LPL News for the week of 7/5/09

[Lakewood Public Library]

"Life is a horizontal fall." -- Jean Cocteau (1889-1963)

LAKEWOOD PUBLIC LIBRARY IS CLOSED SATURDAY, JULY 4th.

UPCOMING EVENTS AT LAKEWOOD PUBLIC LIBRARY

TUESDAY, JULY 7
Afternoon at the Movies - Walt Disney's Peter Pan
Beat the summer heat by taking in a movie shown on our big screen. Bring a snack if you wish.
1:00 pm – 2:30 pm in the Main Library Auditorium

THURSDAY, JULY 9
BOOKED FOR MURDER
Tonight's book is: The Shape of Water by Andrea Camilleri A prominent mover and shaker is found dead in the wrong part of town, but powerful people want to overlook the embarrassing circumstances. Translated from the Italian, this witty mystery paints a vibrant picture of Sicily as Inspector Montalbano sweeps the city looking for clues and a good bite to eat.
7:00 pm in the Main Library Meeting Room

SATURDAY, JULY 11
Lakewood Public Cinema:
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Directed by Stanley Kubrick Rated PG To paraphrase Zappa, there’s no reason to believe the world will end in fire and ice—it could just as easily end in paperwork and nostalgia. Hearken back to the glory days of the Cold War with Peter Sellers, George C. Scott and Slim Pickens in this blackest of comedies about our inevitable nuclear annihilation. It’s just a movie, right?
6:00 pm in the Main Library Auditorium

SUNDAY, JULY 12
SUNDAY WITH THE FRIENDS: Alexis Antes
Witness a singer-songwriter blossoming into firm control of her own destiny in this intimate acoustic concert. Alexis Antes will share original songs from her latest CD along with stories about her life in music and the experiences of a writer.
2:00 pm in the Main Library Auditorium

STREET FESTIVAL BOOK SALE
Saturday, July 18th
3 p.m. - 8 p.m.
Main Library Front Porch
15425 Detroit Ave. Lakewood OH 44107

NEW BOOKS, MOVIES & MUSIC-- Located on the First Floor in the New Book Area

Adult Fiction:

Choker by Frederick Ramsay - MYSTERY RAMSAY
Tap & gown: an ivy league novel by Diana Peterfreund - FICTION PETERFREUND
Banquo's ghosts by Rich Lowry - FICTION LOWRY

Adult Nonfiction:

Who dares wins: the Green Beret way to conquer fear and succeed
by Bob Mayer - 152.46 MAYER
Mix shake stir: cocktails for the home bar: recipes from Danny Meyer's acclaimed New York City restaurants by Danny Meyer - 641.874 MEYER
Challenge for Africa by Wangari Maathai - 320.6096 MAATHAI

Adult Audiovisual:

Tsukihime complete collection -- DVD TSUKIHIME
Way of War --DVD WAY OF WAR
It's not me, it's you by Lily Allen - CD POPULAR ALLEN

Juvenile Fiction:

Betsy B. Little by Anne McEvoy - JPICTURE McEvoy
We are Extremely Very Good Recyclers by Lauren Child— - JPICTURE Child
Black Heart by Justin Somper - JFICTION Somper

Juvenile Audiovisual:

How to Cheat a Dragon's Curse by Cressida Cowell - JCD Fiction Cowell
Sesame Street Sing the Alphabet -- JCD Sesame Street Sing the Alphabet
A Little Princess -- JDVD A Little Princess

BROWSING THE STACKS

Lakewood Public Library offers a wide variety of book collections within our non-fiction area. This week's spotlight is: Biography. Take a vacation from your life and check out someone else's! These books are located on the second floor in the non-fiction collection.

Commodore: the life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by Edward Renehan - BIO VANDERBILT
Edie: girl on fire by Melissa Painter - BIO SEDGWICK
Hypatia of Alexandria: mathematician and martyr by Michael A. B Deakin - BIO HYPATIA
Kerouac: the definitive biography by Paul Maher - BIO KEROUAC
Hawthorne in Concord by Philip James McFarland - BIO HAWTHORNE
Audubon: the making of an American by Richard Rhodes - BIO AUDUBON

LPL'S WEB SITE FOCUS - Disabled American Veterans

Lakewood Public Library hosts the John N. Nemeth Memorial Chapter 108 of the Disabled American Veterans at http://www.lkwdpl.org/dav108/. There is information on this site about how to obtain help concerning veterans benefits from DAV Service Offices in the State of Ohio.

Contact us with any suggestions to this page through email: lpl@lkwdpl.org

THIS WEEK IN LITERARY HISTORY

7/5

It's the birthday of Jean Cocteau, born in Maison-Lafitte, just outside of Paris (1889). He was one of the most versatile artists of the 20th century: He wrote essays, poetry, and novels; and he worked on ballets, operas, and movies. He was involved in some of the most important artistic movements of the 20th century, including surrealism and cubism, and he was friends with some of the most important writers and artists of his day, including Pablo Picasso and Marcel Proust.

7/6

On this day in 1896, the writer O. Henry (William Sydney Porter) hopped a train for New Orleans rather than stand trial for embezzlement . He was raised in North Carolina, but relocated to Texas after he began to show symptoms of tuberculosis. He worked in Austin as a teller for the First National Bank, got married, and had a child. In his spare time, he edited a humor newspaper called The Rolling Stone. Then he moved to Houston, but was summoned back to Austin when shortages were discovered in the bank's ledgers. They were probably due to bad bookkeeping, and he might have escaped conviction, but on the way from Houston to Austin he lost his nerve, stepped across the platform, and boarded a train going the opposite way. He landed in New Orleans, where he took a job on the docks. From there he went to Central America, making friends with criminals who gave him money after they pulled off big robberies. In 1897, word reached him that his wife was dying, and he went back to Texas, knowing he faced a certain prison sentence. His wife died, and he served five years in an Ohio penitentiary. There he began to write short stories, some of which he published under the name of one of the guards, Orrin Henry.

7/7

It's the birthday of Robert Heinlein, born in Butler, Missouri (1907). He wrote more than 50 novels and many collections of short stories. Heinlein is best known for his novel Stranger in a Strange Land, about a boy born during the first manned mission to Mars.He called his books "speculative fiction" rather than "science fiction." He was trying to write about events that could actually happen, taking into consideration the natural laws of the universe.

7/8

It's the birthday of the novelist and short-story writer J.F. (James Farl) Powers, born in Jacksonville, Illinois (1917). He was a writer who didn't have too many readers in his lifetime. He wrote primarily about the lives of Catholic priests. But after his death in 1999, many critics ranked him among the greatest—and funniest—fiction writers of the late 20th century.

He grew up in a town with very few Catholics other than his own family, and he later said, "The town was Protestant. The best people were Protestants and you felt that. That, to some extent, made a philosopher out of me. It made me mad." He went to study at Quincy College Academy, run by Franciscan friars, where most of the students went into the priesthood. But at the last minute, J.F. Powers decided against becoming a priest. He said, "I just didn't care for the look of the life. The praying would have attracted me. I wouldn't have minded the celibacy, but I couldn't see myself standing outside church Sunday morning talking to a bunch of old women."

It was the Depression, and Powers took any job he could get. He worked at a Marshall Field's department store. He sold shirts and books and linoleum. He sold insurance door to door, saved up his money, and bought a typewriter. He got a job as a chauffeur and carried the typewriter along in the trunk so he could write when he was parked.

He got involved in various Catholic charity groups in Chicago. He got to know a lot of priests through his work, and he was fascinated by how human they were, how imperfect, even as they tried to live up to their ideals. And he came to believe that these imperfect men were the real saints. He became fascinated by the nonspiritual aspects of their lives, their fundraising and ordering furniture for the church, and so forth.

For his first novel, Morte D'Urban, he created a priest, Father Urban Roche, who runs a parish and plays golf in his spare time and thinks of himself as a kind of businessman. It won the National Book Award, but it only sold 25,000 copies and Powers was disappointed.

It took him 25 years to write his next novel, Wheat That Springeth Green, (1988). His publishers only ordered 8,500 copies to be printed. Powers begged them to print more. And when the book came out, it got great reviews. The first printing sold out in a few weeks. It took so long to print more copies that, by the time the book was back in print, the word of mouth had already died down. Powers said, "It was as if I were on first base but somebody had come and collected second and third base and carried them away. There was a sharp line drive to left, and I had nowhere to go."

He only published two novels and three collections of stories in his lifetime. By the time he died, most of his books had gone out of print. But his two novels have since been republished, and his short stories have been collected in The Stories of J. F. Powers, which came out in 2000.

J.F. Powers was once asked by nun in an interview for the American Benedictine Review if he had any ideas about the role of the Catholic writer. He replied, "No, I'm afraid I don't, Sister, except that obviously he should not write junk."

7/9

It's the birthay of author Dean Koontz, born in Everett, Pennsylvania (1945). He's the author of more than 70 supernatural and science fiction thrillers, including The Bad Place and Mr. Murder. The turning point in his career was in 1969, when his wife told him that, if he wanted to try to be a writer, he could quit his job and she would support him for five years. He published 18 novels in those first five years, and his career was on its way.

7/10

Today is the birthday of Marcel Proust, born in Paris (1871). He's the author of the great, 3,000-page autobiographical novel that we know as either Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time.

7/11

Today is the birthday of the man who gave us Charlotte's Web, E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White,born in Mount Vernon, New York (1899). He was a writer for many years for The New orker magazine. He later moved with his wife to a farmhouse in Maine. E.B. White wrote, "Just to live in the country is a full-time job. You don't have to do anything. The idle pursuit of making a living is pushed to one side, where it belongs, in favor of living itself, a task of such immediacy, variety, beauty, and excitement that one is powerless to resist its wild embrace." For all his love of the country, E.B. White is also the author of a classic about New York City, Here is New York, which people still read today.

The above from The Writer's Almanac