Librarian’s Pick: Canyon Dreams – Michael Powell

“Deep in the heart of northern Arizona, in a small and isolated patch of the vast 17.5-million-acre Navajo reservation, sits Chinle High School. Here, basketball is passion, passed from grandparent to parent to child. Rez Ball is a sport for winters where dark and cold descend fast and there is little else to do but roam mesa tops, work, and wonder what the future holds. The town has 4,500 residents and the high school arena seats 7,000. Fans drive thirty, fifty, even eighty miles to see the fast-paced and highly competitive matchups that are more than just games to players and fans.

Celebrated Times journalist Michael Powell brings us a narrative of triumph and hardship, a moving story about a basketball team on a Navajo reservation that shows how important sports can be to youths in struggling communities, and the transcendent magic and painful realities that confront Native Americans living on reservations. This book details his season-long immersion in the team, town, and culture, in which there were exhilarating wins, crushing losses, and conversations on long bus rides across the desert about dreams of  leaving home and the fear of the same.”

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Librarian’s Pick: We Are Not Here To Be Bystanders – Linda Sarsour

We Are Not Here to Be Bystanders: A Memoir of Love and Resistance “On a chilly spring morning in Brooklyn, nineteen-year-old Linda Sarsour stared at her reflection, dressed in a hijab for the first time. She saw in the mirror the woman she was growing to be—a young Muslim American woman unapologetic in her faith and her activism, who would discover her innate sense of justice in the aftermath of 9/11. Now heralded for her award-winning leadership of the Women’s March on Washington, in We Are Not Here to Be Bystanders Linda Sarsour offers a poignant story of community and family.

From the Brooklyn bodega her father owned, where Linda learned the real meaning of intersectionality, to protests in the streets of Washington, DC, Linda’s experience as a daughter of Palestinian immigrants is a moving portrayal of what it means to find one’s voice and use it for the good of others. We follow Linda as she learns the tenets of successful community organizing, and through decades of fighting for racial, economic, gender, and social justice as she becomes one of the most recognized activists in the nation. We also see her honoring her grandmother’s dying wish, protecting her children, building resilient friendships, and mentoring others even as she loses her first mentor in a tragic accident. Throughout, she inspires readers to take action as she reaffirms that we are not here to be bystanders.

In his foreword to the book, Harry Belafonte writes of Linda, “While we may not have made it to the Promised Land, my peers and I, my brothers and sisters in liberation can rest easy that the future is in the hands of leaders like Linda Sarsour. I have often said to Linda that she embodies the principle and purpose of another great Muslim leader, brother Malcolm X.”

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5 Owls- Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

SO MUCH HAPPENS IN THIS BOOK

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is the third book in the Harry Potter series. In it, JK Rowling, ramps up the action and the world building by revealing a ton of new characters, ideas and history. Just to name a few: Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, Peter Pettigrew, animagi, boggarts, dementors, Expecto patronum!, the Marauder’s Map, time turners, etc, etc, etc. We learn more about the previous war against Voldemort and a bit about Harry’s parents’ past. Phew! So many things we learn in this book remain important for the rest of the series. 

We hope you had a great time reading the third book in this exciting series, and will join us in reading the next installment, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire! Please enjoy discussing the events of this book in the comments!

  • Tell us in the comments what you would do with a time turner?
  • If you could have a long lost relative/godparent, who would you want it to be?
  • If you could hear this same story from another person’s point of view, who would you choose?
  • Were you shocked at the reveal of Scabbers’ true identity? 
  • What do you think your boggart would look like?
  • How about your patronus?
  • Why couldn’t anyone prove Sirius was innocent?
What did we miss? Is there anything you would like to discuss or any questions you and your family had? Did you have a favorite quote or a favorite scene?
Please introduce them in the comments.

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We ask library patrons under 13 to participate in these discussions with adult supervision. We would like to encourage families to incorporate discussion questions into their at-home book chats. Discussions are open to first time readers, and super-fans, so please limit spoilers to the book currently being discussed and previous ones only.  There will be a second post, later in the month for overarching theories and ideas, and for connecting what happens in this book to events in future installments.

Please be respectful.

Librarian’s Pick: The Watergate Girl – Jill Wine-Banks

Image result for the watergate girl“It was a time, much like today, when Americans feared for the future of their democracy, and women stood up for equal treatment. At the crossroads of the Watergate scandal and the women’s movement was a young lawyer named Jill Wine Volner (as she was then known), barely thirty years old and the only woman on the team that prosecuted the highest-ranking White House officials. Called “the mini-skirted lawyer” by the press, she fought to receive the respect accorded her male counterparts―and prevailed.

In The Watergate Girl, Jill Wine-Banks opens a window on this troubled time in American history. It is impossible to read about the crimes of Richard Nixon and the people around him without drawing parallels to today’s headlines. The book is also the story of a young woman who sought to make her professional mark while trapped in a failing marriage, buffeted by sexist preconceptions, and harboring secrets of her own. Her house was burgled, her phones were tapped, and even her office garbage was rifled through.

At once a cautionary tale and an inspiration for those who believe in the power of justice and the rule of law, The Watergate Girl is a revelation about our country, our politics, and who we are as a society.”

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Librarian’s Pick: A Century Of Votes For Women – Christina Wolbrecht

“How have American women voted in the first 100 years since the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment? How have popular understandings of women as voters both persisted and changed over time? In A Century of Votes for Women, Christina Wolbrecht and J. Kevin Corder offer an unprecedented account of women voters in American politics over the last ten decades. Bringing together new and existing data, the book provides unique insight into women’s (and men’s) voting behavior, and traces how women’s turnout and vote choice evolved across a century of enormous transformation overall and for women in particular. Wolbrecht and Corder show that there is no such thing as ‘the woman voter’; instead they reveal considerable variation in how different groups of women voted in response to changing political, social, and economic realities. The book also demonstrates how assumptions about women as voters influenced politicians, the press, and scholars.”

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Librarian’s Pick: Suffrage – Ellen Carol Dubois

“Distinguished historian Ellen Carol DuBois begins in the pre-Civil War years with foremothers Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Sojourner Truth as she explores the links of the woman suffrage movement to the abolition of slavery. After the Civil War, Congress granted freed African American men the right to vote but not white and African American women, a crushing disappointment. DuBois shows how suffrage leaders persevered through the Jim Crow years into the reform era of Progressivism. She introduces new champions Carrie Chapman Catt and Alice Paul, who brought the fight into the 20th century, and she shows how African American women, led by Ida B. Wells-Barnett, demanded voting rights even as white suffragists ignored them.

DuBois explains how suffragists built a determined coalition of moderate lobbyists and radical demonstrators in forging a strategy of winning voting rights in crucial states to set the stage for securing suffrage for all American women in the Constitution. In vivid prose DuBois describes suffragists’ final victories in Congress and state legislatures, culminating in the last, most difficult ratification, in Tennessee.

DuBois follows women’s efforts to use their voting rights to win political office, increase their voting strength, and pass laws banning child labor, ensuring maternal health, and securing greater equality for women.

Suffrage: Women’s Long Battle for the Vote is sure to become the authoritative account of one of the great episodes in the history of American democracy.”

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