Staff Picks: Books
Staff-recommended reading from the
KPL catalog.
What with last year’s passage of Ordinance 1856 in Kalamazoo and June being now-presidentially-proclaimed Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered Pride Month, I have been inspired to learn more about the lives of transgendered individuals, the oppressions they face and the strength it takes to walk in this culture as a trans person. At KPL, I discovered documentaries, feature films, biographies, historical accounts, sociological perspectives and novels.
I was especially struck by Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to RuPaul. Transgender activist Leslie Feinberg gives many examples through history of famous and not-so-famous people who crossed the lines of the gender expectations our culture holds. I learned so much through their and Feinberg’s own experiences.
Some subject terms you can use to find information about, by and for transgendered people in KPL’s collection are: transgender people; transgenderism; transsexuals and gender identity. Also, check out the GLBT Pride display on the first floor of the Central library through the end of June!
Book
Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to RuPaul
0807079405
Author Carolyn Marsden’s latest novel, Take Me with You is set in an Italian town in the years closely following WWII.
Raised in an Italian orphanage, a young, bi-racial girl named Susanna and her best friend, Pina, want to be adopted (or, better yet, reclaimed by the parents who left them there as much younger girls), but fear being separated, as each considers the other her BFF and her OFF (only friend forever).
The book’s jacket says “Set in Naples, Italy; Take Me with You is a lyrical novel that follows the friendship of two girls and touches on the themes of identity and the meaning of home.”
I picked this novel up on the new books cart recently, started to scan it, and couldn’t put it down. Both Susanna and Pina, now bridging on their teen years, are desperate to discover their true parentage. Pina’s mother does live nearby, but has built her “new” life around her new family, and that family doesn’t include Pina. Heartbroken, Pina turns to Susanna, who has just learned that her father, an African American serviceman, will be coming to “claim” her and take her to America and a new home. Susanna is torn…between being unsure of her future and her concern for her friend. The novel’s ending could suggest a sequel because the girls’ futures are left open and unsettled.
While the main characters in this novel are female, it would make a good historical fiction read for anyone. This could even be a good classroom read-aloud.
Book
Take Me with You
9780763637392
Suppose an uncle who supposedly died in the London Blitz appeared out of nowhere, and told you he had been locked inside an Irish prison for the last 30 years, for a crime he didn’t commit? That’s the beginning of this thriller by British author Robert Goddard, and in Goddard’s world, there are unforseen twists and turns aplenty.
The story begins in 1976, when young Stephen Swan’s 68 year old uncle Eldritch shows up in England, claiming to have been wrongly accused of spying. Now ill, Eldritch persuades Stephen to try and help him track down a missing Picasso painting, worth an untold fortune to the family who owned it prior to World War II. The story alternates between Stephen’s narration in 1976, and Eldritch’s story, set in the 1940’s, when he was a cocky young man involved in profitable but somewhat shady activities. Secrets buried in the past are affecting current generations, and Eldritch hopes to right old wrongs.
This story of espionage and suspense kept me guessing until the final pages. Give Goddard a try if you like well written historical mysteries, with plenty of action and atmosphere.
Book
A Long Time Coming: a novel
9780385343619
The Oshtemo Book Group has had a wonderful year of discussions about a variety of books. We ended the 2009-10 season with a “Readers Choice” roundtable where everyone could share a book they particularly enjoyed.
Not surprisingly, each book mentioned was a top favorite of the reader, and we all added that title to our “must read” list.
We were surprised that so many of the titles fell under the “historical fiction” category, but not all. There were several nonfiction books and a Pulitzer Prize winner as well.
So if you are looking for a good summer read you might want to check out the following titles:
- Winter Garden, Kristin Hannah
- Day after Night, Anita Diamant
- Left to Tell, Immaculee Ilibagiza
- Night Fall and Wild Fire, Nelson DeMille
- Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout
- Dogs of Bedlam Farms, Jon Katz
- Enchantment, Orson Scott Card
- Heat: an amateur's adventures as kitchen slave, line cook, pasta maker, and apprentice to a Dante-quoting butcher in Tuscany, Bill Buford
- Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett
- Madonnas of Leningrad, Debra Dean
- Stitches, David Small
- Nineteenth Wife, David Ebershoff
- Making Rounds with Oscar, David Dosa
- Little Bee, Chris Cleave
Book
Oshtemo Book Group
bragg-book-discussion-09-160
http://www.kpl.gov/book-clubs/oshtemo-book-group.aspx 
As a convincing philosopher of science once argued, Thomas Kuhn, our scientific understanding of the world works within a paradigm, or model, or set of assumptions that unifies our view of it. The paradigm is supported by the discoveries it predicts, and vice versa. All scientists know, and almost everyone feels, that our latest scientific model of the world is that of the machine, given to us by the philosopher Rene Descartes (pronounced "Day Cart") and expressed in the revolutionary science of Newton. According to this model, the physical world is a giant mechanical clock, running and built on fully predictable and necessary laws, discoverable mostly through mathematics.
Many scientists today are realizing that, considering the discoveries in quantum physics, the machine model is leaving things out, is incomplete. Interestingly, The Matter Myth is an attempt of two scientists (professor of mathematical physics; astrophysicist) to overthrow the world as machine and replace it with the world as organic and living; which, they realize, is reminiscent of the old Aristotelian model of the world--the paradigm that was overthrown to begin with!
What I loved about this book is that, at the same time it argues for its' general thesis, it gives the reader a grand tour of the most difficult concepts in science--Einstein relativity, quantum theory, the big bang, evolution, cosmology--in a way that makes sense for people like me...people who cannot read Einstein, but want to check out a book at the library that explains him in a way I can understand.
book
The Matter Myth
0671728407
The History Channel has really been outdoing themselves with new and fun programming. Some of my favorites are Food Tech, American Pickers, and Pawn Stars. From these websites, you can watch previous episodes or learn about the program in more detail.
One of the shows I caught the other night (since baseball season has not monopolized the TV quite yet) was How the States Got Their Shapes. The stories behind many of our state's boundaries are quite fascinating and noteworthy. Beyond the geographic obviousness of things like the Great Lakes or the Gulf of Mexico, the state shape legacy often revolves around money and politics--often including a war or conflict of some sort. The belief in slavery (or lack thereof) carried far into the West and determined the straight, horizontal lined borders of many states. Even major rivers such as the Mississippi River don't automatically create a border. The "boot toe" part of Louisiana crosses right over the Big Muddy, for example.
If you missed the show on state shapes, you can pick up a book of the same name here at the library. Each state is its own chapter chock full of maps and stories that help provide insight into some of the weird things we either don't realize or take for granted. For instance, what if half of your town in is Canada and your Uncle George lives on the other side of town? Plan on a couple hours of passport, border patrol time!
Book
How the States Got Their Shapes
9780061431388
Set in both 1991 and 16th century Massachusetts, this book is appealing on several fronts. The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane successfully combines historical fiction, the Salem witch trials, and romance, for a good read with substance.
Cambridge graduate student Connie Goodwin moves to the rundown family home in Marblehead, Massachusetts for the summer. Connie finds an old key and a small piece of paper in a family Bible, with the words “Deliverance Dane” scrawled on it, and begins an investigation into its source. Soon after, strange events begin to occur. Flashbacks to Connie’s ancestors and events in the early American witchcraft era are seamlessly interwoven into the story.
I listened to the audiobook version of this title, read by Katherine Kellgren, and highly recommend it.
Book
The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane: a novel.
9781401340902
Before email, instant messaging, tweets, texting and even phoning, friends and family exchanged letters. Epistolary fiction is a story based on letters or diary entries, a format that is enjoying a resurgence.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a recent bestseller and a favorite of many book groups, is the correspondence between a British journalist and a reading group from Guernsey, set just after World War II. (KPL also has the audiobook version.)
Twenty years of correspondence is the basis for 84 Charing Cross Road, based on the real-life exchange of letters between New Yorker Helene Hanff, a freelance writer, and Frank Dole, a used book dealer in London.
One of my favorites in this format is The Diary of Mattie Spenser, a fictional journal of settling the Colorado Territories in the late 1800’s.
There are children’s, teen, and adult materials, fiction and nonfiction, in a letter or diary format. The subject headings in our catalog are “epistolary fiction” and “diary fiction.”
Book
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
9780385340991
This book is not only important because it is a penetrating critique of higher education in America, but because, when it was published in 1988, many people read it; it's a historical phenomenon; whether positive or negative, it struck a cord.
With its ambiguity, lack of clear argumentation, interesting and constant digressions, and deepness of thought, I sincerely struggled and disagreed, and agreed, and hated, and loved this book. Which makes me think: isn't that the beauty of a book?--that we can agree and disagree, understand and misunderstand, throw away and keep some or all of its' parts?
Bloom basically thinks that the American university, under the influence of some German thinkers (Nietzsche, Freud), has lost its' philosophical grounding, and has reduced itself to thinking there is no truth, that morals are relative, and so on. And from the rubble of this Nihilism emerges a student population that doesn't see the point of education, doesn't think seriously, and doesn't discuss things like what it means to live a good life, or be a good human, or have a good government. In a word, Bloom thinks the philosophers have left the building.
What I truly took away from this roller-coaster discussion--of ancient philosophy, the Founding Fathers, the sixties, and what it all has to do with the university--is that, somewhere along the way, we may have lost the sense that human knowledge is a unified whole (or even the sense that there is such a thing called knowledge!). We have forgotten that the great thinkers of our past--Kepler, Newton, Einstein, Jefferson, Locke--all considered there to be branches of knowledge that fit together in a coherent and meaningful way; they were part of a grand project, which is why they knew so much about other areas of knowledge. Have our college students lost this sense of unity?
Book
The Closing of the American Mind
0671479903
I had never heard of the Vel d’Hiv roundup of Jews in France on July 16 and 17, 1942, by the French police. This story has long been buried in the history of the holocaust. It was a source of great embarrassment to the French government and rarely taught in history lessons. Sarah’s Key tells the tale through the eyes of both a young girl caught up in the roundup, and a reporter 60 years later uncovering the story only to find it has personal ramifications for her family. What is especially riveting is how the author weaves the story around a key—a tragic key that locked a little boy away in a closet, while his sister, Sarah, who locked him away to keep him safe and hidden, is sent to the camps—not just for the few hours she suspected, but for many months until she escapes.
I really enjoyed this book. It was hard to put down, and I am planning on choosing it for an Oshtemo Book Group read in 2011.
Book
Sarah’s Key
9780312370831