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Maine Citizen’s Guide to the Special Referendum Election Tuesday, June 12, 2018.

posted: , by PPL
tags: Recommended Reads | Adults | Government

On June 12, voters will cast ballots in a statewide Special Referendum Election and Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap is reminding all Maine voters of an informational resource that can help them make an informed decision at the polls: the 2018 Maine Citizen’s Guide to the Referendum Election.

The Citizen’s Guide is intended to provide as much information as possible so that voters have a convenient resource to educate themselves before casting their ballot. The Department of the Secretary of State, in collaboration with the attorney general, prepared the guide as an unbiased and non-partisan review of the People’s Veto question that voters will consider at the polls this June.

In the guide, voters can read the full text of the People’s Veto legislation, along with an analysis of its intent and content. Voters can also learn the impact of a yes or no vote. Election law also allows for citizen advocacy statements to be published supporting or opposing questions, which provides voters with those viewpoints to consider; one public comment was filed in support of this question and no public comments were filed in opposition

Question 1: People’s Veto

Do you want to reject the parts of a new law that would delay the use of ranked-choice voting in the election of candidates for any state or federal office until 2022, and then retain the method only if the constitution is amended by December 1, 2021, to allow ranked-choice voting for candidates in state elections?

A “YES” vote favors the people’s veto, meaning that ranked-choice voting would be the method for choosing party nominees in future primary elections for all state and federal offices, and in determining the winners of general elections for U.S. Senate and Congress.

A “NO” vote opposes the people’s veto, meaning that ranked-choice voting would be delayed until after December 1, 2021, and repealed unless the Legislature and the voters adopt a constitutional amendment by that date authorizing RCV in general elections for Governor, State Senator and State Representative.

For more, please visit;

Voters’ Guide for June 12 Special Referendum Election, 2018.


May Staff Picks: Spring Into…

posted: , by Elizabeth
tags: Library Collections | Recommended Reads | Adults | Readers Writers

The joy of new books! Nonfiction is where it’s at this May, and plenty of unique and dynamic titles are already here. You can also log in to your library account and place holds on the new nonfiction books we have on order, including intriguing options like The Secret Life of CowsThe Right Words to Solve Every Parenting Dilemma, or Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan. Read on as a few of our Youth Services and Adult Services staff members share their own new nonfiction picks and reading ideas.  

Children’s Services New Nonfiction 

 Carrie’s Pick 

The Easy Family Cookbook 

I love family cookbooks and this British import is sure to become a family favorite! With metric and imperial measurements, heavy binding, and wipeable pages, this book has it all. The Easy Family Cookbook is packed with recipes that children will actually enjoy and families can make together on a weeknight without a lot of fuss. Organized by mealtimes and full of inventive and family friendly recipes, but still well balanced and healthy, this cookbook will grow with your family. Recipes include lovely photographs to entice even the most picky eaters. 

Research shows families that regularly eat dinner together benefit in myriad ways. From lower rates of obesity and eating disorders, to higher grade-point averages and self-esteem, the health benefits of family dinner are well documented. And family dinner conversation has even been shown to be a more potent vocabulary builder than reading! So why not start a new family tradition and let the kids pick a dinner or two a week to plan, cook, and clean up after? Everyone will benefit from the time spent together, the skills and confidence gained by learning to cook, and the magic that happens when families slow down and make eating well together a priority.  

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Cindy’s Pick 

The Girl Guide, 50 Ways to Learn to Love your Changing Body by Marawa Ibrahim is a lovely new non-fiction choice for middle-grade readers who may just be sashaying into puberty.  Ibrahim’s very cheerful, friendly writing invites you to explore the many mysteries of puberty.  Whether it is hair growing in new places, periods, embarrassment, meditation, exercise, body positivity or body parts, Ibrahim covers it all nicely.  

It’s very inclusive of different body types and skin colors, without being pushy in any direction, which was refreshing to see.  There are illustrations and photographs aplenty, including one showing Ibrahim’s own beautiful face: one half picturing an unrealistic, airbrushed side of her face, smoothed out with flawless makeup, while the other half remains unedited with her natural skin, acne and all.  

What you come away with most strongly in this wonderful guide is that it is okay to be whoever you are, whatever you look like or feel like.  If only we had all gone through Middle School with this book in our backpacks! 

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Teen Services New Nonfiction 

Kelley’s Pick 

I LOVED For Everyone by Jason Reynolds, read it twice in one sitting, and want to buy it FOR EVERYONE.

 Harper’s Pick 

Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World by Pénélope Bagieu is more than just another collection of women to admire. With art that is both cute and expressive without being overwhelming, Bagieu tells the stories of a diverse array of women. The depth of information on each is amazing, especially considering how each biography fits in just a few short pages. Brazen had me adding a number of names to my ‘cool people to learn more about’ list, including: Nzinga, Las Mariposas, Tove Jansson, Sonita Alizadeh, Mae Jemison, and so many more.  

 

Adult Services New Nonfiction

Eileen’s Pick 

I want to know everything.  A little bit at a time.  The Dewey decimal system is my map.  Today I am making a beeline for 508.7414. 

Granite, Fire, & Fog: the Natural and Cultural History of Acadia by Tom Wessels  

We are anchored to a marvel of natural wonder that is our home address:  Planet Earth.  Acadia is a small slice of Earth’s slow cooked story, a physical and eventually an ethnic amalgam of the past and present, with a whiff of the inevitable yet to come right in our own backyard.   Wessels steps onto the path that Acadia has travelled for billennia, wending his way through the fantastic evolution of a place, to my mind rivalling the most unbelievable fiction as it roiled, boiled, compressed, rose up, sparked life.  

On my second time reading Granite, Fog, & Fire, I again am enamored of the emotionally grounding nature of bedrock and what carves and covers it.  To wit: lichens, mosses, glacial striations, igneous intrusions, crevice communities and such like amazements.  Wondering what defines a bog versus a fen?  Look no further than page 44, although I cannot imagine stopping there.  You’ll not have met wind as sculptor or the travails of the Wabanaki who summered in Acadia for over 100 generations of regenerative lifestyle or the paper birch’s role as a “canary in the coal mine” of climate change… so many things I didn’t think to wonder about before reading Wessels’ gem.  It is eminently accessible, written by a devoted fan of Acadia who is also a professor of ecology at Antioch University of New England, part guide, part history book, all engaging. 

Did I mention that there is a glossary?  I do love a good glossary! 

Nonfiction has inspired and informed me, sometimes improved me, occasionally outed me as inept.  I have lamented my neck with Nora Ephron, cooked vegetarian for everyone with Deborah Madison to guide me, and slept with a helmet for my pillow in the Pacific theater ‘long side Robert Leckie.  DIY.  Travel guides.  Philosophy and religion.  It’s all there, a smorgasbord that will feed me forever.  I am ravenous and will not be satisfied anytime soon. 

So, I keep on keepin’ on, trolling the stacks for books to fill the huge gaps in what I know, exploring new territory, reexamining old ways of thinking, and sometimes prying open my wallet to buy something that speaks to me, like Granite, Fire, & Fog 

Thank you, Mr Wessels. 

  ______________________________

Jessie’s Pick 

More than just a true crime book, Michelle McNamara chronicles her obsession with one of America’s most horrific unsolved crime sprees as she delves deeply into the case of the Golden State Killer in I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. Sadly, the author died suddenly before the book was finished. Her widower, actor Patton Oswalt, enlisted some of McNamara’s colleagues to complete her work using her extensive notes. McNamara’s respect for the victims is clear, and her confidence that the crimes would someday be solved shines through the deeply disturbing subject of her research: last month, two years after McNamara’s death, a suspect was finally apprehended.  

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Brandie’s Pick 

“History is a merciless judge. It lays bare our tragic blunders and foolish missteps and exposes our most intimate secrets, wielding the power of hindsight like an arrogant detective who seems to know the end of the mystery from the onset.”  

I’d heard a lot of buzz about David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon—a 2017 finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction—but I don’t generally read from the 360s. Then Now Read This, a book club from PBS NewsHour and the New York Times, chose it as the book club pick for February. I’d committed to reading all the books they selected this year so I had to read it. I appreciate book clubs for so many reasons—but mostly because they get me to read outside of my comfort zone. This is a perfect example of a book I’d never have picked up on my own, but I’m so glad I read it. 

Killers of the Flower Moon is a well-documented narrative of conspiracy, small-town corruption, and the mysterious murders of wealthy members of the Osage Nation in Osage County, Oklahoma, in the 1920s after oil was discovered on their land. Newspapers described the increasing number of unsolved murders as the “Reign of Terror,” and local law enforcement couldn’t be trusted to solve the case or help the Osage Nation. 

The Federal Bureau of Investigation was created by Theodore Roosevelt in 1908: by the 1920s, though, it was still relatively small, with only a few hundred agents and a handful of offices around the country. Many agents, known for bending laws and getting cozy with criminals, were not to be trusted. The Department of Justice, Grann writes, “had become known as the Department of Easy Virtue.”  J. Edgar Hoover was appointed director in 1924 and the Osage murders were to be Hoover’s first significant test of the new F.B.I.’s abilities. 

Lies, greed, murder, cover-ups…this gripping true crime tale reads more like fiction than nonfiction. Grann is an extraordinary writer and really pulls you in from the first page. I don’t want to give too much away: there is so much to be discovered from all the twists and turns. It especially felt important to learn more about the Osage Nation as well as this dark piece of history. I highly recommend this read—check out the print version or you will miss all the fascinating pictures pertaining to this history.

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Hazel’s Pick 

The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives edited by Viet Thanh Nguyen 

“When it comes to justice, it does not matter whether those in a host country think they have no obligation to refugees. Keeping people in a refugee camp is punishing people who have committed no crime except trying to save their own lives and the lives of their loved ones.”  

In less than 200 pages, Nguyen has compiled a series of brave and moving pieces from seventeen different refugee writers. Their accounts span widely across both time and place—from post-World War II Ukraine, to 1970s Chile under Pinochet, to Mugabe’s thirty-year presidency over Zimbabwe. These authors’ voices and their reasons for writing are as varied as their countries of origin, and the result is a timely and necessary collection that aches, endures, and reaches for home. 

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Elizabeth’s Pick 

Powerful writing and profound responses to assault, harassment, and abuse make up the personal essays in the new collection Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Cultureedited by Roxane Gay with writing from Samhita Mukhopadhyay, Miriam Zoila Pérez, Brandon Taylor, and a host of other contributors. Many share personal experiences and impact. Together they also call out culpability on individual and institutional levels, challenge the toxic culture they reveal, and get to the roots of systemic violence and aggression, underscoring the need for more widespread accountability of criminal actions as well as meaningful social change of the cultural norms and behaviors that cause lasting harm.

As Nora Salem writes in “The Life Ruiner,” her essay in this collection: “I’m writing this for the other girls, some of whom may be in my family. The boys, too. I’m writing this for my friend who told me to blame myself…Like all the writers I read, I’m writing to prove I exist. The Life Ruiner alone didn’t ruin me. The world that made him did—the place that continues to manufacture replicas of him and continues to create the circumstances in which he and his replicas thrive. What is there to do about that?” 

   ______________________________

Nate’s Pick 

As someone who has both struggled with and been intrigued by William Vollman’s fictional works, his nonfiction has offered slightly more grounded opportunities to explore his writing.  Though not a practice in brevity, his newest undertaking, No Immediate Danger: Volume One of Carbon Ideologies   presents a history of climate change, including major causes and a commentary on challenges associated with tackling the issue; it also explores the Fukushima nuclear disaster and Vollman’s travels in Japan.  From the author of books dedicated to the ethics of violence and poverty, I expect a comprehensive perspective complimented by thoughtful social commentary. 

  ______________________________

 

As ever, thanks for reading. For more ideas, you can always explore new additions to the library’s collections on our website here. Or try filling out our Your Next (Great!) Read form here, briefly tell us what you like to read and what you’re in the mood to read next, and you’ll receive a book list of personalized reading ideas and suggestions created for you by our Reader’s Advisory staff.


The 1968 Project – April

posted: , by Raminta Moore
tags: Adults | Seniors | Art & Culture

The 1968 Project aims to highlight some of the historic events of the year. From protests and famous battles to chart-topping popular hits and box office smashing film, 1968 was a huge historical year with reverberations that we still feel today. The 1968 Project looks to grab snippets of these events on a monthly basis and list them here with links for further exploration.

April 1
The debut novel from Jeffrey Hudson (aka Michael Crichton), A Case of Need, is published.

The 249th and final episode of The Andy Griffith Show airs on television.

Publicity photo of Andy Griffith and Ron Howard from the television program The Andy Griffith Show. The photo was to remind people when the show would return to the air with new episodes and to be careful driving because it was now school time.

April 3rd
Planet of the Apes and 2001: A Space Odyssey both premier.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivers what is to be his final speech known as, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.”
We aren’t engaged in any negative protest and in any negative arguments with anybody. We are saying that we are determined to be men. We are determined to be people. We are saying — We are saying that we are God’s children. And that we are God’s children, we don’t have to live like we are forced to live.”

Simon and Garfunkel release their album, Bookends.

April 4th
Dr. King is assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.

Sign (1969) pro­mot­ing a holiday on the an­ni­ver­sa­ry of King’s death

April 6th
shootout between Black Panthers and Oakland police results in several arrests and deaths, including 16-year-old Panther Bobby Hutton. 

April 10th
Postponed due to the assassination of Dr. King, the 40th annual Academy Awards ceremony takes place at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. Rod Steiger wins Best Actor for In the Heat of the Night. Best Actor in a Supporting Role goes to George Kennedy for Cool Hand Luke. Katherine Hepburn wins Best Actress for her role in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. The award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role goes to Estelle Parsons in Bonnie and Clyde. Mike Nichols wins Best Director for The Graduate. The Best Picture winner for 1968 is In the Heat of the Night.

April 11th
President Johnson signs the 1968 Civil Rights Act.
An act to enforce the constitutional right to vote, to confer jurisdiction upon the district courts of the United States of America to provide injunctive relief against discrimination in public accommodations, to authorize the Attorney General to institute suits to protect constitutional rights in public facilities and public education, to extend the Commission on Civil Rights, to prevent discrimination in federally assisted programs, to establish a Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity, and for other purposes. -long title

April 14th
Off-Broadway at Theater Four, Mart Crowley’s play, The Boys in the Band premiers. Reviewer Clive Barnes calls this play the “finest treatment of homosexuality I have ever seen on stage.” It is one of the first plays to avoid many of the conventional gay stereotypes for a more complex psychological treatment of the play’s various gay characters, brought together for a birthday party.

This is a poster for The Boys in the Band. The poster art copyright is believed to belong to the distributor of the film, the publisher of the film or the graphic artist.

April 16th
Fay Bainter, stage and film actress passes at the age of 74.

Edna Ferber, author, passes at age 82.

April 19th
The Zombies release their album, Odessey and Oracle.

April 20th
Pierre Trudeau is sworn in as Canada’s 15th Prime Minister. Fortyseven years later, his son Justin, becomes Canada’s 23rd Prime Minister.

April 21st
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead wins Best Play at the 22nd Annual Tony Awards.

April 24th
Hundreds of Columbia University students, protesting the Vietnam War, take over several administration offices at the University. The protests shut down the school and are not broken up by the New York Police Department until April 30th.

April 27th
Sly & The Family Stone release their album, Dance to the Music.

Booker T & The MG’s release Doin’ Our Thing.

April 29th
The premier of Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical, is performed on Broadway.

The poster art copyright is believed to belong to Michael Butler, the original producer of the musical or the graphic artist.

Be sure to come back at the end of next month for events from May 1968!

March 1968

January & February 1968

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