Library Notes for the week of July 30

Summer is just flying by this year. We had a great time at our Fancy Nancy Party last week and here is a photo of the fun. Don’t forget to get your child to the Grand Finale of the Summer Reading Program. Thursday, August 7^th, Last Leaf Productions will perform Bayou Bug Tales. There will be three performances so you can go to Sedro-Woolley, Anacortes or Mount Vernon. They are wonderful and not to be missed. Get those reading minutes in so your child will be in the drawing for the end of SRP prize!

For the adults we have some new books in. If you are into biographical accounts, here are a few you may be interested in.

In the Frame: My Life in Words and Pictures by Helen Mirren. Helen's aristocratic Russian grandfather was sent to London by the Czar and found himself stranded and penniless by the Bolshevik revolution. He brought with him a trunk of papers and photographs. This memoir starts with the contents of the trunk, with evocative pictures of Helen's Russian antecedents. She has kept a rich seam of photographs and memorabilia from her life, and her parents, family life, childhood, teenage and early years as an actress.

My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor. On the morning of December 10, 1996, Jill Bolte Taylor, a thirty-seven-year-old Harvard-trained brain scientist, experienced a massive stroke when a blood vessel exploded in the left side of her brain. A neuroanatomist by profession, she observed her own mind completely deteriorate to the point that she could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life, all within the space of four brief hours. As the damaged left side of her brain--the rational, grounded, detail- and time-oriented side--swung in and out of function, Taylor alternated between two distinct and opposite realties: the euphoric nirvana of the intuitive and kinesthetic right brain, in which she felt a sense of complete well-being and peace; and the logical, sequential left brain, which recognized Jill was having a stroke, and enabled her to seek help.

The Thief at the End of the World by Joe Jackson. On June 10, 1876, a self-styled explorer named Henry Wickham arrived at Liverpool having sailed from Brazil. He hastened to London and the offices of the Royal Botanic Gardens where he immediately presented the director with a sample of the precious cargo he had brought: 70,000 seeds of "the valuable rubber known as 'Pará fine,' " Wickham's story is interesting in and of itself, but obviously its ramifications go far beyond. "Biopiracy," at its core "is about power and its imbalance -- the historical fact that poorer countries have been high in resources, while richer nations want what they have."