Middlesex County Community Foundation Grants Awarded To Essex Library

Thanks to two generous grants from the Middlesex County Community Foundation, the Essex Library will be able to offer two very special programs for young people in 2009.

Days of Knights, offered during the February school break, Feb. 17th thru the 21st, is a daily series of events themed around chivalry, knighthood, and the Middle Ages, with crafts like shield-making, heraldry, stories, films, and more, that ends with an all-day Medieval Fair and a program by the curators of the Higgins Armory Museum, in which kids will see actual armor and weapons displayed and demonstrated. Huzzah!

The second program, offered in the spring, is called GirlZone, and is aimed at helping teen girls gain essential life skills in a supportive and encouraging environment. Girls will learn about grooming, self-image, job interview techniques, manners, and more during the six once-weekly meetings.

The Middlesex County Community Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the quality of life in Middlesex County. Its two-fold mission: to work with charitably-minded individuals and organizations to build permanent endowments and other charitable funds; and to support local nonprofit organizations through effective grantmaking to address community needs. Since its founding in 1997, the Community Foundation has provided more than $1.1 million in grants to more than 150 organizations for the arts, cultural and heritage programs, educational activities, environmental improvements, and for health and human services.

Take A Bus To South Pacific

The Essex Library is offering a bus trip on Wednesday, March 11th (matinee) to Lincoln Center to see Essex resident David Pittsinger in the Tony Award-winning Broadway revival of Rogers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific.

Tickets are $150 per person and include round-trip Dattco coach transportation and an orchestra seat at the show. The bus will leave from the Essex Town hall parking lot at 9a.m. which will give us time to eat lunch in NYC before the show. A list of neighborhood restaurants will be handed out on the bus.

Credit cards are accepted. Checks should be made out to Friends Of The Essex Library. Tickets must be paid in full by December 29th. We cannot confirm your reservation without payment. Refunds will not be available. Contact the Library if you have any questions: 860 767-1560.

Whole Foods For The Whole Body Cooking Class

Cook Well, Be Well! On Sunday, January 25th at 1p.m. nutritionist Belinda Murano of “It’s Your Thyme” in Old Saybrook will conduct this tasty cooking class in making delicious food that’s healthy for you. She’ll be serving up flavorful samples of her “whole foods” cuisine, along with cooking tips, recipes, and new ways to spice up your culinary repertoire.

Poetry In Winter With Victoria Murphy

Join Victoria Murphy on four Wednesday mornings: January 21st, 28th, February 4th and 11th, at 10:30a.m. as she examines some poetic forms including: the Villanelle, the Sestina, and the Heroic Couplet by reading a variety of examples, both ancient and modern. The recommended text is: The Making Of A Poem edited by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland; copies will be available at the circulation desk.

Death and Taxes: What You Don’t Know CAN Hurt You

Join us for three very informative Tuesday evenings–on January 13th, 20th and 27th at 7p.m. hosted by the Hon. Judge Deborah Pearl of Essex Probate Court and Suzanne Kitchings, Esq., who specializes in Elder law and estate planning. Each evening, a different topic will be explored relating to estate planning, wills, trusts, and avoiding the common pitfalls of probate. You may not be able to take it with you–but you can find out how to protect it for those you leave behind.

The Met Comes To The Library, With Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin

Join us on Sunday, January 11th at 3p.m. for the third in our “Live From The Met on HD” screenings.  This time out, we serve up Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, the gorgeous adaptation of Pushkin’s tragedy of unrequited love starring: Renée Fleming, Ramón Vargas and Dmitri Hvorostovsky. Valery Gergiev conducts a thrilling account of Tchaikovsky’s most intensely passionate score. A signature role for the lovely Renée!

Centerbrook Architecture Series Continues

Join us at the Library on Friday, January 9th at 7p.m. when Jefferson B. Riley, FAIA, partner at Centerbrook Architects, will present The Seven Layers Of Allure; Understanding Humanism In Architecture.

Jeff Riley received a Bachelor of Arts from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin in 1968 and a Master of Architecture degree from Yale University in 1972. In 1975 he was a founding partner of Centerbrook Architects and Planners. In 1992 he was invested into the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects.

Since 1978 he has been the master planner and architect for over 55 projects at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. Since 1990 Mr. Riley has worked with the United Church of Christ Fellowship of Architects to develop liturgical design guidelines for church buildings. In 1999 he received the Lucia R. Briggs Distinguished Achievement Award from his alma mater, Lawrence University. In 2001 his own house in Connecticut received a 25 Year Award for Design Excellence from the New England Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

Tai Chi At The Library

Learn about the ancient art of Tai Chi with Master Zhang Zhao Xun in an introductory demonstration at the Library on Saturday, January 10th, at 12:30p.m. Relax, breathe, and find an inner balance that will not only improve your physical flexibility and improve your outlook but will reduce stress and be fun too. No special equipment is necessary and Tai Chi may be enjoyed by young and old alike. Comfortable clothing and flat, rubber-soled shoes are recommended. Master Zhang has devoted his life to the study of martial arts and will be starting a Tai Chi class locally soon. Call the Library at 767-1560 to register.

Holiday Closings

Just a quick reminder that the Library will be closed on December 24th, 25th, 31st and January 1st. And mind our new hours:

Sunday- 1-5
Monday-  11-5
Tuesday-  10-7
Wednesday-  10-5
Thursday-  10-7
Friday-  10-5
Saturday-  10-2

New York Times’ 10 Best Books Of 2008

The Times announced their selection of the 10 Best Books of 2008 recently. Not surprisingly, many of these books were award nominees, if not winners, and have frequently appeared on other ‘best of 2008′ lists.

Fiction

Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser  “In his first collection in five years, a master fabulist in the tradition of Poe and Nabo­kov invents spookily plausible parallel universes in which the deepest human emotions and yearnings are transformed into their monstrous opposites.”

A Mercy by Toni Morrison  “The fate of a slave child abandoned by her mother animates this allusive novel — part Faulknerian puzzle, part dream-song — about orphaned women who form an eccentric household in late-17th-century America. Morrison’s farmers and rum traders, masters and slaves, indentured whites and captive Native Americans live side by side, often in violent conflict, in a lawless, ripe American Eden that is both a haven and a prison — an emerging nation whose identity is rooted equally in Old World superstitions and New World appetites and fears.”

Netherland by Joseph O’Neill  “O’Neill’s seductive ode to New York — a city that even in bad times stubbornly clings to its belief “in its salvific worth” — is narrated by a Dutch financier whose privileged Manhattan existence is upended by the events of Sept. 11, 2001. When his wife departs for London with their small son, he stays behind, finding camaraderie in the unexpectedly buoyant world of immigrant cricket players, most of them West Indians and South Asians, including an entrepreneur with Gatsby-size aspirations.”

2666 by Roberto Bolaño  “This latest work, first published in Spanish in 2004, is a mega- and meta-detective novel with strong hints of apocalyptic foreboding. It contains five separate narratives, each pursuing a different story with a cast of beguiling characters — European literary scholars, an African-American journalist and more — whose lives converge in a Mexican border town where hundreds of young women have been brutally murdered.”

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri  “There is much cultural news in these precisely observed studies of modern-day Bengali-Americans — many of them Ivy-league strivers ensconced in prosperous suburbs who can’t quite overcome the tug of traditions nurtured in Calcutta. With quiet artistry and tender sympathy, Lahiri creates an impressive range of vivid characters — young and old, male and female, self-knowing and self-deluding — in engrossing stories that replenish the classic themes of domestic realism: loneliness, estrangement and family discord.”

Nonfiction

The Dark Side: the inside story of how the war on terror turned into a war on American ideals by Jane Mayer  “Mayer’s meticulously reported descent into the depths of President Bush’s anti­terrorist policies peels away the layers of legal and bureaucratic maneuvering that gave us Guantánamo Bay, “extraordinary rendition,” “enhanced” interrogation methods, “black sites,” warrantless domestic surveillance and all the rest. But Mayer also describes the efforts ofunsung heroes, tucked deep inside the administration, who risked their careers in the struggle to balance the rule of law against the need to meet a threat unlike any other in the nation’s history.”

The Forever War by Dexter Filkins  “The New York Times correspondent, whose tours of duty have taken him from Afghanistan in 1998 to Iraq during the American intervention, captures a decade of armed struggle in harrowingly detailed vignettes. Whether interviewing jihadists in Kabul, accompanying marines on risky patrols in Falluja or visiting grieving families in Baghdad, Filkins makes us see, with almost hallucinogenic immediacy, the true human meaning and consequences of the “war on terror.””

Nothing To Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes  “This absorbing memoir traces Barnes’s progress from atheism (at age 20) to agnosticism (at 60) and examines the problem of religion not by rehashing the familiar quarrel between science and mystery, but rather by weighing the timeless questions of mortality and aging. Barnes distills his own experiences — and those of his parents and brother — in polished and wise sentences that recall the writing of Montaigne, Flaubert and the other French masters he includes in his discussion.”

This Republic Of Suffering: death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust  “In this powerful book, Faust, the president of Harvard, explores the legacy, or legacies, of the “harvest of death” sown and reaped by the Civil War. In the space of four years, 620,000 Americans died in uniform, roughly the same number as those lost in all the nation’s combined wars from the Revolution through Korea. This doesn’t include the thousands of civilians killed in epidemics, guerrilla raids and draft riots. The collective trauma created “a newly centralized nation-state,” Faust writes, but it also established “sacrifice and its memorialization as the ground on which North and South would ultimately reunite.””

The World Is What It Is: the authorized biography of V. S. Naipaul by Patrick French  “The most surprising word in this biography is “authorized.” Naipaul, the greatest of all postcolonial authors, cooperated fully with French, opening up a huge cache of private letters and diaries and supplementing the revelations they disclosed with remarkably candid interviews. It was a brave, and wise, decision. French, a first-rate biographer, has a novelist’s command of story and character, and he patiently connects his subject’s brilliant oeuvre with the disturbing facts of an unruly life.”