As Much Chaos As We Can Stand

Cognitive Surplus:
Creativity and generosity in a connected age
by Clay Shirky
Penguin, 2010
242 pgs.

I have finally finished reading Clay Shirky's phenomenal new book Cognitive Surplus and I have been blown away by it from beginning to end. Shirky, a professor at NYU, explores how the default settings inherent in social media software are driving not only how we connect with each other, but about the kinds of massive projects that we can create if we spend even just a modicum of our free time (time usually spent watching television) contributing to them.

The depth of this book is difficult to summarize, but let me give it a shot.

Each of us has an amount of time, thanks to the labor struggles of the twentieth century, with which we can do what we will (our cognitive surplus, i.e. leftover brain time). With the advent of television we slowly became consumers of a passive media environment, so much so that many of us watched enough television that it could be considered equivalent to having a part time job. This wasn't because we necessarily wanted to be couch potatoes, but this was the environment we had. It was a default pattern, not necessarily a desired state of being.

With the introduction of the internet we began developing a different pattern of social behavior toward our media. From the creation of ASCII art as a humble little creative endeavor in early emails we have progressed to an era where we can create our own original videos and share them with the entire world. Beyond even that we have also grown to the point where massive, globally shared projects, like Wikipedia are made possible by the dedicated efforts of millions of people spending time creating content instead of being a passive receptacle of pre-packaged media.

What drives us to create and share things like lolcats, fan fiction and YouTube videos, or to participate in large scale protests or create alternative news reporting outlets?

Shirky's answer: we have the means and opportunity to do so, for free, and the software that has been designed to support these structures promotes an environment of creating and sharing. These things have always been going on, but the ability to share our personal creative works, or to participate in a mutually creative and supportive environment has just not been available at this scale ever before. We all know people who wrote fan stories of their favorite television show, or who went to conventions and shared their hobbies with each other. Social media allows us to not only find those people who share our interests, however bizarre they may be, but to engage in them with an unprecedented level of speed and freedom, thus nurturing subcultures to greater heights.

Beyond the level of subcultures we have begun to develop massive multi-user created systems that have a great deal of civic value. Projects like developing open source software like Linux or Apache, creating articles for Wikipedia or reporting news on Ushahidi have become invaluable resources to society. These works could not have been done without the ability to connect disparate people who have a shared ethic, vision and need via social media.

The long term view of how the internet is shaping our society has yet to be seen, and the examples he provides of similar revolutions in communications show that one can never really predict where we will be fifty or a hundred years from now. What Shirky does provide however is a bit of a roadmap outlining what factors lead to successful social media environments, and an excellent review of how far we've come in just a few short years.

This was one of the most engrossing reads I've had in quite a long time. Fun, informative, and a great amount of positive speculation about the internet. I strongly recommend it, not just for people who have internet wonkery as an interest, but for pretty much anyone who has a deep love for culture. The stories are thought provoking, funny, scary and over all brilliant.

Check it out!

Have You Been Living Underground?

I love getting the NPR updates on my Facebook, because I'll find fabulous gems like this article about the new underground bunker company Vivos. Make sure to watch the video as well.

Seeing these luxury disaster shelters immediately made me think about Philip K. Dick's underground world in The Penultimate Truth. In this novel people dwell in an series of connected pods miles below the surface of the earth. Their purpose in these pods is to produce robot soldiers to go to the surface and continue fighting the war that destroyed everything that lives and irradiated most everything else. Each day these pod societies churn out more robots, only to receive orders to build more robots. All the while, on the surface military fiefdoms have cropped up and the folks who orchestrated the war in the first place have carved out vast empty cities to belong solely to them, while the robot soldiers do nothing more than defend their territory from the encroachments of similar military lords. These Ozymandias-like princes jaunt around the country for pointless meetings in private helicopters and jets, and continue to think up ways to perpetuate this mythic war to the billions of humans dwelling underground. Needless to say a few brave souls in the pods are starting to question their conditions, and that's when things begin to really change. This was a quick read and absolutely fascinating.

In a more wacky fantasy vein there is also Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. Simon is a digger in an underground village. His family died as the result of a cave-in back when he was younger and he was raised by his best friend Kamina. The lives of the people in Simon's village are turned upside-down when one day a giant robot crashes through the dome ceiling, revealing that there is both life on the surface and that it's unbelievably dangerous. Simon and Kamina team up with a surface girl named Yoko to defeat the giant robot and save their village, but that's only the beginning of a story that spans the most outrageously epic story you will ever read.

If you're more in the mood for a classic you may want to look at Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth made into a film starring Brendan Frazier. In this novel a professor travels down into different layers of geologic history, and along the way encounters the flora and fauna of the ancient earth. Yes, wooly mammoths and dinosaurs! How can you go wrong? On the other end of speculative time is H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, where in the far future the peaceful, childlike Eloi people dwell in the decaying surface buildings while the pale ape-like Morlocks live in the dark underground.

Any of these works would make good reading while living in your own beatiful underground dwelling.

Wicked Awesome

Horns
by Joe Hill
William Morrow, (c) 2010

Recently I had the misfortune of being terribly sick, layed up in bed and feeling awful. That said, I was incredibly lucky that I had, mere days before, checked out Joe Hill's latest novel Horns. Had I not been in bed for an entire day I would have not had the luxury of reading the entirety of this book in one sitting, and I would have had to steal every spare moment here and there to dive back into the book and find out what happened next.

And let me explain just one other thing, for a librarian, I'm not a terribly fast reader. I read at the speed of spoken conversations, which is amazingly slow compared to many of my colleagues. For me to actually blaze through a novel as quickly as I did, means that it was a relentless onslaught of reading from morning to night.

I could absolutely not put this book down.

Horns follows the life of Ignatius Perrish. He is the son and brother to famous musicians, as well as being the prime suspect in the brutal murder of his former fiance Merrin. It seemed that all those troubles were behind him, until he wakes up one morning with two large knots on the side of his head. It's clear that they are horns, but he has no idea why. What he quickly learns is that under the power of the horns people will reveal their darkest truths to him, beginning with his live-in girlfriend Glenna who immediately confesses that she wants to make herself repulsive to him because she can't bear to tell him to get out of her life. And that's just within the first ten pages.

What follows is an ever deepening look into the differences between the face we show the world and the thousand things we wish we could say to one another save for propriety. Hill asks a lot of intriguing questions about lies, omissions and truth; what we say to people versus what people hear; what we say and what we mean and the blurry lines between good and evil. Not only that, but it's wrapped in the most deeply intertwined writing where every element of the story fits neatly into every other. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Horns is that it doesn't really fit into any easily defined category. While sure, there are elements of fantasy or horror, I wouldn't say that it's either of those things. It's just a great story.

I would strongly encourage anyone who read Joe Hill's short story collection 20th Century Ghosts to get this latest novel. I admit that I wasn't that thrilled with his first novel Heart Shaped Box, but I gave 20th a shot and it was absolutely brilliant work. Horns fits right in with some of those great pieces, particularly You Will Hear the Locust Sing which blends Kafka's Metamorphosis with school violence. In both stories the reason for the transformation is very unclear, but the power that it awakens in the character leads to some of the most intriguing metaphors.

So, check out the book, carve out a day, sit down and read from morning 'til night. You'll be glad you did.

Wintry Mix

I've absolutely loved spending the last few days at home staying warm and dry from the snow. I spent the time watching movies with friends, baking, and working on a new quilt. We're open today and if you make it before the next wave of snow hits you can come and pick up some entertainment to help you and your family get through this historic snow storm.

Here are a few wintry suggestions to get you started.

Movies

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
Snow Dogs
Why Did I Get Married
The Shining
30 Days of Night

Books

The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats

Snow by Uri Shulevitz

The Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist

The Coldest Winter Ever by Sister Souljah

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson

Her Father's Daughter

"Who's the Daddy?" is a question most often posed in paternity episodes of the Maury Povich show (not that I've ever watched it) or in the pages of celebrity rags discussing the newest "baby bumps" in Hollywood (not that I ever read them while standing in line at the grocery store). "Who's the Daddy" is also a fitting turn of words for a host of fiction and non-fiction books. I uncovered no less than 17 books in the D.C. Library catalog with the title, The [insert occupation here]'s Daughter.

For example:


The Calligrapher's Daughter
The Doctor's Daughter
The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter
The Alchemist's Daughter
The Professor's Daughter
The Agitator's Daughter
The Impostor's Daughter
The Fat Man's Daughter

You'll find these titles in our new "Who's the Daddy?" display. Of course there was a time when one's patrilineal descent meant everything. It can still carry great influence (see Bush 41 and 43), or serve as another type of transformative force in one's life, as President Obama has described through his tenuous relationship with his own father. The father/daughter memoirs here also have fascinating stories to tell. In The Agitator's Daughter, a Georgetown University law professor recounts growing up in a family of civil rights activists that goes back four generations, and the family ruin brought about by her father's relentless pursuit of justice. In the graphic novel The Impostor's Daughter: A True Memoir, the narrator tells how she grew up in awe of her war veteran father, only to discover later that his stories of heroism and adventure were lies.

The daughters in these books remain nameless until you flip open their covers. Come and check one out!

Dystopia Schmystopia

If you’re anything like me and many Generation-X pseudo-nerds, then you have a love/hate relationship with future dystopian sci-fi novels. Don't get me wrong—I've read and love a lot of these books. I think they resonate especially with we jaded Gen-X'ers who grew up in the shadow of the last decade of the Cold War. Remember the movie 'Red Dawn'? Enough said.

Although we're no longer terrified of the Soviets lobbing a city-killer sized nuke over Canada, we've experienced a scary last eight years. Partly because of the newly rekindled fire feeding the spread of terrorism (“Bring it on!”), I think we're feeling a slight return of that distant sense of doom. The other day I saw a guy walking around DC wearing a t-shirt that read One Nation Under Surveillance. That's what I’m talking about. Way to distill it to four words, shirt company! Maybe I'm imagining this mood on the street, maybe I'm projecting, but I'm not imagining the hundreds of underground anti-establishment podcasts with themes of mistrust, anarchy, and disdain for our ruling authorities. I listen to them on my lunch break and they make me A) glad to have the freedom of speech B) want to reach for a future dystopian novel.

One problem is the immense number of these novels that are out there—it’s impossible to keep up. If you look to the past you have to go all the way back to Mary Shelley in the 1820s to see this genre first taking shape. In the mid 1900s come the most crucial post-industrial dystopian novels: A Brave New World, Animal Farm, Nineteen-Eighty-Four, Fahrenheit 451. There were also many other lesser-known masterpieces like Naked Lunch, A Canticle for Leibowitz, The Postman, and it’s really never stopped since then. Okay, end of sermon. But I would like, O’ my brothers, to talk partially about a novel published in 1962, and what is in part the target of this malenky report, my merry droogs, this being the audio book presentation of a novel of future London, that is, A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess.

In high school and in college, people kept telling me I had to read this book. “Dude, you've read Nineteen-Eighy-Four, now you need to try something harder.” But I’d pick up a paperback edition of Clockwork with tiny type on gray paper and end up putting it down shortly thereafter and start making up excuses: I just can't get into the lingo. It's immediately too dark to get into, it just doesn't click. That all changed two months ago when a library patron returned a 6-disc audio book version of it and suggested, no demanded, that I rip it to my iPod. (BTW, recommendations of patrons, by the way, are how I’ve come across most of my favorite books. Bog bless Washington’s enthusiastic readers and well-stocked libraries!)

Anthony Burgess wrote dozens of novels from 1956 to 1995, but to his chagrin it was Clockwork that won him superstar status. Burgess expressed regret over this any chance he was given. The small tome was just one of many books he'd written over the decades, and not his favorite by any means. Nevertheless, for better or worse, it is for this quirky chronicle of teenage depravity, and largely due to the hit film based on it, that people remember this author and vision of the future.

When I think of the sixties, I picture people sitting around on shag rugs listening to the first Pink Floyd record, often in altered states of mind. But this book was published in 1962, before the hippie thing had exploded. It was in this silence before the coming social hurricane that Burgess gives us his terrifying vision of a bleak, sprawling future full of unrestrained crime carried out by poorly parented teens, all living in fearful concrete suburbs. The only reason I know this is because of Tom Hollander, and Recorded Books.

From the first line, What’s it going to be, then, eh? The character of poor Alex is vividly and effortlessly imagined thanks to Hollander’s perfect cockney accent, urbanized and infused with Russian slang. This isn’t a book report and I don’t want to color anyone’s opinion of the work. I'm not addicted to audio books like some people—I still prefer hard copies. All the same, I do want to throw this out there: I’ve been through A Clockwork Orange three times (!!!) now on my iPod, after having picked up and put down the paper version at least twice as many times. Put it on hold—it’s painless and well worth the minimal trouble, even if you’re a lazy reader like me. You will get pulled in and, if you're anything like me, you'll like it so much you'll laugh out loud on the train and embarrass yourself.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

I just finished reading the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. It seems like half the staff were reading it all at the same time, and a couple of us watched Blade Runner, the film inspired by the book. It's been sitting on my bookshelf at home for years now, and I've been wanting to read it for a while. Apparently the time was right and it made its way into my backpack and today I finished it.

It was a really great novel. Nobody plays mindgames with the reader, or with his characters, like Philip K. Dick does. The world exists in a state of post-nuclear destruction. The sky is obliterated by radioactive dust, most all life on earth is dead, mutated, or on the verge of extinction. Most of humanity has zoomed off to settle other, non-nuclear worlds with the help of android slaves to build settlements and take care of the major labor. Well, the android models keep getting smarter and smarter, and it becomes more and more difficult to tell androids from humans. So, in order to detect whether or not someone is human or android human police have to administer a test to prove the essential humanity of the individual based on empathetic responses. Rick Deckard works for the San Francisco police department as a bounty hunter who takes down rogue androids. He's been assigned to take out the remaining 6 androids who escaped from their captivity on Mars.

Due to the near extinction of most all animal life humans on Earth have mostly become followers of this empathy cult, whose leader, Wilber Mercer, was a lover of animals. People strive to own and care for living creatures, even though the cost of purchasing, much less caring for, a pet are exorbitantly high given their rarity. Not only do they strive to become pet owners and caretakers, they also spend time "fusing" with the others in the cult through the empathy box, where they share each others emotions as they climb the hill of sacrifice with Mercer.

This becomes the lynch pin in determining whether or not someone is an android. How do they react to animal death? How do they feel about the products that were derived from killing something extraordinarily rare? My own brain goes to thinking about sociopaths like Dexter who have no regard for life, animal or human, because they lack empathetic response. The Voigt-Kampff test they use in the book (and the film) measures how they respond to certain triggering words or situations related to animal cruelty and the death of humans. Interestingly enough, The Wave Magazine in San Francisco used the Voigt-Kampff questions when they spoke with candidates for Mayor of the city. The results were incredibly interesting.

Mad Men at DC Public Library

If you haven't been watching Mad Men on AMC you are missing out on one of the best written, best acted shows on television today. You can get up to speed with Don, Betty, Joan, Peggy, Pete and the crew by checking out seasons 1 and 2 from your local DC Public Library.

But we've got way more than just the videos. Being an avid fan of the show I've compiled a list of books that are mentioned throughout the course of the show that we have here in the collection, along with some other period pieces and contextual works that I'm sure you'll find enjoyable, if not amusing.

Check it out.


Books Mentioned in Mad Men

Lady Chatterly’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence

Exodus by Leon Uris

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

Meditations in an Emergency by Frank O’Hara
Call Number: 811 O36M

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
Call Number: 937 G439H


The 1960s

The 1960s: Examining Pop Culture ed. by David M. Haugen and Matthew J. Box
Call Number: 973.923 N714A

The 1960's: American Popular Culture Through History by Edward J. Rielly
Call Number: 973.923 R555

One minute to midnight : Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the brink of nuclear war by Michael Dobbs. Call Number: 973.922 D632

We Shall Overcome by Herb Boyd, Narrated by Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee.
Call Number: 323.1196 B7896

I Have A Dream: writings and speeches that changed the world. by Martin Luther King, Jr. ed. by James M. Washington
Call Number: 332.092 K53I

On the Road to Freedom: a guided tour of the civil rights trail. by Charles E. Cobb, Jr.
Call Number: 323.1196 C653


Kennedy v. Nixon

The making of a Catholic president : Kennedy vs. Nixon 1960 by Shaun A. Casey.
Call Number: 322.1097 C338

1960 : LBJ vs. JFK vs. Nixon : the epic campaign that forged three presidencies by David Pietrusza.
Call Number: 324.973 P626N


Camelot

John F. Kennedy: A Biography by Michael O'Brien
Call Number: 92 K348OB

Brothers: the hidden history of the Kennedy years by David Talbot
Call Number: 973.922 T138

The Kennedys : portrait of a family by Richard Avedon ; Shannon Thomas Perich ; foreword by Robert Dallek.
Call Number: 973.922 A961

The secret life of Marilyn Monroe by J. Randy Taraborrelli.
Call Number: 92 M7534T


Advertising

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Copywriter's Words and Phrases by Kathy Kleidermacher.
Call Number: 659.132 K63

Brand Failures: the truth about the 100 biggest branding mistakes of all time by Matt Haig
Call Number: 658.827 H149

Don't Think Pink: What really makes women buy--and how to increase your share of this crucial market by Lisa Johnson
Call Number: 658.834 J67

Adland: Searching for the meaning of life on a branded planet by James P. Othmer
Call Number: 659.1 O87

Consuming Kids: Protecting our children from the onslaught of marketing and advertising by Susan Linn
Call Number: 658.8342 L758


Socializing

Mr. Boston official bartender's guide by edited by Anthony Giglio with Jim Meehan ; photography by Ben Fink.
Call Number: 641.874 M679A

The Perfect Buzz: the essential guide to boozing, bars and bad behavior by David Bramwell.
Call Number: 394.13 P438

The appetizers and canapés cookbook by Lillian Langseth-Christensen and Carol Sturm Smith. Illus. by Lillian Langseth-Christensen. (1968)
Call Number: 641.81 L285

Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior by Judith Martin.
Call Number: 395 M381A

Naked Lunch at 50

While checking my facebook this morning I ran across this NPR story about the 50th anniversary edition of Naked Lunch being released by Grove Press next month.

I first encountered Naked Lunch and the wild eccentricities of the beat generation while I was in high school. I found some of the kids giggling over a book of poems by Allen Ginsberg (it was the red book of Collected Poems 1947-1980). Later on I found out they were giggling at the sexy poems, but unlike my peers I read through the rest of the book and it made me dizzy with ecstasy. The barrage of images, the flow of the language, the yearning and striving for more, more more... It was breathtaking, and I wanted to read more. My local library back in Ohio had a copy of Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. It too was filled with the awe and wonder of living and the stark beauty of the California coastline. I still wanted more. So I looked into the beats, and the people who were in the movement and I stumbled on Burroughs.

Naked Lunch was completely different from all the rest of them. It was surreal, like looking at the world through a drug induced haze and finding the world around you to be filled with aliens, prostitutes, junk and lies. It was the strangest thing I'd ever read. Around the time that I read the book a film adaptation had come out starring Peter Weller (of RoboCop fame) and Julian Sands (of Warlock infamy). Around 1992 it was on cable and I snuck into the living room and watched it late at night while my parents were sleeping (yeah, I was 16, and it was one of those late night Cinemax movies). Bizarre is not even the beginning of how to describe it.

After that Burroughs was embedded in my brain. I heard him singing "Star Me Kitten" with R.E.M. on the X-Files album. I found all the books he had written at the local library. I kept buying beat books looking for more.

It actually worked in my favor later on in high school as well. I was on the academic team (think quiz bowl) and we got served the following question in the third round and I have never forgotten it.

"What William S. Burroughs novel did the author describe as being about 'drugs and sex and sex and sex'?"

I rang that buzzer and leapt in there, "NAKED LUNCH!"

Everyone around on my team and the team we were playing against looked at me with shock. I don't know if it was the fact that I knew the answer, that I got it so quickly or that I was so full of glee for having heard that question at the quiz. I was literally vibrating with joy. I turned to everyone's looks of stupor and said, "That is my favorite book!"

And it remains one today.

The Scalinata in Literature

I had the weirdest coincidence this last weekend, in that I was reading two separate books that take place in two totally different time periods and both of them mentioned the exact same architectural feature in Rome.

The Spanish Stairs (Scalinata della Trinità dei Monti) were built in the 1720's to connect the Piazza di Spagna to the church of Trinità dei Monti. The picture on the left shows the fountain in the Piazza, the church above and on the right is the Keats-Shelley house. That's right, John Keats and Percy Shelley. John Keats lived his last days on earth looking out the window over the Spanish Stairs.

And that's where the story gets interesting.

I started reading Tim Powers's novel "The Stress of Her Regard" a while ago, and still haven't quite finished it. The book is set in the heyday of the English romantic poets, and Keats, Byron and Shelley are main players in the story. The novel follows their lives, and explores what truly was the muse that inspired these greatest of poets to craft their works. Powers's explanation is that the muse was actually a vampiric creature known to the Greeks as a Lamia (note: link contains nude artwork). As the creature slowly drains the life from the poets she alternately inspires them to greater heights of artistry. But over time the poets begin to show the strain on their lives, and eventually they crave to be released from this burden. The scene with Keats plays out with the fantasy creature begging to be let in to keep her lover alive as he dies while gazing over the Scalinata. I totally have not given away even a fraction of this epic fantasy drama by revealing this information. Just know that the rest of it is just as weird and exciting. It took me about 17 years to get around to reading this book, but it was worth the wait.

Halfway through reading "The Stress of Her Regard" I got one of those *sigh* moments and just couldn't be bothered to continue reading it. SO I put down "stress" and picked up something completely different. For no particular reason I was drawn to Alfred Bester's "The Stars My Destination." I had no idea what it was about, it had just been sitting on my bookshelf at home for too long.

It's the twenty-sixth century and Gulliver Foyle is a space marine of sorts who gets stranded out in deep space with no way home. One day while waiting for who knows how long he spies the passing starship "Vorga" and signals for a ride. Vorga ignores his plea and Gully begins to plot his revenge against the ship. While Foyle is tracking down the crew of the ship to find out who gave the order he finds himself in Italy, looking ot meet up with one of the former crew members, where else, but on the Scalinata!

I can't tell you how weird it was for me to just accidentally read two totally different books, by two totally different authors, set about 700 years apart, where they shared the exact same location at a midway point through the story. Just absolutely bizarre.

Both of the books are extremely interesting, but both for different reasons. "The Stress of Her Regard" is great for people who have a penchant for the romantic poets and a taste for the gothic. There are moments that are positively gruesome, and the language is witty and florid. "The Stars My Destination" is more of a sci-fi vendetta adventure story. The story jumps from place to place quickly, and the ending is completely surreal. It's an absolute page turner.

Check it out!

In The News: To Cook Or Not To Cook

As part of our efforts to expand the scope of the blog we're going to be doing a series of articles on here looking at hot topics in the news and how we at the library can help expand your understanding of the topic.

In last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food, wrote an article entitled Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch where he explores how television cooking shows migrated from instruction based cooking like Julia Child into "dump and stir" shows like Rachel Ray and butch cooking challenge shows like Iron Chef. He also mentions Nora Ephron's new movie Julie and Julia as an example of someone discovering the love of cooking, and along the way finding the key to unlock her own passions as a writer.

It's a great piece of writing, and as someone who busts out Julia Child's "The Way To Cook" a couple times a month it made me want to rethink my cooking priorities.

Here's a list of some of the books Pollan discusses in his article, and a few others, along with the library call number so you can locate them here at the DC Public Library.

In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan, Penguin, 2008
Call Number: 613 P771

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, Penguin, 2007
Call Number: 394.12 P773O

Julie and Julia: 365 days, 524 recipes, 1 tiny apartment kitchen by Julie Powell, Little Brown, 2005
Call Number: 641.5092 P884

Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, 40th Anniversary ed., Knopf, 2001
Call Number: 641.5944 C536A

My Life in France by Julia Child, Knopf, 2006
Call Number: 92 C535
Also available as an mp3 audio book via Overdrive

Top Chef: The Cookbook text by Brett Martin ; recipes edited by Liana Krissoff and Leda Scheintaub., Chronicle, 2008
Call Number: 641.5 T673

In the Heat of the Kitchen by Gordon Ramsay, Wiley, 2004
Call Number: 641.5 R178

The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters, Clarkson Potter, 2007
Call Number: 641.5 W329

Rachel Ray's Big Orange Book by Rachel Ray, Clarkson Potter, 2008
Call Number: 641.555 R264R

The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, Norton, 2001
Call Number: 305.4209 F899F2

The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, Knopf/Random House, 1993
Call Number: 305.4 B386

Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives by Guy Fieri, William Morrow, 2008
Call Number: 647.9573 F465

The Physiology of Taste by Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, Penguin, 1994
Call Number: 641.01 B857A5

Catching Fire by Richard Wrangham, Basic, 2009
Call Number: 394.12 W941

New Facebook Group

I've created a new facebook group for parents, teachers and librarians of children who have a taste for scary, strange or horrifying stories. It's called Spooky Books for Strange Children. If you have an account on FB, head over and check it out.

(If there's enough interest, I may make a separate blog here on Blogger - thoughts?)

The Importance of Being Eleanor Roosevelt

Eleanor Roosevelt, the well known First Lady and wife of President Franklin Roosevelt, was one of the main American delegates to the UN who helped compile the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This declaration was put forward by the United Nations in 1948, three years after the end of World War Two. It was also Eleanor Roosevelt who was one of the leaders of the United States Delegation for the committee on human rights and she was the one who prodded the committee to put forward a new formulation of the idea of human rights to the world, one that reflected the challenges of a world recently united by the struggle of a World War.

In a relatively new book entitled " A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights," Mary Ann Glendon shows how it was the enthusiasm and commitment of Ms Roosevelt that helped to bring the early UN to a focus on human rights as the basis for a new world order. She helped to direct the human rights commission to agree upon a common formulation of human rights for all nations. She also encouraged the United States’ State Department to stand behind our principles of democracy and human dignity when those principles were questioned by some new nations. According to Ms Glendon, it was her good sense and idealism that made the committee work and it was her fame that helped to sucessfully publicized the Declaration of as a new Magna Carta for the twentieth century.

Eleanor Roosevelt was a world figure at the time, one of the few American women of stature who helped direct the political work of the New Deal, served the causes of civil rights, sought to improve conditions of the poor, and brought about agricultural reform. She worked both within and outside of government. She became a symbol after her husband’s death of the American ideals of democracy, human rights, and social welfare for the masses of people. She became most famous for advancing the cause of universal human rights within the United Nations and bringing a greater idealism to the purposes behind the world organization as it came upon the world stage to become the major player that it remains today.

Classics Landslide

WOW!

We're getting a ton of new editions of great classics that you might have read in your literature classes. If you've been thinking about reading one of those great works and never got around to it, now is exactly the right time. Among them are:

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Light in August by William Faulkner
Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
Kim by Rudyard Kipling
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

And tons more...

Stop in and check out some of these wonderful books.

Japanese Books in Translation: Part 3 - The Final Chapter

The final shipment of our Toyota grant books of Japanese literature in translation have arrived!We now have a major display featuring all of those titles, so swing by and check it out. We've got a little something for everyone.
Non-Fiction

J-Horror: the definitive guide to The Ring, The Grudge and beyond by David Kallat
North Korea Kidnapped My Daughter by Sakie Yokota

Fiction

Twinkle Twinkle by Kaori Ekuni
May in the Valley of the Rainbow by Yoichi Funado
A Rabbit's Eyes by Kenjiro Haitani
Naoko by Keigo Higashino
The Guin Saga Book One: The Leopard Mask by Kaoru Kurimoto
The Guin Saga Book Two: Warrior in the Wilderness by Kaoru Kurimoto
The Blade of the Courtesans by Keiichiro Ryu
Paradise by Koji Suzuki
Outlet by Randy Teguchi
Sayonara Gangsters by Genichiro Takahashi
Translucent Tree by Nobuko Takagi

Mystery Fiction

Ashes by Kenzo Kitakata
The Cage by Kenzo Kitakata
Winter Sleep by Kenzo Kitakata
The Poison Ape by Arimasa Osawa
Promenade of the Gods by Koji Suzuki

Historic Fiction

Zero over Berlin by Joh Sasaki

Horror

The Crimson Labyrinth by Yusuke Kishi
Now You're One of Us by Asa Nonami
Parasite Eve by Hideaki Sena
Birthday by Koji Suzuki
Dark Water by Koji Suzuki
Ring by Koji Suzuki

Science Fiction

Spiral by Koji Suzuki
Loop by Koji Suzuki

Japanese Books In Translation: Part 2 - Fiction and Non-Fiction

We just received a few more of the books from our Toyota grant collection. Here's the quick list.

Fiction

The Fall of Constantinople
The Battle of Lepanto
The Siege of Rhodes
-- all by Nanami Shiono

Boy by Takeshi Kitano

Non-Fiction

The Toyota Leaders: An Executive Guide by Masaaki Sato
A Slow Death: 83 Days of Radiation Sickness by NHK-TV "Tokaimura Criticality Accident" crew

New Books for Teens

This week has been very exciting for our collection of books for teens, as we've been getting tons of new books from some of the best authors around. Here's a quick rundown of three of our newest titles:

Skinned, by Robin Wasserman - The first book in a new trilogy, this is the story of a young girl named Lia Khan, who, after nearly dying in an tragic accident, isn't quite a young girl named Lia Khan anymore... or is she? Taking its cue from the cyberpunk movement and the speculative fiction of Phillip K. Dick, the book takes on the questions of death and identity, the places technology can take us, and whether these are places we want to go.





Shifty, by Lynn E. Hazen - Soli is a fifteen-year-old boy who has spent his life drifting from one foster home to another; always in trouble, always an outsider. Now, he's trying his best to keep out of it, but it seems that trouble is determined to follow him wherever he goes. Hazen's writing is as real as it is quirky, full of wry humor and keen insight into the head of a boy trying to find his way in a world which has already written him off.



Planet Pregnancy, by Linda Oatman High - This free-verse novel tells the story of Sahara, a sixteen-year-old girl living in Texas who discovers that she's become pregnant. Sahara's story is one of turmoil and transformation as she comes to terms with the immensity of the changes this news wreaks on her life. Even more compelling for its simple eloquence, Planet Pregnancy is a must-read story of personal growth and social awareness.

New Feature: New Arrivals

We've added a new feature to the WTD blog, the New Arrivals list. If you go to the blog at wathatdaniel.blogspot.com, you'll see on the top left hand corner the 10 most recent additions to the collection here at the interim library.

So check out the site every Friday afternoon and see what's new!

Cormac McCarthy Rules!

So, you’ve seen the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men by now. You may have even rented the DVD and watched the extras. If you did, you probably remember the name Cormac McCarthy. I watched The Charlie Rose Show with the film's directors (The Cohen brothers) and actors and every other reference was to the extraordinary story-telling power and grace of the book's author, Cormac McCarthy. In fact it was more like Cormac McCarthy Cormac McCarthy Cormac McCarthy… Though the topic at hand was their recent Academy Awards, the actors and filmmakers kept coming back to McCarthy.

McCarthy tends to stick with the Southern Gothic and post-apocalyptic genres because that’s what he does best. Take for example another brilliantly dark novel by the author, the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Road. Think Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle mixed with Don DeLillo’s White Noise, but darker. The Road is a beautifully written, genuinely creepy post-apocalyptic dystopian tale of a father and son making their way across a barren wasteland after an unknown cataclysm has wiped every other living thing off the face of the earth. If, for the reader, modern times summon feelings of eminent doom, The Road is a thoroughly moving story, and truly not too dark for the casual reader, unless they are a casual reader of 'Desperate Housewives' novelizations. But seriously, please do check out The Road from my Staff Picks shelf at the Watha T. Daniel Interim Library. You'll be glad you did.

This Week at Watha T.-June 2-8

Good Morning Neighbors!

We've got some awesome movies this week and our first book talk for teens, and our Saturday is FULL of awesome programs. So, check it out!

Monday, June 2

4:00 p.m.: Doctor Who - Father's Day

Wednesday, June 4

10:00 a.m.: Story Time for 3-5 year olds with Miss Tracy

6:00 p.m.: Big Kid Movie - James and the Giant Peach

Thursday, June 5

4:00 p.m.: Teen Book Talk

Saturday, June 7

10:00 a.m.: Customizing your MySpace page

1:00 p.m.: Big Summer Energy Savings