Blog Category: Director's Notebook

Posted by KChin on Tue, Oct 30
Library Director’s NotebookNovember , 2012 It has always interested me that during some of the worst years of the Great Depression many of the most popular movies were set in fancy nightclubs, swank restaurants,  penthouses, and mansions, with uniformed servants attending to the sundry needs of stylishly gowned and tuxedoed guests. Untold numbers of Americans were standing in soup kitchen lines, loading their remaining possessions on to truck beds, or selling apples on street...
Posted by KChin on Tue, Oct 30
I loved reading Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, Magaret Atwood and other great writers of feminist literature who began to enlighten and engage us in the latter half of the twentieth century. They often wrote from a slight remove - South Africa, England, Canada - and captured something of the the reality of women’s lives in a deeply lyric, yet often disturbing way. Some say all great literature is transgressive - and perhaps it needs to be to hit us so hard and ask so much of our understanding...
Posted by KChin on Tue, Oct 23
Saving books is what libraries are all about: this is a fictionalized account of one very special book, the history of the Sarajevo Haggadah, a sacred Jewish codex rescued by a Muslim librarian during the 1996 Yugoslav civil war.  This book originated over five centuries earlier, and we follow its near misses backwards through the years, to Sarajevo of the 1940’s, to 19th century Vienna, to 15th century Venice, to the Spanish Inquisition, to Seville in 1480. There are connections to the...
Posted by KChin on Wed, Oct 03
                “What is the sound of an eighty-nine-year-old heart breaking?  It might not  be much more than silence, and certainly a small, slight sound.”                       ~  From On Canann’s Side by Sebastian Barry ~ Library Director’s NotebookOctober, 2012 Lilly Bere is the 89 year old narrator of On Canaan’s Side by Sebastian Barry.  Having lived through “the troubles”,  before, during and...
Posted by KChin on Wed, Sep 05
Library Director’s NotebookSeptember, 2012 When we think of Americans in Paris, we are most likely to recall the Americans who flocked to Paris in the 1920’s like Hemingway or Fitzgerald; or perhaps we think of American troops liberating Paris to the cheers of ecstatic crowds; or maybe we even think of Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron in the classic ballet from the award winning film An American in Paris.  What most of us are not likely to think of is the...
Posted by KChin on Tue, Jul 31
Library Director’s NotebookAugust 2012 A new book by Anne Tyler is always a treat, not just because her writing is superbly tender and absurdly funny, but because she is not the kind of writer who churns out a new book or two every year. Fans of Anne Tyler need to wait at least a few years between books, but the results are worth the wait. In The Beginner’s Goodbye, Tyler returns to familiar, but never-tapped-out terrain, the inner musings and...
Posted by KChin on Thu, Jun 28
Library Director’s NotebookJuly, 2012Dennis Lehane fans know that his novels are hard hitting, often very graphically violent stories of the lives of troubled men and women.  While his book The Given Day also has its share of violence, there is much more to this book than a front seat to a blood bath.As in so many of Lehane’s stories, the setting is Boston and many of the characters are Irish Americans. The Given Day is set  at the end of...
Posted by KChin on Wed, Jun 06
Library Director’s NotebookJune, 2012 I remember where I was on November 22, 1963.  I was sitting in my 7th grade English class, watching with astonishment, as my usually dour teacher burst into tears upon learning that President Kennedy had been shot. At that time I had no understanding at all of what was happening in the United States regarding race relations, women’s rights, the Cold War, or the American political scene.  The period of the late ‘50’s and early 60’s in...
Posted by KChin on Thu, Apr 26
                                      Library Director’s Notebook                       May, 2012 Some authors write books that might have been set at any time, at any place; others become known for specific localities or historical periods.  Fans of Pete Hamill, of whom I am one, know that he is best identified with New York, particularly the “old” New York of some decades ago.  And although it’s been said so often that it has become...
Posted by KChin on Fri, Mar 30
            Library Director’s Notebook  April, 2012 I just finished reading a book which in less than 230 pages propelled me through emotions as varied as pity, repugnance, horror, doubt, and compassion.  This short but intense book is The Butterfly Cabinet by Bernie McGill. I found this book as I find so many in the library these days.  It was featured in one of the outstanding, thematically-based displays of fiction and non-fiction prepared by our...

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