International Literacy Day

- Ann Leave a comment

Today is International Literacy Day! What better way to celebrate than to teach someone to read?

At the Davenport Main Library, we have two special sections which can help you do just that. Our ESL (or English as a Second Language) area is located on the second floor in the southwest corner. If English is not your native tongue, this is a good place to start. Picture dictionaries are an example of the material found here. If you can’t remember the word, you can always point to the picture of it!

Another area located in the same corner at Main is the Learning Center, which deals primarily with literacy issues. Most of the items here help those with limited reading abilities who want to master basic life skills. For example, there’s a whole series called Life Skills Literacy which includes titles such as Things to Know About Personal Paperwork or Things to Know About Spending and Saving Money, all by Richard Kimball. Come to think about it, even some very literate people could use these books!

He Said Beer, She Said Wine by Sam Calagione and Marnie Old

- Ann Leave a comment

Ever wonder which wine to have with a meal? Ever debate the pairing of different beers with specific foods? Ever argue with your SO about which is better, beer or wine? He Said Beer, She Said Wine by Sam Calagione and Marnie Old will not only educate and entertain you, it’ll provide you with fresh issues to debate.

Written by two acknowledged experts in their field, this book starts with an overview of each beverage, the basics of how each is produced, a discussion of varieties and styles and how to taste and evaluate each one. The heart of the book discusses pairing wine and beer with different foods such as cheese, vegetables, sandwiches, pizza, fish, pasta, chicken and desserts.

The final section is the fun part – bringing the debate home. Calagione and Old describe how to have a wine versus beer party, including giving you ideas on how to set up voting, sample menus and wine/beer pairings, and recipes.

Smart but never stuffy, this lavishly illustrated book is sure to encourage lots of friendly debate – and might even have you believing in the value of the other beverage, no matter what side you’re on.

Cheer! by Kate Torgovnick

- Ann Leave a comment

Cheerleaders are usually portrayed as air-headed and dumb, the sport is often the butt of jokes and in this age of equal rights, it’s considered anit-feminist to be part of a squad. The truth, of course, is very different.

It wasn’t that long ago (before Title IX in the 70s) that cheerleading was often the only organized sport available to high school and college women. Today, competitive cheerleading (not the silly dance steps performed by squads at professional football and basketball games) is a scholarship sport at hundreds of colleges, with National Championships held each year in April that are shown on ESPN. Like any college sport, it requires rigorous practices, learning specific skills, staying in excellent physical condition and game day situations. It is also plagued by the same problems – illegal drug use, often serious injuries and eating disorders.

Just in time for opening of college football. Cheer! by Kate Torgovnick takes you through a typical season with the squads from Stephen F Austin, Southern University and the University of Memphis. You’ll go behind the scenes, experience the hard times and the fun times and come to love the people of each squad. Well-researched and detailed, Cheer! will give you new insight into – and respect for – the world of cheerleading.

It’s what’s for dinner….during Lent

- Bill Leave a comment

To be filed under the category of “where does it come from” is Richard Ellis’s Tuna: A Love Story. There are all kinds of fish facts to amuse your dinner company, including:

* What you’re eating out of the can scientifically isn’t tune per se, but a member of the family called skipjack.

* The largest fish market in the world is in Tsukiji, Japan. Every day, this icebox is loaded with catch from around the world and millions of dollars are exchanged. One fish brought $173,600 US in 2001.

* The purse seining method of tuna fishing leads to the deaths of thousands of dolphins per year. If a can is labeled “tuna safe”, it merely means a good faith effort is made to rescue as many as possible, and these regulations are far from a global standard.

* A highly-prized bluefin tuna (a rich dark red meat unlike our Starkist, Bumblebee, and Chicken of the Sea) can fetch upwards of $400 a pound. The sushi restauranteur marks up from there.

* Around one in 40 million tuna eggs will make it to adulthood. Once they do, however, few species can compete physically with a quarter-ton fish that can swim in excess of 50 mph.

* The insatiable appetite and unlimited finances of the Japanese for this delicacy may very likely result in the species’ extinction in the future.

Sorry Charlie!

Apocalypse, Atheists, the Ark, oh my!

- Bill Leave a comment

How important is religion to you? Well it’s important to someone, as several of these new red-hot religious book have a starting print run of 200,000 copies.

Here are a few titles that just came off the mountain at DPL for your perusal:

Sylvia Browne – End of Days: Predictions and Prophecies about the End of the World
The world has become a scary place—religious wars, global terrorism, and genocide are all over the news, and thanks to the Internet, the Information Age has ushered in the Anxiety Age. Who better to lead the way out than Sylvia Browne, the most popular psychic working today?

Jack Kerouac – Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha
Published for the first time in book form, an account of the life of the Buddha by the author of On the Road

T.D. Jakes – Before You Do: Making Great Life Decisions
A guide by the author of Reposition Yourself identifies twenty-five spiritual and psychological tools for reevaluating one’s place in life before making decisions about relationships with family, friends, and others

A Friendly Letter to Skeptics and Atheists: Musings on Why God Is Good and Faith Isn’t Evil
Social Psychologist David Myers admits that many people throughout history who have claimed to believe in God have caused much evil in the world. He is respectful of his atheist interlocutors, like Richard Dawkins, preferring to discuss how Surely, in some ways I’m wrong, you’re wrong, we’re all wrong.

The lost ark of the covenant: Solving the 2,500 year of fable of the biblical ark
With painstaking historical scholarship, groundbreaking genetic science, and hair-raising fieldwork, Parfitt, who the Wall Street Journal calls “a British Indiana Jones,” debunks the previous myths and reveals the shocking history of the Ark and its keepers. From Israel to Egypt, Ethiopia, and the ruins of Great Zimbabwe, the journey leads to places Parfitt could never have imagined.

Anne Rice – Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession
In a haunting memoir, the best-selling author of Interview with a Vampire presents an intensely personal journey of faith that records her New Orleans Catholic childhood; loss of faith and involvement with secular humanism; the alienation and tragedy that marked her life; and her eventual return, after thirty-eight years as an atheist, to New Orleans and a belief in Christ

Joel Osteen – Daily Readings from Become a Better You: 90 Devotions for Improving Your Life Every Day
An anthology of inspirational and motivational readings by the pastor author of Become a Better You includes pieces that illustrate his seven principles for leading an improved life

Keep Your Doors Locked…

- Ann Leave a comment

So, the joke goes like this:

Be sure to keep your doors locked this time of year. Not because of a crime wave, but to keep the neighbors from sneaking bags of zucchini and tomatoes into your car/back porch!

It wasn’t that long ago that we were in the depths of icy winter and many of us had forgotten what a real, homegrown tomato tasted like (just that it wasn’t that pale red styrofoam substitute that you found at the grocery store) and now, just a few months later we’re drowning in tomatoes and overwhelmed by zucchini.

The library, of course, is here in your time of need. Here are some titles to help you cope with the Great Tomato Overload (you know, just in case the neighbors are on to you and are keeping their doors locked…)

Vegetable Dishes I Can’t Live Without by Mollie Katzen

Tomatoes and Mozzerella by Hallie Harron

The Tomato Festival Cookbook by Lawrence Davis-Hollander

Perfect Vegetables by Carl Tremblay

The Joy of Pickling by Linda Ziedrich

Preserving for All Seasons by Anne Gardon

The Classic Zucchini Cookbook by Nancy Ralston

DVDs for September

- Ann Leave a comment

September 16

Made of Honor – Patrick Dempsey, Michelle Monaghan

Tom and Hannah have been platonic friends for years. He’s a serial dater, while she wants marriage but hasn’t found Mr. Right. Just as Tom is starting to think that he is relationship material after all, Hannah gets engaged. When she asks Tom to be her “maid” of honor, he reluctantly agrees just so he can attempt to stop the wedding and woo her.

Also coming out September 16

Another Cinderella Story

Speed Racer

September 23

The Leatherheads – George Clooney, Rene Zellweger

A romantic comedy set against the backdrop of America’s start-up pro-football league in 1925. Dodge Connolly, a charming, brash football hero, is determined to guide his team from bar brawls to packed stadiums. But after the players lose their sponsor and the entire league faces certain collapse, Dodge convinces a college football star to join his ragtag ranks. Carter Rutherford, a golden-boy war hero who single-handedly forced multiple German soldiers to surrender in WWI, Carter has dashing good looks and unparalleled speed on the field. Lexie Littleton is a spitfire newswoman who suspects there are holes in Carter’s war story. As the new game of pro-football becomes less like the freewheeling sport he knew and loved, Dodge must both fight to keep his guys together and to get the girl of his dreams.

Also coming out September 23

Deception

Sex and the City

September 30

Iron Man – Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Palthrow

Tony Stark is the complete playboy who also happens to be an engineering genius. While in Afghanistan demonstrating a new missile, he’s captured and wounded. His captors want him to assemble a missile for them but instead he creates an armored suit which uses to escape. Back in the U.S. he announces his company will cease making weapons and he begins work on an updated armored suit only to find that his second in command at Stark Industries has been selling weapons to the insurgents. Tony must use his new suit to return to Afghanistan in an attempt to destroy the arms and to stop Stane from misusing his research.

Also coming out September 30

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Taxi to the Dark Side

Now Out of Print – Booktalking

- Ann Leave a comment

written by Angela

Oh, how technology changes everything – sometimes for the (much) better!

I started my library career in 1997 at DPL’s Reference Desk. One of the tasks I was assigned was to create a reader’s advisory newsletter. I started Booktalking, a bi-monthly print newsletter which featured reading lists, anecdotes, and book/author information. I still have copies of the newsletter back to 2001 – don’t know where I saved the older archives, probably on a (gasp!) floppy disc, but at least it was the smaller disc, not the record-album-looking one from War Games. If you’re feeling nostalgic, you can read back-issues of Booktalking on the Library’s website, but only back to 2006. Probably because I recycled old articles and added a new twist.

Most of my reading tastes are still the same – love chick lit by Marian Keyes; love laughing at Carl Hiaasen. But there is a much better way to get this information to the public in a timely and interactive manner. Blogging! (And when I re-read this entry in 5… scratch that … 2 years, I’ll be like, “Blogging – that’s so archaic. It’s all about the microchips in the brain now, man. Read my mind…”). Sadly, we don’t have that technology in Iowa yet, so we blog. And the Reference Department has created a dandy blog that captures the essence of my original newsletter, Booktalking.

So, Booktalking as a publication is gone, but in its place is something beautiful, magical really – “Info Café.” Read it daily (you’re reading it now, in case you didn’t know). I’d tell you to bookmark it, but that’s sort of last year, too. RSS feed it, baby. Don’t know how? Call the Reference Desk – no, wait, who has time to make phone calls anymore? You can chat with them live on the “inter-galactic web” (internet).

Wake me up when technology stays the same for more than day. Until then, read books. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

100’s 101

- Bill Leave a comment

Are you trying to figure out what to do with your life, the meaning of life, or making plans for what happens after you stop breathing? Walk to the 100’s range of the Davenport Public Library. The 100’s are the destination for philosophy, psychology, new-age spirituality, and the supernatural. Here are a few brand-new “100’s” you might enjoy:

Thanking the Monkey
By Karen Dawn of the Washington Post is a look at the issues of animal rights, past and present, pulling quotes from celebrities in the use of animals as pets, entertainment, food, and test subjects

Just Who Will You Be
Maria Shriver pens this bestseller, which addresses living a full life when the foundations of one’s self image are taken away. Shriver was forced to resign upon husband Arbold Schwartzenegger’s election as California governor after 25 years as a national news anchor/reporter.

Ghosts Among Us
Van Praagh, the New York Times bestselling author and co-executive producer of the CBS series The Ghost Whisperer, shares his knowledge and life experience about ghosts. Contains true ghost stories and details about their active participation in our lives.

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