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, December 10, 2012.

50/50, starring, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Seth Rogen and Anna Kendrick. Directed by Jonathan Levine.  (2011.)  Library Call Number: PN1995.9.C55F54 2012.

 

          From the Amazon Product Description: “Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Seth Rogen team up to beat the odds in a film that Rolling Stone calls achingly hilarious and heartfelt. Diagnosed with spinal cancer, 27 year old Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) navigates the road to recovery with the sometimes overbearing support of his crude best friend (Rogen), his smothering mother (Angelica Huston) and an inexperienced therapist (Anna Kendrick).  Inspired by a true story of writer Will Reiser, 50/50 is an honest yet hysterically funny account of a young man's journey toward healing.”
          Although billed as a comedy, the film is more a serious look at cancer in a young man, with poignantly funny scenes mixed in.  The combination of drama and humor gives the film a more realistic feel and avoids what could have been the usual maudlin, Hollywood fare.

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, October 1, 2012

       Lunch Line, a documentary by Michael Graziano and Ernie Park. Library Call Number:LB3479.U6L83 2010.

From the Liner Notes: The National School Lunch Program began in 1946, and now more than 60 years later, feeds more than 31 million children every day. In this documentary, leaders from all sides of the school food debate including government officials, school food service experts, activists and students, weigh in on the program and discuss ways to continue nourishing America's children for another 60 years.     

     The documentary also follows six kids from one of the toughest neighborhoods in Chicago as they set out to fix school lunch, and end up at the White House. Their unlikely journey parallels the dramatic transformation of school lunch from a patchwork of local anti-hunger efforts to a robust national feeding program. The film tracks the behind-the-scenes details of school lunch and childhood hunger from key moments in the 1940s, 1960s and 1980s to the present, revealing political twists, surprising alliances and more common ground than people might realize.

    A selection of the Stout Food for Thought Series.

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.”

Library Video of the Week, December 19, 2011

Beyond Babyland, a documentary by David Appleby and Craig Leake. University of Memphis; Distributed by Cinema Guild. Library Call Number: RJ60.U52T3 2010.

From the Container insert: "Of the thirty most industrialized nations, the U.S. has the worst record of infant mortality, with African American babies dying at three times the rate of whites. In some places, that rate equals those of many third world countries. When [the] filmmakers…discovered that their hometown of Memphis had the highest infant mortality rate in the country, they decided to follow those individuals who were working to reverse the statistics. Soon they began meeting some of the young pregnant mothers most at risk, and decided to concentrate much of their efforts on learning more about their particular circumstances. The film takes us from the neonatal intensive care unit where doctors and nurses fight for the lives of pre-term babies, to a county cemetery that buries so many infants the residents of the poorest neighborhoods call it ‘Babyland.’

          We observe doctors, nurses, church volunteers and social workers as they try to navigate their way through dwindling resources, and we meet three teenage girls whose stories give us a glimpse into the stressful realities of the inner city—conditions that contribute significantly to the high mortality rate."

     This video can be found in the 3rd floor collection.

Browsing Area Book of the Week, April 18, 2011.

Half-Broke Horses: A true-life novel by Jeannette Walls.
Library Call Number: PS3623.A3644 H35 2009.
          Author Walls introduces us to her grandmother, Lily Casey Smith, by way of an autobiographical/fictional rendition of her life. Growing up in the early 20th century on a ranch in Texas, Lily’s first home was a dugout in the bank of a creek, with a sod roof browsing goats occasionally stepped through and walls that gophers, snakes and scorpions would regularly pierce. Helping her father break horses by the age of six, Lily fought for the education that led her to become a schoolteacher, grew up during the Great Depression and eventually settled on an Arizona ranch. Replete with real-life drama and tragedy, the stories of Lily and her family provide a wonderful and evocative glimpse into western America in the early to mid-20th century and illuminate much of the self-reliance and self-discipline necessary to survive in that era. From the flash flood in the opening chapter to the tragedies of her later years, this is a modest American woman worthy of great respect.