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Library Topics
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Address: 301 N.
Pennsylvania |
Welcome to Build a Better Trade Show Image Week, National Engineers Week, and International Friendship Week. Today is the anniversary of the day in 1879 when the first chain store, Woolworths, opened in Utica, New York. The chain closed in 1997.
Saturday is the anniversary of the date in 1919 when Grand Canyon National Park was established. An immense gorge cut through the high plateaus of northwest Arizona by the raging Colorado River, covering 1,218,375 acres, Grand Canyon is considered one of the most spectacular natural phenomena in the world.
WHAT'S HAPPENING?
At Wednesday's 10:00 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. story times, children will observe National Children's Dental Health Month by making a sparkling tooth. Saturday morning's 10:00 story time allows children to participate in Floral Design Day by designing with flowers. Donations of artificial flowers would be greatly appreciated. Just drop them by the library!
BOOK TALK
Librarian Barbara Harris provides this week's book information. A new year or Millennium causes us to reflect upon our history, and family memoirs introduce us to the daily lives of the people who made our country. James and Janet Robertson transformed the records they found in the eighteenth-century Connecticut farmhouse they bought into the book "All Our Yesterdays." T.O. Madden, Jr. discovered a trunk full of his family papers and reconstructed his family history beginning with a mulatto woman indentured to James Madison in "We Were Always Free."
In "Family," Ian Frazier traces 200 years of his ancestors as they move from New England to settle in the Midwest. The family of John Hildebrand's wife settled near Rochester, Minnesota. He tells their story in "Mapping the Farm." "American Elegy" is Jeffrey Simpson's tribute to his western Pennsylvania pioneer ancestors.
Immigrants from everywhere have enriched our country and our culture. Duong Van Mai Elliott traces four generations of a Vietnamese family in "The Sacred Willow," and "Children of the Roojme" by Elmaz Abinader describes Lebanese immigrants. Migrants of another sort were the "Okie" family Dan Morgan follows from the Depression to the late 1980s in "Rising in the West."
If reading these inspires you to record the lives of your predecessors, check out "Writing Family Histories and Memoirs," by Kirk Polking; "To Our Children's Children," by Bob Grene and D. G. Fulford; or "For All Time," by Charley Kempthorne, for suggestions about how to do it!
DID YOU KNOW?
In a slim paperback from Sierra Club Books, "Seven Wonders: Everyday Things for a Healthier Planet," author John Ryan declares that the public library is one of seven "sustainable wonders...not monuments to past achievements or technologies, but tools to help us live." The bicycle, ceiling fan, clothesline, and ladybug are also on the list. They all help us "rein in our economy's rapid plunder of the planet's natural resources" and "help reduce our colossal appetites to a level the earth can support."
According to Ryan, "The average North American library lends out 100,000 books a year but buys fewer than 5,000, saving nearly 50 tons of paper and 250 tons of greenhouse gas emissions...." Ecological issues aside, Ryan also touches on the philosophy underlying public libraries, and the funding issues that plague them. The world would be a better place generally, he concludes, if more people would read. We certainly can't argue with that logic!
THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK: "If you've reached a dead end, it could be that you're sitting on it." (unknown)
JUDY ARMSTRONG, 624-7276
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Address: 301 N.
Pennsylvania |
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