eBranch Blog

March 25, 2008

Historically Inaccurate Movies

Yahoo! Movies recently had a feature on the 10 Most Historically Inaccurate Movies. Topping the list is the current movie 10,000 B.C. I have to say that when I saw 10,000 B.C., the historical inaccuracies were very distracting while watching the movie - wooly mammoths helped build the pyramids? Come on. Personally, I enjoyed several of the other movies on their list, but then while historically accurate, they were good movies. See the list for their reasons why the movies aren't accurate. If you want to check them out for yourself see the list below, which also includes links to books and other materials on the historical aspects of each film.

10,000 B.C. - In Theaters
Check out books on the pyramids, mammoths, and ancient Egyptians

Gladiator
For the facts, check out books on gladiators, ancient Rome, and Sick Caesars for information on Emporer Commodus.

300
For more information see materials on the Battle of Thermopylae and Sparta,

The Last Samurai
See the catalog for information on 19th century Japan, Samurai warriors, and The Last Samurai a book on Saigo Takamori - the basis for Ken Watanabe's character.

Apocalypto
Read about the Mayan Civilization.

Memoirs of a Geisha
Read about Geishas or read Arthur Golden's novel.

Braveheart
Read about the real William Wallace.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age
Books about Elizabeth I; the first movie - Elizabeth.

The Patriot
Read about Francis Marion, the basis for Mel Gibson's character.

2001: A Space Odyssey
The late, great Arthur C. Clarke wrote a short story - Sentinel of Eternity in 1951, which was adapted into the movie and novel in 1968. He didn't quite get 2001 right, but then neither did George Orwell get 1984 right. Read the book.

For more on history and the movies, see the book History Goes to the Movies: A Viewer's Guide to the Best (and Some of the Worst) Historical Films Ever Made by Joseph Roquemore.

Born Together: The Literature of Twins - West U. Librarian's Article in LJ

Keddy Outlaw, branch librarian at West University Branch Library, has contributed a fourth article entitled "Born Together: The Literature of Twins" to the Reader's Shelf column, in Library Journal. Keddy looks at the interconnected relationships of twins in fiction and nonfiction. The Reader's Shelf column is edited by Neal Wyatt.

Elyse Schein & Paula Bernstein. Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited
Nancy Segal. Indivisible by Two: Lives of Extraordinary Twins
Joanna Trollope. A Spanish Lover
Kim Edwards. The Memory Keeper's Daughter
Lori Lansens. The Girls
Pamela Spiro Wagner & Carolyn S. Spiro, M.D. Divided Minds: Twin Sisters and Their Journey Through Schizophrenia

Previously:
In the Spirit of Solitude - West U. Librarian's Article in LJ from 5/2007
Women Painters in Print - West U. Librarian's Article in LJ from 9/2006
West U. Librarian's Article Published in Library Journal from 12/2005

Author Arthur C. Clarke Has Died

Science Fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke died early on March 19 in his adopted home of Colombo, Sri Lanka, from a cardio-respiratory attack. He was 90 years old.

Clarke is known for his visionary science fiction writing and his collaboration with director Stanley Kubrick on the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. He has written many fiction and nonfiction books as well as over 100 short stories. His technological predictions included global broadcasts via satellite, space stations and the Internet.

Many of Clarke's novels can be found in our collection, including the ones below.

2001: A Space Odyssey
2001: A Space Odyssey is the classic science fiction novel that changed the way we looked at the stars and ourselves. 2001: A Space Odyssey inspired what is perhaps the greatest science fiction film ever made--brilliantly imagined by the late Stanley Kubrick.... 2001 is finally here.

2010: Odyssey Two
Nine years after the disastrous Discovery mission to Jupiter in 2001, a joint U.S.-Soviet expedition sets out to rendezvous with the derelict spacecraft to search the memory banks of the mutinous computer HAL 9000 for clues to what went wrong . . . and what became of Commander Dave Bowman. Without warning, a Chinese expedition targets the same objective, turning the recovery mission into a frenzied race for the precious information Discovery may hold about the enigmatic monolith that orbits Jupiter. Meanwhile, the being that was once Dave Bowman--the only human to unlock the mystery of the monolith--streaks toward Earth on a vital mission of its own . . .

The Hammer of God
In the year 2110 technology has cured most of our worries. But even as humankind enters a new golden age, an amateur astronomer points his telescope at just the right corner of the night sky and sees disaster hurtling toward Earth: a chunk of rock that could annihilate civilization. While a few fanatics welcome the apocalyptic destruction as a sign from God, the greatest scientific minds of Earth desperately search for a way to avoid the inevitable. On board the starship Goliath, Captain Robert Singh and his crew must race against time to redirect the meteor form its deadly collision course. Suddenly they find themselves on the most important mission in human history--a mission whose success may require the ultimate sacrifice.

The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke
From early work like "Rescue Party" and "The Lion of Comarre, " through classics like "The Star, " "Earthlight, " "The Nine Billion Names of God, " and "The Sentinel" (kernel of the later novel, and movie, "2001: A Space Odyssey"), all the way to later work like "A Meeting with Medusa" and "The Hammer of God, " this immense volume encapsulates one of the great SF careers of all time.

Childhood's End
Giant silver ships appear above every major city in the world. The Overlords have arrived. They eliminate ignorance, disease, poverty, and fear. After fifty years they also start eliminating humans.

March 20, 2008

2008 Notable Children's Books and Recordings

Each year the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) identifies the best of the best in children's books and recordings.

The 2008 Notable Children's Books list is divided into Younger Readers, Middle Readers, Older Readers and All Ages. Some titles from this list are:

Nancy Coffelt. Fred Stays with Me!
A child describes how she lives sometimes with her mother and sometimes with her father, but her dog is her constant companion.

Ellen Levine. Henry's Freedom Box: A True Story from the Underground Railroad
A fictionalized account of how in 1849 a Virginia slave, Henry "Box" Brown, escapes to freedom by shipping himself in a wooden crate from Richmond to Philadelphia.

Tim Wynne-Jones. Rex Zero and the End of the World
In the summer of 1962 with everyone nervous about a possible nuclear war, ten-nearly-eleven-year-old Rex, having just moved to Ottawa from Vancouver with his parents and five siblings, faces his own personal challenges as he discovers new friends and a new understanding of the world around him.

From the 2008 Notable Children's Recordings list:

Sara Pennypacker. Clementine
While sorting through difficulties in her friendship with her neighbor Margaret, eight-year-old Clementine gains several unique hairstyles while also helping her father in his efforts to banish pigeons from the front of their apartment building. Narrated by Jessica Almasy.

Walter Dean Myers. Jazz
From bebop to New Orleans, from ragtime to boogie--and every style in between--this collection of energetic poems, accompanied by bright and exhilarating paintings, celebrates different styles of the American art form, jazz. Performed by James "D-Train" Williams and Vaneese Thomas.

Gary D. Schmidt. The Wednesday Wars
During the 1967 school year, on Wednesday afternoons when all his classmates go to either Catechism or Hebrew school, seventh-grader Holling Hoodhood stays in Mrs. Baker's classroom where they read the plays of William Shakespeare and Holling learns much of value about the world he lives in. Read by Joel Johnstone.

March 18, 2008

Won't You Wear a Sweater on March 20? -- Honoring Mister Rogers

In honor of what would have been Mister Rogers’ 80th birthday on March 20, Mr. McFeely — aka David Newell, the public relations director for Family Communications, Inc. (the nonprofit company founded in 1971 by Fred Rogers) — has a special request.

"We’re asking everyone everywhere — from Pittsburgh to Paris — to wear their favorite sweater on that day," he asks in his best speedy delivery voice. "It doesn’t have to have a zipper down the front like the one Mister Rogers wore on the program, it just has to be special to you."

But wait, there’s more.

It just so happens that Sweater Day is part of Pittsburgh’s 250th anniversary celebration and the first-ever "Won’t You Be My Neighbor?" Days (March 15 — 20).

"We wanted to recognize Fred in a way that would reflect his deep appreciation of what it means to be a caring neighbor," explains FCI’s Margy Whitmer.

As a result, "’Won’t You Be My Neighbor?" Days — WYBMND for short, although not by much — was born as a means of promoting neighborliness.

March 11, 2008

March Teen Newsletter

The March/April 2008 issue of the Teen Newsletter is now available!

The Teen Newsletter is produced every other month and features news about Harris County Public Library young adult programming. It also contains interviews with our Young Adult Staff and new young adult materials that we have just added to our collection.

This issue features the Michael L. Printz Award and Teen Tech Week.

The staff interview in this issue is with Meredith Layton. She is the Young Adult Librarian at the Clear Lake City-County Freeman Branch Library.

March 10, 2008

National Book Critics Circle Awards announced

The 2007 National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced on March 6, 2008. Awards are given in several categories, including fiction, general nonfiction, biography/autobiography, and poetry. Winners are chosen by the 700+ reviewers who are part of the National Book Critics Circle.

Criticism

Alex Ross. The Rest is Noise
The Rest Is Noise takes the reader inside the labyrinth of modern sound. It tells of maverick personalities who have resisted the cult of the classical past, struggled against the indifference of a wide public, and defied the will of dictators. Whether they have charmed audiences with pure beauty or battered them with pure noise, composers have always been exuberantly of the present, defying the stereotype of classical music as a dying art. ~Book Jacket

Finalists:
Joan Acocella. Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays
Julia Alvarez. Once Upon a Quinceańera: Coming of Age in the USA
Susan Faludi. The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America
Ben Ratliff. The Story of a Sound

Poetry

Mary Jo Bang. Elegy
Mary Jo Bang's fifth collection, "Elegy," chronicles the year following the death of her son. By weaving the particulars of her own loss into a tapestry that also contains the elements common to all losses, Bang creates something far larger than a mere lament. Continually in search of an adequate metaphor for the most profound and private grief, the poems in "Elegy "confront, in stark terms and with a resilient voice, how memory haunts the living and brings the dead back to life. Within these intimate and personal poems is a persistently urgent, and deeply touching, examination of grief itself.

Finalists:
Matthea Harvey. Modern Life
Michael O'Brien. Sleeping and Waking
Tom Pickard. The Ballad of Jamie Allan
Tadeusz Rózewicz. New Poems, trans. by Bill Johnston

Biography

Tim Jeal. Stanley, the Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer
Presents the tragic life of Henry Morton Stanley, the adventurer in the great age of exploration. Rejected by both parents at birth and consigned to a Welsh workhouse, he emigrated to America, fought in the Civil War - on both sides - before becoming a journalist and then an explorer. ~Publisher's description

Finalists:
Hermione Lee. Edith Wharton
Arnold Rampersad. Ralph Ellison: A Biography
John Richardson. The Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917–1932
Claire Tomalin. Thomas Hardy

General Nonfiction

Harriet Washington. Medical Apartheid
Medical Apartheid is the first and only comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans. Starting with the earliest encounters between black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, it details the ways both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without their knowledge - a tradition that continues today within some black populations. Shocking new details about the government's notorious Tuskegee experiment are revealed, as are similar, less-well-known medical atrocities conducted by the government, the armed forces, prisons, and private institutions. ~Book Jacket

Finalists:
Philip Gura. American Transcendentalism: A History
Daniel Walker Howe. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848
Tim Weiner. Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA
Alan Weisman. The World Without Us

Autobiography

Edwidge Danticat. Brother, I'm Dying
When the author was only four years old, her parents emigrated from Haiti to New York in search of a better life, leaving their daughter in the care of her uncle Joseph. A peaceful pastor in Port-au-Prince, Joseph raised Edwidge with the love and devotion of a father, despite facing many hardships in politically turbulent Haiti. It wasn't until she was 12 years old that Edwidge was finally reunited with her parents--and forced to confront the inevitably complex emotions.

Finalists:
Joshua Clark. Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone
Joyce Carol Oates. The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973–1982
Sara Paretsky. Writing in an Age of Silence
Anna Politkovskaya. Russian Diary: A Journalist's Final Account of Life, Corruption and Death in Putin's Russia

Fiction

Junot Diaz. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. From his home in New Jersey, where he lives with his old-world mother and rebellious sister, Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fukś-the curse that has haunted the Oscar's family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love. Oscar, still waiting for his first kiss, is just its most recent victim. ~Book Jacket

Finalists:
Vikram Chandra. Sacred Games
Hisham Matar. In the Country of Men
Joyce Carol Oates. The Gravedigger’s Daughter
Marianne Wiggins. The Shadow Catcher

March 05, 2008

Celebrate Read an E-Book Week

March 2nd to March 8th is Read an Ebook Week! Epublishers Weekly, a blog devoted to ebooks, posted a list of 30 benefits of ebooks this week. Here are a few highlights from the list:

1) Ebooks promote reading.

2) Ebooks are good for the environment.

3) Ebooks are easily updateable, for correcting errors and adding information.

4) Ebooks make reading accessible to persons with disabilities.

5) Ebooks (in the form of digital audio books) free you to do other activities while you are listening.

Did you know HCPL has multiple ways for you to access ebooks? They are all listed in the eBooks section of our Databases page.

HCPL Digital Media Catalog allows you to check out and download eAudio books, eBooks, and music. There are hundreds of popular titles available. Please see our Quick Start Guide to find out how to get started.

NetLibrary eBooks lets you search through thousands of books online and then read one right on your computer screen. Some titles allow downloading. See our NetLibrary Help page to find out more about how to use this service.

Safari Books Online is the premier source for technical ebooks for programmers and IT professionals. Please note that there is a limit of five simultaneous users for this resource.

Tumblebooks offers electronic books for children.

Check out some of our ebooks! Below are the top 10 most checked out titles in HCPL's collection:

1) Eloisa James. Duchess in Love - 73 checkouts

2) Natalie Haughton. 365 Easy One-Dish Meals - 69 checkouts

3) Lynsay Sands. A Bite to Remember - 68 checkouts

4) Kinley MacGregor. Born in Sin - 67 checkouts

5) Lori Foster, Erin McCarthy and Amy Garvey. Bad Boys of Summer - 65 checkouts

6) Lynsay Sands. A Quick Bite - 65 checkouts

7) Lori Foster, Erin McCarthy and Helenkay Dimon. When Good Things Happen To Bad Boys - 65 checkouts

8) Julia Quinn. Brighter Than the Sun - 63 checkouts

9) Gena Showalter. The Nymph King - 61 checkouts

10) Gena Showalter. Gena Showalter Bundle (three novels) - 61 checkouts

Our eAudio books are also very popular - below are the top five most checked out eAudio books:

1) Nicholas Boothman. How To Make People Like You in 90 Seconds or Less - 113 checkouts

2) James Patterson, Maxine Paetro, and Carolyn McCormick. 5th Horseman (unabridged) - 83 checkouts

3) Robert T. Kiyosaki, Sharon L. Lechter, and Stephen Hoye. Rich Dad's® Rich Dad, Poor Dad - 82 checkouts

4) Christopher Paolini and Gerald Doyle. Eragon (unabridged) - 82 checkouts

5) James Patterson and Suzanne Toren. 1st to Die (unabridged) - 81 checkouts

March 04, 2008

New Titles Cataloged Lists Updated

The New Titles Cataloged in the Past 30 Days have been updated for February 2008.

The lists are in PDF file format and require the free Adobe Reader to view. We hope you enjoy the new format. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions about this change please use our Feedback Form.