Orem Library

In the tradition of his bestselling books "The Story of Civilization" and "The Lessons of History, " Pulitzer-prize winning historian Will Durant traces the lives and ideas of those who have helped to define civilization, in a book published 20 years after his death.

Hailed for her "fearless indictment of the most powerful man in Russia" (The Wall Street Journal), award-winning journalist Masha Gessen is unparalleled in her understanding of the events and forces that have wracked her native country in recent times. In The Future Is History, she follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren...

Father Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix, suffering from a fever and fearing that he is dying, recalls the most important events in his life, from Paris in 1943 to Chile under General Pinochet.

Mark Twain's account of his transformation into a Westerner when he joins his brother, a newly appointed federal official in Nevada.

"In an overloaded, superficial, technological world, in which almost everything and everybody are judged by their usefulness, where can we turn for escape, lasting pleasure, contemplation, or connection to others? While many forms of leisure meet these needs, Zena Hitz writes, few experiences are so fulfilling as the inner life, whether that of a bookworm, an amateur astronomer, a birdwatcher, or someone who takes a deep interest in one of countless...

"An ambitious new history of philosophy in English that broadens the canon to include many lesser-known figures. Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote that "philosophy should be written like poetry." But philosophy has often been presented more prosaically as a long trudge through canonical authors and great works. But what, Jonathan Rée asks, if we instead saw the history of philosophy as a haphazard series of unmapped forest paths, a mass of individual...

Examines the life of René Descartes, the seminal scientist, mathematician, traveler, soldier, and spy who transformed seventeenth-century Europe and became the father of modern philosophy.

In this book, the author (a distinguished political philosopher) argues that the social/political crisis of 20th-century America is really an intellectual crisis marked by obvious declines in appreciation of humanities, a drop in the qualitative output of our university systems, and a disquieting disconnect between today's students and the spiritual and cultural traditions of their heritage.

Running with Scissors is the true story of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton) gave him away to be raised by her unorthodox psychiatrist who bore a striking resemblance to Santa Claus. So at the age of twelve, Burroughs found himself amidst Victorian squalor living with the doctors bizarre family, and befriending a pedophile who resided in the backyard shed. The story of an outlaw childhood where rules were unheard of,...