Welcome

Welcome to the Freeport Memorial Library blog. We hope to use this blog to offer in-depth information about library services that we do not have room to explore in our bi-monthly newsletter. We look forward to hearing from you.

Thursday, November 19, 2015

Readers' Advisory

Invisible Ink: My Mother's Secret Love Affair With a Famous Cartoonish (A Graphic Memoir)
Bill Griffith (2015)

This is the renowned cartoonist's first long-form graphic work — a 200-page memoir that poignantly recounts his mother’s secret life, which included an affair with a cartoonist and crime novelist, Lawrence Lariar, in the 1950s and 1960s. Lariar lived at 57 West Lena Avenue. Freeport, NY.  Invisible Ink unfolds like a detective story, alternating between past and present, as Griffith recreates the quotidian habits of suburban Levittown and the professional and cultural life of mid-century Manhattan in the 1950s and ’60s as seen through his mother’s and his own then-teenage eyes. Griffith puts the pieces together and reveals a mother he never knew.
 

Wednesday, October 7, 2015

Readers' Advisory

Start A Revolution: Stop Acting Like A Library
by Ben Bizzle with Maria Flora (2015)


Bizzle and Flora present students, academics, and librarians working in a variety of contexts with a comprehensive guide to reinventing and radically marketing library services based on the author’s experience in reinvigorating the Craighead County Jonesboro Public Library in Arkansas. The authors have organized the bulk of their text into eight chapters, including a prelude telling the Jonesboro story, and an interlude telling the story of the Crooked Valley Regional Library. The eight chapters cover a variety of related topics, including digital library services, mobile library services, Facebook advertising and marketing, and many others. (Summary by: protoview.com).

Friday, October 2, 2015

Readers' Advisory

The Girl in the Spider's Web: A Lisbeth Salander Novel
by David Lagercrantz (2015)



Lagercrantz's worthy, crowd-pleasing fourth installment in the late Stieg Larsson's Millennium saga opens in Sweden, where some intellectual property developed by artificial intelligence genius Frans Balder has been stolen by a video game company with ties to Russian mobsters. Crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist, who's casting about for a new investigative project, is about to meet with Balder when an intruder kills the scientist and puts Balder's autistic eight-year-old son in danger. Meanwhile in the U.S., the National Security Agency is hacked, and its chief of security, Edwin Needham, vows revenge. Lisbeth Salander plays a central role in both plot lines, and the pleasure resides in watching Lagercrantz  corral an enormous cast of characters into an intricate story revolving around the larger-than-life hacker and her desire to right wrongs, including corporate espionage, a government spying on its own citizens, and violence against the defenseless. (PW Annex Reviews).

Monday, September 21, 2015

Readers' Advisory

Farewell Jackie Collins
Writer
1937-2015


British-born author Jackie Collins regularly landed on best-seller lists with her racy page-turners that chronicled the scandalous doings of various fictional movie stars, rock stars, up-and-coming stars, and has-been stars. Best known for her immensely successful Hollywood series that kicked off with the 1983 best seller Hollywood Wives, Collins mined her own experiences in celebrity-ville for the plots of many of her books. Critics were not always been kind to Collins, but the 500 million books sold under her name attest to her enduring appeal. Collins died of breast cancer at the age of 77. (Biography in Context).

Click here for book by Jackie Collins.

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Readers' Advisory

Patience and Fortitude: Power, Real  Estate, and the Fight to Save A Public Library
By Scott Sherman (2015)

 
 
For over a century, the New York Public Library (NYPL) has been considered a cultural mecca, with its iconic lion statues "Patience" and "Fortitude" welcoming tourists, scholars, writers, new immigrants, and its fellow New Yorkers. As Sherman (contributing writer, The Nation) details in this real-life thriller, the historic research center and its branches recently faced an uncertain future in light of financial struggles and misguided good intentions. NYPL officials and trustees formulated a plan to renovate the central library by transporting three million research books to a storage facility in New Jersey in order to make room for Internet and technology labs. To raise money for the project, they also wanted to sell several rundown branches. When the public heard about the plan, they fought to keep the renowned research library intact and save the branches from closing. Famous authors, scholars, and library lovers built a grassroots campaign, which ultimately succeeded, in support of these vital neighborhood centers. (Library Journal).
 
 
Excerpt from NPR:

The late eminent architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable deserves special mention as a heroic voice of the opposition forces. Sherman says Huxtable was 91 and in failing health when the controversy erupted. Stonewalled by library officials when she initially tried to research the renovation plan, Huxtable persevered and wrote an excoriating essay for The Wall Street Journal in 2012. Responding to the library officials' argument that modernization was needed because only 6 percent of print sources were being read every year by patrons, Huxtable said:

"If we could estimate how many ways in which the world has been changed by that 6%, the number would be far more meaningful than the traffic through [the library's] lion-guarded doors ... [A] research library is a timeless repository of treasures, not a popularity contest measured by head counts, the current arbiter of success."
 

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Readers' Advisory

Black Mass: The Irish Mob, the FBI, and a Devil's Deal
Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill (2000)


John Connolly and James "Whitey" Bulger grew up together on the tough streets of South Boston. Decades later, they met again when Connolly was a major figure in the FBI's Boston office and Bulger was godfather of the Irish Mob. This is the true story of what happened between them as a dark deal spiraled out of control, leading to drug dealing, racketeering, and murder. Includes black and white photographs. The authors write for the Boston Globe . O'Neill has won the Pulitzer Prize, and both authors have won the Hancock and Loeb awards. They have covered the Bulger-Connolly story for over a decade. (Booknews.com)

Saturday, September 12, 2015

Books for Librarians

Library Professional Development

The Meaning of the Library: A Cultural History
Edited by Alice Crawford (2015)

 
From Greek and Roman times to the digital era, the library has remained central to knowledge, scholarship, and the imagination. Generously illustrated, The Meaning of the Library examines this key institution of Western culture. Tracing what the library has meant since its beginning, examining how its significance has shifted, and pondering its importance in the twenty-first century, significant contributors--including the librarian of the Congress and the former executive director of the HathiTrust--present a cultural history of the library. (From the publisher)

Books for Librarians

Library Professional Development

The Library Innovation Toolkit:
Ideas, Strategies and Programs
Edited by Anthony Molaro and Leah L. White (2015)


Librarians describe innovations in libraries focusing more on people--either staff or patrons--than on technology. They cover innovation in terms of culture, staff, outreach, technology, spaces, and programs. Among their topics are the library's role in promoting tolerance and diversity in a university, the Virginia Tech experience in building a toolkit to craft an instruction program, seizing the opportunity for innovation and service improvement, a digital media lab in an academic library, and stepping into the story with children and young people.

Tuesday, September 1, 2015

Readers' Advisory


Farewell Wayne Dyer
Self-Help Writer
1940-2015
 
Charismatic and camera-friendly, Wayne Dyer became well known after the publication of his first best-selling book, Your Erroneous Zones, in 1976. Since then, he has been a proponent of such typical New Age concepts as "living in the moment" and making "choices that bring us to a higher awareness," as he told a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times in 1994. In addition to books, Dyer has used audio recordings and the broadcast media to his advantage, securing his position as a cultural icon and leading light in the areas of motivation and self-awareness. (Biography in Context).
 
Dwyer was diagnosed with lymphocytic leukemia in 2009.  He died in August 2015 at the age of 75.
 

Readers' Advisory

Farewell Oliver Sacks
Neurologist
1933-2015
 

An author and physician in the field of neurology, Oliver Sacks (1933-2015) helped fuel debate about the essential qualities of humanity through his books, essays, and lectures. The author of such well-known works as Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Sacks used case studies from his own practice to advocate re-humanizing the medical arts. His stories of courageous patients coping with handicaps inspired popular movies, plays, and even an opera, but they spoke most eloquently on their own as a testament to the hardiness of the human spirit. (Biography in Context).

Click here for books by and about Oliver Sacks.

Thursday, July 2, 2015

Readers' Advisory

The Wright Brothers
David McCullough (2015)


Pulitzer-winning historian McCullough  sees something exalted in the two bicycle mechanics and lifelong bachelors who lived with their sister and clergyman father in Dayton, Ohio. He finds them—especially Wilbur, the elder brother—to be cultured men with a steady drive and quiet charisma, not mere eccentrics. McCullough follows their monkish devotion to the goal of human flight, recounting their painstaking experiments in a homemade wind tunnel, their countless wrong turns and wrecked models, and their long stints roughing it on the desolate, buggy shore at Kitty Hawk, N.C. Thanks largely to their own caginess, the brothers endured years of doubt and ridicule while they improved their flyer. McCullough also describes the fame and adulation that the brothers received after public demonstrations in France and Washington, D.C., in 1908 cemented their claims. (Publishers Weekly)

Friday, June 12, 2015

Readers' Advisory

The House We Grew Up In
by Lisa Jewell (2014)


Meet the Bird family. They live in a simple brick house in a picture-perfect Cotswolds village, with rambling, unkempt gardens stretching just beyond. Pragmatic Meg, dreamy Beth, and tow-headed twins Rory and Rhys all attend the village school and eat home-cooked meals together each night. Everybody in town gushes over the two girls, who share their mother’s apple cheeks and wide smiles. Of the boys, lively, adventurous Rory can stir up trouble, moving through life more easily than little Rhys, his slighter, more sensitive counterpart. Their father is a sweet gangly man, but it’s their mother, Lorelei, a beautiful free spirit with long flowing hair and eyes full of wonder, who spins at the center.

Time flies in those early years when the kids are still young. Lorelei knows that more than anyone, doing her part to freeze time by protecting the precious mementos she collects, filling the house with them day by day. Easter egg foils are her favorite. Craft supplies, too. She insists on hanging every single piece of art ever produced by any of the children, to her husband’s chagrin.Then one Easter weekend, tragedy occurs. The event is so devastating that, almost imperceptibly, it begins to tear the family apart. Years pass and the children have become adults, found new relationships, and, in Meg's case, created families of their own. Lorelei has become the county’s worst hoarder. She has alienated her husband, her children, and has been living as a recluse for six years. It seems as though they’d never been The Bird Family at all, as if loyalty were never on the table. But then something happens that calls them home, back to the house they grew up in—and to what really happened that Easter weekend so many years ago.


Delving deeply into the hearts and minds of its characters, The House We Grew Up In is the gripping story of a family’s desire to restore long-forgotten peace and to unearth the many secrets hidden within the nooks and crannies of home. (Publisher's summary).

Friday, May 15, 2015

Readers' Advisory

Farewell B. B. King
Musician
1925-2015
 
King was known for his hits My Lucille, Sweet Little Angel and Rock Me Baby.  He was born in Mississippi in 1925 and began performing in the 1940s.

His awards included:
Grammy Awards for Best R&B Vocal, for The Thrill Is Gone, 1971; and for Best Traditional Blues Recording, for Blues 'n' Jazz, 1984, for My Guitar Sings the Blues, 1986, and for Live at San Quentin, 1991. Humanitarian Award, B'nai B'rith Music and Performance Lodge of New York, 1973; NAACP Image Award, 1975. Inducted into Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame, 1987; Lifetime Achievement Awards from National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (special Grammy), 1988; from Songwriters Hall of Fame, 1990; and from Gibson guitar company, 1991. Star on Hollywood Walk of Fame, 1990; Presidential Medal of Freedom, 1990; National Heritage Fellowship from National Endowment for the Arts, 1991; Grammy Awards for Best Traditional Blues Album, for Blues Summit, 1993; Grammy Award for Best Traditional Blues Album, for Blues on the Bayou, 1999; Grammy Award for Best Traditional Blues Album, for Riding with the King, 2000; Grammy Award for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals for Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby?, 2000; Grammy Award for Best Traditional Blues Album, for Christmas Celebration of Hope, 2002; Grammy Award for Best Pop Instrumental Performance, for Auld Lang Syne, 2002; Grammy Award for Best Traditional Blues Album, 80, 2005; Grammy Award for Best Traditional Blues Album, for One Kind Favor, 2008.


Source:
"B. B. King." Contemporary Black Biography. Vol. 7. Detroit: Gale, 1994. Biography in Context. Web. 15 May 2015.
 
For material by and about B. B. King, click here.

Wednesday, May 6, 2015

Readers' Advisory

Me Before You
by Jo Jo Moyes (2012)

"They had nothing in common until love gave them everything to lose Louisa Clark is an ordinary girl living an exceedingly ordinary life--steady boyfriend, close family--who has never been farther afield than their tiny village. She takes a badly needed job working for ex-Master of the Universe Will Traynor, who is wheelchair bound after a motorcycle accident. Will has always lived a huge life--big deals, extreme sports, worldwide travel--and now he's pretty sure he cannot live the way he is. Will is acerbic, moody, bossy--but Lou refuses to treat him with kid gloves, and soon his happiness means more to her than she expected. When she learns that Will has shocking plans of his own, she sets out to show him that life is still worth living. A Love Story for this generation, Me Before You brings to life two people who couldn't have less in common--a heartbreakingly romantic novel that asks, What do you do when making the person you love happy also means breaking your own heart? (From publisher).

Monday, April 20, 2015

Readers' Advisory

Girl on the Train
by Paula Hawkins (2015)


Obsessively watching a breakfasting couple every day to escape the pain of her losses, Rachel witnesses a shocking event that inextricably entangles her in the lives of strangers.

Monday, April 13, 2015

Readers' Advisory

Farewell Gunter Grass
Novelist / Poet / Playwright
1927-2015
 
 
Gunter Grass cemented his reputation as one of the most important postwar German authors with The Tin Drum, which addresses the dark page in German history of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler's rise. While this book focused on the years before World War II, Grass later penned two others which became the Danzig Trilogy; the second centering on the war years and the last volume dealing with the postwar era. All of the three are set in Danzig, the writer's childhood home, and use mythic or folkloric characters who are often physically unusual in order to force a new perspective of the events of the time. Thanks to these and other politically outspoken works, the left-leaning Grass was once widely known as the conscience of Germany's postwar generation. A prolific writer, he has created several plays and works of poetry in addition to more than 45 books. In 1999, he was honored with the Nobel Prize in literature.
 
Source: "Gunter Grass." Newsmakers. Detroit: Gale, 2000. Biography in Context. Web. 13 Apr. 2015.
 

Sunday, April 12, 2015

Freeport Author

Freeport Author
Michael Harrison



Michael Harrison presents his new book Pinstripes and Penance: The Story of Ex-Yankee John Malangone to Librarian Cynthia J. Krieg

Monday, March 16, 2015

Readers' Advisory

Dead Wake: The Crossing of the Lusitania
by Erik Larson (2015)
 
 

Freeport's own Erik Larson (Freeport High School class of 1972) has written a book that tells the riveting story of the final voyage of the top-of-the-line British passenger ship the Lusitania.  After leaving New York  on May 1, 1915, the Lusitania was torpedoed six days later off the coast of Ireland. The ship sank in 18 minutes leaving only 764 survivors from a total of 1,959 passengers. This event eventually pushed the United States into World War I.

Like all of Larson's books, Dead Wake has been thoroughly researched and tells the story through the individuals involved.  As we honor the 100 anniversary of World War I, this narrative history is a must read.


More about Erik Larson from the Library's March/April Newsletter


Erik Larson
by Regina G. Feeney and Cynthia J. Krieg

Erik Larson grew up in Freeport and graduated from Freeport High School in 1972. He earned his B.A. in Russian history and culture from the University of Pennsylvania in 1976 and went on to the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and graduated in 1978 with an M.S. He has been a feature writer for the Wall Street Journal and Time and has written articles for Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, and the New Yorker. He taught nonfiction writing at San Francisco State, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Oregon. He now lives with his family in Seattle, Washington. Larson has fond memories of living in Freeport.  According to his biography he had “three main pursuits: climbing tall trees, riding my bike to the far reaches of the island (typically without my parents’ knowledge) and body-surfing at Jones Beach (field no. 9).”
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When asked recently about the Freeport Memorial Library, Larson said, “I remember going to the library quite a bit. As a young kid I participated in the summer reading competitions, where each kid was represented by a fish on a large sea-like poster. I never won. Later, as a teen, the library was where I went to study with friends...and, um, make out. So, a multi-purpose institution. There you go.” Some of Erik Larson’s books owned by the Library are:
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Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania (March 2015): This nonfiction narrative about the sinking of the Lusitania tells the harrowing tale of wartime travel in 1915. While Captain William Thomas Turner placed tremendous faith in the gentlemanly strictures of warfare hat kept civilian ships safe from U-boats, Captain Walther Schwieger decided to change the rules of the game.
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In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin (2011): The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history.(call number: B Dodd L)
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Thunderstruck (2007): A true story about two men--Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication--whose lives intersect during one of the greatest criminal chases of all time. (call number: 364.152 L)
...

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America (2003): Set in Chicago during the 1893 World’s Fair, this book combines the true story of two men: Daniel H. Burnham, the architect responsible for the fair’s construction, and H. H. Holmes, a serial killer masquerading as a charming doctor. (call number: 364.1523 L)

 

 

 
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Thursday, March 12, 2015

Readers' Advisory

Farewell Sir Terry Pratchett
Fantasy Author
1948-2015
 
 
Called the "master of humorous fantasy" by a critic for Publishers Weekly, British author Terry Pratchett won the prestigious Carnegie Medal in 2002 for his novel The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents. Author of numerous science fiction and fantasy novels, Pratchett was known primarily for his Discworld series and his Bromeliad trilogy for children.  Discworld  offered humorous parodies of other famous science fiction and fantasy writers, such as J. R. R. Tolkien or Larry Niven, and spoofs such modern trends as New Age philosophy and universal concerns like death.  Pratchett was knighted in 2009.
 
Sir Terry Pratchett died aged 66, eight years after being diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.  His final tweet was "The end."
 
 
Sources:
 
Terry Pratchett." Authors and Artists for Young Adults. Vol. 54. Detroit: Gale, 2004. Biography in Context. Web. 12 Mar. 2015.
 
"Sir Terry Pratchett, renowned fantasy author, dies aged 66," BBC, http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-31858156

Friday, March 6, 2015

Readers' Advisory

50th Anniversary of Selma to Montgomery 
March 7, 1965
 
 
About the march:
 
In 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. chose Selma, Alabama as the site of a renewed voting rights campaign. The growing militancy of the civil rights movement made it essential that he score a quick victory in order to restore confidence in his non-violent approach. When segregationist police attacked the peaceful marchers, King had his victory. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed through Congress shortly thereafter.
 
Selma was home to 14,400 whites and 15,100 blacks, but the city's voting rolls were ninety-nine percent white. Every time that an African American attempted to register to vote, Sheriff Jim Clark and his deputies, many of whom were Ku Klux Klan members, turned the would-be voter away. During one week, more than three thousand black protesters were arrested for protesting this voting ban. In February 1965, a mob of state troopers assaulted a group of blacks, fatally shooting a young man, Jimmie Lee Jackson, as he tried to protect his mother and grandmother.
 
Jackson's death inspired black leaders to organize a fifty-four-mile (eighty-seven-kilometer) march from Selma to Montgomery to petition Governor George Wallace for protection of blacks registering to vote. On March 7, the march began. King was absent, having returned to Atlanta because of pressure from White House officials. He missed the sixty helmeted state troopers and local police with gas masks who lined up opposite the six hundred marchers at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. While white spectators cheered and Sheriff Clark ordered them to attack, the troopers moved on the protesters, swinging bullwhips and rubber tubing wrapped in barbed wire. The marchers stumbled over each other in retreat and seventeen went to the hospital with injuries. That evening, horrified viewers throughout the nation watched the images from the Pettus Bridge on television.

This incident, known as Bloody Sunday, pushed the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson into action to protect the voting rights of African Americans. To keep the pressure on, King led a second march on March 9th. A federal injunction had forbidden the marchers to proceed to Montgomery while their case was investigated, but as a comrpomise King and his marchers were allowed to cross the Edmund Pettus bridge, pray and demonstrate, and then return to Selma voluntarily. Later, the federal courts ruled that the protest should be allowed to take place, and King led a third and final march from Selma to Montgomery, starting on March 21 and ending March 25th in front of the state capitol. 

Source: Anonymous. "March from Selma." Government, Politics, and Protest: Essential Primary Sources. Ed. K. Lee Lerner, Brenda Wilmoth Lerner, and Adrienne Wilmoth Lerner. Detroit: Gale, 2006. 77-79. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 6 Mar. 2015.


Other resources:

60 Minutes on Selma
New-York Historical Society Exhibit
Smithsonian Institute
History Channel

Library Databases (for Freeport Library cardholders)


Friday, February 27, 2015

New Database

Lynda.com

The Freeport Memorial Library is pleased to offer its cardholders access to Linda.com's library of instructional videos. Normally, using lynda.com requires a paid subscription, but as a Freeport library cardholder you can access Lynda.com content from any computer with an Internet connection simply by entering your 14-digit BPL library card barcode.

What is lynda.com?
Lynda.com is an online learning site that hosts a constantly growing library of over 3,000 courses that include over 130,000 videos. Courses cover a variety of topics (including business, design, web development and multimedia skills) and software (Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite and open source applications) that can help you pursue personal and professional goals. These courses are delivered by expert instructors and feature searchable transcripts that make it easy to find quick answers to questions. They also feature Certificates of Completion that can be uploaded to a LinkedIn profile.

Friday, January 30, 2015

Readers' Advisory

Farewell Colleen McCullough 
Author
1937-2015
 


      McCullough was born in the late 1930s in Wellington, a large city in the Australian state of New South Wales. Her father was a relatively recent Irish immigrant to the continent, while her mother came from neighboring New Zealand. As a child, McCullough lived with her family for a time in the Outback, Australia's rough, arid region, but spent most of her formative years in the large city of Sydney. A voracious reader from an early age, she excelled in academic pursuits, especially the sciences, and pinned her hopes upon becoming a doctor.

      The Thorn Birds, became an international publishing sensation as its sales climbed past the seven-million mark. This saga of three generations in an Irish Catholic family in Australia seemed to pique interest in the history and culture of the continent, as witnessed by a spate of books and films set "Down Under" that entered into the annals of pop culture in the years following The Thorn Birds success.

Source: "Colleen McCullough." Authors and Artists for Young Adults. Vol. 36. Detroit: Gale, 2000. Biography in Context. Web. 30 Jan. 2015.

Click here her books by Colleen McCullough.
 

Thursday, January 15, 2015

Readers' Advisory

All the Light We Cannot See
by Anthony Doerr (2014)


Blind since six, Marie-Laure flees Paris with her father during World War II; they end up in Brittany's Saint-Malo. Meanwhile, orphaned German boy Werner proves to be a whiz with radios, which leads him to military school and, eventually, to tracking the Resistance. Soon he's in Saint-Malo, too. (Library Journal)