Adult Services / Left

250 veterans gathered today at the National World War II Memorial in Washington D.C.  HBO and a nonprofit group brought the veterans to Washington to mark the premiere of a 10-part series called “The Pacific.”  It begins Sunday and focuses on the lives of Marines fighting the Japanese.

“The Pacific” is primarily based on two memoirs: With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa, by Eugene Sledge and Helmet for My Pillow, by Robert Leckie.  The series will tell the stories of the two authors and John Basilone, who received the Medal of Honor for his actions at the Battle of Guadalcanal.

While Jimmy Stewart was building his reputation as an actor, the world was preparing for war.  On September 16, 1940 Congress passed the Selective Service Act calling for 900,000 men between the ages of 20 and 36 to be drafted each year.  When Stewart’s draft number (310) was called in February 1941, he appeared at Draft Board No. 245 in West Los Angeles.  At 6’3” and weighing only 138 pounds, he was 5 pounds under the acceptable weight and was turned down for service.  Stewart wanted to fly and serve his country but by May of 1941 he would have been too old to get into flight school.  So, he went home, “bulked up,” and went back to pass the Army Air Corps physical with an ounce to spare.

Stewart, already a licensed pilot, wanted to see combat.  He remained stateside for almost two years, until commanding officers yielded to his request to be sent overseas.  In England he flew B-24s and did so for the remaining years of the war.  Stewart’s war record included 20 dangerous combat missions as command pilot, wing commander, or squadron commander.  He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross with two Oak Leaf Clusters, the Air Medal with three Oak Leaf Clusters, and the French Croix de Guerre with Palm.  At the end of the war he had risen to the rank of Colonel.  After the war he remained with the US Air Force Reserves and was promoted to Brigadier General in 1959.  He retired from the Air Force in 1968 and received the Distinguished Service Medal.

Please join us on April 13, 2010 at 12:00 pm at the Annex for a presentation of Harvey, starring American war hero Jimmy Stewart.

Click here to watch a trailer for Harvey.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold is often credited with the creation of the modern film score.  But before arriving in Hollywood he was well known in Europe as a composer of operas and concert works.  Like his namesake, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Korngold began his musical career as a child prodigy.

Korngold came to Hollywood from Austria in 1934 and shortly after signed an exclusive contract with Warner Bros., making him one of the first world-renowned composers to work in the Hollywood film industry.  Shortly after his arrival in California, the Anschluss took place in Austria, creating perilous conditions for Jews and forcing him to remain in America.

His first original score for Captain Blood helped launch Errol Flynn’s film career in 1935, and Korngold’s score for the movie Anthony Adverse received an Oscar for the best film music of the year 1936.  His other scores include The Prince and the Pauper (1937), Juarez (1939), The Sea Hawk (1940), The Sea Wolf (1941), King’s Row (1941), and Deception (1946).

Please join us on March 9, 2010 at 12:00pm at the Annex to enjoy Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s superb Oscar-winning score for the swashbuckling epic The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) starring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland.

View a trailer from The Adventures of Robin Hood!

If you’ve ever wondered if the book was as good as (or better than) the movie, check out the book display cart near the circulation desk at the Peninsula Center Library.  It features books that have been adapted for the big (and little) screen.

Last Monday, the Los Angeles Times announced finalists for its book prizes, to be presented April 23rd:

Biography

Kirstin Downey, The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience

Linda Gordon, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits

Michael Scammell, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth Century Skeptic

Melvin Urofsky, Louis D. Brandeis: A Life

Kenneth Whyte, The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst

Current Interest

Dave Cullen, Columbine

Dave Eggers, Zeitoun

Tracy Kidder, Strength in What Remains

Nicholas D. Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide

T.R. Reid, The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Healthcare

Fiction

Jill Ciment, Heroic Measures

Jane Gardam, The Man in the Wooden Hat

Michelle Huneven, Blame

Kate Walbert, A Short History of Women

Rafael Yglesias, A Happy Marriage

Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction

Petina Gappah, An Elegy for Easterly

Paul Harding, Tinkers

Philipp Meyer, American Rust

Daniyal Mueenuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

Wells Tower, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

Graphic Novel

Gilbert Hernandez, Luba (A Love and Rockets Book)

Taiyo Matsumoto, GoGo Monster

David Mazzucchelli, Asterios Polyp

Bryan Lee O’Malley, Scott Pilgrim, Vol. 5: Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe

Joe Sacco, Footnotes in Gaza

History

Richard Holmes, Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

Martha A. Sandweiss, Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception across the Color Line

Kevin Starr, Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance 1950 – 1963

Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940

Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic 1789 – 1815 

Mystery / Thriller

Megan Abbott, Bury Me Deep

David Ellis, The Hidden Man

Attica Locke, Black Water Rising

Val McDermid, A Darker Domain

Stuart Neville, The Ghosts of Belfast

Poetry

Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Apocalyptic Swing

Amy Gerstler, Dearest Creature

Tom Healy, What the Right Hand Knows

Brenda Hillman, Practical Water

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, }Open Interval{

Science & Technology

Marcia Bartusiak, The Day We Found the Universe

Graham Farmelo, The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom

Bill Streever, Cold: Adventures in the World’s Frozen Places

Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

Carol Kaesuk Yoon, Naming Nature: The Clash between Instinct and Science 

Young Adult Literature

James Cross Giblin, The Rise and Fall of Senator Joe McCarthy

Frances Hardinge, The Lost Conspiracy

Deborah Heiligman, Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith

Elizabeth Partridge, Marching for Freedom: Walk Together Children and Don’t You Grow Weary

Shaun Tan, Tales from Outer Suburbia

The New Jersey judge whose ruling opened Little League baseball to girls, died Monday at the age of 75.  Sylvia Pressler ruled in 1973 that 12 year old Maria Pepe should not have been barred from playing on a boys team.  The organization’s national office had threatened to revoke the local league’s charter.

Although Little League initially condemned Pressler’s decision, it lost on appeal, and eventually amended its charter to allow girls.  Pressler’s legal opinion cited Little League as “American as the hot dog and apple pie.  There is no reason why that part of Americana should be withheld from girls.”

Library Resources: Little League, women and baseball

The Palos Verdes Library District catalog includes just about every Academy Award® honoree for Best Foreign Language Film since the award was first presented in 1948.  You can check the availability of the movies right here (PDF file).

In this motion picture awards season, we’d like to remind you that the Palos Verdes Library District catalog includes all Academy Awards® Best Picture winners from 1927 to 2008.  You can see what’s available in this PDF file.

Scientist Temple Grandin was the subject of an HBO film which premiered last week.  Grandin, who struggled early in her life with autism, believes an autistic ability to “think in pictures” led her to becoming an expert in animal behavior and livestock handling.

Grandin believes that mildly autistic students can succeed in science and technology, and that hands-on education can give them the confidence to learn and apply math and communication skills.  She used such skills to design equipment, facilities, and processes promoting easier, less stressful livestock handling.

Library resources: Works by Temple Grandin

Lt. Col. Lee Archer, a member of the U. S. Army Air Forces fighter group of African Americans known as the Tuskegee Airmen, died last Wednesday at the age of 90.  Archer flew 169 combat missions, and was considered the sole black American “ace” of World War II, having shot down five enemy aircraft.

Archer earned the Distinguished Flying Cross and received special citations from three Presidents.  Following his retirement from the Air Force in 1970, Archer joined General Foods as one of the era’s few black corporate vice presidents of a major American company.

Library resources: Tuskegee Airmen

In an effort to solve the mystery of who inspired the Mona Lisa, Italian researchers have reached an agreement in principle with French cultural authorities to exhume the body of Leonardo da Vinci.  His remains are interred at a chateau in the Loire Valley.

If Leonardo’s skull is found, experts can recreate his face, and compare it to the famed painting.  The artist loved riddles, and some scholars believe he may have painted himself as a woman in his masterpiece.  Others believe that the Leonardo’s remains should be left undisturbed.

Library Resources: nonfiction about Leonardo, fiction about Leonardo

For some inspiration– and reading material– take a look at the book display cart adjacent to the circulation desk at the Peninsula Center Library.  You’ll find books about people who’ve made a difference in our world, who became the change they wanted to see in life, to paraphrase Gandhi.

The American Heart Association has recently published a list of factors to be used in assessing cardiovascular health.  Called “Life’s Simple 7,” they include smoking, weight, physical activity, diet, blood pressure, cholesterol and glucose.

In conjunction with the guidelines, the AHA has created an online resource, “My Life Check,” to help people assess their heart health.  The results can be used to create a plan to address risk factors and modify behaviors which negatively impact health.

Library Resources: Heart disease prevention, Heart-healthy cooking

The Palos Verdes Library District is pleased to announce that we are now offering eBooks through the OverDrive online resource in the EPUB format, a new standard recommended by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). These types of files can be added to your compatible computer or eBook reader using Adobe Digital Editions.

Another format?!

While eBook readers have been around since the 1990s, the past couple years brought a surge of new devices. Whether it’s the iPad by Apple, the  Nook by Barnes and Noble, the Kindle by Amazon, or the Reader by Sony, they all do the same thing – allow a user to read on a portable electronic device.

With hundreds of devices available where when one device plays some file formats while another does not, it gets confusing to keep track of compatibility (check our compatibility page to see if your device works). Some of you may be asking, “Why don’t eBooks just use open formats?”. There are a number of reasons but the one worth mentioning in the library context is licensing. In the 1990s, digital piracy was rampant as was seen in A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc.. The process of sharing a digital file consisted of copying the file and giving it to someone else which was pretty much effortless and required little more than a computer with an internet connection or a storage device – there was no need for paper, ink, or a printing press to reproduce the document. How could a company compete with this new peer-to-peer sharing reality?

Massive losses of revenue spooked copyright and content holders and in order to combat this, various forms of digital rights management (DRM) evolved. These DRM files allowed copyright holders to set expiration dates on digital files or limit the amount of times a file could be copied or simultaneously shared. Fast-forward to today and very little has changed except that there are more formats and more devices and some of the formats have even become proprietary to elbow out competition.

What is so special about EPUB?

First and foremost is the fact that EPUB is not just another frivolous format created to control content by copyright holders (though it does that too). EPUB files are exciting in my opinion primarily for accessibility and usability reasons. The EPUB format allows text to be reflowed, meaning words can wrap from one line to another if the size of the text is altered. This is a popular feature for people who need to read enlarged text (i.e. my grandparents) since the words will become larger and you will not have to scroll horizontally to see the remainder of the line (often the case with PDFs since they are more like photographs that enlarge the entire document to scale). Another usability advantage is that since EPUB files are XML documents, all text is searchable in any EPUB file and can be extremely useful if you are trying to find certain words in a book or article.  Keyword searchability is hit-or-miss with PDF documents since they may or may not have had optical character recognition applied to the document.

Adobe, who produces the Adobe Reader product, is a company that supports the IDPF, and they are not afraid of their PDF format going along the wayside anytime in the near future. Their PDF product is useful for being a digital picture of the original document and keeps many features such as graphs, images, and charts in the context in which it was presented in the book or article. A welcome relief to all will be that since both the EPUB and PDF format are supported in the Adobe Digital Editions software, no additional software is required to be installed on your computer.

Update 2/10/10: KCRW’s Politics of Culture had a related podcast on this topic on February 9, 2010: iBooks, eBooks and the Future of Books on the Web