college socializing

Ok, so I'm an old fart. I just realized this in class this morning when one of the students mentioned Thefacebook.com and I had no idea what she was talking about! Turns out it is this really cool social networking tool that college students are using all over the country. They can search for old high school classmates, peers interested in the same political views, fellow booklovers, where to party, and more. I wish they had this when I was in college...

sorry Virginia, there is no God...

Essay by Natalie Angier on raising one's children as atheists. Angier is the author of Woman: An Intimate Geography and has won the Pulitzer Prize for her beat reporting in the sciences.

wotd

Have you ever tried to increase your vocabulary by reading the dictionary? Well, I tried to do that word-a-day stuff, too, but now Dictionary.com makes it easy by subscribing to their RSS feed on Bloglines. Now you can get a word-of-the-day delivered right to you instead of lifting those darn heavy dictionaries...

battle against FDR

Could the Bushies really hate FDR's legacy enough to dismantle Social Security? In light of this, "It's difficult to discern the short-term political gain for Republicans to try to dismantle Social Security now. So the payoff must be more psychological or intellectual. Now that they indisputably control all three branches of government, Republicans finally have the opportunity to slay some of the liberal demons that have been bedeviling them for so long." Finally after 70 years, they might get their way. Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s Pulitzer Prize-winning series about FDR is a good introduction to the social and economic goals of New Deal policies in light of the Depression, for those with a taste for reading more about why Social Security was necessary.

british invasion

Need a list of books to read for the upcoming year? Look no further than the "tortoises & hares" of 2005, a list of upcoming novels and nonfiction by major British authors.

awards

I missed it last week, but the Caldecott & Newberry Medal Award winners were announced on January 17 at ALA Midwinter meeting. The best in children's literature were given to Kira-Kira, by Cynthia Kadohata (Newberry) and Kitten's First Full Moon, written and illustrated by Kevin Henkes (Caldecott). I bought a copy of Henkes book when he published it last year -- wonderful black & white illustrations. I knew it was a keeper!

a nation divided...

The digital divide is real, and ever-widening, according to a report issued by the Kaiser Family Foundation -- it also appears that poor children are the ones most affected:
"According to the most recent major government datasets, based on information collected in 2001, 4 in10 children have never used the Internet, and lower income
and minority youth are far less likely than other children to have gone online. While 75% of children from families earning over $75,000 a year have gone online, less than half (49%) of those from families earning $20-35,000 and only 37% of those earning under $20,000 a year have gone online. Similarly, while two-thirds (67%) of white children have gone online,
just 45% of African American and 37% of Hispanic youth have done so."
A disturbing trend...

Rye redux

Its Holden Caulfield meets Ayn Rand in this dystopian look at the inhumanity of the human condition. A cynical young man hits the road and finds himself in a brutual police state somewhere in Europe, where he learns about that all-important concept; freedom...

Fightin' over fair use...

As a librarian, here is an issue near and dear to my sweet little heart -- copyright and fair use. An interesting article in this month's Bookforum discusses "...recent laws—like the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which increased protection of copyrighted material on the Internet, and the Sonny Bono Act—{which} have elevated intellectual property's status to such a degree that many courts and corporations often treat it in virtually the same way as they do physical property. " I'm all for writer's protection of their intellectual property, but I think it goes too far when you have huge corporations like FOX News try and put a copyright on words and phrases, a la "fair and balanced"...

Everything is free on the web, no?

Here is an interesting article about the origins of Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia on the web. What is special about this encyclopedia is the ability for anyone to edit its contents. How revolutionary! There are some cool links to other wiki sites, where anyone is free to add an article or edit content. Democracy still lives on the internet...

Oh, Canada...

America's first international bestseller turns out to be Canadian in origin. It appears the inspiration for Uncle Tom's Cabin was a runaway slave named Josiah Henson who escaped and made his way to freedom in Ontario, Canada. Now there is an historic site honoring him in Dresden, Ontario, open to the public.

We can't even get away from it in academia...

Wal-Mart invades academia! Now, even Wal-Mart has its own conference in the academic world -- held for the first time this past April at UC Santa Barbara. "The range of subjects covered in the conference papers to be published early next year testifies to Wal-Mart's impact both on the transfer of goods from third-world sweatshops to suburban shopping malls in the US and on local communities where its stores are located". Isn't this what I've been saying for three years now? One of the conference papers is entitled Everyday Low Wages: The Hidden Price We All Pay for Wal-Mart and talks about how Wal-Mart's ridiculously low wages force some to go on welfare. Told you so...

...and in today's book review...

Nick Hornby's newest book is a mouthful! The Polysyllabic Spree: A Hilarious and True Account of One Man’s Struggle With the Monthly Tide of the Books He’s Bought and the Books He’s Been Meaning to Read represents a feeling many of us booklovers MUST have encountered at some point in our reading careers...

Its a Book Thang...

Baltimore's revolutionary answer to a Salvation Army for book-aholics is a bookstore where all the books are free. Or, in other words, a library where you never have to return the books!

Powell's Review of the Day

Powell's Books in Seattle has an email book review-of-the day which they will send directly to your inbox. Its generally a mixture of literary fiction and general nonfiction. Most of the reviews come from popular magazines or newspapers, such as The Christian Science Monitor or Esquire.

Year of Wonders

Year of Wonders, Geraldine Brooks

Set in the year 1666, Brooks' first novel is a surpisingly engaging fictional account of a town quarantined by the Plague in rural England. Fans of well written historical fiction would do well to check this story out. Young Anna Frith, widow and mother of two young boys, is a housemaid in the rectory of one Reverend Mompellion and his wife, Elinor, when the Plague strikes her household. Eventually the Plague spreads throughout the village, and the Reverend decides to quarantine the village to stop the spread elsewhere. The consequences of his decision will touch all of the main characters, especially Anna. What makes the novel work are the complex relationships the novelist explores between characters, especially Anna and the reverend's wife, Elinor. Deeply loving, kind, and generous, Elinor is a former aristocrat, who has, on the surface, come down in the world to marry Reverend Mompellion. How do people, under enormous stress and strain, interact and coexist with one another? What makes one society thrive and another fall apart? Brooks examines these questions and, in the process, writes a moving and absorbing historical novel.