Just a reminder that the JCPLA Staff Development Day at
Homewood Library will be Friday, August 25th and we hope to see you there!
Our next RART meeting will be Wednesday, October 11th at 9am
at the Pinson Library and the topics up for discussion are science fiction,
fantasy, and horror.
We took care of the RART yearly housekeeping items
today. I am delighted to serve as RART
moderator for another year and have a gander at the great topics on the
docket for 2018’s meetings!
February 14 – Scandinavian mysteries & thrillers
April 4 – erotica & clean romance
(The April meeting date was changed from the second Wednesday because of the Alabama Library Association annual conference. I’m aware that prior commitments mean you may not be able to attend on April 4th. We’ll look forward to seeing you at another meeting.)
(The April meeting date was changed from the second Wednesday because of the Alabama Library Association annual conference. I’m aware that prior commitments mean you may not be able to attend on April 4th. We’ll look forward to seeing you at another meeting.)
June 13 – short stories
August 8 – recently published (last 5 years) Westerns
October 10 – fiction from an animal’s point of view
December 12 – graphic novels (fic & nonfic) for adults
I’m still waiting on confirmation for one venue, then we’ll
be booked in to a great variety of libraries around the county. Stay tuned!
This week, we talked about parenting & mentoring books
as a sort of back-to-school celebration.
Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in the Digital Age by Sherry Turkle
Renowned media scholar Sherry Turkle investigates how a
flight from conversation undermines our relationships, creativity, and
productivity—and why reclaiming face-to-face conversation can help us regain
lost ground. We live in a technological universe in which we are always
communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection.
Preeminent author and researcher Sherry Turkle has been studying digital culture for over thirty years. Long an enthusiast for its possibilities, here she investigates a troubling consequence: at work, at home, in politics, and in love, we find ways around conversation, tempted by the possibilities of a text or an email in which we don’t have to look, listen, or reveal ourselves.
We develop a taste for what mere connection offers. The dinner table falls silent as children compete with phones for their parents’ attention. Friends learn strategies to keep conversations going when only a few people are looking up from their phones. At work, we retreat to our screens although it is conversation at the water cooler that increases not only productivity but commitment to work. Online, we only want to share opinions that our followers will agree with – a politics that shies away from the real conflicts and solutions of the public square.
The case for conversation begins with the necessary conversations of solitude and self-reflection. They are endangered: these days, always connected, we see loneliness as a problem that technology should solve. Afraid of being alone, we rely on other people to give us a sense of ourselves, and our capacity for empathy and relationship suffers. We see the costs of the flight from conversation everywhere: conversation is the cornerstone for democracy and in business it is good for the bottom line. In the private sphere, it builds empathy, friendship, love, learning, and productivity.
But there is good news: we are resilient. Conversation cures.
Based on five years of research and interviews in homes, schools, and the workplace, Turkle argues that we have come to a better understanding of where our technology can and cannot take us and that the time is right to reclaim conversation. The most human—and humanizing—thing that we do.
The virtues of person-to-person conversation are timeless, and our most basic technology, talk, responds to our modern challenges. We have everything we need to start, we have each other.
Savvy Auntie: The Ultimate Guide for Cool Aunts,Great-Aunts, Godmothers, and All Women Who Love Kids by Melanie Notkin
Savvy Auntie is the ultimate guide for cool aunts,
great-aunts, godmothers, and all women who love kids but have none of their
own! Written by Melanie Notkin—America’s premier Savvy Auntie and creator of
the popular online community Savvy Auntie—Savvy Auntie focuses on
everything that parenting manuals generally leave out: namely auntie-ing! This
groundbreaking handbook celebrates the 50% of kid-loving American women who
aren’t (or are not yet) moms, but have so much to add to the Family Village.
A practical parent-friendly handbook filled with easy-to-do,
effective, science-based tips and strategies that can be used in the course of
normal everyday routines to boost language skills and instill an enduring love
of reading in infants, toddlers, and new readers. Based on cutting-edge
scientific research combined with insights author Nancy Newman gained as a
teacher and a parent, Raising Passionate Readers sheds light on
important underlying ideas and explains how to have fun with children in ways
that enhance their ability to listen, talk, read, and write. Newman’s upbeat
approach, wise advice, and pragmatic suggestions can be adapted to a wide range
of personalities, schedules, and settings.
LEARN
• Why raising enthusiastic readers is easier than most
people realize
• Which popular myths about time, technology, and teachers
to ignore
• How infant/toddler communication skills affect IQ and
emotional growth
• When early matters (and doesn’t matter) in the reading
process
• Which “secrets” turn new, struggling, and reluctant
readers into avid readers
• How to help all children get the most out of technology
Raising Passionate Readers will inform, inspire and
empower parents, grandparents, educators, librarians, learning specialists,
pediatricians, and anyone else interested in helping children become lifelong
readers.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Lisa Damour, Ph.D.,
director of the internationally renowned Laurel School’s Center for Research on
Girls, pulls back the curtain on the teenage years and shows why your
daughter’s erratic and confusing behavior is actually healthy, necessary, and
natural. Untangled explains what’s going on, prepares parents for
what’s to come, and lets them know when it’s time to worry.
BOOKS FOR A BETTER LIFE AWARD WINNER
In this sane, highly engaging, and informed guide for parents of daughters, Dr. Damour draws on decades of experience and the latest research to reveal the seven distinct—and absolutely normal—developmental transitions that turn girls into grown-ups, including Parting with Childhood, Contending with Adult Authority, Entering the Romantic World, and Caring for Herself. Providing realistic scenarios and welcome advice on how to engage daughters in smart, constructive ways, Untangled gives parents a broad framework for understanding their daughters while addressing their most common questions, including
• My thirteen-year-old rolls her eyes when I try to talk to her, and only does it more when I get angry with her about it. How should I respond?
• Do I tell my teen daughter that I’m checking her phone?
• My daughter suffers from test anxiety. What can I do to help her?
• Where’s the line between healthy eating and having an eating disorder?
• My teenage daughter wants to know why I’m against pot when it’s legal in some states. What should I say?
• My daughter’s friend is cutting herself. Do I call the girl’s mother to let her know?
Perhaps most important, Untangled helps mothers and fathers understand, connect, and grow with their daughters. When parents know what makes their daughter tick, they can embrace and enjoy the challenge of raising a healthy, happy young woman.
BOOKS FOR A BETTER LIFE AWARD WINNER
In this sane, highly engaging, and informed guide for parents of daughters, Dr. Damour draws on decades of experience and the latest research to reveal the seven distinct—and absolutely normal—developmental transitions that turn girls into grown-ups, including Parting with Childhood, Contending with Adult Authority, Entering the Romantic World, and Caring for Herself. Providing realistic scenarios and welcome advice on how to engage daughters in smart, constructive ways, Untangled gives parents a broad framework for understanding their daughters while addressing their most common questions, including
• My thirteen-year-old rolls her eyes when I try to talk to her, and only does it more when I get angry with her about it. How should I respond?
• Do I tell my teen daughter that I’m checking her phone?
• My daughter suffers from test anxiety. What can I do to help her?
• Where’s the line between healthy eating and having an eating disorder?
• My teenage daughter wants to know why I’m against pot when it’s legal in some states. What should I say?
• My daughter’s friend is cutting herself. Do I call the girl’s mother to let her know?
Perhaps most important, Untangled helps mothers and fathers understand, connect, and grow with their daughters. When parents know what makes their daughter tick, they can embrace and enjoy the challenge of raising a healthy, happy young woman.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A Time Top 10 Book of the Year • A San
Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year
The author of the New York Times bestseller Cinderella Ate My Daughter offers a clear-eyed picture of the new sexual landscape
girls face in the post-princess stage—high school through college—and reveals
how they are negotiating it.
A generation gap has emerged between parents and their
girls. Even in this age of helicopter parenting, the mothers and fathers of
tomorrow’s women have little idea what their daughters are up to sexually or
how they feel about it. Drawing on in-depth interviews with over seventy young
women and a wide range of psychologists, academics, and experts, renowned journalist
Peggy Orenstein goes where most others fear to tread, pulling back the curtain
on the hidden truths, hard lessons, and important possibilities of girls’ sex
lives in the modern world.
While the media has focused—often to sensational effect—on
the rise of casual sex and the prevalence of rape on campus, in Girls & Sex Peggy Orenstein brings much more to the table. She examines the ways
in which porn and all its sexual myths have seeped into young people’s lives;
what it means to be the “the perfect slut” and why many girls scorn virginity;
the complicated terrain of hookup culture and the unfortunate realities
surrounding assault. In Orenstein’s hands these issues are never reduced to
simplistic “truths;” rather, her powerful reporting opens up a dialogue on a
potent, often silent, subtext of American life today—giving readers
comprehensive and in-depth information with which to understand, and navigate,
this complicated new world.
Playing off the themes in the Caldecott Medal-winning
children's book Where the Wild Things Are, this informative,
practical, and encouraging guide will help parents guide boys down the path to
healthy and authentic manhood. Wild Things addresses the physical,
emotional, and spiritual parts of a boy, written by two therapists who are
currently engaged in clinical work with boys and their parents and who are also
fathers raising five sons. Contains chapters such as “Sit Still! Pay
Attention!” “Deficits and Disappointments,” and “Rituals, Ceremonies, and Rites
of Passage.”
Michael Chabon, author of WONDER BOYS and the Pulitzer
Prize-wining THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY, has written an
autobiographical narrative as inventive, beautiful and powerful as his
novels.In these insightful, provocative, slyly interlinked essays, one of our
most brilliant and humane writers presents his autobiography and vision of life
in the way so many of us experience our own: as a series of reflections,
regrets and re-examinations, each sparked by an encounter, in the present, that
holds some legacy of the past.What does it mean to be a man today? Chabon
invokes and interprets and struggles to reinvent for us, with characteristic
warmth and lyric wit, the personal and family history that haunts him even as
it goes on being written every day. As a son, a husband and above all as a
father of four young children, Chabon's memories of childhood, of his parents'
marriage and divorce, of moments of painful adolescent comedy and giddy
encounters with the popular art and literature of his own youth, are like a
theme played - on different instruments, with a fresh tempo and in a new key -
by the mad quartet of which he now finds himself co-conductor.
Beloved by millions, George S. Clason’s timeless classic
reveals the financial principals that hold the key to personal wealth.
THE SUCCESS SECRETS OF THE ANCIENTS—AN ASSURED ROAD TO HAPPINESS AND PROSPERITY
Countless readers have been helped by the famous “Babylonian parables,” hailed as the greatest of all inspirational works on the subject of thrift, financial planning, and personal wealth. In language as simple as that found in the Bible, these fascinating and informative stories set you on a sure path to prosperity and its accompanying joys. Acclaimed as a modern-day classic, this celebrated bestseller offers an understanding of—and a solution to—your personal financial problems that will guide you through a lifetime.
This is the book that holds the secrets to keeping your money—and making more. May they prove for you, as they have proven for millions of others, a sure key to gratifying financial progress.
Baby Sign Language Basics: Early Communication for Hearing Babies and Toddlers by Monta Z. Briant
Since 2004, Baby Sign Language Basics has introduced hundreds of thousands of families and educators around the world to the miracle of signing with their babies—and left them wanting more! Monta Briant provides more than 300 American Sign Language (ASL) signs, illustrated with clear, easy-to-understand photos and descriptions. Baby-specific signing techniques, songs, and games are also included to make learning fun and open up two-way communication quickly.This book is a must-read for all parents, grandparents, and anyone else who spends time with preverbal children. After all, what parent or caregiver doesn’t want to know what their baby is trying to tell them?
Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects and Activities for Dads and Kids to Share by Ken Denmead
The ultimate DIY project guide for techie dads raising kids in their own geeky image, in the spirit of The Dangerous Book for Boys.
Today's generation of dads grew up more tech-savvy than ever. Rather than joining the Little League team, many grew up playing computer games, Dungeons and Dragons, and watching Star Wars. Now with kids of their own, these digital-age dads are looking for fresh ways to share their love of science and technology, and help their kids develop a passion for learning and discovery.
Enter supergeek, and father of two, Ken Denmead. An engineer and editor of the incredibly popular GeekDad blog on wired.com, Ken has created the ultimate, idea-packed guide guaranteed to help dads and kids alike enjoy the magic of playtime together and tap into the infinite possibility of their imagination. With illustrations throughout, this book offers projects for all ages to suit any timeframe or budget. With Denmead's expert guidance, you and your child can:
•Fly a night-time kite ablaze with lights or launch a video camera with balloons
•Construct the "Best Slip n' Slide Ever," a guaranteed thrill ride
•Build a working lamp with LEGO bricks and CDs
•Create a customized comic strip or your own board game
•Make geeky crafts like cyborg jack-o'-lanterns or Ethernet cuff links
Brimming with endlessly fun and futuristic tidbits on everything from gaming to gadgets, GeekDad helps every tech-savvy father unleash his inner kid-and bond with the next generation of brainiacs.
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