Reader's Place: Sept 21, 2020
A spotlight on the books written and edited by our 2020 Ideas Festival speakers, for your reading pleasure.
Ideas Festival 2020: Jill Carr With John Schwartz, Tuesday, September 22, 2020, 7:00 PM - 8:00 PM.
Final Draft: The Collected Work of David Carr, by David Carr; edited by Jill Rooney Carr (eLibrary, Library catalog)
A career-spanning selection of the legendary reporter David Carr's writing for the New York Times, Washington City Paper, New York Magazine, the Atlantic, and more.
Throughout his 25-year journalistic career, David Carr was noted for his sharp and fearless observations, his uncanny sense of fairness and justice, and his remarkable compassion and wit. His writing was informed both by his own hardships as an addict, and his intense love of the journalist's craft. His range—from media politics to national politics, from rock 'n' roll celebrities to the unknown civil servants who make our daily lives function—was broad and often timeless. Whether he was breaking exclusives about Amazon or mourning Philip Seymour Hoffman's death or taking aim at editors who valued political trivia over substance, Carr's voice and concerns remain enormously influential and relevant. In these hundred or so articles, from a range of publications, we read his stories with fresh eyes. Edited by his widow, Jill Rooney Carr, and with an introduction written by one of the many journalists David Carr mentored and promoted, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Final Draft is a singular event in the world of writing news, an art increasingly endangered in these troubled times.
Ideas Festival 2020: Abby Sher, recipient of the Maplewood Literary Award, Wednesday, September 30, 2020, 7:00 PM - 8:30 PM
Sanctuary, by Paola Mendoza and Abby Sher (eLibrary, Library catalog)
A near future dystopia where a young girl and her brother must escape a xenophobic government to find sanctuary. It's 2032, and in this near-future America, all citizens are chipped and everyone is tracked—from buses to grocery stores. It's almost impossible to survive as an undocumented immigrant, but that's exactly what sixteen-year-old Vali is doing. She and her family have carved out a stable, happy life in small-town Vermont, but when Vali's mother's counterfeit chip starts malfunctioning and the Deportation Forces raid their town, they are forced to flee. Now on the run, Vali and her family are desperately trying to make it to her tía Luna's in California, a sanctuary state that is currently being walled off from the rest of the country. But when Vali's mother is detained before their journey even really begins, Vali must carry on with her younger brother across the country to make it to safety before it's too late. Gripping and urgent, Sanctuary is as haunting as it is hopeful in envisioning a future where everyone can find sanctuary.
Miss You Love You Hate You Bye, by Abby Sher (eLibrary, Library catalog)
A darkly comic and heartbreakingly honest YA novel about finding the courage to help a friend who can't stop hurting herself. Zoe and Hank (short for Hannah) have been inseparable since they met in elementary school. The leader of the pack, Zoe is effortlessly popular while Hank hides comfortably in her shadow. But when Zoe's parents unexpectedly divorce, Zoe's perfect facade starts cracking little by little. Sinking under the weight of her broken family, Zoe develops an eating disorder. Now she must rely on Hank for help. However, Hank struggles to help Zoe; after all, she is used to agreeing, not leading. How can she help her best friend get better before it's too late? Written partially in letters from Zoe and mostly in narrative from Hank's perspective, Miss You Love You Hate You Bye is a poignant and eye-opening novel about friendship, mental health, and learning to put yourself first.
All the Ways the World Can End, by Abby Sher (Library Catalog)
A "laughter through tears" YA novel about a teenage girl struggling to deal with her father's terminal cancer—in all the wrong ways. Lenny (short for Eleanor) feels like the world is about to end. Her best friend is moving to San Francisco and her dad is dying. To cope with her stress Lenny is making a list of all the ways the world can end—designer pathogens, blood moon prophecies, alien invasion—and stockpiling supplies in a bunker in the backyard. Then she starts to develop feelings for her dad's very nice young doctor—and she thinks he may have feelings for her too. Spoiler alert: he doesn't. But a more age-appropriate love interest might. In a time of complete uncertainty, one thing's for sure: Lenny's about to see how everything is ending and beginning, all at the same time.
Breaking Free:True Stories of Girls Who Escaped Modern Slavery, by Abby Sher (eLibrary, Library Catalog)
Breaking Free will strike a chord with all young readers as it recounts the stories of courageous young women who escaped the unspeakable abuse of sexual slavery. Instead of running from their pasts, they choose to help those still caught in the system. Abby Sher tells the riveting story of three survivors of sexual slavery. These three women could easily have been voiceless victims, lost to the horrors of their own histories. Instead, they not only fought their way out of servitude, they have each become leading advocates and activists in the anti-trafficking movement.
Amen, Amen, Amen: Memoir of a Girl Who Couldn't Stop Praying (Among Other Things), by Abby Sher (Library Catalog)
Until the age of ten, Abby was a happy child in a fun-loving, musical family. But when her father and favorite aunt pass away, Abby fills the void of her loss with rituals: kissing her father's picture over and over each night, washing her hands, counting her steps, and collecting sharp objects that she thinks could harm innocent pedestrians. Then she begins to pray. At first she repeats the few phrases she remem-bers from synagogue, but by the time she is in high school, Abby is spending hours locked in her closet, urgently reciting a series of incantations and pleas. If she doesn't, she is sure someone else will die, too. The patterns from which she cannot deviate become her shelter and her obsession. In college Abby is diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and while she accepts this as an explanation for the counting and kissing and collecting, she resists labeling her fiercest obsession, certain that her prayers and her relationship with G-d are not an illness but the cure. She also discovers a new passion: performing comedy. She is never happier than when she dons a wig and makes people laugh. Offstage, however, she remains unable to confront the fears that drive her. Amen, Amen, Amen is an elegy honoring a mother, father, and beloved aunt who filled a child with music and their own blend of neuroticism. It is an adventure, full of fast cars, unsolved crimes, and close calls. It is part detective story, part love story, about Abby's hunt for answers and someone to guide her to them. It is a young woman's radiant and heartbreaking account of struggling to recognize the bounds and boundlessness of obsession and devotion.
Ideas Festival 2020: Punching the Air with Ibi Zoboi and Dr. Yusef Salaam, Thursday, October 15, 2020, 7:00 PM - 8:30 PM
Punching the Air, by Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam (eLibrary, Library catalog)
A powerful YA novel in verse about a boy who is wrongfully incarcerated. Amal Shahid has always been an artist and a poet. But even in a diverse art school, he's seen as disruptive and unmotivated by a biased system. Then one fateful night, an altercation in a gentrifying neighborhood escalates into tragedy. "Boys just being boys" turns out to be true only when those boys are white. Suddenly, at just sixteen years old, Amal's bright future is upended: he is convicted of a crime he didn't commit and sent to prison. Despair and rage almost sink him until he turns to the refuge of his words, his art. This never should have been his story. But can he change it? With spellbinding lyricism, Ibi Zoboi and prison reform activist Yusef Salaam tell a moving and deeply profound story about how one boy is able to maintain his humanity and fight for the truth, in a system designed to strip him of both.
Ideas Festival 2020: Andrea Bernstein with Nancy Solomon, Wednesday, October 21, 2020, 7:00 PM - 8:00 PM
American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power, by Andrea Bernstein (eLibrary, Library catalog)
A multigenerational saga of two families, who rose from immigrant roots to the pinnacle of wealth and power, that tracks the unraveling of American democracy. In American Oligarchs, award-winning investigative journalist Andrea Bernstein tells the story of the Trump and Kushner families like never before. Their journey to the White House is a story of survival and loss, crime and betrayal, that stretches from the Klondike Gold Rush, through Nazi-occupied Poland and across the American Century, to our new gilded age. In building and maintaining their dynastic wealth, these families came to embody the rising nationalism and inequality that has pushed the United States to the brink of oligarchy. Drawing on more than two hundred interviews and more than one hundred thousand pages of documents, many previously unseen or long forgotten, Bernstein shows how the Trumps and the Kushners repeatedly broke rules and then leveraged secrecy, intimidation, and prosecutorial and judicial power to avoid legal consequences. The result is a compelling narrative that details how the Trump and Kushner dynasties encouraged and profited from a system of corruption, dark money, and influence trading, and that reveals the historical turning points and decisions—on taxation, regulation, white-collar crime, and campaign finance laws—that have brought us to where we are today.
Ideas Festival 2020: The Toni Morrison Book Club, Monday, October 26, 2020, 7:00 PM - 8:30 PM
The Toni Morrison Book Club, by Juda Bennett, Winnifred Brown-Glaude, Casssandra Jackson, and Piper Kendrix Williams (eLibrary, Library catalog)
In this startling group memoir, four friends—black and white, gay and straight, immigrant and American-born—use Toni Morrison's novels as a springboard for intimate and revealing conversations about the problems of everyday racism and living whole in times of uncertainty. Tackling everything from first love and Soul Train to police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement, the authors take up what it means to read challenging literature collaboratively and to learn in public as an act of individual reckoning and social resistance. Framing their book club around collective secrets, the group bears witness to how Morrison's works and words can propel us forward while we sit with uncomfortable questions about race, gender, and identity. How do we make space for black vulnerability in the face of white supremacy and internalized self-loathing? How do historical novels speak to us now about the delicate seams that hold black minds and bodies together? This slim and brilliant confessional offers a radical vision for book clubs as sites of self-discovery and communal healing. The Toni Morrison Book Club insists that we find ourselves in fiction and think of Morrison as a spiritual guide to our most difficult thoughts and ideas about American literature and life.
Compiled by Jenny Zbrizher