Shopping List for the Hungry Mind 3

(Recommendations from library staff.)

READING: The Medici Effect: What elephants & epidemics can teach us about innovation by Frans Johansson. It's a business management book (yawn) celebrating the Intersection of ideas that makes me feel pretty good about being in a library (career choice!) -- although I don't think libraries are ever mentioned (hmmm.)

PLAYING: "Lost in Blue" for Nintendo DS. High school senior Keith and nearly blind Skye get tossed on a deserted island and have to keep themselves going with realistic tasks and on the lookout. It's hard, it's sometimes tedious, it's great to stay alive.

LISTENING: The Big Bam : the life and times of Babe Ruth (paper version) by Leigh Montville as an abriged audio book. The guy was a true American phenomena of time and place and this is a great bio that works as a story being told.

WATCHING: The Wire. A David Simon and Edward Burns television creation that continues their amazing documentation and fictionalization of the shadows of urban Baltimore (Homicide: Life on the Streets, The corner: a year in the life of an inner-city neighborhood) that have universal appeal and relevance.

-Rick Lezenby

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READING: A companion to African-American Studies edited by Lewis Gordon and Jane Gordon. Essays on the difficulty and installation of African-American Studies in colleges and universities in the USA. We might take it for granted now, but there is still antagonism about this site. Gordon and Gordon (philosophy and political science) are editors, both at Temple University. Introduction by the editors sets up the playing field of this subject matter.

WATCHING: A Street Car Named Desire (1951) film. Janet Leigh, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden A must-see film; one of Brando's first films. The DVD from circulation is a special edition with two discs: disc #2 has outtakes and screen tests of Brando. Do it! (Brando looks like a teen-ager, in the screen test.)

LISTENING: "Sing Sing Sing". A famous jazz number, popularized by Benny Goodman (1939). I heard a performance from the Lincoln Center, with a contemporary band, and with commentary by Ed Bradle

-Al Vara