AT THE LIBRARY
New items are available at the Hancock County Public Library.
The following items are available at the Hancock County Public Library, 900 W. McKenzie Road. For more information on the library’s collection or to reserve a title, visit hcplibrary.org.
{span style=”text-decoration: underline;”}Adult Fiction{/span}
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“The Water Dancer,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that power saves his life. This brush with death creates an urgency in Hiram and a scheme to escape from the only home he’s ever known. So begins a journey that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia’s proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the Deep South to dangerously idealistic movements in the North. Even as he’s enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, Hiram’s resolve to rescue the family he left behind endures. “The Water Dancer” is the story of an atrocity inflicted on generations of women, men, and children, the capricious separation of families and the war they waged to simply make lives with the people they loved.
{span style=”text-decoration: underline;”}Adult Nonfiction{/span}
“Three Seconds in Munich: The Controversial 1972 Olympic Basketball Final,” by David A.F. Sweet
One. Two. Three. That’s as long as it took to sear the souls of a dozen young American men in the controversial finish of the 1972 gold-medal basketball contest between the United States and the Soviet Union, the world’s two superpowers at the time. The U.S. team, whose unbeaten Olympic streak dated back to the 1936 Berlin Games, believed it had won the gold medal that September in Munich, not once, but twice. But it was the third time the final seconds were played that counted. What happened? The head of international basketball trotted onto the court and twice demanded time be put back on the clock. A referee allowed an illegal substitution and an illegal free-throw shooter for the Soviets while calling a slew of late fouls on the U.S. players. The American players became the only Olympic athletes in the history of the games to refuse their medals. Of course, the 1972 Olympics are remembered primarily for a far graver matter, when 11 Israeli team members were killed by Palestinian terrorists, stunning the world and temporarily stopping the games. Through interviews with many of the American players and others, the author relates the horror of terrorism, the pain of losing the most controversial championship game in sports history to a hated rival, and the consequences of the players’ decision to shun their Olympic medals to this day.
