Orem Library

"Latino" is the most open-ended and loosely defined of the major race categories in the United States. Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of "Latino" assembles the Pulitzer Prize winner Héctor Tobar's personal experiences as the son of Guatemalan immigrants and the stories told to him by his Latinx students to offer a spirited rebuke to racist ideas about Latino people. Our Migrant Souls decodes the meaning of "Latino"...

From acclaimed columnist and political commentator Michael Harriot, a searingly smart and bitingly hilarious retelling of American history that corrects the record and showcases the perspectives and experiences of Black Americans. America's backstory is a whitewashed mythology implanted in our collective memory. It is the story of the pilgrims on the Mayflower building a new nation. It is George Washington's cherry tree and Abraham Lincoln's log cabin....

Nancy Horan, author of the million-copy New York Times bestseller Loving Frank, returns with a sweeping historical novel, which tells the story of Abraham Lincoln's ascendance from rumpled lawyer to U.S. president to the Great Emancipator through the eyes of a young asylum-seeker who arrives in Lincoln's home of Springfield from Madeira, Portugal. Showing intelligence beyond society's expectations, fourteen-year-old Ana Ferreira lands a job in the...

When President Theodore Roosevelt welcomed the country's most visible Black man, Booker T. Washington, into his circle of counselors in 1901, the two confronted a shocking and violent wave of racist outrage. In the previous decade, Jim Crow laws had legalized discrimination in the South, eroding social and economic gains for former slaves. Lynching was on the rise, and Black Americans faced new barriers to voting. Slavery had been abolished, but if...

It was 1863. Abraham Galloway--son of a white father and an enslaved mother--stood next to the Army recruiter, holding a gun to the soldier's head. He had escaped slavery in the hold--of a ship four years earlier, fleeing to Canada, then became a master spy for the Union Army. Now, in the days after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Galloway had returned to North Carolina, becoming the leader of more than 4,000 escaped slaves who...

When three siblings are found shot to death in the still-segregated town of West Mills, North Carolina, in 1976, and the white authorities show no interest in solving the case, Josephine Wright sets out to prove the innocence of her childhood sweetheart,Olympus "Lymp" Seymore, the murder victims' half-brother and the leading suspect in the case. 1976. In the still-segregated town of West Mills, North Carolina in 1976, three siblings-- Marian, Marva,...

Rabbi Diana Fersko is used to having difficult conversations with members of her congregation about how the rise is antisemitism is affecting their lives, from the threat of violence to microaggressions and identity denial. In We Need to Talk About Antisemitism, she gives us the tools we need to understand the state of antisemitism today. Unpacking the origins of the most prominent conspiracy theories about the Jewish people, Rabbi Fersko shows how...

In 1939 North Carolina, an all-Black baseball team "trespasses" on the whites-only baseball field, and the resulting racial outrage can only be resolved on the mound.

From the American Revolution to Black Lives Matter, Americans have come to associate freedom with the fight of the oppressed for a better world. Few ideas are as central to the national mythos. But whenever the federal government has taken a stand for racial minorities, however halfhearted, white Americans have been quick to weaponize the concept of freedom, framing the state itself as a tyrannical obstacle to their own liberties. In Freedom's Dominion,...

Intertwining the stories of two Black students decades apart, this compelling and honest novel follows Kevin and Gibran as they navigate similar forms of insidious racism while discovering who they want to be instead of what society tells them they are.