October 10, 2013
Sociologist Eric Klinenberg, who wrote a book about the summer of 1995 in Chicago where nearly 700 people died from heat, is suggesting that library branches be outfitted to cope with extreme weather. More than that, he’s saying we should actually build more branches for this purpose. He argues that in emergencies people gravitate to […]
October 10, 2013
Canadian writer Alice Munro has won this year’s Nobel Prize for literature. Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy said that Ms. Munro was a “master of the contemporary short story.” Now 82, Ms. Munro has said that she would most likely retire having completed her 14th short story collection, Dear Life. In today’s […]
October 9, 2013
Want to increase your emotional intelligence? You might want to put down that Danielle Steel book and start reading Chekhov. Researchers from New York’s New School for Social Research recently published a study in the journal Science which found that “people performed better on tests measuring empathy, social perception, and emotional intelligence after reading literary […]
October 9, 2013
We just have to be patient, I guess. According to this recent interview on NPR with author Martin, the sixth installment in the hugely popular fantasy series A Song of Fire and Ice (aka Game of Thrones), “Winds of Winter,” is getting written albeit slowly. Part of the reason is Martin’s involvement in many other […]
October 8, 2013
I was impressed with the originality of these library projects and I think you’ll agree. Take a look at the colorful, imaginative space at the Topeka children’s room (brief video included), where a huge dinosaur is resting his feet on the floor. (Sorry, they just can’t find his head in the ceiling…) A little more tame is […]
October 8, 2013
John Grisham’s 1989 legal thriller A Time to Kill, which was made into a film starring Matthew McConaughey, is being adapted for the stage by Rupert Holmes and directed by Ethan McSweeny. The play, revolving around a young white Mississippi lawyer defending a black man for revenge murder, will open on Broadway October 20, two […]
October 8, 2013
Yesterday’s Chicago Trib featured an article about a group of elementary school students at Henking School in Glenview who participated in a state-wide program to have the largest number of people all reading the same book on the same day. For eight years in a row, kids across Illinois have helped maintain a national Guinness […]
October 7, 2013
Ann Christophersen and Linda Bubon opened Women and Children First in Chicago to “promote the work of women writers and to create a place in which all women would find books reflecting their lives and interests.” W&CF has grown to become one of the largest independent feminist bookstores in the country, featuring thousands of books by and about women, children’s books, and […]
October 6, 2013
Author Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods, A Really Short History of Nearly Everything, and many others) will be speaking at the Skokie School auditorium in Winnetka October 10, 2013, at 7PM. If he speaks the way he writes, it should be quite entertaining. Shira S.
October 6, 2013
We’ve discussed various types of bookcases before, but I think these are truly different. Question: would you use a Jaguar, even a nonfunctional one, to house books? Or where is the perfect spot to house the extra sarcophagus lying around the basement? Shira S.
