Books & More
Find it at the Library
The Paul Sawyier Public Library is committed to providing the community with materials and services to engage and entertain. Libraries have always been a community center for reading and we take that role seriously. We offer electronic options for finding something great from anywhere with your library card. Each month, groups meet to discuss books in order to gain that extra perspective. Is there something we do not have that you need? We can ask another library to send us a copy for you or we can buy it for the collection for others to enjoy. This page provides a list of all the options we make available to our patrons when it comes to our collection of materials.
Digital Collections
Check out materials from home! We offer several services that let you use the library from wherever you are.
Book Discussions
Each month the library has a variety of discussion groups to attend. Members receive a copy of the book then meet to share their thoughts.
Interlibrary Loan
Need something that is not available at PSPL? We can borrow a copy from another library and have it sent here to you!
Purchase Suggestion
Is there something that is not on the shelf here that you think belongs? Let us know!
Reading Recommendations
Looking for more suggestions for what to read next? Browse the entire collection of books featured on our website.
Get a Card
Are you a Kentucky resident? Here’s how you can become a member of the library.
Borrowing Guidelines
What can I check out? How many? How long? The answers are here.
Search the Catalog
Browse the catalog to find books and much more!
Best Sellers
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A Fate Inked in Blood
Bound in an unwanted marriage, Freya spends her days gutting fish, but dreams of becoming a warrior. And of putting an axe in her boorish husband's back.
Freya's dreams abruptly become reality when her husband betrays her to the region's jarl, landing her in a fight to the death against his son. To survive, Freya is forced to reveal her deepest secret: she possesses a drop of a goddess's blood, which gives her magic capable of repelling any attack. A
magic that was foretold would unite the fractured nation of Skaland beneath a king-the one who controls the shield maiden's fate.
Believing he's destined to rule Skaland, the fanatical jarl binds Freya with a blood oath and orders his son, Bjorn, to protect Freya from their enemies. Desperate to prove her strength, Freya must train to fight and learn to control her magic, all while facing perilous tests set by the gods. Except the greatest test of all may be resisting her forbidden attraction to Bjorn. If Freya succumbs to her lust for the charming and fierce warrior, she risks not only her own destiny but the fate of all the people she swore to protect. -
The Hunter
It’s a blazing summer when two men arrive in a small village in the West of Ireland. One of them is coming home. Both of them are coming to get rich. One of them is coming to die.
Cal Hooper took early retirement from Chicago PD and moved to rural Ireland looking for peace. He’s found it, more or less: he’s built a relationship with a local woman, Lena, and he’s gradually turning Trey Reddy from a half-feral teenager into a good kid going good places. But then Trey’s long-absent father reappears, bringing along an English millionaire and a scheme to find gold in the townland, and suddenly everything the three of them have been building is under threat. Cal and Lena are both ready to do whatever it takes to protect Trey, but Trey doesn’t want protecting. What she wants is revenge.
From the writer who is “in a class by herself,” (The New York Times), a nuanced, atmospheric tale that explores what we’ll do for our loved ones, what we’ll do for revenge, and what we sacrifice when the two collide. -
Never Too Late
Kezia Cooper Hobson, recently widowed, arrives in New York from San Francisco. Determined to make a fresh start, she has just completed the sale of her Pacific Heights home, not to mention her husband’s venture capital firm, and in doing so, is also freed from her responsibility as a board member of the company. Bringing with her only a few personal treasures, she is excited to move into the blank slate of a beautiful midtown penthouse, in the city that she has always loved. It is also where her two adult daughters now live.
As Kezia settles into her new apartment, she meets her movie-star next-door neighbor, Sam Stewart, whose terrace borders hers. Just a couple of weeks after she arrives, however, a devastating crisis strikes New York City. Kezia and Sam find themselves connecting over their strong impulse to help those in need. As they share a life-changing experience of volunteering, a bond is sparked and a friendship is formed.
Kezia’s daughters, Kate and Felicity, are taken aback by their mother’s new friendship, both more focused on their own love lives than hers. But Kezia is learning that the changes she’s making are just what she needs to open new horizons.
In this powerful and moving new novel, Danielle Steel illuminates the importance of human connection and embracing brave change, proving it’s never too late for a brand-new start. -
White Rural Rage
White rural voters hold the greatest electoral sway of any demographic group in the United States, yet rural communities suffer from poor healthcare access, failing infrastructure, and severe manufacturing and farming job losses. Rural voters believe our nation has betrayed them, and to some degree, they’re right. In White Rural Rage, Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman explore why rural Whites have failed to reap the benefits from their outsize political power and why, as a result, they are the most likely group to abandon democratic norms and traditions. Their rage—stoked daily by Republican politicians and the conservative media—now poses an existential threat to the United States.
Schaller and Waldman show how vulnerable U.S. democracy has become to rural Whites who, despite legitimate grievances, are increasingly inclined to hold racist and xenophobic beliefs, to believe in conspiracy theories, to accept violence as a legitimate course of political action, and to exhibit antidemocratic tendencies. Rural White Americans’ attitude might best be described as “I love my country, but not our country,” Schaller and Waldman argue. This phenomenon is the patriot paradox of rural America: The citizens who take such pride in their patriotism are also the least likely to defend core American principles. And by stoking rural Whites’ anger rather than addressing the hard problems they face, conservative politicians and talking heads create a feedback loop of resentments that are undermining American democracy.
Schaller and Waldman provocatively critique both the structures that permit rural Whites’ disproportionate influence over American governance and the prospects for creating a pluralist, inclusive democracy that delivers policy solutions that benefit rural communities. They conclude with a political reimagining that offers a better future for both rural people and the rest of America. -
Attack from Within
American society is more polarized than ever before. We are strategically being pushed apart by disinformation—the deliberate spreading of lies disguised as truth—and it comes at us from all sides: opportunists on the far right, Russian misinformed social media influencers, among others. It's endangering our democracy and causing havoc in our electoral system, schools, hospitals, workplaces, and in our Capitol. Advances in technology including rapid developments in artificial intelligence threaten to make the problems even worse by amplifying false claims and manufacturing credibility.
In Attack from Within, legal scholar and analyst Barbara McQuade, shows us how to identify the ways disinformation is seeping into all facets of our society and how we can fight against it. The book includes:- The authoritarian playbook: a brief history of disinformation from Mussolini and Hitler to Bolsonaro and Trump, chronicles the ways in which authoritarians have used disinformation to seize and retain power.
- Disinformation tactics—like demonizing the other, seducing with nostalgia, silencing critics, muzzling the media, condemning the courts; stoking violence—and reasons why they work.
- An explanation of why America is particularly vulnerable to disinformation and how it exploits our First Amendment Freedoms, sparks threats and violence, and destabilizes social structures.
- Real, accessible solutions for countering disinformation and maintaining the rule of law such as making domestic terrorism a federal crime, increasing media literacy in schools, criminalizing doxxing, and much more.
Disinformation is designed to evoke a strong emotional response to push us toward more extreme views, unable to find common ground with others. The false claims that led to the breathtaking attack on our Capitol in 2021 may have been only a dress rehearsal. Attack from Within shows us how to prevent it from happening again, thus preserving our country’s hard-won democracy. -
Bad Therapy
In virtually every way that can be measured, Gen Z's mental health is worse than that of previous generations. Youth suicide rates are climbing, antidepressant prescriptions for children are common, and the proliferation of mental health diagnoses has not helped the staggering number of kids who are lonely, lost, sad and fearful of growing up. What's gone wrong?
In Bad Therapy, bestselling investigative journalist Abigail Shrier argues that the problem isn't the kids – it's the mental health experts. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with child psychologists, parents, teachers and young people themselves, Shrier explores the ways the mental health industry has transformed the way we teach, treat, discipline and even talk to our kids. She reveals that most of the therapeutic approaches have serious side effects and few proven benefits: for instance, talk therapy can induce rumination, trapping children in cycles of anxiety and depression; while 'gentle parenting' can encourage emotional turbulence – even violence – in children as they lash out, desperate for an adult to be in charge.
Mental health care can be lifesaving when properly applied to children with severe needs, but for the typical child, the cure can be worse than the disease. Bad Therapy is a must-read for anyone questioning why our efforts to support our kids have backfired – and what it will take for parents to lead a turnaround.
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Burn Book
While tech titans bragged they would 'move fast and break things', Kara Swisher was moving faster and breaking news. Covering the explosion of the digital sector in the early 1990s, she developed a long track record of digging up and reporting the truth of this new world order. Her consistent scoops drove one CEO to accuse her of "listening in the heating ducts" and for Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg to once say: 'It is a constant joke in the Valley when people write memos for them to say, "I hope Kara never sees this."'
Burn Book is part memoir, part history and, most of all, a necessary recounting of tech's most powerful players. This is the inside story we've all been waiting for of modern Silicon Valley and the biggest boom in wealth creation in the history of the world.
While still in college, Swisher got her start at The Washington Post, where she became one of the few people in journalism interested in the emerging field of tech. She was among the first to recognize the potential of the internet, accurately predicting that 'everything that could be digitized, would be digitized.' She went on to work for The Wall Story Journal, joining with Walt Mossberg to start the groundbreaking AllThingsD conference, as well as pioneering online tech sites.
It's only a slight exaggeration to say Swisher has interviewed everyone. Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Bob Iger, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Meg Whitman, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg are just a few who Swisher made sweat-figuratively and, in one famous case, literally.
Despite the damage she chronicles, Swisher remains optimistic about tech's potential to help solve problems and not just create them. She calls upon the industry to make better, more thoughtful choices, even as a new set of powerful AI tools are poised to change the world yet again. At its heart, this book is a love story to, for, and about tech from someone who knows it better than anyone.
Burn Book includes soaring tales of innovation and brilliant entrepreneurs, as well as Silicon Valley's much more complex history of striving, success, and failure. The book details how the commercial internet came into being and how, for all it has given the world, it now sits at the center of global power, creating a clear and present danger to humanity. -
Blood Money
It’s often said that China is in a cold war with America. The reality is far worse: the war is hot, and the body count is one-sided.
China is killing Americans and working aggressively to maximize the carnage while our leaders remain passive and, in some cases, compliant. Why?
If anyone could crack the code, it’s the renowned nonpartisan investigator Peter Schweizer. Schweizer’s previous three number one New York Times bestsellers sent shock waves through official Washington, sparking FBI investigations and congressional probes that continue to this day.
For Blood Money, Schweizer and his team of forensic investigators spent more than two years scouring a trove of restricted Chinese military documents, data-mining a mountain of American financial records, and tracking US political leaders’ investments and family businesses. Schweizer unloads bombshell after bombshell, exposing the Chinese Communist Party’s covert operations in the American drug trade, social justice movement, and medical establishment to sow chaos and decadence in the United States.
A towering achievement of investigative journalism, Blood Money is one of those rare books that makes you clearly see the world anew.
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The House of Hidden Meanings
From international drag superstar and pop culture icon RuPaul, comes his most revealing and personal work to date—a brutally honest, surprisingly poignant, and deeply intimate memoir of growing up Black, poor, and queer in a broken home to discovering the power of performance, found family, and self-acceptance. A profound introspection of his life, relationships, and identity, The House of Hidden Meanings is a self-portrait of the legendary icon on the road to global fame and changing the way the world thinks about drag.
Central to RuPaul’s success has been his chameleonic adaptability. From drag icon to powerhouse producer of one of the world’s largest television franchises, RuPaul’s ever-shifting nature has always been part of his brand as both supermodel and supermogul. Yet that adaptability has made him enigmatic to the public. In this memoir, his most intimate and detailed book yet, RuPaul makes himself truly known.
In The House of Hidden Meanings, RuPaul strips away all artifice and recounts the story of his life with breathtaking clarity and tenderness, bringing his signature wisdom and wit to his own biography. From his early years growing up as a queer Black kid in San Diego navigating complex relationships with his absent father and temperamental mother, to forging an identity in the punk and drag scenes of Atlanta and New York, to finding enduring love with his husband Georges LeBar and self-acceptance in sobriety, RuPaul excavates his own biography life-story, uncovering new truths and insights in his personal history.
Here in RuPaul’s singular and extraordinary story is a manual for living—a personal philosophy that testifies to the value of chosen family, the importance of harnessing what makes you different, and the transformational power of facing yourself fearlessly.
A profound introspection of his life, relationships, and identity, The House of Hidden Meanings is a self-portrait of the legendary icon on the road to global fame and changing the way the world thinks about drag. “I've always loved to view the world with analytical eyes, examining what lies beneath the surface. Here, the focus is on my own life—as RuPaul Andre Charles,” says RuPaul.
If we’re all born naked and the rest is drag, then this is RuPaul totally out of drag. This is RuPaul stripped bare.
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The Chaos Agent
Artificial intelligence leads to shockingly real danger for the Gray Man in this latest entry in the #1 New York Times bestselling series.
A car accident in Japan.
A drowning in Seoul.
A home invasion in Boston.
Someone is killing the world’s leading experts on robotics and artificial intelligence. Is it a tech company trying to eliminate the competition or is it something even more sinister?
After all, artificial intelligence may be the deadliest battlefield gamechanger since the creation of gunpowder. The first nation to field weapons that can act at the speed of computer commands will rule the battlefield.
It’s an irresistible lure for most, but not for the Gray Man. His quest for a quiet life has led him to Central America where he and his lover, Zoya Zakharova, have assumed new identities. With a list of enemies that includes billionaires, terrorists, and governments, they need to keep a low profile, but the world’s deadliest assassin can’t expect to hide out forever.
Eventually, they’re tracked down and offered a job by an old acquaintance of Zoya’s. He needs their help extracting a Russian scientist who is on the kill list. They reject the offer, but just being seen with him is enough to put assassins on their trail.
Now, they’re back on the run, but no matter which way they turn, it's clear that whoever's tracking them is always going to be one step ahead. Since flight’s no longer possible, fight is the only option left, and no one fights dirtier than the Gray Man.
Resources for Readers
Kentucky Virtual Library
Includes access to multiple databases and research resources as well as the Kentucky Digital Library
Library ELF
Use Library ELF to get reminders about due dates and to get detailed information about the items checked out on your library account.