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Whitewright Public Library
Whitewright Public Library Offers Award-Winning “Wild New World: Epic Story of Animals and People in America” during Worldwide Digital Book Club

Whitewright Public Library Offers Award-Winning “Wild New World: Epic Story of Animals and People in America” during Worldwide Digital Book Club

History, nature and science-based ebook and audiobook available for free along with online discussion

Sometimes the truth creates the most fascinating tale. Residents in the Whitewright area can experience this firsthand by reading an award-winning true story about history, nature and science during Big Library Read, the world’s largest digital book club. From May 9-23, Dan Flores’s Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America is available for free as an ebook and audiobook on the Libby app through Whitewright Public Library. Library card holders can join thousands of others around the globe in reading the digital book without waitlists or holds, then discuss online. Told in thrilling narrative style and informed by genomic science, evolutionary biology and environmental history, Wild New World is sure to both educate and entertain booklovers.

This Big Library Read novel is available through more than 22,000 libraries around the world, including approximately 90 percent of public libraries in North America, and hundreds of thousands of readers are expected to participate. The program is facilitated by OverDrive, the leading digital reading platform for popular ebooks, audiobooks and magazines and creator of the Libby app.

Wild New World begins in 1908, near Folsom, New Mexico, where a cowboy discovered the remains of a herd of extinct giant bison. By examining flint points embedded in the bones, archeologists later determined that a band of humans had killed and butchered the animals 12,450 years ago. This discovery vastly expanded America's known human history but also revealed the long-standing danger humans presented to the continent's evolutionary richness.

Distinguished author Dan Flores's ambitious history chronicles the epoch in which humans and animals have coexisted in the "wild new world" of North America—a place shaped both by its own grand evolutionary forces and by momentous arrivals from Asia, Africa and Europe. With portraits of iconic creatures such as mammoths, horses, wolves and bison, Flores describes the evolution and historical ecology of North America like never before.

Big Library Read is an international reading program that connects readers around the world with an ebook through public libraries. Wild New World is the 33rd selection of this program which began in 2013 and takes place three times per year.

Wild New World was published as an ebook by W. W. Norton & Company and audiobook by HighBridge. The title can be read without waitlists or holds on all major computers and devices through Libby or libbyapp.com, including iPhone®, iPad® and Android™ phones and tablets. Through Libby, readers can also “send to Kindle®” [U.S. libraries only]. The title will automatically expire at the end of the lending period, and there are no late fees.