Pines and Plains Libraries

Growing a successful business is about meeting the needs of customers—and, by extension, the needs of the entire community. Turn your business into a good citizen and you can help ensure its success and contribute to making your community a great place to live and work. Growing Local Value shows how to build a values-driven business that is deeply embedded in local life. Drawing on real-world examples from Greyston Bakery, Wild Planet Toys,

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"What if you could harness the power of the free market to solve the problems of poverty, hunger, and inequality? To some, it sounds impossible. But Nobel Peace Prizewinner Muhammad Yunus is doing exactly that. As founder of Grameen Bank, Yunus pioneered microcredit, the innovative banking program that provides poor people - mainly women - with small loans they use to launch businesses and lift their families out of poverty. In the past thirty years,...

"At the centre of Secret Life is The Building, an office building wherein several factions vie for dominance... Jeff VanderMeer's ecological speculations overlap with Theo Ellsworth's deep-layered style to create a mind-bending narrative that defamiliarizes the mundanity of office work and makes the arcane rituals of The Building home... Secret Life observes the sinister individualism of bureaucratic settings in contrast with an unconcerned natural...

"The COVID-19 pandemic changed many aspects of sports and entertainment. From closing gyms and stadiums to canceling concerts and postponing the Summer Olympics, readers will learn how the world adapted to the deadly pandemic"--

Are tech giants the new robber barons of the digital age? Many governments and ordinary people are increasingly uncomfortable with the monopolistic might a small number of tech companies are amassing, the taxes they are avoiding, the data they are collecting, the privacy they are undermining, and the way they are functioning as extraterritorial powers beholden to no state and to no citizen or consumer. All sides of this super-charged debate are represented...

In Plutopia, Brown draws on official records and dozens of interviews to tell the stories of Richland, Washington and Ozersk, Russia--the first two cities in the world to produce plutonium. To contain secrets, American and Soviet leaders created plutopias--communities of nuclear families living in highly-subsidized, limited-access atomic cities. Brown shows that the plants' segregation of permanent and temporary workers and of nuclear and non-nuclear...

"Part memoir, part history, Burn Book is a necessary chronicle of tech’s most powerful players. This is the inside story we’ve all been waiting for about modern Silicon Valley and the biggest boom in wealth creation in the history of the world."--Amazon

An analysis of the stellar career of Barbra Streisand through a lens of her struggles against prejudice explores how she has transcended show business and embraced her Jewish heritage and other distinctive qualities to render her successes a metaphor for outsiderness and marginalization.

Kerri Arsenault grew up in the small, rural town of Mexico, Maine, where for over 100 years the community orbited around a paper mill that provided jobs for nearly everyone in town, including three generations of her family. Kerri had a happy childhood, but years after she moved away, she realized the price she paid for that childhood. The price everyone paid. The mill, while providing the social and economic cohesion for the community, also contributed...