SKCTC Middlesboro Library

We started the SKCTC Middlesboro blog a while ago, but got a bit sidetracked and haven’t posted for a while.  We are now going to get back on track with library news, photos, and book information.  We look forward to hearing from our students and the SKCTC community!  Please feel free to contact us with any ideas or suggestions for the library!

Just now, we are getting in some new books on a variety of topics.  One we’ve recently acquired is My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey by Jill Bolte Taylor.  Dr. Taylor was working in brain research when she herself experienced a massive stroke at the age of 37.  Although she lost the ability to walk, talk or even remember her previous life, she at the same time experienced a great sense of peace.  This book chronicles her recovery, where she learned to rely less on her logical “left brain” and to more fully explore her intuitive “right brain.”  The book is available for check out today!  RC 388.5 .T387 2009

Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala is the second of two books about Guatemala that I have read over the past two months.  I prefer the first book,  Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala, which I read in August shortly after returning from that country. Although a non-fictional account of life in Guatemala in the years following “La Violencia,” Silence on the Mountain reads much like a novel as the author, through the written word, recreates his experience in that troubled country.

Buried Secrets is not without its own set of virtues, however. Replete with data and facts, it provides hard numbers and descriptive information regarding villages razed, techniques of torture and terror, and the government’s strategy as it set about denying its genocide of the Maya.  Indeed, the book reads like a reference work in places and probably provides more actual information than Silence on the Mountain.

On a more critical note, though, Buried Secrets must have originally been a Ph.D. dissertation, subsequently recast for book publication. Long passages are marked, burdened really, by a writing style suggestive of a graduate student’s slavish efforts at conceptual precision.  And the author’s continual effort to place her Guatemala research into a broad theoretical framework, again suggestive of dissertation research, at times gets in the way of her own story.

These books are reminders of evil’s pervasive reality, and that much of the evil in the world is caused by people who believe, or claim to believe, that they are fighting evil.

I’m going back and rereading the children’s classics(especially Newberry award and honor books=2-5 per week) since I don’t do TV.

I’ve just read Robert Morgan’s Gap Creek (of Oprah’s book club fame) and his more recent novel This Rock. I enjoyed both, but I really can’t understand why Oprah picked the former and not the latter, other than GC has a strong female protagonist. GC spans the first year of marriage for  Hank and Julie Richards. Through Julie’s first person perspective, the reader glimpses authentic Carolina mountain life before the turn of the century. Morgan’s prose is clean and poetic, a pleasure to read. I’m sure he was influenced heavily by Arnow, but whereas she used phonetic spelling, he practices the current technique of suggesting dialect through syntax. Consequently, the language rings true without condescension.  This Rock , which is set during the early 1920s, alternates between the perspectives of a young man Muir and his widowed mother Ginny. Muir’s voice commands most chapters with Ginny’s appearing sporadically. This is a classic Cain and Abel story of Muir’s search for himself and his struggle with his brother Moody. In retrospect, I wonder why Morgan allows us to see Moody only through the eyes of his mother and brother rather than giving him his own chapters. I’ll have to mull about this choice because I’m sure it’s significant in understanding the way Moody functions in the story.  One part of the book that doesn’t work for me is a segment about a circus coming to town and an elephant stomping a man to death. I think Morgan based this on a true incident, but it doesn’t flow within the context of the novel. A middle-aged Hank and Julie appear in this novel, but fleetingly. I recommend both books, and I look forward to reading more of Morgan’s fiction. (He has a Daniel Boone biography coming out in October, BTW.)

Gap Creek  PS3563.O87147 G36 2000
This Rock   PS3563.O87147 T48 2001

Hunter’s Horn  PS3501.R64 H86 1997

I recently read the Appalachian classic Hunter’s Horn by Harriet Arnow. I was blown away by her characterization and rich prose. At first, the text looks intimidating because the font is smaller than standard and at 600+ pages, it appears so dense as to be impenetrable. In addition, many readers are put off by her phonetic spellings of Appalachian dialect. However, the effort is worth it. She writes from the close third person perspective, and unlike The Dollmaker, which is primarily from Gertie’s point of view, this novel allows us to sympathize with its three main characters: Nunn, Milly, and Suze. It is a powerful commentary on the political and social climate that transcends its Appalachian setting. In fact, I’ve been calling Arnow the female Mountain Steinbech.

Freakonomics is a must read, and we have it in our library.  
HB74.P8 L479 2005

I’m currently enjoying reading the book Can Jane Eyre Be Happy? More Puzzles in Classic Fiction by John Sutherland which tries to answer some of the great puzzles in literary history, including:

How vulgar is Mrs. Elton? (Jane Austen’s Emma)
Why is Fagin hanged and why isn’t Pip prosecuted? (Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist and Great Expectations)
How many pianos has Amelia Sedley? (W. M. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair)

I must admit that it had never occurred to me to question most of the “puzzles”, but it’s very entertaining to read the “clues” that Sutherland has found in the texts to explain these conundrums.   There are more books in the series, including Is Heathcliff a Murderer? and Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennett?  The books read like the National Enquirer for English majors!

I’ve also been listening to the audio book of Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal.  What can you say about Terry Pratchett’s novels other than that they are outrageous fun!  In this one, Moist Von Lipvig has been plucked from the jaws of death to serve as the postmaster for Ankh-Morpork.  He is assisted and sometimes thwarted by an assortment of odd characters, including golems, werewolves and banshees.   I’m glad there are numerous novels in his Discworld series, because I think I’m going to be busy for a while!