For the Birds…and Birders Everywhere

The University of Michigan library has been putting together a new Creative Commons sharing  platform, the PictureIt Rare Book Reader.  They have recently released 435 high quality digital images of Audubon’s Birds of America elephant folio.  The images can be viewed in high-resolution, and shared under the creative commons license.  The University of Michigan keeps a room dedicated to Audubon’s original work at the Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library, including the full 8 volume elephant folio.  However, if you want to view the Audubon images yourself in full size, come on in to The Community Library, and ask about our own folio edition in our Reference Collection (not the original, but still extraordinarily nice!)

We also have a very solid collection of ornithology books in our regular stacks covering birding and birders around the world.  Our most recent release, Imperial Dreams by Tim Gallagher, tracks the nearly mythical two foot long Imperial Woodpecker (largest of all carpinteros) through the wilds of the Sierra Madre in Mexico.  The book explores both the natural history of the mountains of Northern Sonora and it’s erratic and dangerous political and social situation from the time of Pancho Villa’s raids to today’s terrorizing cartels.

Our most recent book for birders as well as anyone interested in any manner of ecological niches is The World’s Rarest Birds by Erik Hirschfeld, Andy Swash and Robert Still put out by the Princeton University Press.  The book includes photographs of 515 endangered species, and fine illustrations of extremely rare birds that have never been photographed.  QR codes are included to link to individual species on BirdLife International’s website, where detailed current information on the rara avis is freely available.

Another new arrival to our shelves provides some stunning visual imagery of the northern flyways and watersheds critical to migratory birds and animal habitat–check out The Sacred Headwaters:  the fight to save the Stikine, Skeena, and Nass by Wade Davis.  The author will be a speaker at this summer’s Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, and should have some very keen observations about the conflict between the copper, gold and methane extraction companies leasing the mineral rights and concerned conservationists and First Nations stakeholders in British Columbia and the Northwest Territories.  Wade Davis also recently published a feature article in National Geographic on the people of the Stikine River Valley.

What are your favorite birds and birdwatching sites?  Think of us when you are planning your next trip into the Wild, and put The Community Library on your Living List.

Harold Fry on Commonwealth Book Prize shortlist

Reblogged from Readersforum's Blog:

 | By Charlotte Williams

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce (Transworld), longlisted for the Man Booker, is one of three UK debuts shortlisted for the £10,000 Commonwealth Book Prize.

The Death of Bees by Lisa O'Donnell (Windmill), a tale of two sisters after the death of their parents, and The Bellwether Revivals by Benjamin Wood (Simon & Schuster), a story set among Cambridge students, also make the shortlist.

Read more… 36 more words

The Community Library currently holds many books that have been selected for the Commonwealth Book Prize shortlist. Come by the library and sample books by Rachel Joyce, Lisa O'Donnell, Jeet Thayil, Naomi Benaron, and many others!

Happy World Book Night! Get a jump on summer reading.

London is celebrating World Book Night with a number of events–the Time Out London travel blog has many local recommendations, but anyone can celebrate wherever they are in the world…with your own personal good book.  The April 23rd date was chosen to honor the anniversary of the deaths of Shakespeare and Cervantes, and is celebrated in many areas by giving away free books.  The Community Library gives away free books every day, (all you need is a free library card!), though we do encourage you to eventually give them back.  We also have a free paperback exchange shelf for all comers at the entrance of the library.  Feliz, world readers!

The Summer Reading Season is ramping up as the days grow longer and the snow recedes.  Now that Baldy is closed, and the mountain biking trails are still blocked, there are still some peak outlets in The Community Library.  Just arrived:

Making Meaning Out of Mountains: The Political Ecology of Skiing by Mark C.J. Stoddart, being catalogued for our shelves today.  While the book examines the management of mountain environments around ski areas in British Columbia, the socio-political observations will be of interest to thinking skiers everywhere.  Other newly added books of regional interest include Mariel Hemingway’s The Willingway, from Changing Lives Press, and Haunted Idaho: Ghosts and Strange Phenomena of the Gem State by Andy Weeks.  Secret recommendation for fishermen about to be stranded by stream closures to protect young trout–the Dungarvon Trilogy by Herb Curtis, a Canadian classic about the life and fishing on a New Brunswick salmon river in the sixties.

New summer books are breaking out this May–don’t wait for competition from the snowbirders!  Michael Pollan’s new book Cooked! is starting very strong.  If it accumulates more holds, or if our patrons request it, we will load it on our Nooks for patron checkout.  We have also loaded Kate Atkinson’s popular new novel Life After Life on a Nook.  Dozens of books in one easy to carry device–such a deal!  Also just released to the stacks–David Baldacci’s new thriller The Hit,   Amy Brill’s The Movement of Stars, and being cataloged right now, Andre Aciman’s Harvard Square and  Isabel Allende’s new novel, Maya’s Notebook.  Our newest travel book for the Departure Lounge explores Goa and Mumbai.

Donations of the month–Heavy Metall!  A patron donated a dozen books related to the art, crafting and design of metalwork, including blacksmithing, the work of Alfred Habermann, and the catalog for Metall Design International.  Thank you for extending the breadth of the art design shelves @ The Community Library!

New Works with the flavor of the Northern Rockies

There is a freshet of new releases in regional literature this spring, in a wide variety of genres.  Some of the books are by local or nearly local authors, and some are set on an Idaho stage.

Rugged Mercy by local author Robert Wright is the historical biography of Dr. Wright, the author’s grandfather, who practiced medicine in the Wood River Valley during the mining era through the sheepherding heydays.  The award-author’s previous book The Evolution of God was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2010.  He will be speaking at the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference this summer.

The Shelter Cycle by Peter Rock is set on the Idaho/Montana border and deals with two friends who grew up together in a remote survivalist encampment, and how they deal with society (or Boise) in later years.  The author’s previous book, My Abandonment, was also set in the Northwest wilderness, and both come with excellent reviews.

A Serpent’s Tooth is the new Craig Johnson mystery in the Longmire series set in Absaroka County near the Big Horns in Wyoming.  The book will be released in late spring, just as season 2 of the television series based on the same character begins.  Craig Johnson will also be speaking at the SVWC this summer.

Breaking Point, the new book in the Joe Pickett series by C. J. Box, shares the Wyoming setting from the perspective of a Forest Service ranger in roughly the same neck of the woods, but a much different flavor.

Works Cited  Idaho author Brandon K. Schrand (Enders Hotel) writes a memoir using key well-remembered books to mark various coming-of-age passages.

City of Rocks is another western by Michael Zimmer, just released this last fall.  The book is based in part on surviving transcripts from the American Legends Collection (ALC) created in 1936 as part of the Federal Writers Project of the WPA.

The Beautifully Worthless by Lambda award winner Ali Liebegott is a re-issue of her first prose/poetry book about an impulsive road trip from Brooklyn to ‘Camus’, Idaho.  It is definitely not a travelogue.

Godforsaken Idaho: Stories by Shawn Vestal () takes the checkered history of Idaho and Mormonism head on in powerful vignettes.

The River’s Song by Jim Satterfield is rerelease of an 1870′s era western adventure that stretches from the Milk River country through the Missouri Breaks and into the Bitterroot and Lolo Pass.  There is a June release date for Satterfield’s new suspense novel Saving Laura, set in a cocaine-dusted ski area in Aspen, Colorado, in 1979.

Think Globally, but Read Locally, @ The Community Library!

New Great Courses for Curious Polymaths and Autodidacts

The Community Library has over three hundred college level courses and seminars on audio and DVD.  We’ve just added a dozen new subjects!  Thanks to a generous matching donation by the Director of our Board, Lyman Drake, we have been able to purchase 12 new Great Courses from the Teaching Company.

Patrons can listen to a physics lesson take a course on The Art of Storytelling while on a long vacation drive.  History buffs can dive into the past with DVD series like The African Experience and  Conquest of the Americas,  or listen to audio courses on commute, such as Daily Life in the Ancient World.

For those interested in life strategy and logic, we have added the audio courses The Art of War and Thinking Like an Economist: A Guide to Rational Decision Making.  Add the tutorial on Effective Communications Skills and bring some new power tools into your long-term career toolkit.

The lectures on Tocqueville and the American Experiment explore the underpinnings of democracy reverberate in the news today.   Thinking about your rights under the Constitution and how they are changing this Congressional session?  Bundle the Tocqueville course with his seminal work, Democracy in America, or dip into The Skeptic’s Guide to American History.

These courses dovetail very well with the newest books on our stacks, added just in the last few days.  Test drive the DVD documentary Dirty Energy and cruise the New Book Shelf forBending Towards Justice: the Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy by Gary May, or Bolivar: American Liberator by Marie Arana.

Never mind spring showers–new April books, CDs and DVDs are raining down @The Community Library.

Our Besler Classical Music Collection has moved!

As the variable spring weather blows through the Valley, it is a good time to lay a foundation for the busy high summer season events like the Northern Rockies Music Festival, the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, and particularly, the Sun Valley Summer Symphony.  Our Max Besler Classical Music Collection contains over 1,100 classical music CDs, perfect for summoning memories of warm summer nights at the Symphony.  We’ve recently moved the collection into the main adult library, right across the room from our popular music CDs and DVD movies.  We hope the new space will make it easier for our patrons to find new and challenging music from all ages.

Dovetailing with the music collection, we have also added a new book about how fifteen major operas were created–Michael Rose’s The Birth of an Opera:  15 Masterpieces from Poppea to Wozzeck.  The enormous amount of work going into creating operatic productions is not without drama of it’s own.  Rose draws on many primary sources to tell the stories of composers and librettists, performers and producers in many ages, using letters, memoirs and personal tales.

Other resources available to classical music aficionados include numerous Teaching Company CD and DVD seminars and college-level lectures.  The six part series How to Listen to and Understand Great Music surveys music from the ancient world to the modern era.  We also have in-depth studies on numerous composers, including DVDs on operatic works such as The Lives and Operas of Verdi, Isaac Stern’s study on classical music students in China in From Mao to Mozart, and a full performance of Le Nozze de Figaro in four acts.

Whether your musical tastes run to Wozzeck or Reckless Kelly, the Sun Valley Symphony or the Stanley Street Dance, the Library has music for you!  Explore more than books, @ The Community Library!

 

 

Darkest Victoriana

This last month we added a new book on the history of Anglo explorations of Africa in the middle of the 19th century, Monte Reel’s Between Man and Beast : an unlikely explorer, the evolution debates, and the African adventure that took the Victorian world by storm.  Reel documents the considerable explorations of Paul Belloni Du Chaillu through the jungles, plains and deserts of Africa, and his clashes with the intrenched scientific ideas and mores of the Victorian era.  He was the first European explorer to document the existence of gorillas, and Du Chaillu soon ran afoul of the high politics of the Darwinian debate as he theorized about the relationships of primates to humans.  Detractors and competitors called him a fraud and a fabricator as he expounded on his observations and adventures in early colonial Africa.

It happens that one of the Community Library’s founders, Clara Spiegel, collected many volumes of Du Chaillu’s early accounts of his explorations, aimed at young people and the popular market.  The volumes were donated many years ago to the Library, and are now included in our Departure Lounge travel section near Monte Reel’s account of Du Chaillu’s work.  They were publish between 1868 and 1871, bound in leather with gilt stamping, and are in quite remarkably good shape for being nearly 150 years old.  The pages are filled with melodramatic accounts of encounters with various tribes, slavers, animals, insects and locales, from giant spiders to venomous snakes, orang-outangs to water buffalo.

The original publications, including Stories of Gorilla Country, My Apingi Kingdom, Lost in the Jungle and others, are unexpurgated Victoriana–they are deeply colored by the intolerant Anglo culture of the mid-19th century.  Native peoples are thoughtlessly insulted and exploited, and prejudices are voiced with total abandon–which makes the books all the more valuable as a lens into the past today.  Du Chaillu embodies the role of the Great White Hunter, and has a lamentable tendency to shoot just about anything that moves, on principle.  Some of the excellent woodcuts are quite raw, some egregious, some fascinating, some surprisingly tender.

Edgar Rice Burroughs steeped himself in Du Chaillu’s work–some of the illustrations could be lifted from early editions of Tarzan.  It is clear Du Chaillu’s accounts (some quite fictionalized) have influenced popular culture and fueled a centuries worth or more of myths and misconceptions about Africa, even while he did produce some surprising scientific observations.  They also represent a thought-provoking primary resource for this era of conflict and discovery on the African continent.

For a fresh look at modern Africa, check out this article on book artist Keri Muller who has lived in South Africa and Mozambique, and creates fascinating images with leaves of books saved from pulping.  Keri Muller’s own blog, Simple Intrigue, has many more images and some very interesting discussions on the intersection of art, design, business, travel and Africa.

Global Voices has produced an ebook about current events in sub-Saharan Africa called African Voices for Hope and Change, which can be downloaded free to your own devices via ePub, Mobi or .pdf formats.  The book is available in English and Italian translations.  Other books recently added to the Community Library collection exploring modern Africa include Creating Room to Read : a story of hope in the battle for global literacy by Microsoft executive John Wood, Crisis in the Horn of Africa : politics, piracy and the threat of terror by Peter Woodward, and Food & cooking of Africa, by Rosamund Grant with Josephine Bacon, an exploration of Africa’s cuisine and culinary history, with beautiful step-by-step photos of ingredient preparation and finished recipes.

If the opportunity presented, where would you like to travel on the African continent?  Check out the travel section @TheCommunityLibrary, and go farther….

 

March comes in like a Lion–Fa’ilte a chairde

And most happy upcoming St. Patrick’s Day, fellow readers!  Celebrate safely, if not overly wisely, this Sunday.  As oft happens here in the central mountains of Idaho, there is a St. Patrick’s Day storm predicted, with wind, snow and drifting.  If you care to hunker down with some corned beef and a good book at home, we have some strong new works on Eire–The Course of Irish History  edited by T. W. Moody and F. X. Martin, andAll standing : the remarkable story of the Jeanie Johnston, the legendary Irish famine ship  by Kathryn Miles.  The latter is a remarkable story about the only “coffin ship” to never lose a passenger during the great emigration from the Famine.  The graves are walking : the great famine and the saga of the Irish people   by John Kelly takes a new look at the Irish Potato Famine.

Stories of Irish immigrants have fueled some popular new fiction–May the Road Rise up to Meet You by Peter Troy, The Gods of Gotham by Lyndsay Faye, and Black Irish by Stephen Talty.  Or, if you prefer your Irish straight, no chaser, you can delve into Frank Delany’s line by line podcasts deconstructing James Joyce’s Ulysses on RSS feed or Itunes, and re-Joyce!

Joyce is waiting for the right reader in our stacks @ The Community Library–welcome Irish friends!

March Books have arrived, in time for Spring Break

March is a big month for new fiction releases.  Some local favorites hitting the stacks later this March include the new mystery by C.J. Box set in Wyoming, Breaking Point, and a new Harlen Coben, Six Years (both will be released in the next two weeks.)  Also upcoming are books by Jane Green, Ruth Ozeki, Jonathan Dee, and Sun Valley Writers’  Conference speaker Austin Ratner.

But there’s no need to wait–we’ve just received 4 boxes of hot new reads that will hit the shelves this week.  Just in time for St. Patrick’s Day, Erin Hart launches an archaeology mystery set in Ireland, The Book of Killowen.  Or, if you have a yen for Italian, the new Inspector Montalbano book, Dance of the Seagull by Andrea Camilleri is out.

Among the new spring crop of writers, Andrea Hirata caught my interest with the first American release of the Indonesian bestseller The Rainbow Troops about a small school in constant threat of closure.  I’ve added it to my “To Read” list.  Award-winning Turkish writer Elif Shafak has released Honor, about the challenges of a Kurdish immigrant family in London in the ’70s.

New nonfiction books include the story of Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s 1889 race around the world, Eighty Days by Matthew Goodman.  The story delves into both the technological challenges of beating the fictional record of Jules Verne’s hero Phileas Fogg, but also the Victorian era constraints facing women traveling the world alone.

If your interest in the War of the Roses has been rekindled by the recent discovery of Richard III’s remains, try Blood Sisters by Sarah Gristwood, recounting the sagas of the women behind the clash of the Yorkists and Lancastrians.  John Thavis has released The Vatican Diaries at a very interesting juncture in the Catholic Church.  And Dan Baum describes the travels of a liberal Democrat from Boulder (by way of Jersey) through American gun culture in Gun Guys, A Road Trip.

Those with an interest in geology, tectonism and vulcanism may want to survey two new popular science books (and may want to revisit their emergency preparations in their wake.)  The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano that Darkened the World by William and Nicholas Klingaman follows the global aftermath of the eruption of Mount Tambora and how it affected even politics, art and religion.  The Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala is a much more personal and immediate and terrifying account of the devastating tsunami of 2004 in Sri Lanka.

Our Donation of the month–The Americans are Coming by award-winning Canadian author Herb Curtis, sometimes compared to Garrison Keillor, but all original.  Come check it out, eh?

A Focus on History, Regional and Beyond

 

Sandra Hofferber, our hyper-talented Director of Regional History, has written and assembled a book!  A Pictorial Early History of the Wood River Valley delves into the Community Library’s own unique oral interviews, photos, maps and scrapbooks of early settlers. There will be a book launch party at the Library tonight at 6:00 pm to celebrate the publication!  Come and see the book in person (and get one signed!) or view it online at our Lulu sales site.  If you are out of the area, the ebook is available for 5.99, and the paperback for 15.00.  All proceeds support the Library and our Regional History collection.

The book starts with accounts of the First Nation peoples that lived in the Valley for thousands of years before the arrival of fur trappers, stockmen and miners in the 19th century. It continues through the many waves of immigrants, the gold and sheep booms, and the establishment of early hot springs resorts in Warm Springs and Clarendon, before the opening of Sun Valley ski mecca.  We have a copy in the stacks–check it out!  Or visit Regional History anytime to see much, much more!

As a happenchance, today I was weeding another section of history in our collection, and found some orphan books that need a little patron love before they go to the Gold Mine.  Dovetailing with the Wood River history, we have Frontier Women and The Spirit of Indian Women, with firsthand tales of how western women from all walks carved a living in the 19th century West.  As this is Women’s History Month, these books get a bye back to the shelves.  They join I Dwell in Possibility–Women Build a Nation 1600-1920, and A Shining Thread of Hope:  The History of Black Women in America.

Also getting new life on the shelf are a history of the first international women’s movement, Joyous Greetings by Bonnie Anderson and Not for Ourselves Alone, the story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.  Three studies of the modern feminist movement were also spared, including Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future and Grassroots: a Field Guide for Feminist Activism , written by Jennifer Baumgardner, a speaker at the Library just a few years back.

Delve into the past, and look to the future, @The Community Library!