need when marking assignments, there is limited space to explore these topics within an already tight social work curriculum. This revised second edition helps to tackle this problem and goes to the heart of these essential skills. By using practical examples and interactive features Critical Learning for Social Work Students will help guide you through your degree and on to becoming a fully-developed and critical practitioner. It covers key areas of critical thinking such as developing a clear and logical argument as well as the application of self-evaluation and understanding the 'professional self'. For this edition there is a new chapter on developing emotional intelligence.

Date Added: 08/21/2017


July, July

by Tim O'Brien

A &“perceptive, affectionate, and often very funny&” novel about old college friends at a thirty-year reunion, by the author of The Things They Carried (Boston Herald).   From a National Book Award winner who&’s been called &“the best American writer of his generation&” (San Francisco Examiner), July, July tells the story of ten old friends who attended Darton Hall College together back in 1969, and now reunite for a summer weekend of dancing, drinking, flirting, reminiscing—and regretting.   The three decades since graduation have brought marriage and divorce, children and careers, hopes deferred and replaced. This witty, heart-rending novel about men and women who came into adulthood at a moment when American ideals and innocence began to fade, a New York Times Notable Book, is &“deeply satisfying&” (O, the Oprah Magazine) and &“almost impossible to put down&” (Austin American-Statesman).   &“A symphony of American life.&” —All Things Considered, NPR  

Date Added: 08/21/2017


The Gate of Angels

by Penelope Fitzgerald

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize: A novel of two &“wonderful characters&” who meet by accident in Edwardian England, and fall inconveniently in love (The Washington Post).   In 1912, rational scientist Fred Fairly, one of Cambridge&’s best and brightest, crashes his bike and wakes up in bed with a stranger—fellow casualty Daisy Saunders, a charming, pretty, and almost pathologically generous working-class nurse. So begins a series of complications—not only of the heart but also of the head—as Fred and Daisy take up each other&’s education and turn each other&’s philosophies upside down.   From the recipient of a National Book Critics Circle Award, among other honors, this story of an unlikely and possibly doomed romance is a &“deft comedy of manners . . . Fitzgerald&’s elegant prose shines with intelligence and subtle wit . . . Her flair for well-drawn eccentric characters will appeal to fans of Muriel Spark and Barbara Pym&” (Library Journal).   &“A singular accomplishment.&” —Boston Globe   &“Powerfully bewitching.&” —Los Angeles Times

Date Added: 08/21/2017


A Dead Hand

by Paul Theroux

A travel writer is drawn into a strange criminal case, and an even stranger romantic affair, in a novel that brings India &“brilliantly, blazingly to life&” (The Washington Post).   When Jerry Delfont, an aimless, blocked travel writer, receives a letter from an American philanthropist, Mrs. Merrill Unger, he is intrigued. She informs him about a scandal, involving an Indian friend of her son&’s. Who is the dead boy, found on the floor of a cheap hotel room? How and why did he die? And what is Jerry to make of a patch of carpet, and a package containing a human hand?   Jerry is swiftly captivated by the beautiful, mysterious Mrs. Unger—and revived by her tantric massages—but the circumstances surrounding the dead boy cause him increasingly to doubt the woman&’s motives and the exact nature of her philanthropy. Without much to go on, Jerry pursues answers from the teeming streets of Calcutta to Uttar Pradesh. It is a dark and twisted trail of obsession and need.    From the author of The Great Railway Bazaar, A Dead Hand is offers &“an abundance of richly drawn characters . . . Theroux has used his travel writer&’s eye and ear and his novelist&’s imagination to craft a tense, disturbing, funny and horrifying book around all of them&” (San Francisco Chronicle).   &“The real pleasure is Theroux&’s talent for rendering place and his irreverent comments on everything from the British royals to pop culture, aging, and yes, the venerable Mother Teresa.&” —Publishers Weekly

Date Added: 08/21/2017


The Golden Apples

by Eudora Welty

This collection of short stories of the Mississippi Delta by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author is &“a work of art&” (The New York Times Book Review).   Here in Morgana, Mississippi, the young dream of other places; the old can tell you every name on every stone in the cemetery on the town&’s edge; and cuckolded husbands and love-starved piano teachers share the same paths. It&’s also where one neighbor has disappeared on the horizon, slipping away into local legend.   Black and white, lonely and the gregarious, sexually adventurous and repressed, vengeful and resigned, restless and settled, the vividly realized characters that make up this collection of interrelated stories, with elements drawn from ancient myth and transplanted to the American South, prove that this National Book Award–winning writer, as Katherine Anne Porter once wrote, had &“an ear sharp, shrewd, and true as a tuning fork.&”   &“I doubt that a better book about &‘the South&’—one that more completely gets the feel of the particular texture of Southern life, and its special tone and pattern—has ever been written.&” —The New Yorker

Date Added: 08/21/2017


How to Travel with a Salmon

by Umberto Eco

&“Impishly witty and ingeniously irreverent&” essays on topics from cell phones to librarians, by the author of The Name of the Rose and Foucault&’s Pendulum (The Atlantic Monthly).   A cosmopolitan curmudgeon the Los Angeles Times called &“the Andy Rooney of academia&”—known for both nonfiction and novels that have become blockbuster New York Times bestsellers—Umberto Eco takes readers on &“a delightful romp through the absurdities of modern life&” (Publishers Weekly) as he journeys around the world and into his own wildly adventurous mind.   From the mundane details of getting around on Amtrak or in the back of a cab, to reflections on computer jargon and soccer fans, to more important issues like the effects of mass media and consumer civilization—not to mention the challenges of trying to refrigerate an expensive piece of fish at an English hotel—this renowned writer, semiotician, and philosopher provides &“an uncanny combination of the profound and the profane&” (San Francisco Chronicle).   &“Eco entertains with his clever reflections and with his unique persona.&” —Kirkus Reviews  Translated from the Italian by William Weaver

Date Added: 08/21/2017


The Ponder Heart

by Eudora Welty

&“A wonderful tragicomedy&” of a Mississippi family, a vast inheritance, and an impulsive heir, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Delta Wedding (The New York Times). Daniel Ponder is the amiable heir to the wealthiest family in Clay County, Mississippi. To friends and strangers, he&’s also the most generous, having given away heirlooms, a watch, and so far, at least one family business. His niece, Edna Earle, has a solution to save the Ponder fortune from Daniel&’s mortifying philanthropy: As much as she loves Daniel, she&’s decided to have him institutionalized. Foolproof as the plan may seem, it comes with a kink—one that sets in motion a runaway scheme of mistaken identity, a hapless local widow, a reckless wedding, a dim-witted teenage bride, and a twist of dumb luck that lands this once-respectable Southern family in court to brave an embarrassing trial for murder. It&’s become the talk of Clay County. And the loose-tongued Edna Earle will tell you all about it. &“The most revered figure in contemporary American letters,&” said the New York Times of Eudora Welty, which also hailed The Ponder Heart—a winner of the William Dean Howells Medal which was adapted into both a Broadway play and a PBS Masterpiece series—as &“Miss Welty at her comic, compassionate best.&”   

Date Added: 08/21/2017


Mr. Palomar

by Italo Calvino

A novel of a delightful eccentric on a search for truth, by the renowned author of Invisible Cities.   In The New York Times Book Review, the poet Seamus Heaney praised Mr. Palomar as a series of &“beautiful, nimble, solitary feats of imagination.&” Throughout these twenty-seven intricately structured chapters, the musings of the crusty Mr. Palomar consistently render the world sublime and ridiculous.   Like the telescope for which he is named, Mr. Palomar is a natural observer. &“It is only after you have come to know the surface of things,&” he believes, &“that you can venture to seek what is underneath.&” Whether contemplating a fine cheese, a hungry gecko, or a topless sunbather, he tends to let his meditations stray from the present moment to the great beyond. And though he may fail as an objective spectator, he is the best of company.   &“Each brief chapter reads like an exploded haiku,&” wrote Time Out. A play on a world fragmented by our individual perceptions, this inventive and irresistible novel encapsulates the life&’s work of an artist of the highest order, &“the greatest Italian writer of the twentieth century&” (The Guardian).

Date Added: 08/21/2017


The History of the Siege of Lisbon

by José Saramago

A proofreader realizes his power to edit the truth on a whim, in a &“brilliantly original&” novel by a Nobel Prize winner (Los Angeles Times Book Review).   Raimundo Silva is a middle-aged, celibate clerk, proofing manuscripts for a respectable publishing house. Fluent in Portuguese, he has been assigned to work on a standard history of the country, and the twelfth-century king who laid siege to Lisbon. In a moment of subversive daring, Raimundo decides to change just one single word of text—a capricious revision that completely undoes the past. When discovered, his insolent disregard for facts appalls his employers—save for his new editor, Maria Sara. She suggests that Rainmundo take his transgressions even further.   Through Rainmundo and Maria&’s eyes, what transpires is an alternate view of history and a colorful reinvention of a debatable truth. It&’s a serpentine journey through time where past and present converge, fact becomes myth, and fiction and reality blur—especially for Rainmundo and Maria themselves, who begin to find themselves erotically drawn to each other.   &“Walter Mitty has nothing on Raimundo Silva . . . this hypnotic tale is a great comic romp through history, language and the imagination.&” —Publishers Weekly  Translated by Giovanni Pontiero  

Date Added: 08/21/2017


Thirteen Stories

by Eudora Welty

&“I&’ve read her Thirteen Stories many times, and I&’m always awed by how much comedy, pathos, satire and lyricism she manages to squeeze into her stories.&” —Sue Monk Kidd   A strong sense of place—in this case Mississippi—along with often larger-than-life characterizations of ordinary folk with all their glorious eccentricities and foibles, and above all a completely distinctive voice, come together in Eudora Welty&’s fiction to offer us a world that is sometimes sad, sometimes comic, often petty, and always compassionate.   Here is a baker&’s dozen of Welty&’s very best, including: &“The Wide Net,&” in which a pregnant wife threatens to drown herself, despite fear of the water, and a communal dragging of the river turns into a celebratory fish-fry; &“Petrified Man,&” revealing the savagery of small-town gossip; &“Powerhouse,&” Welty&’s prose answer to jazz improvisation and the emotional heart of the blues; and &“Why I Live at the P.O.&”, the hilariously one-sided testimony of a postmistress who believes herself wronged by her family. With her highly tuned ear and sharp insight into human behavior, Eudora Welty has crafted stories as vital and unpredictable as they are artful and enduring.   &“Miss Welty has written some of the finest short stories of modern times.&” —The New York Times   &“Eudora Welty is one of our purest, finest, gentlest voices.&” —Anne Tyler

Date Added: 08/21/2017


Lighthousekeeping

by Jeanette Winterson

An orphaned girl is held spellbound by the tales of a lighthouse keeper on the Scottish coast, in a novel by the Costa Award-winning author of The Passion.   After her mother is literally swept away by the savage winds off the Atlantic coast of Salts, Scotland, never to be seen again, the orphaned Silver is feeling particularly unmoored. Taken in by the mysterious keeper of a lighthouse on Cape Wrath, Silver finds an anchor in Mr. Pew—blind, as old and legendary as a unicorn, and a yarn spinner of persuasive power.   The tale he has to tell Silver is that of a nineteenth-century clergyman named Babel Dark, whose life was divided between a loving light and a mask of deceit. Peopled with such luminaries as Charles Darwin and Robert Louis Stevenson, Mr. Pew&’s story within a story within a story soon unfolds like a map. It&’s one that Silver must follow if she&’s to be led through her own darkness, and to find her own meaning in life, in this novel by a winner of the Costa, Lambda, and E.M. Forster Awards, the author of Oranges are Not the Only Fruit; Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? and other acclaimed works.   &“In her sea-soaked and hypnotic eighth novel, Winterson turns the tale of an orphaned young girl and a blind old man into a fable about love and the power of storytelling…Atmospheric and elusive, Winterson's high-modernist excursion is an inspired meditation on myth and language.&”—The New Yorker  

Date Added: 08/21/2017


HTML 5

by Preston Prescott and Eleonora Baron

Scoprite le novità di HTML Grazie a questo libro scoprirete le basi di HTML 5 e come utilizzarlo. Se conoscete già le precedenti versioni di HTML, in special modo HTML 4, imparare a usare HTML 5 sarà un gioco da ragazzi. HTML 5 è la versione più recente dell' Hypertext Markup Language, tuttavia ha mantenuto svariate caratteristiche di HTML 4 e persino di XHTML. Cosa scoprirete leggendo questo volume? *Le differenze tra HTML 4 e 5 *La struttura dei documenti HTML 5 *Come gestire titoli, paragrafi, elenchi, tabelle e form *Come gestire i link e le immagini *Come incorporare contenuti complessi, citazioni, video e audio *Come formattare le vostre pagine web nel modo più accattivante ed efficace Volete saperne di più? Scaricate subito la vostra copia!

Date Added: 08/21/2017


Algebra

by Ernest Shult and David Surowski

This book presents a graduate-level course on modern algebra. It can be used as a teaching book - owing to the copious exercises - and as a source book for those who wish to use the major theorems of algebra. The course begins with the basic combinatorial principles of algebra: posets, chain conditions, Galois connections, and dependence theories. Here, the general Jordan-Holder Theorem becomes a theorem on interval measures of certain lower semilattices. This is followed by basic courses on groups, rings and modules; the arithmetic of integral domains; fields; the categorical point of view; and tensor products. Beginning with introductory concepts and examples, each chapter proceeds gradually towards its more complex theorems. Proofs progress step-by-step from first principles. Many interesting results reside in the exercises, for example, the proof that ideals in a Dedekind domain are generated by at most two elements. The emphasis throughout is on real understanding as opposed to memorizing a catechism and so some chapters offer curiosity-driven appendices for the self-motivated student.

Date Added: 08/21/2017


Most Evil II

by Steve Hodel

Most Evil II is Steve Hodel's follow-up investigation (2009-2015) into his father's potential murders and introduces new evidence and additional linkage obtained by him over the past six years.

Included in that evidence, is the solving of the Zodiac's forty-five year cryptic cipher, which gives us the answer to the question asked in Most Evil, "Were Black Dahlia Avenger and Zodiac the same serial killer?"

The solution of that cipher provides us with the name of San Francisco's most infamous serial killer. However, it is not presented as just another "theory" from some armchair detective, or even from the author himself, a highly respected, veteran LAPD homicide detective. Rather, the solution comes from the killer's own mouth, written in his own hand--it is Zodiac's personally signed confession!

Date Added: 08/21/2017


Mari Bariethi-01 Mari Bariethi

by Suresh Dalal

શરીરમાં જે સ્થાન આંખનું છે એ સ્થાન ઘરમાં બારીનું છે. કહેવું હોય તો એમ કહેવાય કે બારી એ ઘરની આંખ છે. આપણે તો સલામતીથી જીવવામાં માનનારા માનવીઓ; એટલે તો ઘરની ચાર દીવાલો ચણી લીધી. પણ ચાર દીવાલમાં ગૂંગળાઈ રહેવું કેમ પોસાય? આપણે એથી બારીઓ મૂકી. પ્રતીક્ષાના પર્યાય જેવા ઝરૂખાઓ સજાવ્યા, ગૌરવ આપે એવા ગવાક્ષો રખાવ્યા. ઘરની અને બહારની દુનિયા વચ્ચેના સેતુનું કામ બારી જ કરે છે. Essays by Suresh Dalal on various subjects, originally published in a popular series: Mari Bariethi in Janmabhoomi Pravasi

Date Added: 08/21/2017



Showing 1 through 25 of 58 results