carolyn.rogers's blog

The 2010 novel Anthill is a fictional account of an Alabama backwoods boy who grows up to be a Harvard lawyer fighting to save the woodlands of his childhood, the West Nokobee Tract at the edge of William Ziebach National Forest. It is a privately owned tract of longleaf pine savanna. It becomes his secret place and he bicycles into it every chance he gets to escape his parent's troubled marriage.

The debate about using drones in far off lands to damage al-Queda has begun. On Tuesday Democratic and Republican senators joined a former deputy chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in calling upon the administration to make public more information about its top-secret targeted killing program, amid questions about the legality and effectiveness of hundreds of CIA drone strikes. Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Mark Mazzetti's new book, The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth, looks at how the CIA’s  role has changed since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001.

On April 22, 1970, the first Earth Day generated 13,000 events where millions of people participated, and Congress took the day off. Forty-three years later, Adam Rome has written the first serious history of the largest demonstration in American history in The Genius of Earth Day (APL has ordered it). His captivating narrative explains the roots and remarkable success of Earth Day. The grass-roots but very powerful movement engaged politicians, youth, the media, schools, and everyday people in an explosion of interest and activity around protecting the Earth.

According to the the March issue of Booklist, the rules for Women’s Fiction are:
*The main character (or characters) is a female, and the story is character-driven.
*The author is female—there are rarely exceptions to this rule.
*A woman’s relationships are of highest plot importance.
*The setting is usually contemporary.
*Love and romance may be present but are not the heart of the story.

Tuesday, February 26, was John Steinbeck's 110th birthday.  I have a few bits of news to keep you updated on one of America's greatest authors. "Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream." (Cannery Row by John Steinbeck, 1945). But over the years the one-time center of the sardine industry has been gentrified into a waterfront promenade and shopping district.

When he was a child, his mother, a linguist from Texas, enrolled Kehinde Wiley and his brother in art programs as a way to help keep them safe in the rough South Central Los Angeles neighborhood where they lived. When he was 12, he went to the U.S.S.R. on an arts exchange program. He then received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1999 and an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2001. Against heavy competition, he became an artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem where he started establishing himself as an art-world luminary.

In 1980, Elsie B. Washington wrote Entwined Destinies which is widely considered to be the first black romance novel. It tells the story of a young black woman, a magazine correspondent, who after many travails finds love with a dashing black man, an oil executive. Since then black romance has been a  thriving genre, but today it seems readers may want less stereotyped, more complex stories. Romance is still the most consistently profitable genre in a shaky publishing business.

Tonight is the first part of Lance Armstrong's eagerly awaited interview with Oprah Winfrey. After denying doping for so long, Lance Armstrong is going to come clean. Since the first whiff of suspicion back in 1999, when the former French rider Christophe Bassons spoke publicly about widespread doping in cycling, Armstrong has been on the offensive.

I listen to a lot of different radio stations, but a change at KUT has made me realize that it's the music that I want, not the talk. KUT now has programming divided between news and music. Since the change was made a few days ago, I just listen to the music format. If you also need music to keep the wheels turning smoothly, check out one of our top 2012 CDs. I created a list in the catalog to make it easy to place a hold on a title. The list's description says "mostly pop/rock, but a few jazz and classical, and, of course, a little bit of country."