"Realm of Ice and Sky," the newest book from award-winning author Buddy Levy, is the thrilling narrative of polar exploration via airship—and the men who sacrificed everything to make history. From Arctic explorer and American visionary Walter Wellman who pioneered both polar and trans-Atlantic airship aviation, to American explorer Dr. Frederick Cook who was the first to claim he made it to the North Pole in 1908, and Norwegian explorer extraordinaire Roald Amundsen who attempted to fly to the North Pole by airship, Levy's newest book is a serial history of the aerial explorations to reach the summit of the Earth. Book signing to follow. Buddy Levy is an award-winning author known for his books on arctic history. His last book, "Empire of Ice and Stone: The Disastrous and Heroic Voyage of the Karluk," won the 2023 National Outdoor Book Award and was a finalist for the 2023 Banff Mountain Book Competition. Levy is the author of more than ten books, including "Labyrinth of Ice: The Triumphant and Tragic Greely Polar Expedition," and "River of Darkness: Francisco Orellana’s Legendary Voyage of Death and Discovery Down the Amazon." His books have been published in eight languages and won numerous awards. He lives in Idaho.

Drawing on many years of experience reporting in China and other repressive regimes, The Community Library's Writer-in-Residence at the Hemingway House Kathleen Mclaughlin will discuss how socioeconomic inequality has given rise to authoritarianism around the world. She'll talk about parallels between China and the U.S. in our current political moment and how Americans might protect their own democracy and democratic norms. Kathleen Mclaughlin is a journalist and non-fiction author who worked as a foreign correspondent in China for sixteen years. Her work centers on socioeconomic class, labor rights and inequality around the world, and how those factors shape global, national and local politics. Her 2023 book, Blood Money: The Story of Life, Death, and Profit Inside America's Blood Industry, an investigation of the global plasma industry, shed light on the United States' erosion of social safety nets that quietly led millions of Americans to sell their blood to get by.

Documenting her family's escape from the ethnic killings of Armenians in Baku, Azerbaijan, Liyah Babayan takes us in this memoir into her childhood perspective of war and violence during her most formative years. Based around journal entries written by her at a young age, she describes learning English in America and her personal experience of how becoming a refugee shaped her. Liyah takes the reader into her most private and personal space along with her struggle with identity, assimilation and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Her loss of innocence, longing for a childhood, and survivor's guilt is conveyed through her emotional reflection about life after genocide. We meet a child who finds safety in detachment from everything around her and finds peace in the stillness and liminal space of her pending identity as an adolescent. The memoir gives readers a glimpse of life in America and what it means to be a newcomer. On the other side of the American Dream, we learn about the mental health struggles of those arriving from war and violent conflicts and how they are expected to assimilate with little or no support. This memoir captures life's inability to break the human spirit when a family ...