Patron Spotlight

Patron Spotlight: Gwendolyn Watson

Librarians are not supposed to have favorites, but if we did, Gwendolyn Watson would be high on our list. Mrs. Watson has been a patron of the Freeport Memorial Library since moving to Freeport in 1986.

Mrs. Watson is a retiree of the Westbury Public Schools where for 28 years she was a secretary to the principal in one of the district schools. Before that she worked at Adelphi University for 10 years, serving as secretary in the religious center, and later as a secretary in the physical education department.

Being retired allows Mrs. Watson the opportunity to visit the Library frequently. Besides having the opportunity to read numerous books, she finds the many sources of reference materials and programs available to the community outstanding.

Mrs. Watson, who has a strong interest in travel, has been around the globe; highlights include her visits to the United Kingdom and China. Before she books a trip, she plans her itinerary at the Library by taking advantage of our travel books, magazines, DVDs, and monthly travel lectures.

When not visiting exotic places, Mrs. Watson enjoys taking her grandchildren to local museums and botanical gardens with the Library’s free museum passes. She is also a regular at the Library’s Sunday concerts and enjoys the Library’s monthly art exhibits and art receptions.

Mrs. Watson believes that education is a life-long experience that includes reading books, visiting museums, and traveling to new places. When not keeping her mind fit, she keeps physically fit by taking various exercise classes including aquacize, tai-chi, yoga, and zumba.

Mrs. Watson is a longtime member of the Friends of the Freeport Memorial Library. She is also the proud mother of three children and eight grandchildren.

eBooks

Publishers Refusing to Sell eBook to Libraries

The following publishers will no longer make available their eBooks to libraries via Nassau Digital Doorway (OverDrive):

Brilliance Audio
Hachette Book Group
Macmillan Publisher
Penguin Group
Simon & Schuster

If you stop seeing your favorite author's books in OverDrive, that author may be published by one of these companies. We hope that this situation changes in the future.

Book Recommendation

Book Recommendations:
Happy Birthday President Lincoln

Fiction

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith (2010)
This book reveals the hidden life of the sixteenth U.S. president, who was actually a vampire-hunter obsessed with the complete elimination of the undead, and uncovers the role vampires played in the birth, growth, and near-death of the nation.

Lincoln by Gore Vidal (1984)
The character of President Lincoln, unremittingly tested by the trials of the war years, is reflected through the eyes of the diverse and colorful denizens of Washington, including his wife Mary and his political rivals and disciples.

Nonfiction

Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness by Joshua Wolf Shenk (2006)
Lincoln's Melancholy reveals how Lincoln’s depression influenced both the president's character and his leadership. Lincoln forged a hard path toward mental health from the time he was a young man. Shenk draws from historical record, interviews with Lincoln scholars, and contemporary research on depression to understand the nature of his unhappiness.

Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin (2006)
Team of Rivals doesn't just tell the story of Abraham Lincoln. It is a multiple biography of the entire team of personal and political competitors that he put together to lead the country through its greatest crisis. Here, Doris Kearns Goodwin profiles five of the key players in her book, four of whom contended for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination and all of whom later worked together in Lincoln's cabinet.

Book Recommendations

Book Recommendations

19th Wife by David Ebershoff (2008)
It is 1875, and Ann Eliza Young has recently separated from her powerful husband, Brigham Young, prophet and leader of the Mormon Church. Expelled and an outcast, Ann Eliza embarks on a crusade to end polygamy in the United States. Yet soon after Ann Eliza’s story begins, a second narrative unfolds–a tale of murder involving a polygamist family in present-day Utah. Jordan Scott, a young man who was thrown out of his fundamentalist sect years earlier, must reenter the world that cast him aside in order to discover the truth behind his father’s death.

Ice Princess by Camilla Lackberg (2008)
After she returns to her hometown to learn that her friend was found in an ice-cold bath with her wrists slashed, biographer Erica Falck researches her friend's past in hopes of writing a book. She joins forces with Detective Patrik Hedstrom, who has his own suspicions about the case. This is Camilla Lackberg's first book in a series of Swedish mysteries. Her books are a combination of Bridget Jones meets Girl with the Dragon Tattoo but without the gratuitous violence.

Book Recommendations

Fiction

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American Heiress by Daisy Goodwin (2011)
Traveling abroad with her mother at the turn of the twentieth century to seek a titled husband, beautiful, vivacious Cora Cash, whose family home in Newport dwarfs the Vanderbilt mansion, suddenly finds herself Duchess of Wareham, married to Ivo, the most eligible bachelor in England. Nothing is quite as it seems, however; Ivo is withdrawn and secretive, and the English social scene is full of traps and betrayals. Money, Cora soon learns cannot buy everything, as she must decide what is truly worth the price in her life and her marriage.

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Nonfiction

The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City and Sparked the Tabloid Wars by Paul Collins (2011)
The grisly finds that began on the afternoon of June 26, 1897, plunged detectives headlong into the era’s most baffling murder mystery. Seized upon by battling media moguls Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, the case became a publicity circus. Reenactments of the murder were staged in Times Square, armed reporters lurked in the streets of Hell’s Kitchen in pursuit of suspects, and an unlikely trio—a hard-luck cop, a cub reporter, and an eccentric professor—all raced to solve the crime.

Freeport Author

Freeport Author, Virginia Terris

Dr. Virginia R. Terris passed away on January 12, 2012. Dr. Terris was a professor of English at Adelphi University and an accomplished poet. Her poetry appeared in many journals including the New Yorker, Paris Review, Nation, American Poetry Review, and Greenfield Review. Between 1983 to 1987, Dr. Terris served as the Long Island director of the Poetry Society of America.
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THE CANAL IN WINTER

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In the canal the ice thickens
whichever way the wind comes from.
At first a fragile skin at morning
the ice ripples in the light wind.

The wind blows over it. The ice deepens.
Snow drifts across it blows away.
Tides seep over its edges. Freeze.
It grows too large for itself.

Heavy against itself it groans
The ocean under it restless.
Will not stay beneath it.
Will not be still
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Crushing against itself
its crevasses open. I listen
to its snapping through the night.
I turn to the windows
to watch ice tearing itself apart.
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This poem is from Canal: Poems by Virginia R. Terris (1981)

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Read All About It!

Freeport's Historical Newspapers

The Freeport Leader is now online and fully searchable from 1941 to 1990 (except 1945) and from 2001 to 2003. The years 2004 to 2010 should be available shortly.

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Since 2005, the Freeport Memorial Library has been digitizing its collection of local newspapers and adding them to the Long Island Memories Digitization Project.

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In addition to the Leader, you can also search:

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Daily Review of Nassau County – March 1921 to June 1921
Freeport News- February 1921 to November 1921
Nassau County Review- January 1899 to March 1921
Nassau Post- January 1914 to July 1918
Queens County Review- November 1895 to December 1898
South Side Messenger- January 1916 to December 1918