The Big Blue Brain

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27 October 2008

New Spanish titles for October

20 October 2008

El pergamino de la seducción: una novelaby Gioconda Belli

Belli's rigorously imagined and sumptuously presented novel is a dual story of obsessive love, with a bi-level plot alternating between past and present. From the past, the author retrieves the almost legendary tale of Queen Juana of Castile, eldest daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, and her alleged madness caused by the premature death of her handsome husband, Philip of Hapsburg. The contemporary story line is also set in Spain; over a period of time and in piecemeal fashion, a teenage student in a convent school, Lucia by name, learns from a college professor, who will become her first lover, of his own obsession: Queen Juana and her life story, specifically the unanswerable question of whether she was insane or simply the victim of a smear campaign by the male forces at court who would seek to control her. The professor, as if Scheherazade, tells Lucia a series of episodes concerning the tragic queen so Lucia may internalize Juana's plight, all the while executing his seduction of her. Male manipulation of the female, as we see, is hardly a thing of the past. A balance between the two time levels is carefully maintained, the contemporary story intensifying the viability of the characters from the past--all this carried along, as if down a lovely stream, by the sheer beauty of the author's prose style.

Escuadrón guillotina by Guillermo Arriaga

Full of Arriaga's trademark humor and irony present in his films and novels, The Guillotine Squad takes us back to one of the most exciting times in Mexican history. Feliciano Velasco y Borbolla de la Fuente, a lawyer, sells his famous invention, the guillotine, to Pancho Villa, the renowned insurgent general of the Mexican Revolution. Soon Feliciano finds himself immersed in the logic of this simultaneously bizarre, heroic, and cruel world of Villa's troops. "With Guillermo Arriaga's work, something curious happens: he discovers new paths, abandons previous characters and themes, and manages to confect a truly masterful little novel.

Por un día más by Mitch Albom

In this second novel from Tuesdays with Morrie and The Five People You Meet in Heaven author Albom, grief-stricken Charles "Chick" Benetto goes into an alcoholic tailspin when his always-attentive mother, Pauline, dies. Framed as an "as told to" story, Chick quickly narrates her funeral; his drink-fueled loss of savings, job ("sales") and family; and his descent into loneliness and isolation. After a suicide attempt, Chick encounters Pauline's ghost. Together, the two revisit Pauline's travails raising her children alone after his father abandons them: she braves the town's disapproval of her divorce and works at a beauty parlor, taking an extra job to put money aside for the children's education. Pauline cringes at the heartache Chick inflicted as a demanding child, obnoxious teen and brusque, oblivious adult chasing the will-o'-the-wisp of a baseball career. Through their story, Albom foregrounds family sanctity, maternal self-sacrifice and the destructive power of personal ambition and male self-involvement. He wields pathos as if it were a Louisville Slugger—shoveling dirt into Pauline's grave, Chick hears her spirit cry out, " 'Oh, Charley. How could you?' "—but Albom often strikes a nerve on his way to the heart.



Chips espías by Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre

RFID, which stands for Radio Frequency Identification, is a technology that uses computer chips smaller than a grain of sand to track items from a distance.  Compiling massive amounts of research with firsthand knowledge, Chips espías explains RFID technology and reveals the history and future of global corporations' and the U.S government's strategies to imbed these trackers on everything-from postage stamps to shoes to people themselves-and spy on Americans without our knowledge or consent. It also urgently encourages consumers to take action now-to protect their privacy and civil liberties before it's too late.







New Movies at the Library!

13 October 2008

Check out these brand new releases or browse our shelves for oldies- but goodies!

   

 

The Happening

Incredible Hulk

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Iron Man

John Adams

Love Guru

Mongol (Mongolian)

Onion Movie

Run Fatboy Run

The Strangers

The Visitor

You Don't Mess with the Zohan

  

  


Welcome new staff member!

6 October 2008

The Adult Services Department is please to announce that we have a new staff member, Judith Lopez.  Judith is currently working on her master's degree in Library Science.  She is bilingual in English and Spanish. Please stop by and say hello.