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The Double Comfort Safari Club
By Alexander McCall Smith
New challenges and an exciting adventure await Botswana lady detective Precious Ramotswe in this eleventh entry in the much-beloved series. As usual, there are multiple plotlines. There’s Mma Mateleke, who suspects her husband of being unfaithful (turns out, he harbors the same suspicions about her).
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At Leisure with Joyce Saricks: Training 101—First You Read
Pundits continue to talk about the graying of the library profession. The truth of that phrase was brought home to me when I chatted with the first library assistant we hired for the readers’-advisory department at Downers Grove Public Library. While we talked about some annotated book lists we had created early on, she commented that the newest librarians in the department hadn’t even been born when we wrote those! That was a shocker! After I got over my initial dismay, I started thinking about one of the major challenges in training bright, young, new librarians: how to expand their reading background quickly.
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Top 10 Black History Nonfiction: 2010
By Ray Olson
Although 6 of the 10 best African American nonfiction books reviewed since the February 1, 2009, Spotlight on Black History aren’t biographies, only one may lack elements of that beloved-by-readers genre, making for a reading list, indeed.
The Dandy Dons: Bill Russell, K. C. Jones, Phil Woolpert, and One of College Basketball’s Greatest and Most Innovative Teams. By James W. Johnson. 2009. Univ. of Nebraska, paper, $19.95 (9780803218772).
Powered by Bill Russell and K. C. Jones, the 1955–56 NCAA champion University of San Francisco Dons compiled a 60-game winning streak, in the process altering basketball forever.
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Readers’ Advisory Corner: Sara E. Martinez’s Latino Literature
By Cynthia Crosser
This installment in the Genreflecting Advisory Series is the first readers’-advisory title published in English on Latino literature. Editor Martinez is coordinator for the Hispanic Resource Center for Tulsa City-County Library. The goal is to sample broadly from Latino authors in the U.S., Latin America, Portugal, and Spain. Coverage is limited to works available in English that were first published between the years 1995 and 2008.
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The Manley Arts: Roots
By Will Manley
I’m wracking my brain to remember a book that had a more powerful impact during my library career than Alex Haley’s Roots, but I can’t think of one. It was published in the bicentennial year of 1976, the year when Black History Week was officially extended to Black History Month.
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Top 10 Black History Video: 2010
By Sue-Ellen Beauregard
Including two titles (Let Freedom Ring and Prom Night in Mississippi) reviewed in this issue and a picture-book adaptation (March On!), these outstanding black-history programs are culled from reviews appearing in Booklist from May 1, 2007, through February 1, 2010.
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Minority Report: A Legacy of Contributions and Abuses
Posted by: Vanessa Bush
In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot chronicles the amazing story of the medical breakthroughs gained from a black woman’s cell line. I heard Skloot last week on NPR’s Fresh Air where she told host Terry Gross that in 1951 Henrietta Lacks was diagnosed with terminal cervical cancer. A doctor at Johns Hopkins [...] |
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Child of the Civil Rights Movement by Paula Young Shelton
Posted by: Cindy Dobrez and Lynn Rutan
Lynn: In December it was my great pleasure to meet Paula Young Shelton during her book tour through Ann Arbor. Mrs. Shelton, a first grade teacher in Washington, D.C., talked about the Civil Rights History unit she taught each year and the difficulty in finding materials appropriate for her young students. Every year [...] |
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Web Site of the Week: Book of Odds
Posted by: Christine Bulson
With the Super Bowl today, some fans are thinking about the odds of who will win. A new web site of 2009, bookofodds.com, is advertised as the first source on the odds of anything. What about the odds of a cow having its’ hide in the Super Bowl? There is an explanation of the method used to determine that the odds are [...] |
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“Organic” Reading
Posted by: Neil Hollands
Young adult novels are underutilized by book groups and that’s a shame. They aren’t just for kids and they have several characteristics that make them outstanding book group choices: they tend to be quick reading, they’re loaded with issues, and they feature strong emotions and relationships in transition. As an added bonus, many book group members love [...] |
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Meg Cabot + Twitter = Audiobook Awesomeness
Posted by: Mary Burkey
Your tweets + Cabot = collaborative storytelling. BBC Audiobooks America’s first Twitter audiobook, Hearts, Keys, and Puppetry, was kicked off by Neil Gaiman, completed by the Twitterverse, and narrated by Katherine Kellgren. You can download the audiobook for free on the BBCAA web site or from iTunes. BBCAA’s new venture into the Twittersphere will take [...] |
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