Funny Bunny on the Run!!

Cool Crafts for Kids
Saturday, April 5 @ 11 a.m.
When we made a sample of one of April's featured crafts (treat/treasure box shown left), we knew we had a winner. What we did not anticipate was Mr. Bunny's escape and search for a yummy carrot treat of his own!

Children ages 3-7 may participate in our Cool Crafts program. In addition to the "bunny box", participants will also craft a dazzling tropical fish.

Registration is limited to 15 so hop, hop, hop over to our online events calendar or phone the library to reserve your place.

The Information Superhighway

Fast, Easy but Beware of the Potholes...
American culture critic Lee Siegel offers up a compelling critique of the Internet and all of the services we use every day (websites, blogs, wikis, email) in Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob.

In short form, Siegel skillfully argues that the Internet is not a virtual world paradise that connects us to each other in real world terms. Rather, the Internet has an underbelly that promotes isolation, anonymous bullying, invasions of privacy, and mainstream acceptance of unsavory, if not illegal practices (plagiarism, pornography).

Siegel's is a short and very readable book but don't expect any punches to be pulled -- not even with Comedy Central's John Stewart. Siegel's book is available at our library.

National Medal of Honor Day: March 25th, 2008

Beyond the Call of Duty
"Medal of Honor: Portraits of Valor Beyond the Call of Duty" is a New York Times bestseller with over 250,000 copies in print. One of the many copies is available for checkout at our library. Browse our copy but do keep the title in mind as one worth purchasing as a Memorial Day gift for your family's veteran.

From Publishers Weekly
"This group portrait of most of the living recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor has an entry for each recipient, including a photo portrait at the time of the award, a summary of the medal-winning action and sometimes (though not often enough) the later career. The variety of actions documented by [Peter] Collier (The Rockefellers) will impress even fairly seasoned students of military history, as will the 250 duotone portraits. They range from thumbnail period snapshots to full page close-ups of the lions in winter."

"Book Sense" Announces Books of the Year

What's Book Sense?
"BookSense.com is a family of independent-bookseller websites and is the e-commerce arm of the American Booksellers Association's Book Sense program." Independent bookstores (and we hope you know who and where they are in Connecticut) are those who just like public libraries, "share their love of books with their customers and their communities".

Award Winners: All Available at Our Library
Fiction: A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
Nonfiction: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver
Children’s Literature: The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick
Children’s Illustrated: Knuffle Bunny Too: A Case of Mistaken Identity by Mo Willems

The awards will be presented at the ABA’s annual Celebration of Bookselling, May 29, during BookExpo America.

Complementary Care, Complementary Caring...

Complementary Care Panelists

Pictured Left to Right:
Michael Smithwick (Hypnotherapy), Natalia Seguro-Wright (Acupuncture),
Sherry Russenberger (Reiki Energy Healing), Susan Fielding (Massage Therapy),
Dr. Patrick Connelly (Chiropractic), Joseph Belanger (Holistic Physical Therapy),
Dr. Bret Lieberman (Naturopathic Medicine)

The library extends it sincere thanks to our panelists, all of whom took time out of their weekend schedules to participate in a complementary care program on Saturday, March 15th. If you are interested in complementary care -- which includes a very broad spectrum of interventions, aids, counselling and approaches -- please consider these folks, as well as many others in our local area.

Network early and often! It can be a good way to develop your personalized list of contacts, credentialled in their field, and to find complementary care that meets your care-plan needs.

American History: Yours, Mine, and Ours

John Adams Meets HBO
Actor/producer Tom Hanks continues his endeavors to breathe life into our interest in American history with his TV mini-series adaptation of David McCullough's Pultizer Prize-winning biography of John Adams.

The seven-part mini-series premieres tonight at 9 p.m. on HBO. Paul Giamatti stars as Adams and Laura Linney as his wife Abigail. David Morse portrays George Washington. Watch the YouTube video "John Adams: A Closer Look (HBO)" which includes interview comments from David McCullough.

If you are an HBO subscriber, enjoy -- but don't resist the chance to read McCullough's extraordinary book (available at our library) about a brilliant politician who helped shape our country.

Great Books

From Phil Carr's Recommended Reading List

For those of you who have not yet had the pleasure to meet him, Phil Carr is the most recent addition to our Adult Services staff. Here's a pick from Phil's recommended reading list.

Goya by Robert Hughes

Hughes' biography of Francisco Goya puts forth the theory that Goya was the first journalist to record in pictures the events of his day. (Note the cover of the book.) Goya was in essence a photojournalist at large before the advent of the camera. Goya's etchings, many of which were mass produced and sold to the general public, recorded the tribulations of the Inquisition and the Spanish War against the invading French. From this war, the term "guerrilla warfare" was coined. Goya recorded the whole show and Hughes puts forth a very readable record of the artist's ventures.

Hughes sees Goya as what the artist himself would have regarded as his most important roles: visual chronicler of his society, creator of images, interpreter of history. Goya's large-scale church commissions, his portraits of public figures and the royal court are at worst competent and at best triumphant examples of public art. Even public art has its secrets and Hughes reveals many of them -- warts and all.

Web-Crawling for Recipes

Not Much in the "Fridge"?
We all face those days when the contents of our refrigerator doesn't appear to hold much promise. With SuperCook, help is on the way.

Use SuperCook to type in the recipe components you have on hand, including leftovers from that scrumptious meal your family enjoyed yesterday. Follow the "My Kitchen" links and an equally fabulous meal will be on your table in no time!

SuperCook is one of most practical applications of web-crawler technology we've seen in a while. Click here and give SuperCook a try.

Poet of the Month

March's Featured Poet

Amy Clampitt (1920-1994) , was born in New Providence, Iowa, and after Grinnell College she settled in New York City, working by turns at the Oxford University Press, in the Audubon Society’s Library, and as a freelance editor. The Kingfisher, from which the acutely observed poem below comes, appeared in 1983 and was followed by four more: What the Light was Like, Archaic Figure, Westward, and A Silence Opens.

The Cormorant in its Element

"That bony potbellied arrow, wing‑pumping along
implacably, with a ramrod's rigid adherence,
airborne, to the horizontal, discloses talents
one would never have guessed at. Plummeting

waterward, big black feet splayed for a landing
gear, slim head turning and turning, vermilion‑
strapped, this way and that, with a lightning glance
over the shoulder, the cormorant astounding‑

ly, in one sleek involuted arabesque, a vertical
turn on a dime, goes into the inimitable
vanishing‑and‑emerging‑from‑under‑the‑briny‑

deep act which, unlike the works of Homo Houdini,
is performed for reasons having nothing at all
to do with ego, guilt, ambition, or even money."

Further Reading: The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt, 1994, in our library’s collection.

Coming in April: National Poetry Month, a month-long celebration of both poets and poems.

Content developed by local resident and poet Leland Jamieson

Visit Lee's blog

"An Elephant's Faithful One Hundred Percent"

Books to Film
Horton Hears a Who! opens on the big screen next week (March 14) and buzz has it that the film will delight both children and adults.

The Dr. Seuss books, of course, are already delightful and have been for the past 50+ years. Both of the "Horton" books offer people of all ages lessons about courage, responsibility, and respecting each other. “After all, a person is a person, no matter how small.”

Make new friends with any or all of the characters in our library's complete collection of Seusseriffic books by checking out the Dr. Seuss book display in the Children's Services Department.

WonderLab: Simple Science for Little People

The Wonderful, Wonders of Simple Science
Meet Tessa, our library's Wonderlab program leader. Though Tessa's goofy 3-D glasses are the envy of mad scientists near and far, Tessa is and uses a more gentle approach.

Each Wonderlab program employs a combination of standard science experiments plus amazingly inventive add-ons. All Wonderlab programs are geared to the developmental skills and interests of children ages 4-5.

Register for the March 15th Wonderlab program, all about Marvelous Mixtures.