Celebrate Black History Month

Saturday, February 18th, 2012

February is Black History Month in the US. Take this opportunity to explore the civil rights movement and black history with your kids using some great reads from the Children’s Library. We have a wide selection of age appropriate materials about American heroes and iconic figures including Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcom X, among others. Below are a few recommended titles from our collection:

Back of the Bus
Written by Aaron Reynolds, Illustrated by Floyd Cooper
Reviewed by Children’s Library Volunteer Kristen Crans

Back of the Bus draws you right through the open doors of a public bus bumping down the roads of Montgomery Alabama in 1955. It takes you to the back seat of that bus, where a little boy and his mother are on their way home after a long, tiring day. The boy and his Mama are sitting in the back because that’s where folks of their color are supposed to be sitting. But on this particular day, one woman chooses not to sit where she is supposed to, and that woman is Mrs. Rosa Parks.

This retelling of the story of Rosa Parks is enlightening and very relatable to childrenas it is told through the eyes of a young boy experiencing it all first hand. If the rhythm of the text isn’t enough to draw the reader in, then the oil paintings will, as they highlight the faces and emotions felt by all riding on that bus that day. This is a great
conversation starter to discuss what can otherwise be a difficult topic for children to understand. This moving story can be found in the Children’s Library with the Easiest Reader Picture Books  under the call number ER.

Giant Steps to Change the World

by Spike Lee and Tonya Lewis Lee

Reviewed by Children’s Library Volunteer Carole Black

The concepts presented in Giant Steps to Change the World make it more appropriate for 7-10 year olds and may be read individually or in a group to initiate discussion.

Sean Qualls's bold graphics, collage and drawings colorfully illustrate the achievements of people who take risks to realize their dreams.  Creative text encourages the reader to face fears and obstacles they encounter as they take their big first step to making their own impact on the world.

New @ the Library. You can find it in the Children's Library with the Easiest Readers in EL.

Some other titles you might like:

Boycott Blues : How Rosa Parks Inspired a Nation, written by Andrea Davis Pinkney ; illustrations by Brian Pinkney.

Illustrations and lyrical text recall the December, 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama and the events that followed.

Found in the Children's Library on the Holiday Shelf under EP

I Have a Dream, by Martin Luther King Jr., with forward by Coretta Scott King; Illustrated by fifteen Coretta Scott King Award and Honor book artists.

I Have a Dream is the complete text from Martin Luther King, Jr.'s famous speech for the MArch on Washington. It includes paintings by fifteen award winning illustrators.

You can find it in the Children's Library with the Juvenile Non-Fiction under J 325.26 KING.

One Crazy Summer, by Rita Williams Garcia

One Crazy Summer is the story of three sisters from Brooklyn who are sent to Oakland, CA in the summer of 1968 to meet the mother who left them, and who happens to be active in the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. A  story of self discovery that also touches on topics of racism, abandonment and cultural identity, this book comes highly recommended by the Library's own Bookworms!For middle grade readers, ages 9+.
You can find it with the Juvenile Fiction under J WIL.

Tags: black history, books, children, civil rights, family, literature, reviews, rosa parks
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On Perfume, Paris and Glamour

Monday, February 13th, 2012

Photo: Vincent Thibert

Denyse Beaulieu is an author and translator based in Paris. She writes a bilingual blog on scent. Her book The Perfume Lover: A Personal History of Scent, will be published on March 15th by Harper Collins. She has learned the principles of perfume composition with the help of some of the profession’s most prestigious noses. Her expertise has been acknowledged by the London College of Fashion where she has taught an intensive “Understanding Fragrance” course. She is a member of the Société Française des Parfumeurs and a juror at the Fragrance Foundation France.

We are thrilled that Denyse will be a part of our Passion Panel on Wednesday 15 February at 19h30. She will join experts Sister Noella Marcellino and  Robert Camuto for this panel on three things we love and associate with France: perfume, cheese, and wine. Today, Denyse explains how she was introduced to perfume and how one of her memories was transformed into an essence. She writes:

“I want more Denyse!”

There was no comma between “more” and “Denyse”. The wonderful Jenny Heller, my editor at HarperCollins, didn’t just want more out of my manuscript. She wanted more about me and my “glamorous Parisian life”. This wasn’t just about perfume, she said: it was a woman’s story.

I was dismayed. Granted, The Perfume Lover: a Personal History of Scent was written in the first person. Wasn’t I living every perfume lover’s dream? I’d inspired a great perfumer to compose a fragrance based on a story I’d told him. I would be chronicling its development throughout our work sessions, and my journal would be the narrative thread stringing together my essays on the art of perfumery. Still, however partial and subjective my “personal history of scent” would be, I hadn’t expected Jenny to ask me to delve into my life and loves. But she had a point: how could I tease my life in Paris apart from my passion for fragrance?

Perfume is to smells what eroticism is to sex: an aesthetic, cultural elaboration of the raw materials provided by nature. And thus, perfumery, like love, requires technical skills and some knowledge of black magic; both can be arts, though neither is recognized as such. And I’ve been studying both in the capital of love and luxury, Paris, where I settled half a lifetime ago. It is in Paris that I learned about l’amour; in Paris that I stepped through the looking glass into the invisible realm of scent. I’ve had good teachers: discussing the delights of the flesh as passionately and learnedly as you would speak about art or literature is one of the favourite pastimes of my adopted countrymen. For the French, pleasure is intensified by delving into its nuances. By putting words to it. La volupté is taken very seriously indeed: a worthy subject for philosophizing in the boudoir.  Is this why fine perfumery, with its delicate balance of artistic creativity, exquisite taste, sensuous pleasure and technical know-how, is such a quintessentially French achievement?

It was, in fact, because of the Philosophie dans le Boudoir that I left Montreal for Paris: I was doing my PhD on the Marquis de Sade. But it was only while writing The Perfume Lover – and adding “more Denyse” – that I realised my first lessons in philosophy had indeed been dispensed to me in a boudoir. Or rather, between the closet, dresser and Vogue collection of a glamorous French neighbour in the suburbs of Montreal. It was thanks to her that the first drops of French perfume ever touched my skin. Perhaps they acted as a magic potion. That day, at age eleven, I decided I’d be French. Not only French, but Parisian. And not only Parisian, but Left Bank Parisian: glamorous, intellectual and bohemian.

The perfume was Yves Saint Laurent’s Rive Gauche. Was it by chance that the very first perfumer I met, decades later, was one of its co-creators? My encounter with Jacques Polge, who had since gone on to become Chanel’s in-house perfumer, was my first step into an intensely secret world that would open itself up to me as I learned to translate its coded language into words.  But I never thought that one day my words would be translated back into scent and poured inside a bottle. That Paris, the capital of perfumery, would offer me this gift. That perfume would, at last, make me a Parisian writer. My story in a bottle. My name on a book.

I can’t imagine anything more glamorous than that, but in the ancient sense of the Scottish word, which is derived from “grammar”: occult learning; magic charm; a haze in the air causing things to take on a different appearance. Those are the very words I would use to describe perfume.

Tags: A Personal History of Scent, Denyse Beaulieu, The Perfume Lover
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Letters About Literature – Our Winners

Friday, February 10th, 2012

This year, the American Library in Paris participated for the first time ever in the Letters About Literature contest created by the Library of Congress. The idea was for school-age children to write to an author  who has changed the reader somehow, or changed their view of the world.

We’ve selected two winners from the entries we received, and all of the letters have been sent on to the national contest. The winners chosen by the American Library in Paris are Loic Lescoat (7-8 grade group) and Molly Griffiths (for the high school group). The two young writers were given a set of brand new, award winning books as well as a calligraphy set to encourage their writing. You can read their letters below:

Dear George Orwell,

Before I read 1984, my concept of freedom was very different from what it is now. Before, I thought freedom was something that I didn’t have much of as a child, but would have more of as an adult. Now I understand that it has a much broader meaning.

Freedom is in fact a most precious and precarious thing. It is a notion that has evolved over four millennia since the start of the first civilization to become what it is today. But it could have been wiped out completely multiple times and is a constant, never-ending battle for liberty.

Seeing that the Party members in your book did not have freedom of speech, or even freedom of thought, made me realize how fortunate I am to be able to enjoy this every day. This gratefulness is amplified by the thought of people in some countries in the world who don’t have these very basic rights.

Winston’s only hope to make a difference in the world is by writing in his journal. My possibilities, on the other hand, are endless. I could do research in science to look for an accessible energy source, I could be president and change peoples’ lives, or I could just turn off unneeded lights and conserve energy to battle global warming. When you think about it, so many people today have a chance to have a major impact on the world.

For the first thirty pages of 1984, I didn’t think the story was particularly plausible: I mean, malevolent policemen who can practically read your mind? A world divided into just three countries? And how did the Inner Party members take control anyway? All this seemed completely unrealistic.

It was only after doing a bit of reading that I was awoken to the fact that such an oppressive system really was possible, and could have happened quite a few times in history (the German Nazis and Russian Communists), and that 1984 was in fact a message to the world: if totalitarians took power, it would be extremely hard to reverse this change, and after a certain point in time, rebellion would be completely impossible. People would have a hard time communicating their dreams of freedom because of Newspeak and probably wouldn’t want to change things because they would have no memory of what life was like before the Revolution. Humanity would be doomed to never think for themselves again.

This thought led me to promising myself that should anyone attempt to jeopardize even the smallest of freedoms, I will always stand firm in what I believe is right. Recently I thought of you when my very popular friend asked me why I hung out with my other not-so-popular friend. He said that he didn’t see why I liked him. I replied that it was my call as to whether I wanted to be friends with him or not. It was at that moment that I realized how important it was to me to befriend whoever I wanted to, and how happy it made me to meet new people, and I shuddered at the idea of somebody else deciding for me who I should talk to, as was the case for Winston.

Over the two weeks that it has taken me to read your book, I have learned far more than I ever thought a book could teach me: once freedom is acquired, this does not mean that it is ours for keeps. In the future I will remember to fight for a society for the people, by the people. Thank you for your beautiful writing, and I hope it enlightens many others to come.

Sincerely yours,

Loïc Lescoat

Dear Madeleine L’Engle,

People have always told me that I lack confidence in myself. I have rarely been able to compliment or laugh at myself. But then I read Wrinkle in Time, and it made me believe in who I am, because of the way Meg believes in who she is.

The idea of time-travelling had always seemed impossible to me. That was until I met Mrs. Who and her two extraordinary friends. Travelling, or tessering, through galaxies and dimensions you’ve never heard of before, with those three women accompanying you, you wouldn’t think it to be impossible, which it is what the book taught me.

Love is unconditional, a saying that few understand and believe. But sometimes, a person’s capacity to love can change everything. I was touched when Meg saved her brother from IT, by just simply loving him, which made me think that a person’s fate can be changed by love.

I feel connected to this book because I think I am very much like Meg. A misunderstood, self-conscious young girl, willing to go to any lengths to save someone she loves, and who has the strength to love in the face of pure hate.

Before I read your book, I would internalize insults and start believing in them, thus losing confidence in myself. Charles Wallace, who is called a “moron”, because he doesn’t speak, while he actually has an advanced knowledge for his age, inspired me to change my view of myself, and stand up to the insulting given to me by people who didn’t actually know me.

Meg and Charles Wallace taught me to stand up for myself, and for others, and to gain confidence. It has changed me because now, I fight back, instead of retreating.

My life will be different from now on, because I have become a new person; a self-confident person, who isn’t afraid of showing who she is.

So I would like to thank you, Madeleine, for helping me realize that I like who I am, and also for teaching to stand up for myself.

Yours sincerely,

Molly Griffiths

Tags: books, children, letters about literature, reviews, thoughts, writing
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Taking wine and words to new places

Tuesday, February 7th, 2012

Robert Camuto is a career American journalist who moved to the South of France in 2001 and started snooping around cellars and vineyards to write about the changes taking place in France’s 21st Century Wine World. The product of that Exploration was his first book Corkscrewed: Adventures in the New French Wine Country (2008), which was translated in French and has won several prestigious awards. His second book Palmento: A Sicilian Wine Odyssey (2010) was referred to by Eric Asimov in the New York Times as “beautiful, enthralling work.” Robert writes for several U.S, publications including the Wine Spectator, Food & Wine and the Washington Post Travel. He writes:

Oenologists analyze it, critics grade it, snobs show off with it, some try to politicize it and sommeliers wax eloquent about it —all in an effort to define an experience that is personal and subjective. The more we seem to know about wine the less we understand it.

This might seem like a heresy coming from someone who has spent much of the last decade writing about wine and winemakers, but I think it’s true. The fact that some wines still defy codification makes it worthy of spilling more ink and drink.

My background is journalism, and after moving to the South of France, I started following the currents of French wine. It was a compelling story: after decades of industrialization, new generations of winemakers were returning to smaller production and simpler methods. Forgotten, unknown or unappreciated wine regions were suddenly turning out interesting wines that reflected a sense of place. This renaissance has since spread across Europe and the winegrowing Old World.

My explorations in France and my ancestral terroir of Sicily have led to two critically acclaimed books which feature some of the characters – and I mean characters—that have shaped the world of wine in those places.

These neo-paysans or contadini not only have a far greater contact with and understanding of nature than most of us, but they also tend to be quirky, independent-minded individuals who pour a lot of themselves into what they bottle.

Over the years I have met hundreds of winemakers including refugees of modern society, neo-peasants with degrees in design, eastern philosophy or engineering, aristocrats who view the land practically as a family member, and those who simply have wine in their blood.

Are these personalities evident in their wines? Absolutely.

It is natural that we modern humans have developed technical analysis and a vocabulary for describing wine as well as sophisticated ways to control production and drive the markets. Industrial wine science has developed all kinds of corrections and tricks to make wines that hit all the right notes. You want  “black cherry with hints of tobacco and road tar” you got it. In the luxury wine industry grand crus are traded as if on a stock exchange.

But often our wine vocabulary is often incapable of describing the soul of a soulful wine.  Wine is a living thing that joins us at the table and is a dinner companion among our group. Wines, like people, have moods and personalities that change over time and the seasons and with whom, when and with what they are drunk.

Several years ago, the Cote Rotie winemaker Gilles Barge told me, “A good wine is a wine you find to be good. A great wine is a wine you remember… All the rest is literature.”

He had a point, but that hasn’t stopped me from going deeper into that literature and discovering some surprising wines along the way.

Tags: Palmetto, Robert Camuto
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