RI Selects: Readings & Signings
June 20 @ 4 p.m.
Ruth Reichl—the best-selling memoirist, editor of Gourmet and Columbia County weekender—will discuss and sign copies of her latest book, Not Becoming My Mother.
Admission, $25
Spencertown Academy
Spencertown, NY
Saturday, June 27th at 4 p.m.
Adrianne Lobel, daughter of Arnold Lobel, will discuss her father’s post-humously published illustrated book, The Frogs and Toads All Sang.
Oblong Books & Music
Montgomery Row
Rhinebeck, NY
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 06/16/09 at 05:53 PM • Permalink
Reading List: New Books by Local Authors
Sarah Montague new book The Adult Rider: A Practical Guide for First-Time Equestrians and Adults Getting Back in the Saddle is practical and inspirational.
Merritt Bookstore
Millbrook, NY
On the heels of her first novel, Little Pink Slips, former McCall’s editor-in-chief Sally Koslow has just come out with another comic novel, The Late, Lamented Molly Marx, a stylish who-done-it set on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. If all Chick Lit were this funny and well written, the genre would have a better rep. (Ballantine Books, $23)
FLIP! For Decorating (which you can get a feel for in the slide show above) by Elizabeth Mayhew is, according to The New York Times “extremely satisfying, like watching a stop-action film, and very, very useful.” (Random House, $24)
When George Washington was born, the New World had virtually no artists. Over the course of his career, Washington became the subject of choice for an emerging band of painters and sculptors. He posed often, if reluctantly, transforming the culture of our country in the process. Hugh Howard, author of The Painter’s Chair: George Washington and the Making of American Art will read from his new book and discuss the process of researching it. (Bloomsbury Press, $26.95)
With Don’t Cry, Mary Gaitskill, “the onetime mistress of transgression, the former high priestess of literary cool, has written a deeply compassionate book,” according to Claire Dederer, writing for Slate. (Pantheon, $23.95)
In his moment-by-moment insider’s account of the fall of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street author William D. Cohan captures the pervasive Wall Street culture that led to the world-wide financial meltdown. (Doubleday, $27.95)
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 05/14/09 at 10:07 AM • Permalink
Elizabeth Cunningham Brings Her Latest “Maeve” to Oblong Books
Fans (and you know who you are) of the Maeve Chronicles, Elizabeth Cunningham’s series of novels that combine scholorship, whimsy, and delectable fiction to relate the life, times, and spiritual journey of a Celtic Mary Magdalene, named Maeve, may meet the author and hear her read from her latest, Bright Dark Madonna on Friday evening, April 3, at Oblong Books in Rhinebeck.
For those new to Cunningham’s work, it is, by all accounts, unnecessary to have read her two previous Maeve novels, Magdalen Rising and The Passion of Mary Magdalen, to get swept away by this latest in the series, which takes the reader on a breathtaking journey from the temple porticoes of Jerusalem, to the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, to the south of France, and, as always, to the treacherous terrain of the human heart. There will be time to catch up later, since Cunningham, a direct descendant of nine generations of Episcopal priests and herself an ordained interfaith minister at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, balances writing with a counseling practice. Hence, it’s likely to be a while before the author, who lives in Staatsburg, is able to produce the fourth Maeve that the end of this book suggests might be forthcoming.
Elizabeth Cunningham Reading and Book Signing
Friday, April 3rd, 7:30 p.m.
Oblong Books & Music
6422 Montgomery Street; Suite 6
Rhinebeck; 845.876.0500
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 04/03/09 at 05:55 AM • Permalink
A Conversation with “House of Cards” Author William D. Cohan
Author William D. Cohan, our neighbor in Columbia County, was an investment banker for 17 years before he left Wall Street and wrote his first best-seller, The Last Tycoons. On Saturday evening, March 28, he will be at the Hammertown Barn in Pine Plains to talk about his latest book, House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street, a moment-by-moment insider’s account of the fall of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, exactly one year ago. As a preview, Rural Intelligence offers up an exclusive Q&A with the fast-thinking author.
RI: When did you decide to write a book about the fall of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, and how did you get it out so fast? There is an immediacy to the reporting in House of Cards that’s very hard to capture after the fact; it suggests you really were a fly on the wall while it was all happening.
WDC: I started the book literally the weekend Bear Stearns was sold to JPMorganChase. I had been in the middle of another book when my editor, Bill Thomas, at Doubleday, thought it might be worth changing gears to focus on the unfolding financial crisis. For the next eight months, I worked assiduously—did all the research, interviewed some 125 people, and wrote the book—and met the December 1 deadline. The book came out on March 10. Last fall, I remember reading a profile of Tom Friedman in the New Yorker where he talked about coming up with the idea for the World is Flat and then deciding he would do what he had to do to get the book done and published before anyone else came up with a similar idea. There were at least two other books about what happened at Bear Stearns and why in the works within weeks of my getting signed up and I decided, if I could do it, I wanted to be the first book out without sacrificing any—I hope— quality.
RI: Your background is in finance, yet you walked away from Wall Street to become a writer. You’ve done very well with this book and your previous book, The Last Tycoons. But talk about a high-risk gamble. Why?
WDC: It was actually a fairly simple calculus. I was fired from my job as a senior Managing Director at JPMorganChase in January 2004. I was at the prime of my career and was just summarily lopped off in a downsizing. I had been an investigative reporter before I went to Wall Street and I decided that I had had enough of Wall Street and Wall Street had had enough of me. I wanted to write a book about the incredible culture and characters at Lazard, especially since the previous book about the firm was 25 years old and had been written by an outsider. So much had changed at the firm and it was so mysterious to many people that I just couldn’t wait to tell the story. I wrote a proposal, got an agent and sold the book in an auction to Doubleday. Two years later I was done. The book was a New York Times bestseller and the winner of the 2007 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs business book of the year. I could not have imagined a better start to a second career, which I embarked on out of desperation more than anything else.
RI: Where do you stand on the argument that the outsize salaries of the financial services industry are essential “to get and retain the best people.” Was Jimmy Cayne “the best people”? Your sources say he “barely understood” the exotic, mortgage-backed instruments his company Bear Stearns was creating and selling. (And isn’t “barely understood” a euphemism for “was utterly clueless,” as Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan now admit to being about derivatives?) What about Warren Spector, the brilliant creator of some of those (as it turns out) disastrous instruments? Was he a “best people”? Your book is rife with characters who pull on their bespoke pants one leg at a time, at most. Rather than the much-heralded “incentive,” don’t grandiose salaries just nurture hubris and attract personalities prone to morbid competitiveness?
WDC: As Charles de Gaulle famously said, “The graveyards are full of indispensable men.” The truth is that the compensation and incentive system on Wall Street has been badly broken for a generation since Wall Street firms converted from private partnerships – with shared liabilities and shared profits for the partners – to public companies, where bankers and traders were rewarded lavishly for taking short-term risks with their shareholders’ money. If the bets they took paid off they got paid millions and if the bets they paid did not pay off but generated short-term revenues, they also got paid millions and any liabilities related to those revenues were the burden of the shareholders. There is no doubt the executive committee at Bear Stearns – five men, including both Cayne and Spector – got paid way too much for what they did. In 2007, they split around $150 million among themselves for creating the house of cards that collapsed a year later. There has been no mention of anyone returning that money. The culture on Wall Street of alpha males – mostly – fighting over vast sums of money and then complaining when someone’s bonus is “only” two million dollars is disgusting, grotesque and immoral.
RI: Sorry to harp on this, but don’t you think the outsize starting salaries also highjack some of our best young people on their way to pursuing what might well have turned out to be more satisfying and fruitful (for themselves and society) careers?
WDC: One of the best things that I predict will come out of this crisis will be a sea-change among our best and brightest who will see quickly that there is much more to life than heading to Wall Street to push paper around, in the hope of making millions of dollars before they are 30. That is one of the enduring myths of Wall Street that has been rightly shattered by this current financial calamity that was caused in large part by the greedy behavior of many people on Wall Street.
RI: What do you think of the Obama administration’s bank-rescue plan? Do you think it will restore trust? Do you think it should? Or is the Street as much a casino as ever?
WDC: Obviously the Obama administration was dealt a very bad hand here and, I think, is playing it the best way it can. The only way to get the “toxic assets” off the books of the foolish banks is to find investors who want to buy them at prices the banks want to sell them at. By providing attractive financing to buyers of these assets the last impediment to trading them is removed and hopefully confidence in the market will be restored. I think Secretary Geithner deserves high marks for coming up with a well-conceived proposal that has the potential to help restore confidence to the markets. Only time will tell of course but the tenor of things seems to be improving in the capital markets, which is the first step to an overall recovery.
RI: Wall Street is, on the one hand, the last of the great macho strongholds, and, on the other, so emotional (“Stocks are down of fears of….” Fill in the Blank). Don’t you think if women were running that show, they’d be dismissed with a wave of the hand as a bunch of hysterics?
WDC: No actually, I am of the view that if more women were at the helm of Wall Street firms – there are exactly zero women at the helm at the moment that I know of with the exception of maybe a tiny boutique or two – that this kind of greedy, alpha-male behavior that created this whole dastardly problem could have been avoided. Now, this is probably wishful thinking, along the lines of conventional wisdom that if more women were in charge of governments there would be fewer wars but I believe it nonetheless. And I would welcome what remains of Wall Street to test the thesis.
House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street
A conversation and book signing with best-selling author and neighbor William D. Cohan
Saturday, March 28, 6 - 7:30 p.m.
Hammertown Barn
3201 Route 199, Pine Plains; 518.398.7075
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 03/25/09 at 06:49 AM • Permalink
Nostalgia Now: “Barns of the Berkshires”
Photographs by Stephen Donaldson
Stephen Donaldson is a photographer who thinks like a cultural anthropologist. His latest book, Barns of the Berkshires (Schiffer Publishing, $24.95), not only documents a significant and vanishing part of our rural landscape but also sounds the alarm for saving barns before it’s too late. “The old post and beam barns don’t stand a chance,’ he says sadly. “They give no value to the farmer anymore.’ Donaldson laments that only wealthy people can afford to maintain the historic barns of the Berkshires, whether they’re kept for farm animals and storage or converted into residences. “If we don’t mobilize, we are going to lose the very essence of what is so appealing about living here,” he says.
Over the past ten years, he has photographed scores of Berkshire barns and he says that when he goes back to photograph them in another season they’ve sometimes disappeared. He thinks the best way to save landmark barns would be to establish not-for-profit roadside trusts dedicated to their maintenance. In his nostalgic photographs, he makes clear that every barn is site specific; he believes barns should be kept in their native landscapes to honor their history. It’s impossible to deny his contention that barns are essential to the “visual fabric of the region that makes it such an appealing place for both visitors and those seeking an alternate lifestyle to the charge-ahead pace of our cities.”
Donaldson, who moved to Great Barrington ten years ago after living in Detroit, England, New York, and LA, traveled around the world from 1995 -1997 to take pictures and establish a stock photography archive. Now he shoots for magazines works on books, and he deejays every Monday night at public radio station WBCR 97.9 (his program is called “The Doctor Nod Sedation Station Program”.) He is taking pictures for his next book, which will chronicle historic Route 7 from Long Island Sound to the Canadian border. And he will continue to champion beleaguered Berkshires barns, which he sees as more than architectural artifacts: “For me the barns are symbols of integrity, wholesomeness, and a down-to-earth ethic that was an essential building block for this country.”
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 03/24/09 at 07:16 AM • Permalink
Photographer Annie Leibovitz Signs New Book
The difference between great photographers and the rest of us is that for them life occurs in slow motion and without a distracting sound tract, affording them plenty of mental space and time to appraise a scene, consider camera angles, change lenses, and adjust f-stops, while the rest of us are reacting, often frantically, to the events taking place before our eyes. This detachment has earned photographer Annie Leibovitz both great acclaim and some condemnation, the latter primarily for the pictures she took, then published, of her life partner, the writer Susan Sontag, as she lay dying in 2004, which some critics found chillingly exploitive. In Leibovitz’s new book, Annie Leibovitz At Work, she reveals herself not just through her pictures but, unusually for a photographer, with words. Lots of them, about things as glamorous as the famous nude sitting she did with John and Yoko, and as the mundane as how a young photographer might go about getting started (by sticking close to home and photographing the things and people you know best, such as your family). On Saturday, Leibovitz, who lives part-time in Dutchess County, will be available at two venues in the region so fans of her work can hear her speak, ask questions, and get signed copies of her book. Both bookstores request advance reservations.
Oblong Books & Music
Montgomery Row (Rt. 9), Rhinebeck; 845.876,0500
Saturday, December 20, 10 - 12
Merritt Bookstore
57 Front Street, Millbrook; 845.677.5857
Saturday, December 20, from 12:45
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 12/18/08 at 07:32 AM • Permalink
A Serious Conversation About “Scrapbooks: An American History” with Jessica Helfand
When I met Jessica Helfand five or six years ago, I was dumbstruck when she told me that one of the joys of having moved full-time to Falls Village from New York City was having more time to work. (I thought country life was all about recreation, but I’ve come to understand what she meant.) Helfand and her husband, William Drenttel, not only run one of the world’s premiere graphic design firms, Winterhouse, from northwestern Connecticut, but they also maintain one of the design community’s most influential blogs, Design Observer. What’s more, Helfand also manages to find time to teach at Yale, raise two children, and research and write books, including her latest, Scrapbooks: An American History (Yale University Press; $45). It’s one of those rare coffee-table books that is scholarly and accessible; it’s informative, fun with a near universal appeal.
RI: The scrapbooks in your book seems to be unselfconscious. Do you think that it is possible to keep unselfconscious scrapbooks today?
JH: I think it is indeed possible, if you think of a scrapbook as you do a camera: funny that scrapbooks might be considered self-conscious while people think nothing of taking countless numbers of snapshots. (Some serious photographers refer to this phenomenon as “fire-hosing” — literally, brandishing the digital camera as one would a fire hose, without self-censorship or self-editing.) Part of the problem stems from the emphasis on “getting it right” that’s largely been a consequence of all the merchandising surrounding “scrapbooking” as an industry. Some of the supplies are really quite extraordinary, and my point is not to denigrate them — on the contrary, they’re actually pretty great, some of them — but that, while they support the method, they don’t replace the motive, which is to make something extremely personal, not duplicative or generic.
I would say, too, that the whole idea of making something from limited means has long been of interest to artists and theorists because more isn’t now, nor has it ever been a way to necessarily make something better. So if we equate “un-selfconscious” with “limited means” (which I suppose I do, given that scrapbook-makers of long ago had no embellishments but drew from their own immediate orbit) then there’s probably an argument to be made, today, on behalf of a kind of sustainable scrapbooking: using what you have, emptying your pockets at the end of the day, saving all those post-it notes and things you might be inclined to toss. Less to the landfill, more a reflection of your everyday life — banal, perhaps, but also quite genuine, and in no small way, an authentic snapshot of who you are, where you live, what you do and value and experience. Ergo: unselfconscious.
Zelda Fitzgerald scrapbook, Auburn, AL, 1919
RI: One hundred years from now, will a visual historian like yourself be able to find scrapbooks from our era that will be as valuable historical documents?
JH: I certainly hope so. There will no doubt be more of them, since contemporary scrapbookers tend to work with archival materials more and more, while generations ago this was NOT the case. Librarians and archivists struggle with how to house and archive old scrapbooks, which are by their very nature extremely fragile. Many more scrapbooks will survive in coming years, so this will be less of a problem. Libraries may even upload and make them keyword-searchable. They’ll be easier to access and find: part of the difficulty I encountered during my research was due to the fact that they’re currently impossible to index. That will probably change, and soon.
RI: I save tickets stubs, birthday cards, thank you notes, invitations, Playbills, and name tags in a box. Do I have the makings of a contemporary scrapbook or do I just have a lot of paper?
JH: You’re in good company: I hear this from a lot of people, and to me it suggests there’s a scrapbook in your future. The difference between a box of paper and a scrapbook is the narrative you produce: there’s something about cementing something on a page that’s a kind of gesture of permanence— rather a meaningful thing in our frenetic, modern world. Bear in mind that even pasting something on a page does not, in and of itself, mean you can’t go in and edit: indeed, some of the most fascinating scrapbooks I looked at during the course of my research were compelling precisely because you could see someone’s perspective shifting: names crossed out, dates revised, items added, annotated, removed, concealed, and so forth. Messy. Just like life.
RI: Do your children keep scrapbooks?
JH: Our son does not, although he’s a pretty good photographer, and he’s obsessed with news: he’s building his own news-aggreggator and probably sees his blog as a kind of scrapbook. Our daughter’s a consummate maker, sort of a junior member of our studio (and our muse) — and, very much like I was at her age, a serious collage person. We keep a notebook together as well as several of our own: Fiona calls mine a scratchbook — part sketchbook, part scrapbook — very much inspired by the journals kept by Candy Jernigan (who is featured in my book). Jernigan, who died at 39, left over 500 notebooks filled with what she called “rejectimenta” — literally, things she rescued around her. I think the secret to keeping a scrapbook that’s meaningful is keeping it with you at all times, which means it has to be small enough to be portable.
RI: I suspect that more than a few people are keeping Obama scrapbooks. Do you think that it is possible that they will be valuable historical documents?
JH: I think they’ll be like any political scrapbooks — there are thousands of scrapbooks on JFK, the family, the assassination and more, for instance — sort of a time capsule that frames a moment in time. That said, I think there may be political scrapbooks out there that are not so momentous: some years ago, Bill and I were in Washington, DC back when Bob Kerrey was in the Senate. (He’s now the head of the New School in New York.) This was way before I wrote this book, but I remember that in the corner of his office — somewhere between the closed-circuit TV to the floor of Congress and his conference table — he had an old-fashioned drafting table and a glue pot. Open on the table was a 18x24 inch sketchpad, and a copy of that day’s Washington Post. And he told us that every day he’d read the paper and find one seminal thing — an cut it out, and paste it in that sketchpad. Now, you have to imagine how unusual this seemed at the time, in that place: a senator with a drafting table, keeping a scrapbook! But he was devoted to it, and the process of adding something every day seemed an almost meditative act for him. For future Kerrey biographers, I suspect that scrapbook will absolutely be a meaningful historical document, framing his days in the senate, life in Washington in the late 1990s, and so on.
Kelley scrapbook, Briarcliff Manor, NY, 1929
RI: Your book focuses on history, but have you seen any contemporary scrapbooks that make your heart race?
JH: Refer to question 4, above: Jernigan’s scrapbooks were life-changing for me because in them I saw an entire approach to making work. As a practicing designer who makes things, they seemed an unusual genre: part sketchbook, part journal, portable, personal, meaningful. But the longer answer is that many artists work in collage and in book form, and I share some of their work in my book — The Moleskine Project, for instance, or the 1000 Journals Project. They’re formally more interesting to me than the 12x12-inch scrapbooks in vogue today: ironically, I wrote my thesis in graduate school on the history of the square — a format that circumscribed every project I ever engaged in as a student, and that for a long time was thought to frame modernist design thinking — so I’ve actually spent quite a lot of time thinking about that format, that fascinating yet largely unforgiving aspect ratio. I am currently of the opinion that a more biased shape—6 x 9, for example—lends itself to more dramatic page compositions, and I would also say that what “makes my heart race” about many artist scrapbooks are the efforts to engage in a real narrative, to tell a story from page to page. And that’s kind of the point, isn’t it — to tell a story?
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 12/09/08 at 11:17 AM • Permalink
Celebrity Book Signings at Hammertown and Privet House
A bona fide celebrity—not just someone who is accomplished or has a well-known name—is a person whom you’ve always wanted to see in the flesh to determine whether the image you have from magazines and television is accurate. Both Mario Batali, the restaurateur and Food Network star (photographed with Hammertown Barn owner Joan Osofsky, left) and Carolyne Roehm, the fashion designer turned luxe lifestyle-and-garden guru, are larger than life characters—honest-to-goodness celebrities. This weekend, you can meet them at local book signings at Privet House in Warren, CT, and Hammertown Barn in Rhinebeck.
A confession: I have been star-struck by Carolyne Roehm for two decades since my days as a fact-checker at New York magazine when she was a fashion designer and the queen of “nouvelle society,” which New York chronicled in exhaustive detail. If anyone epitomized 1980s uptown glamour, it was Carolyne (right), who was then married to the financier Henry Kravis. In 1990, when I worked at Avenue magazine, I edited a story about the landscape architects who literally moved mountains on her estate, Weatherstone, in Sharon, CT. In 1993, when she and Kravis announced they were getting divorced, I wrote a eulogy for their marriage, Fractured Fairy Tale , in The New York Times. ) Two years ago, I wrote a story about her for the “Habitats” column in The New York Times Real Estate section called The Best Revenge (Isn’t It Always). Carolyne is as charming and captivating as she appears in magazine articles. All of her sumptuous books on gardening and entertaining—including the new A Passion for Blue & White—are inspirational eye candy.
How did Hammertown Barn’s Joan Osofsky lure celebrity chef Mario Batali back to her Rhinebeck store for a signing of his latest book Spain: A Culinary Road Trip. (The last time he visited Hammertown people waited outside in the snow to meet him!) “Mario is married to Susie Cahn. Susie is the daughter of Miles and Lillian Cahn, who owned Coach Bags and until a year or two ago, Coach Farm cheese,” explains Joan. “I am extremely good friends with Miles and Lillian. It was really quite a surprise, as I never expected he would come. People were calling and asking if he was coming again, and I laughed. I told this to Miles and Lillian, never expecting that Mario would take time in his busy schedule to do this again, and the next thing I know he’s planned to drive up, stay over at his inlaws (in Gallatin) and come to Rhinebeck!”
December 6; 3 - 6 PM
Carolyne Roehm signs A Passion for Blue & White at Privet House
4 Cornwall Road, Warren CT; 860.868.1800
December 7; 12 - 1 PM
Mario Batali signs Spain: A Culinary Road Trip* at Hammertown Rhinebeck
Montgomery Row/Route 9; 845.876.1450
(*only books purchased at Hammertown will be signed. You’re encouraged to buy the book in advance at Hammertown in Rhinebeck or Pine Plains.)
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 12/02/08 at 09:17 AM • Permalink
6th Annual Local Authors Day in Sheffield
Sheffield's Bushnell-Sage Library
If you have any lingering doubts that our region has more than its fair share of writers in residence, just take a look at the list (below) of 49 authors and illustrators who will be signing books in Sheffield on Saturday, November 1, at the 6th annual Bushnell-Sage Library’s Local Authors Day. “It’s important for libraries to support local authors,” says Nancy Hahn, the Bushnell- Sage librarian, who started the event. “We don’t even make money from it.”
But, surely, this a fundraiser, right?
“No, it is not,” explains Hahn, “The life of the author is very solitary. This is a chance for them to trade ideas, discuss agents and publishers, find community, and meet their readers.. We even have a luncheon for them afterwards.” Unlike similar events where you have to buy a book to get it signed, you can bring your own worn copies of favorite books to be signed, although the authors will be selling their own brand new books, too. Hahn has a regional sense of what makes a local author. “We try to have as many as possible from Sheffield, of course, but we have writers from Connecticut and Columbia County, too.”
6th Annual Local Authors Day
Saturday, November 1; 10 AM - 12:30 PM
Bushnell-Sage Library
48 Main Street, Sheffield; 413.229.7004
Authors & Illustrators: Peter Steiner, Joan Ackerman, Dan Valenti, Emily Arnold McCully, Jacqueline Rogers, Carole Gilligan, James Gilligan, Michael Ballon, David Anderegg, Gayle Harmelin, David Proskauer, Sonya Hamlin, Richard Greene, Barbara Shook Hazen, Betsy Howie, Chris Nye, Seymour “Rob” Robins, Sonia Pilcer, Stephen Donaldson, Andrew Pincus, Michael Citron and Tracy Mack, Jana Laiz, John Toffey, Robin Magowan, Jerry Posner, Michelle Gillette, Gary Leveille, Ben Hillman, Ruth and Milton Bass, Marlene Hurley Marshall, Irene Willis, Sue MacVeety, Laura Chester, Bernie Drew, Jonathan Baumbach, Derek Gentile, David Kherdian and Nonny Hogrogian, Hester Velmans, Jim Ciullo and Lonnie Carter.
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 10/29/08 at 09:43 AM • Permalink
Banned Book Week Celebrates Its 27th
Banned Books Week, which kicks off on Saturday, has been around since 1982, yet somehow this year it feels particularly compelling. A couple of area bookstores are planning special events.
This weekend Oblong Books (Rhinebeck only) is sponsoring an on-line scavenger hunt. Participants will be given a list of questions (example: What’s the difference between a banned and a challenged book?), and they are expected to find the answers on the internet. There will be a drawing for a prize.
At Spotty Dog Books and Ale in Hudson, every week is banned book week (they host a banned book club). But at 1 pm on Saturday, they’re pulling out all the stops with a storytime and craft hour for little ones. The book: the notorious And Tango Makes Three, by Justin Richard and Peter Parnell, one of the most banned books of 2007, and among the most celebrated. Based on an true incident, it is the story of two male penguins who together raise a baby penguin. The book received the ASPCA Henry Bergh Children’s Book Award for 2007.
Banned Book Week is sponsored by the American Booksellers Association, American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, American Library Association, American Society of Journalists and Authors, Association of American Publishers, National Association of College Stores, and is endorsed by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress.
Spotty Dog Books and Ale
440 Warren Street, Hudson; 518.671.6006
Oblong Books
Montgomery Row (Rt. 9) Rhinebeck; 845.876.0500 ...
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 09/24/08 at 04:36 PM • Permalink
