Browsing Area Book of the Week, March 18, 2013.

The Girls of Murder City: Fame, lust and the beautiful killers who inspired Chicago by Douglas Perry. HV6517.P475 2010.

In 1924, with Prohibition the law of the land, booze in Chicago was more prevalent than ever.  Speakeasies, illegal gin joints and jazz clubs were everywhere, well supplied by Dion O’Banion, Johnny Torrio and Johnny’s lieutenant, Al Capone.  It was also a time when women journalists were hired for the Sunday articles—home and fashion—and the men did the hard news. 

But Maurine Watkins, a preacher’s daughter from Indiana was determined to make it as a newswoman; she started at the Tribune covering homicides.  Chicago, after all, was rich with murder, even before the gang wars, and nothing was more peculiar than the tendency of women in the Second City to get drunk and shoot their boyfriends; nothing, that is, except the other peculiar fact that all-male jurors seemed to find an attractive young woman accused of murder “Not guilty.”

          For Maurine, with her religious morals, this was unconscionable.  Two beauties, Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner were both coming to trial, both of them guilty as hell.  Maurine tried to become the voice of justice and morals for the city, all the while swimming against the tides of sexism and sensationalism. 

But eventually, she would get a hit Broadway play out of it.

 

Library Video of the Week, March 11, 2013.

Forks over Knives, a documentary written and directed by Lee Fulkerson.

Library Call Number: RA645.N87F67 2011

Synopsis excerpts from the Internet Movie Database (IMDB):
            What has happened to us? Despite the most advanced medical technology in the world, we are sicker than ever by nearly every measure. Cases of diabetes are exploding…half of us are taking at least one prescription drug and major medical operations have become routine. Heart disease, cancer and stroke are the country's three leading causes of death...Millions suffer from…degenerative diseases. Could it be there's a…solution so comprehensive…that it's mind-boggling that more of us haven't taken it seriously?  
          FORKS OVER KNIVES examines the profound claim that most, if not all, of the so-called "diseases of affluence" that afflict us can be controlled, or even reversed, by rejecting our present menu of animal-based and processed foods. …The film traces the personal journeys [of two eminent researchers]…Inspired by remarkable discoveries in their young careers... Their research separately and independently led them to the same startling conclusion: degenerative diseases like heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and even several forms of cancer, could almost always be prevented-and in many cases reversed-by adopting a whole foods, plant-based diet. Despite the profound implications of their findings, their work has remained relatively unknown to the public. Written by Brian L. Wendel

Browsing Area Book of the Week, February 25, 2013.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett.  Library Call Number: PS3619.T636.H45 2009.                                 

 

Excerpted from Kirkus Reviews:      “The relationships between white middle-class women and their black maids in Jackson, Mississippi, circa 1962, reflect larger issues of racial upheaval in…Stockett's ambitious first novel.  …recent Ole Miss graduate Skeeter [Phelan] returns to Jackson longing to be a serious writer. While playing bridge with…friends Hilly and Elizabeth, she asks Elizabeth's seemingly docile maid Aibileen for housekeeping advice to fill the column she's been hired to pen for a local paper. The two women begin what Skeeter considers a semi-friendship, but Aibileen…is careful what she shares…Encouraged by a New York editor, [Skeeter] decides to write a book about the experience of black maids and enlists Aibileen's help. For Skeeter the book is primarily a chance to prove herself as a writer. The stakes are much higher for the black women who put their lives on the line by telling their true stories. Although the exposé is published anonymously, the town's social fabric is permanently torn. Stockett uses telling details to capture the era and does not shy from showing Skeeter's dangerous naiveté. Skeeter's narration is alive with complexity—her loyalty to her traditional Southern mother remains even after she learns why the beloved black maid who raised her has disappeared. In contrast, Stockett never truly gets inside Aibileen and Minnie's heads (a risk the author acknowledges in her postscript). The scenes written in their voices verge on patronizing.”

Library Video of the Week, February 25, 2013.

The Help, starring Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer and Bryce Dallas Howard. Directed by Tat Taylor.  Library Call Number: PN1995.9.N4H45 2011.

Kathryn Stockett’s book was on the bestseller list longer than any title since the Da Vinci Code, so it was only natural that it would become a movie.  In 1960s Mississippi, Skeeter, a southern society girl, returns from college determined to become a writer, but turns her friends' lives, and a small Mississippi town, upside down when she decides to interview the black women who have spent their lives taking care of prominent southern families. Aibileen, Skeeter's best friend's housekeeper, is the first to open up, to the dismay of her friends in the tight-knit black community. The casting of Emma Stone and Bryce Dallas Howard as the southern white women and Tony-Award winning Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer in the two major roles of the maids, makes this movie worth seeing.  Spencer went on to win the Critic’s Choice Award, the Golden Globe, the Screen Actors Guild Award, BAFTA and Oscar for her role in the Help, one of only nine actors in history to win all in a single year.

Library Video of the Week, November 5, 2012

Happy, a documentary directed by Roko Belic. Library Call Number: BF575,.GH27H37 2012. 

Excepted from the website Paste: Signs of life in music, film and culture:   Inspired by a New York Times article [that] director Tom Shadyac shared with Belic [ranking] countries by the happiness of their citizens…despite the fact that America is one of the richest countries in the world, it’s nowhere near the happiest.”… Shadyac was so compelled by the contradictory correlation between material wealth and happiness, he funded the majority of Belic’s film out of pocket.

          After traveling [through many nations of the world, what] Belic and his crew discovered was astonishing. He spent a few weeks in the slums of Kolkata, India with positive psychologist Robert Biswas-Diener (“the Indiana Jones of happiness research”) and “the poorest of the poor,” and found a community whose dependence on one another transcended their poverty. “Despite the fact that they live in little huts made of bamboo sticks covered in plastic tarps and plastic bags; despite the fact that there’s open sewage running in front of where they sleep; despite the fact that they have no income for medical care or schooling or for anything in excess of subsistence living, they’re as happy as the average American,” Belic says. “What I saw in the slum that I see missing in many American neighborhoods is a real, genuine sense of camaraderie and a bond among the people who live there.”
          Winner of eight documentary awards.

Library Video of the Week, April 16, 2012.

The Bro Code: How contemporary culture creates sexist men, a presentation of the Media Education Foundation; written and produced by Thomas Keith.      Library Call Number: BF692.5.B76 2011.

          From the Publisher’s website: "Filmmaker Thomas Keith takes aim at the forces in male culture that condition boys and men to dehumanize and disrespect women. Keith breaks down a range of contemporary media forms, zeroing in on movies and music videos that glamorize womanizing, pornography that trades in the brutalization of women, comedians who make fun of sexual assault, and a groundswell of men's magazines and cable TV shows that revel in old-school myths of American manhood. Even as epidemic levels of men's violence against women persist in the real world, the message Keith uncovers in virtually every corner of our entertainment culture is clear: It's not only normal -- but cool -- for boys and men to control and humiliate women. Arguing that there's nothing normal, natural, or inevitable about this mentality, The Bro Code challenges young people, young men and women alike, to step up and fight back against the idea that being a real man means being sexist.”

Browsing Area Book of the Week, February 13, 2012.

Juice! by Ishmael Reed. Library Call Number: PS3568.E365J85 2011.

Reed has written a biting, satiric look at what passes for race relations in the American “post-racial” society.  O.J. Simpson’s trial in 1994 acts as a catalyst to the story here of five aging friends, all in a different art, all worried about the numerous illnesses and injuries of aging, watching America progress through the 90’s into the 21^st century.  Told through the eyes of African-American Paul Blessings, a diabetic television cartoonist for an alternative station, “Juice!” is an obsessive account of Simpson’s trial, the rise of the corporation and the burial of culture.  Blessings, who pens a cartoon called Attitude the Badger, says, “Jonathan Kraal, who had taken over this…network kept me on.  He wanted his station to appeal to high school teachers, dot commers and MBAs.  I have nothing in common with these people.” 

          Dalkey Archive says, “Juice! serves as a comi-tragedy, chronicling the increased anxieties of ‘post-race’ America.”

Browsing Area Book of the Week, December 19, 2011

Girls to the Front: the true story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution by Sara Marcus. Library Call Number: ML3534.3.M37 2010.

A Brooklyn-based journalist gives a brash, gutsy chronicle of the empowering music and feminist movement of the early 1990s led by young women rock groups like Bikini Kill and Bratmobile. Politicized by such national events as the backlash against feminism in the press, the first Iraq War, and the Supreme Court's gearing up to review Roe v. Wade, young women were incensed. Kathleen Hanna, a college student from Olympia, Wash., was spurred to action after interviewing writer Kathy Acker and working for a domestic violence shelter, and she decided to start a band. Hanna, along with Tobi Vail, a fanzine writer (Jigsaw) and former punk rocker who was dating Nirvana's Kurt Cobain, were on a mission to spread female rebellion via their band, Bikini Kill. Meanwhile, Allison Wolfe and Molly Neuman, who had met at the University of Oregon, were in Washington, D.C., cobbling together their own band, Bratmobile.

Thus, writes Marcus in this compelling account, the Grrrl Revolution was sparked. Marcus enthusiastically tracks the "scattered cartographies of rebellion" and captures the combustible excitement of this significant if short-lived moment. –(Publisher’s Weekly Review)

Library Video of the Week, September 26, 2011.

Never Enough: a Documentary  by Kelly Anderson. Distributed through New Day Films.  Library Call Number: RC533 .N48 2010 (36 minutes.)

From the package liner notes: "Do we own our things, or do they own us? [This film] probes our relationship with the material world through three Americans' relationships with their 'stuff.' Michele Gitlin has 700 sweaters. In touch with the pain as well as the pleasure of over-collecting, she calls Ron Alford, the 'Disaster Master,' for help. Ron, a de-cluttering expert who coined the term 'disposophobia' and believes that 'clutter begins in the head, and ends up on the floor,' determines that Michele is indeed a hoarder. We follow Ron as he visits a retired marine (who owns 7,800 Beanie Baby dolls), and a Home Shopping Network addict whose purchases have made his apartment unlivable. [This film] is a meditation on material culture, consumerism, mental illness and the social fabric of our lives".

Browsing Area book of the Week, March 21, 2011.

Sing Me Back Home: Love, Death and Country Music by Dana Jennings.  Library Call Number: ML3524 .J45 2008

“The years from about 1950 to 1970 were the golden age of twang. Country music's giants all strode the earth in those years: Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, George Jones and Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette. And many of the standards that still define country were recorded then. Author Jennings pushes past the iconic voices and images to get at what classic country music truly means to us today. Yes, country tells the story of rural America in the twentieth century--but the obsessions of classic country were obsessions of America as a whole: drinking and cheating, class and the yearning for home, God and death. Jennings knows all of this firsthand: his people lived their lives by country music. This book is about a vanished world in which the Depression never ended and the sixties never arrived.  --From publisher description.

Browsing Area book of the Week, February 21, 2011.

The Making of African America: the four great migrations by Ira Berlin.

Library Call Number: E185.B473 2010.
          Beginning with the Middle Passage, when Africans were forcibly taken from their homeland, Berlin traces the movement and migrations of Black Americans from Colonial times to the present. After slave ships arrived, slaves were transported across the South in huge numbers to work on plantations in the second migration. During the first half of the 20th century there was a similar movement, though voluntary, as millions of sharecroppers and poor farmers, traveled North, all but abandoning some small towns, seeking industrial jobs in the car factories of Michigan and the slaughterhouses of Illinois and Kansas. They found work making tires and glass in Ohio, boilers, submarines and cookware in Wisconsin, steel in Pennsylvania, warships in New York and New Jersey. Finally, a new influx of immigrants appeared from Africa, South America and the Caribbean. All four movements have had a profound effect on Black history and culture, as well as on America itself.