Kids all over America are suffering from what Richard Louv calls "Nature Deficit Disorder", an issue which is causing an ever-deepening disconnection between kids and nature and which will have repercussions for this and future generations interactions with the natural world. The root causes for this are many, according to Louv, including: living in a liability-happy world (i.e., no more kid-made treehouses); an increase in homework; parental overscheduling of kids' time with afterschool activities; the attention-sucking abilities of TV and video games; urban sprawl (reducing areas kids are able to play in nature); and more. Louv suggests helping your child find a self-directed space in nature where they can be curious and creative, whether be in your own yard, a park, or some open space in the neighborhood. Kids who have this have been shown to be more relaxed and creative (helping greatly with ADHD and autism). A fascinating read for parents, teachers, and administrators alike.
Book Lovers
In this Nebula Award-winning novel, Connie Willis mixes historical fiction and science fiction in Blackout, a tale of time travel to Blitz-era Britain. In Oxford in 2060, historians have the ability to perform first hand research by traveling to historical periods of interest and interact directly with the period’s contemporaries (or "contemps"). A handful of young researchers head back to various parts of the Second World War only to find that their portals back to the present are no longer functioning-that they are trapped in the London Blitz with no idea how they will get back to the 21st century. The conclusion of this tale, All Clear, is also available.
In this memoir Augusten Burroughs describes his bizarre and somewhat tramatizing adolescence with humor and candor. At the age of 13 his unbalanced self-absorbed mother sends him to live with her therapist Dr. Finch and his family. We quickly discover that the Finch family is hardly the pinnacle of mental health. Dr. Finch allows his 14 year old daughter Natalie to begin an inappropriate affair with one his rich patients who is over 20 years older than her. His other daughter Hope is so superstitious that she becomes convinced her cat is going to die and holds it hostage in an upsidedown laundrey basket as she waits for it's demise. Burroughs has his own dysfunctional adventures and remains in contact with his increasingly unstable mother. At times horrifying and totally fascinating, Burroughs takes you on an interesting journey.
Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter who begins to feel empathy toward his targets, the androids. Originally pubished in 1968, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? describes a dystopian future where, after a nuclear war, radioactive fallout blankets the Earth and many humans have fled to a colony on Mars. As organic machines, androids were created to assist humans on Mars, but a number of androids have escaped servitude and fled to Earth, where Rick Deckard is waiting to retire them. A scific classic, this novel will cause you to question what makes us human.
Set in the early days of the Abraham Lincoln presidency, The First Assassin tells the fictional story of a plot to murder the new president. Colonel Charles Rook is in charge of Lincoln's security and is determined to make sure the president stays alive. As the Civil War looms, a plot is hatched by a wealthy Southern with allies in Washington, D.C. A hired assassin arrives in town as well as a runaway slave who has proof of the plot.
Flavia De Luce is a precocious eleven year-old girl living with her father and sisters in a sleepy hamlet in postwar England. When a stranger is found dead in her garden and her father is held as a suspect, miss Flavia launches an independent investigation. Armed with her trusty bicycle and an impressive knowledge of science and physics, young Flavia stays one step ahead of the police and unravels the truth about the crime that occurs in her yard and its origins in a theft and murder decades long past.
This book was written in 1968 about a space exploration that takes place ten years ago in 2001. A spaceship maned by two astronauts with the rest of the crew in hibernation is en route to examine a mysterious signal that is being emitted towards Saturn. They are assisted by the self-aware computer--the Hal 9000 which has control over every component of the ship. Hal, however is programmed a little too well and begins displaying neurotic tendencies putting everyone in danger. The beginning and end of this book almost seem like different stories but when you take it all in together it feels more cohesive.
Matt Prior was a successful business journalist when he left that job and tried out a new venture: business advice in verse, poetfolio.com. Now, he’s lost his job and his website, his family’s house is close to foreclosure, his wife is Facebook-cheating on him, and he’s thinking about selling pot to help make his house payments. On top of that, he’s barely sleeping while his dementia-laden father offers loopy quips about football players’ beards and sexy female newscasters. This is a darkly funny (sometimes uproarious) book about the financial times we live in and the lengths one man goes to in order to keep his family together.
In each of the four stories in Stephen King’s new collection, an ordinary person encounters a dark stranger-on a country road, within the person they love, or even inside themselves-and is surprised to discover what it brings out in them. The strength of each tale is not in the twists and turns of the plot itself, but in following the protagonist through his or her negotiation of their own limits for suffering and capacity for malevolence. The narrator of “A Good Marriage” discovers a terrible secret about her husband that devastates the life she loves. In “Fair Extension,” a man is given the opportunity to escape his immediate fate by visiting misfortune on his best friend, while in “1922” a man does the unthinkable to preserve the life he loves and in so destroys everything in it. My personal favorite was the revenge tale “Big Driver,” in which the victim of a terrible crime gives full control to her fragmented psyche in her quest for revenge.
Love his voice or hate it, Bob Dylan is a songster. And it should come as no surprise that Willetz, a Princeton professor of history, focuses as much on the history of the music and lyrics that Bob Dylan borrows from as much as as he does the songs themselves. Willetz investigates Dylan's influences both major and minor (such as the 1930s bluesman Blind Willie McTell and the classical composer Aaron Copland, whom Dylan never acknowledged but Willetz does a connect-the-dots logic through the first 50 pages). Since Willetz is an historian, he can tend to cover these topics exhaustively. But the parts about the making of influential albums like Blonde on Blone and Love and Theft and tours like the Rolling Thunder Revue provided new (to me) insights into the work of this great, American artist.