Mark Your Calendar: Library Program, Doomsday

On Thursday April 26, visiting professor Dr. Quetzil Castañeda will visit the library to show clips from his award-winning documentary film, Incidents of Travel in Chichen Itzá, and speak about the Maya 2012 calendar, including the 5,125 yr. long cycle and the end of a "world age."  I'm excited to hear his scholarly take on this end-of-the-world theory, and it's put me in a reflective mood about my own emergency preparedness.

I grew up in a family that lived and breathed the edict to “be prepared!”  My three brothers are Eagle Scouts.  We had a shelter custom-built in our basement to store a year’s worth of food for seven.  Yet it wasn’t until grad school that one of my professors finally put the fear of god in me.  “What are y'all going to eat during the next disaster?” she demanded as we covered the emergency preparedness segment of her Organizational Management syllabus.  “You sure can’t wait until afterwards to get prepared.”  Then she told us all to get guns.

Literally since that day, my husband and I have been on our path to emergency preparedness.  If you’re interested in making your own kit, I suggest checking out the Center for Disease Control (CDC), FEMA, and several religious organizations, many of which have great emergency preparedness resources.  There’s even an excellent US Army Survival Manual that’s been floating around the internet.  Any way you slice it, your survival kit should cover these seven essential categories:

water

3 day minimum supply of 1 purified gallon per day per person

food

3 day minimum supply of non-perishable high-energy food.  Longer term stores of rice, beans, freeze-dried fruits and veggies, seeds

first aid

bandages, antiseptic, antibiotics, ibuprofen, etc.

tools

hand-crank radio / flashlight, camp-stove, matches, multi-tool, hatchet, utility knife, compass, whistle, generator, duct tape, etc. And sure, even a gun.

clothing / bedding / sanitation

sleeping bags, space blankets, toiletries, one change of clothes per person

important family documents

wills, deeds, insurance policies, birth / marriage / death certificates, photo identification, bank account numbers

special items

travel games, book of poems, very long novels (one per person)...

Crazy Good

Last week while I was in line for coffee, I got asked if I was a psychopath.

This wasn’t because I look psychopathic (I hope), but because I was carrying a copy of Jon Ronson’s newest book, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry, under my arm. It’s my favorite book of the moment, and the one I’m going to badger everyone I know to read.

I’ve been a huge fan of Jon Ronson’s since I first encountered his non-fiction book, The Men Who Stare at Goats, in a used book store in Burlington, VT, circa 2007. The Men Who Stare At Goats is loosely about U.S. Army officers who try to harness psychic energy in an attempt to disintegrate live goats, and since its publication in 2004, it’s been turned into a film starring George Clooney, Kevin Spacey, Ewan McGregor and Jeff Bridges, and Ronson has been invited as a regular contributor to NPR’s This American Life.

Ronson’s forte is weird fringe journalism, wherein he investigates psychic and paranormal military ops, extraterrestrial theories, Roswell type stuff, and now, psychopathy. But the thing that makes him so much more than a run of the mill conspiracy theorist is his knack for serious journalistic endeavors: how did our psy-ops military culture lead up to Abu Graib? How foolproof is the rubric we use to label people psychopaths? And should we be more concerned about the psychopaths who are in prison, or the ones who are running the world’s biggest corporations?

From the Stockwell Strangler to former Sunbeam CEO Al Dunlap, Jon Ronson sets out on a quest to understand the nature of psychopathy and power. (According to the Bob Hare, creator of the Psychopathy Checklist Revised, at least 4% of our world leaders meet the minimum qualifications of psychopathy!) Ronson’s anecdotes are witty and revelatory, and will make you feel a little like you are able to identify the psychopaths in your own life. But at the heart of his investigation, Jon Ronson unveils his own unsettling hypothesis about our culture’s fascination with madness, and why we’re all sort-of comforted by those pill-popping personalities we see on reality TV.

And if nothing else, The Psychopath Test is a fabulous conversation starter. I suggest you take it with you next time you go for coffee. You might get asked if you’re a psychopath.

Rachel - Programs

The Age of Miracles or Mayhem?

The sun exploding, a meteorite crashing into the Earth's surface, a blast from a Death Star ray--these are relatively quick apocalyptic scenarios that would mean the end of human civilization as we know it. But what if it happened slowly--like the gradual slowing of the Earth's rotation? That's exactly what Karen Thompson Walker's upcoming debut novel, The Age of Miracles, imagines. In the year of the supposed prediction of the end of the world by the Mayan long count calendar, it's only fitting that we'd see more stories about the apocalypse. I think this one, however, will stand out.

Julia is a normal 12 year old girl. She goes to school, plays soccer, and has a secret crush on one of her classmates. This normalcy stops when she and her family awake one Saturday morning to find that something has happened to the Earth's rotation: it has begun to slow. As both daylight hours and nighttimes stretch to unimaginable lengths, the effect of gravity increases, birds begin to die off from a mysterious disease, and the people in Julia's life begin to change--and maybe not for the better. Struggling to understand herself anyway, Julia must adapt to these catastrophic changes in her already turbulent life.

Though Julia is the central character, Walker addresses issues beyond the adolescent coming of age story. How would our nation and the world react to the slowing of the Earth's rotation and the resulting discrepancy in our time keeping systems? Would we keep to clock time, or would we be like what Julia refers to as the "real-timers," who adapt their active and inactive schedules to that of the sun? How would governments respond to the damage caused to coastlines as tide levels increase, forcing beach side citizens to relocate? And how would humans acclimate as certain plants and animals begin to die off?

An engaging and powerful portrayal of a dystopian not-too-distant future, this novel is definitely going to be at the top of my favorite books of 2012. The Age of Miracles will be available June 26, 2012 from The Random House Publishing Group, but you can place a hold on the Lawrence Public Library's copy by clicking here.

-William, Reference

This blog post also appears on William's personal blog, www.beyondthebookend.com.

Stamberg's Shortlist

Last week, the crantastic wonderful NPR broadcaster Susan Stamberg was in town to headline an event for the Library Foundation. When asked about her favorite storytellers, she responded that Studs Terkel, Joan Didion, John McPhee and Philip Roth are all on her shortlist.  The authors she noted are all hugely acclaimed and brilliant, of course, but something else they share is a keen ability to unearth and examine different facets of life in America - which is maybe not a surprising preference for a journalist.  So here's a few books from Susan Stamberg's favorites, each reporting on uniquely American experiences (if you find that you like them, maybe shoot a couple bucks to NPR during their next pledge drive as a thank you to S.S.):

Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression by Studs Terkel - In this unique re-creation of one of the most dramatic periods in modern American history, Studs Terkel recaptures the Great Depression of the 1930s in all its complexity. The book is a mosaic of memories from those who were richest to those who were most destitute.  (Bowker)

My American Century by Studs Terkel - This book is a collection of Terkel's encounters over his long career as the nation's premier oral historian. Described by Terkel as a "jazz work," it is made up of material taken from the author's major books…   The packaging of Terkel's work in one volume makes for a convenient and accessible title that recognizes the human side of history.  (Library Journal)

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live by Joan Didion -  Joan Didion's incomparable and distinctive essays and journalism are admired for their acute, incisive observations and their spare, elegant style. Now the seven books of nonfiction that appeared between 1968 and 2003 have been brought together into one thrilling collection. (Bowker)

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion - The first nonfiction work by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era, Slouching Towards Bethlehem remains...the essential portrait of America-- particularly California--in the sixties. (Bowker)

Annals of the Former World by John McPhee– When John McPhee began his journeys back and forth across the United States, he planned to describe a cross section of North America at about the fortieth parallel and, in the process, come to an understanding not only of the science but of the style of the geologists he traveled with… this is our finest popular survey of geology and a masterpiece of modern nonfiction. (Bowker)

Silk Parachute by John McPhee - The world's complex mechanisms beguile us in this scintillating collection of essays, many from the New Yorker. McPhee is fascinated by all manner of intricate and subtle processes... The result is a narrative that is wryly humorous, raptly observant, luxuriating in idle curiosity.  (Publishers Weekly)

Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth -  Goodbye, Columbus is the story of Neil Klugman and pretty, spirited Brenda Patimkin, he of poor Newark, she of suburban Short Hills, who meet one summer break and dive into an affair that is as much about social class and suspicion as it is about love. The novella is accompanied by five short stories that range in tone from the iconoclastic to the astonishingly tender and that illuminate the subterranean conflicts between parents and children and friends and neighbors in the American Jewish diaspora.  (Bowker)

American Pastoral by Philip Roth- American Pastoral is the story of a fortunate American's rise and fall - of a strong, confident master of social equilibrium overwhelmed by the forces of social disorder. Seymour "Swede" Levov - a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheritor of his father's Newark glove factory - comes of age in thriving, triumphant postwar America. But everything he loves is lost when the country begins to run amok in the turbulent 1960s.  (Bowker)

The 1st Trimester

If you read my last post, you’ve started preparing for all the upcoming changes in your life and home.  But as your pregnancy progresses, you’re probably curious about the changes in your body.  Why do I feel so sick?  Will my baby be a boy or a girl?  Should I be eating certain foods?  If I listen to Mozart, will my baby be smarter?  Do chocolate lovers have sweeter babies?: the surprising science of pregnancy by Jena Pincott answers all these questions for you (okay, it doesn’t actually tell you if you’re going to have a boy or girl, but it does report on some cool patterns that might help you guess).

This fascinating book looks at pregnancy from all scientific angles with chapters on pregnancy symptoms, sex determination, how food affects the fetus, how pregnancy affects the father, what (if anything) we can predict about our babies, and the science of labor itself.  Pincott structures the book using questions she asked during her own pregnancy.  The personal details she offers about her own experience soften the sometimes quite technical scientific explanations and I appreciated hearing another woman’s (often humorous) experience.  The book is arranged in nice bite-sized pieces making it easy to read (in between your waves of nausea).  The table of contents lists every question asked, so you can duck into the book and read only what you’re curious about without having to wade through everything.  It’s the perfect book to dip into before bed.

 

I knew this book would be interesting, but I didn’t realize I’d be furiously scribbling down notes about what I should and shouldn’t do while pregnant.  Since Pincott reviews the most recent (as well as older) scientific studies (all of which she cites in case you want to dig further), there’s a wealth of what feels like “real” practical information.  But it turns out you don’t have to take notes; she compiles all the take-home lessons in the last chapter.

I don’t want to give away too much of the plot, but:

• Yes, you should eat chocolate.  You should also eat sardines.
• If you are married to a billionaire, you’re more likely to have a boy.
• Your Kentucky Fried Chicken habit might impact not just your child, but your grandchild too.
• Those crazy, vivid nightmares you’re having?  They’re actually a good thing.
• If you want your child to love Indian food (or brussels sprouts) as much as you do, get eating.
• Guys, don’t worry, you too can breast feed.

If you are interested in knowing more about how experiences during fetal development influence a baby after birth (and the adult it becomes), try one of our other books too: Origins: how the nine months before birth shape the rest of our lives by Annie Murphy Paul.

-Rebecca, Reference