Library News

A customer holds a tray of plants during the Native Plant Sale in 2025.
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Pre-Orders are OPEN NOW for the Annual Native Plant Sale!

This winter season may feel brutal, but we're already dreaming up our summer gardens!

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A graphic of an orange cookbook with a measuring cup and a wooden spoon.
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Recipe Club and Potluck: January 2026

This month's Recipe Club and Potluck program featured delicious soups and chilis, homemade bread and biscuits, a delicious and tangy Brazilian lemonade, and plenty of dessert-- from fresh blueberry crisp to Amish cinnamon bread and colorful Peeps

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New at Cromaine

Book cover for "The War Within a War"

The War Within a War

Award-winning author and journalist Wil Haygood explores how the Vietnam War became a mirror for the struggle of Black Americans—fighting for freedom abroad while demanding equality at home—and a powerful lens through which to understand the racial and political divides that continue to shape American life.

"With this book, Wil Haygood has become the preeminent chronicler of the Black experience in America.” —Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Laureate for The Making of the Atomic Bomb

"In these masterful pages, Haygood reframes both the Vietnam War and the United States’ unfinished struggle for equality."—Mitchell Zuckoff, New York Times bestselling author of 13 Hours and Lost in Shangri-La

Drawing on the lives of soldiers and officers, doctors and nurses, journalists and activists, artists and politicians, Haygood illuminates a generation caught between two battles: one on the front lines in Vietnam and another for justice and dignity in America.

Among those at the heart of the story are Air Force pilot Fred Cherry, the first Black officer captured by the North Vietnamese and a hero to millions back home; Dr. Elbert Nelson, a doctor who came to Vietnam after watching TV footage of the Watts riots in Los Angeles and soon found himself amid rising Black soldier protests overseas; Wallace Terry, a groundbreaking Black reporter determined to expose the dynamics of race and war to the American public and Philippa Schuyler, a biracial concert pianist who traveled to Vietnam to rescue mixed-race orphans, many fathered by Black soldiers, and died trying to bring them to safety.

Surrounding their experiences are the cultural and political forces of the era, including Martin Luther King Jr., Marvin Gaye, Berry Gordy, and Lyndon Johnson, whose voices and actions shaped a decade of turbulence and transformation.

The War Within a War is both sweeping history and intimate revelation, capturing the tragedies and triumphs, the honor and hypocrisies, the courage and cowardice that shaped an era and whose repercussions resonate today.

Book cover for "Miracle Children"

Miracle Children

A riveting investigation into a school, a scam, and a notorious college admissions scandal that exposes the inequalities and racial segregation of American education, from two award-winning New York Times journalists

T.M. Landry College Prep, a small private school in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, boasted a 100 percent college acceptance rate, placing students at nearly every Ivy League university in the country. The spectacle of Landry students opening their acceptance letters to Harvard and Yale was broadcast on television and even celebrated by Michelle Obama. It became a national ritual to watch the miraculous success of these youngsters—miraculous because Breaux Bridge is one of the poorest counties in the country, ranked close to the bottom for test scores and high school graduation rates. T.M. Landry was said to be “minting prodigies,” and the prodigies were often black.

How did the school do it? It didn’t: It was a scam, pulled off with fake transcripts and personal essays telling fake stories of triumph over adversity. Worse, Landry’s success concealed a nightmare of alleged abuse and coercion. In a yearslong investigation, Katie Benner and Erica L. Green explored the lives of the students, the school, the town, and Ivy League admissions to understand why black teens were pressured to trade in racial stereotypes of hardship for opportunity.

Gripping and illuminating, Miracle Children argues that the lesson of T.M. Landry is not that the school gamed the system but that it played by the rules—that its deceptions and abuses were the outcome of segregated schools, inequitable education, and the belief that elite colleges are the nation’s last path to life-changing economic opportunity.

Book cover for "Firestorm"

Firestorm

"Gripping, unshakeable firsthand account. . . . Riveting." --San Francisco Chronicle

A revelatory and searingly immediate report from the frontlines of the firestorm that consumed Los Angeles, from the MS NOW reporter and New York Times bestselling author of Separated, who covered the fires on the ground as an LA native.

On the morning of January 7, 2025, a message pinged the phone of Jacob Soboroff, a national reporter for MS NOW. "Big Palisades fire. We are evacuating," his brother texted within minutes of the blaze engulfing the hillside behind the home where he and his pregnant wife were living. "Really bad." An attached photo showed a huge black plume rising from behind the house, an umbrella of smoke towering over everything they owned. Jacob rushed to the office of the bureau chief.
"I should go. I grew up in the Palisades."
Soon he was on the front line of the blaze--his first live report of what would turn out to be weeks covering unimaginable destruction, from both the Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire, in Altadena. In the days to come, Soboroff appeared across the networks of NBC News as Los Angeles was ablaze, met with displaced residents and workers, and pressed Governor Gavin Newsom in an interview on Meet the Press. But no story Soboroff has covered at home or abroad--the trauma of family separation at the border, the displacement of the war in Ukraine, the collapse of order in Haiti--could have prepared him for reporting live as the hallmarks of his childhood were engulfed in flames around him while his hometown burned to the ground.
But for Soboroff, questions remained after the fires were controlled: what had he just witnessed? How could it have happened? Is it inevitable something like it will happen again? This set Soboroff off on months of reporting--with firefighters, fire victims, political leaders, academics, earth scientists, wildlife biologists, meteorologists and more--that made him keenly aware of how the misfortune of seeing his past carbonize was also a form of time travel into the dystopian world his children will inhabit. This is because the 2025 LA fires were not an isolated tragedy, but rather they are a harbinger--"the fire of the future," in the words of one senior emergency--management official.
Firestorm is the story of the costliest wildfire in American history, the people it affected and the deeply personal connection to one journalist covering it. It is a love letter to Los Angeles, a yearning to understand the fires, and why America's new age of disaster we are living through portends that--without a reckoning of how Los Angeles burned--there is more yet, and worse, to come.
 

Book cover for "There Is No Other"

There Is No Other

An essential balm for these tumultuous times, this thoughtful and inspiring guide features newly gathered teachings to abandon the idea there is an "other," bridging differences and cherishing our lives in the world, from beloved spiritual leader Ram Dass.

With the world seeming to teeter between democracy and authoritarianism, between humanitarianism and individualism, Ram Dass's teachings on wholeness and unity are more needed than ever.

There Is No Other is a groundbreaking work showcasing the late spiritual leader's thoughts and insights on broaching the divide and bringing disparate souls together. In these profound, newly gathered writings, Ram Dass shows us how a house divided against itself--whether that "house" is our individual self or the society in which we live--can come together in wholeness. There is no "other," he explains. It is all one.

Structured in three sections, There Is No Other teaches us to open ourselves, come together in community, and love one another--and ourselves--across all our seeming contradictions and divisions. Anne Lamott contributes a beautiful foreword and each section is followed by a short essay reflecting on the endurance of Ram Dass's ideas penned by Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, and Mirabai Bush, as well as guided meditations to deepen each lesson.

As he leads us toward wholeness within our unique selves and as a human community, Ram Dass gives us the most precious gift: hope. Only in seeing ourselves in our complexity can we come together and honor our incarnations on the sacred planet we inhabit.