Information, Answers & Reviews

Libraries can be an interesting place to find things. It's sometimes said that librarians think differently than other people. That of course isn't really true; our goal is to make things as easy to find as possible for as many people as possible. The end result however can be confusing. Why? Because librarians think differently than other people. The use of numbers in movie titles is a good example. Let's look at the movie "2012," (Two Thousand Twelve)

You might have noticed that in the above example I spelled out the title in parentheses. There is a reason for this. Libraries, unlike your home computer, place titles with numbers on the shelf as if they were spelled out. Why do we do this? Read more »

Although summer officially began just last week, it seems as though it's been hot and dry forever. As we water our gardens and lawns, it's hard to envision a major flood. But join us for a discussion about The Johnstown Flood--still the deadliest flood in US history. It happened in 1889 when the South Fork Dam (fourteen miles upstream from Johnstown, Pa.) failed. The American Red Cross, which Clara Barton had founded in 1891, led the relief effort with Barton herself taking charge. The flood caused many sociological repercussions because the community that was spared included summer homes of many millionaires including Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon, while the community below that suffered had many poor Irish and German immigrants.

This was David McCullough's first book. McCullough went on to win two Pulitzer Prizes for later biographies of Truman and John Adams.

Books Plus meets the first Sunday of each month. All are welcome. Join the discussion or simply come to listen.

No registration necessary. Drop in.

2 p.m., First Sundays

See the upcoming schedule below. Read more »

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I don’t read many novellas but this one, Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson made several “best new book” lists recently.  And it got rave reviews from quite a few other writers.

Grainier’s first memory of trains is of being sent on one as a young child, with a fare receipt pinned to his shirt.  His destination was Fry, Idaho, but he never knew his parents or even the origin point of this trip. One older cousin said that he came from Canada and that the French language had to be whipped out of him. Another cousin said that family had sent him from Utah where he had spent his first years as a Mormon. But all his life, he had only trains and their tracks for the history of his early childhood. Read more »

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I only brought one novel on my vacation to New Mexico, and How It All Began was the perfect one. Not that it’s about New Mexico, no—it’s almost wholly set in London with a few side trips to Cambridge and a “cathedral town.”

The novel begins with an interesting premise, similar to the butterfly affect in New Zealand. What happens in the rest of the world when a butterfly starts a slight breeze wafting Down Under? In this case, it’s nothing as natural or beautiful as a butterfly fluttering.  Instead, an older retired teacher and passionate book person, Charlotte, has been mugged on a city street. This ignites a chain of events that alters many lives.

First, her daughter Rose must come to the hospital and care for her. This leaves Rose’s grumpy, egotistical employer, Henry, a former professor of history, at a loss. Rose had promised to accompany him to Cambridge where he was presenting a lecture on his field, 18^th century England. Read more »