2024 NATIONAL MEDAL
for Museum and Library Service Finalist

Adults

Cartier's Hope

 

New York, 1910: Vera Garland is set on making her mark in a man's world of serious journalism. After the world-famous Hope Diamond is bought by Pierre Cartier, Vera begins investigating rumors about his scheme to manipulate its value. Appealing to a young Russian jeweler for help, Vera is unprepared when she gets caught up in his deceptions and finds herself at risk of losing all she has worked so hard to achieve.

When Time Stoped: A Memoir of My Father's War and What Remains

In 1941, the first Neumann family member was taken by the Nazis, arrested in German-occupied Czechoslovakia for bathing in a stretch of river forbidden to Jews. He was transported to Auschwitz. Eighteen days later his prisoner number was entered into the morgue book. Of thirty-four Neumann family members, twenty-five were murdered by the Nazis. One of the survivors was Hans Neumann, who, to escape the German death net, traveled to Berlin and hid in plain sight under the Gestapo's eyes.

Oona Out of Order

Its New Years Eve 1982, and Oona Lockhart has her whole life before her. At the stroke of midnight she will turn nineteen, and the year ahead promises to be one of consequence. Should she go to London to study economics, or remain at home in Brooklyn to pursue her passion for music and be with her boyfriend? As the countdown to the New Year begins, Oona faints and awakens thirty-two years in the future in her fifty-one-year-old body. Greeted by a friendly stranger in a beautiful house shes told is her own, Oona learns that with each passing year she will leap to another age at random.

Valentine

It's February 1976, and Odessa, Texas, stands on the cusp of the next great oil boom. While the town's men embrace the coming prosperity, its women intimately know and fear the violence that always seems to follow. In the early hours of the morning after Valentine's Day, fourteen-year-old Gloria Ram©Ưrez appears on the front porch of Mary Rose Whitehead's ranch house, broken and barely alive, after a vicious attack in a nearby oil field. This act of brutality is tried in the churches and barrooms of Odessa before it can reach a court of law.

National Small Business Week Returns with a Virtual Summit

The U.S. Small Business Administration has announced its 2021 National Small Business Week Virtual Summit for September 13-15, 2021. This year’s events will spotlight the resilience of America’s entrepreneurs and the renewal of the small business economy as they build back better from the economic crisis brought on by a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. The virtual summit will honor the nation’s 30 million small businesses for their perseverance, ingenuity, triumphs, and creativity.   

Lost Souls Memorial Project Event

In conjunction with the East Brunswick Public Library, Lost Souls Public Memorial Project will be mounting a Remembrance Exhibit to inform, inspire, and engage the local community. Knowing our history, its triumphs and its tragedies, allows us to chart a course for a more just future. Throughout September, the Library will host an exhibit about the Lost Souls - at least 137 African American women, men, and children in 1818, held captive in the home of a Middlesex County judge in what is now East Brunswick.