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Thursday, March 31, 2011
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Post a Video. Win Free Books.
Want to win a $10 gift certificate to the spring book sale?
We're launching a video series, Recommendable Reads, and need your help! For a chance to win a $10 gift certificate to the spring book sale, just create a video, around one minute long, about a book you love. Upload it to YouTube and send the link to sbrown@lawrencepubliclibray.org by noon on Monday, April 4. The winner will be chosen at random. Please tag your videos with "Lawrence Public Library" and "Recommendable Reads".
The first video in the series, created by LPL’s marketing coordinator Susan Brown, is posted below.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Staff Pick: The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll
The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright by Jean Nathan
Dare Wright was a photographer and author of a series of highly successful children’s picture books chronicling the life of a doll named Edith and her teddy bear companions. In her Lonely Doll series, which made its debut in 1957 and was a staple in the early reading life of millions of baby boomers, Wright pioneered the use of photography in books published for children.
Jean Nathan’s biography, The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright, unearths Wright’s personal story. Separated from her brother and father at an early age, Wright formed an unusually close relationship with her mother, a Cleveland portrait painter. Nathan investigates Wright’s frequent retreats into imaginary childhood worlds, as well as her adult attempts to distinguish her own personality from that of her mother. Wright’s subconscious struggle revealed itself in her popular children’s books, for which she staged and photographed elaborate scenes of a doll who shares her mother’s name, looks eerily like Wright herself, and regains a lost brother and father in the form of two teddy bear companions.
This book would be a fascinating read for anyone who grew up with the Lonely Doll books, but fans of gothic fiction, Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological explorations, or movies in the vein of Grey Gardens will also find it equally gripping. The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll can also be read as the story of how one artist’s unresolved issues repeatedly emerged in her work, only to resonate with a generation of children who knew nothing of Wright’s problematic relationships with her family. Nathan frames her biography by sharing with readers her own youthful love of the Lonely Doll books, as well as her journey to meet Wright, whom she tracked down in obscurity near the end of life, and later came to know via a trove of personal photographs, manuscripts, and letters. Nathan’s research, and Wright’s life, were also the subject of a segment on NPR’s “This American Life” in 2000.
Dan - Collection Development
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Staff Review: The Athena Project
The Athena Project by Brad Thor
The Athena Project is the latest novel by Brad Thor (author of Foreign Influence, Blowback, and The Lions of Lucerne.) Thor is known for creating a series of novels with the main character of Scot Harvath, an ex-Navy SEAL turned government secret agent. This book treads similar territory and loyal readers will be excited to know that there is a brief appearance by Harvath in The Athena Project. But Harvath is only a side character in this book. The main story centers around four women who compose an all-female Delta Forces team codenamed the Athena Project. The book follows Athena Project members Casey, Ericsson, Rhodes, and Cooper as they travel around the world carrying out risky counter-terrorism missions.
The detailed and factual exposition in The Athena Project will appeal to readers who like intricate descriptions of small unit tactics, conspiracy theories, and lesser-known 20th century military trivia. The author includes an epigraph at the beginning of the novel stating, “All of the science in this novel is based on reality.”
Aside from the exposition mentioned above, this book is almost entirely made up of action scenes. The reader gets to hear very little of what is going on inside the characters’ minds but there is plenty of clever back-and-forth dialogue. The scenery is painted with broad strokes leaving most of the details of the setting to be filled in by the reader’s imagination. At its best moments, reading this book is like watching an action movie in your head. The Athena Project maintains a fast pace by keeping character descriptions short and simple. The downside of this streamlined approach to characterization is that it puts the onus on the reader to keep track of who is who across multiple storylines and locations.
Finally, it should be noted that this book is kind of campy. Like a good action movie, it is at times over the top. For example, there is a scene where two characters must parachute onto the roof of a building then sneak inside to seduce and drug a powerful underworld businessman in order to extract information about how to stop a Nazi teleportation device. This whole book is like that, completely ridiculous and yet totally enjoyable at the same time. Overall a fun read, but if you can’t suspend your disbelief and enjoy the ride, you might wind up groaning and rolling your eyes once or twice before The Athena Project is over.
Muriel - Circulation
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