For finals, while supplies last, Parham Library is offering free tea and hot chocolate to students, faculty and staff to show our support!
For finals, while supplies last, Parham Library is offering free tea and hot chocolate to students, faculty and staff to show our support!
“Just to be clear, Adam. You do realize that it’s for me alone to decide what’s in your best interests. If I were to rule that the hospital may legally transfuse you against your wishes, what will you think?”
He was sitting up, breathing hard, and seemed to sag a little at the question, but he smiled. ‘I’d think My Lady was an interfering busybody.” (Ian McEwan, The Children Act, 117-118).
Around the World through Books’ upcoming program on Thursday, November 10, will be framed by the events of The Children’s Act by Ian McEwan. Paralegal Studies program head Susan Brewer will lead the discussion, a challenging task because:
This is a book about searching for truth, and it’s a book about judging. Fiona Maye is a high court judge who must decide whether a young man with leukemia, Adam Henry, a Jehovah’s Witness, must have the blood transfusion which he wants to refuse, but without which his treatment will surely fail. Adam is seventeen and three-quarters, still technically a minor, but well over the sixteen years at which a child’s wishes are usually considered in legal matters. His parents support his choice. The hospital has brought it to court—the doctors want to save this charming, intelligent young man. The Henrys believe that Biblical injunctions to abstain from eating blood also preclude accepting blood products into the body. Adam is prepared to die rather than disobey God.
What’s multicultural about all that? What does this book have to do with diversity and inclusion? Here are three answers; perhaps you can supply more. Or perhaps the program will give us a chance to develop other ideas—come to LTC 220 from 7-8:30 on Thursday, Nov. 10 and see.
A wise old professor used to tell this story during college orientation, only in his version there were as many bulls as there are weeks in a semester.
Student Life’s Welcome Back event at Parham Campus this week featured a mechanical bull.
A couple of library staff members tried their cowgirl skills!
But look at the bull in these photos – and remember our tale. Don’t let a chance to grab the bull (or the semester) pass you by!
Only two days are left to register to win a copy of The Yellow Birds. The deadline is October 3. Find the form at this link.
The Yellow Birds is a war novel by Kevin Powers. Powers is a Richmond native who attended James River High School. Enlisting in the army at age seventeen, he later served a year in Iraq as a machine gunner. He was stationed in Mosul and Tal Afar in 2004 and 2005. After his honorable discharge he came home and studied at Virginia Commonwealth University. He then went off to the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a Michener fellow in poetry. He’s won a bunch of awards and now works in New York.
He published his first novel in 2012. The Yellow Birds is a study in contradiction. It tells of the dreariness and horror of an urban war, but the narrative is poetic and beautiful. It is the story of young Private Bartle and his younger buddy Private Murphy. They just want to survive. When they’re on watch, they are desperate to stay awake. They’re soldiers; they talk like solders; they curse like soldiers.
Kevin Powers is coming to Reynolds on Thursday, November 6, to read from The Yellow Birds and his new book of poetry, Letters Composed During a Lull in the Fighting (A few winners of the drawing will receive the poetry instead of the novel). After the reading, he will answer questions from the audience and stay to sign copies of his books. The event will begin at 7 p.m. in Lipman Auditorium. All are welcome; please come.
This program is an Around the World through Books event, sponsored by the Multicultural Enrichment Council.
All three Reynolds campus libraries have copies of The Yellow Birds to lend for two weeks; Parham Campus Library has it as an audiobook.
These are perilous times for libraries–or would be, if libraries were stuck being traditional repositories of print materials. People like libraries, but not just as a place to come fetch books anymore.
Libraries are changing. Here at Reynolds Libraries, we are constantly looking for ways we can be up-to-date and more useful. What we need to know is–what do people want from libraries? What do they value? What should change, and what should be left alone?
That is why we welcome a new report by Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project, called The New Library Patron. In an October 29, 2013, Slideshare presentation (see below), Rainie, along with Kathryn Zickuhr and Kristen Purcell, shows results from people who were asked about the impact of public libraries on their lives. Over 90% say libraries are important to their communities, and 76% say libraries are important to them and their families. This is good news!
Review the presentation below to find what people surveyed find so valuable, and what they wish libraries would do for them. Sure, the study is about public libraries, but many of the findings can be more broadly applied to academic libraries like us.
And then maybe you would like to add a comment to this post about what Reynolds Libraries offer that you find useful, or what you wish we could do that is different.
Back in April I blogged, for Earth Day, about a straw bale garden I was going to try. I am sorry to report that I am still a lousy gardener, but have had some success anyway.
I planted three tomato plants, two zucchini plants from seed, two basil plants, thyme, cilantro, a bell pepper, and a jalapeno. I also planted some French green bean and cantaloupe seeds.
Seeds did come up, but they did not flourish. The tomatoes languished until August, though I did get one or two tomatoes before the Fourth of July, as promised, from the Fourth of July variety. The zucchinis flowered but did not bear. I had two beans, each about an inch long. The cilantro merely endured, until one day it was dead. It didn’t even taste good.
In July I decided it was all a bust and stopped getting up early to turn on the soaker hose. Instead of planting anything in the hole of the square formed by the four bales, I started throwing compost in there. And then it rained.
And everything started to grow. No, not everything, but the basil began to flourish and the tomatoes took off. The bell pepper finally produced an oh-so-small pepper. And now I actually have ripe tomatoes. On Saturday I picked three golfball sized tomatoes from the Fourth of July vine and twenty-two cherry tomatoes from the Sweet Million vine. The Beauty has seven green tomatoes on it. And I’ve picked from the basil and used it in recipes.
That’s my straw bale garden story. As a food source, I cannot recommend it. As a hobby, it has been pretty interesting. Weeds did grow in it, but they were easy to pull out, except down in the hole. I think I should have been more generous with water and fertilizer in the beginning. If you want a real garden you probably have to work much harder.
For a happy ending, here is a picture of my pretty little cherry tomatoes.