Going to the Tifton-Tift County Library in February

Published 8:00 am Tuesday, February 4, 2020

What’s new to read?

 Jeffry Colvin has done a lot of writing and a lot of living before he produced his first novel. He has served as a Marine, is a graduate of the Naval Academy, Harvard University and Columbia University. And now, he is the author of “Africaville,” a multigenerational novel that has its beginnings in the small Canadian village of Africaville.

This village was founded in the early 1800s just outside Halifax, Nova Scotia by black Canadians who had come to Canada mostly through the Caribbean. The first character we meet is Kath Ella, one of the very few children that survive the horrible fever that sweeps the settlement in 1918. We follow Kath Ella as she struggles to become educated, raise her son and how he and his descendants spread out and made their way in places as diverse as Montreal, New England and the deep South.

Heather Morris’s “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” was a huge bestseller and she is following that success with another story related to her by Lale Sokolov, a Holocaust survivor she met in 2003.

Cilka is 16 years old when she is taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp and immediately singled out by the officers because of her beauty. Three years later the camp is liberated and Cilka is charged with sleeping with the enemy and sent to a Siberian prison camp. Here she finds, in the midst of horrible privations and abuse, friends, a purpose and eventually, escape. “Cilka’s Journey” is doing well on the best sellers lists.

Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Isabel Allende has published her twenty-fourth book. “A Long Petal of the Sea” is the result of Allende going back in her own family history, using real historical events and characters based on relatives or people she has known. When General Franco and the Fascists overthrew the Spanish government in the late 1930s, hundreds of thousands of people who backed the wrong side in the conflict are forced to flee for their lives.

Roser, a young pregnant woman whose husband has not been heard from in months and the husband’s brother Victor decide they have a better chance of survival as a married couple. The newly formed family is able to get passage on the SS Winnipeg, a French steamer chartered by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda that takes them to Chile. They long to return to Spain, but Europe is engulfed in war and as time passes, they become more comfortable with their new surroundings and lives.

In the not-too-distant future, “flash” technology gives individuals the ability to transfer their consciousness into other bodies for specific periods. Society has been completely transformed by this advancement – travel, warfare and entertainment has never been the same. But there is a very dark side to flash – darkshare.

This is a black market of desperate people willing to rent out their bodies for any and all purposes imaginable and the people who seek them out for their own purposes. Annami invented flash by accident, trying to find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease. Now she has to set the world right. “Anyone” is by Charles Soule.

Houses of Mercy figure prominently in Serena Burdick’s fiction. Houses of Mercy were Anglican/Presbyterian homes for “fallen women.” This usually meant women who became pregnant out of wedlock, but sometimes it meant women whose families found them difficult to manage. In Ms. Burdick’s novel “The Girls with No Names,” Luella and Effie Tildon discover their father is having an affair. Luella begins to act out, believing that since her father no long abides by the rules, she can do as she pleases. And she does, until she disappears, leaving Effie to work out what has happened. She suspects her father has had Luella committed to the House of Mercy and decides she must rescue her sister at any cost.

How do Frenchwomen age? You have to imagine it is more glamorously than women in south Georgia. Caroline de Maigret and Sophie Mas, authors of “How to be Parisian” have written “Older, But Better, But Older” to give insight into the glamorous Frenchwoman’s mindset as she runs up against her fortieth birthday. Some of the advice seems as alien as it can be; some of it is completely universal, rooting for you to be free and fulfilled as you deal with the changes that are inevitable.

A couple of quick non-fiction mentions. “Father of Lions: One Man’s Remarkable Quest to Save the Mosul Zoo” by Louise Callaghan tells the story how Abu Laith manages to get Zombie the lion and Lula the bear smuggled out of Iraq to safety.

“Free Cyntoia: My Search for Redemption in the American Prison System” by Cyntonia Brown-Long is the story of Cyntoia Brown, sentenced to life in prison at 18 for killing a 46 year old man who picked her up for sex when she was 16. A chance encounter with a prison educator convinced her to enroll in classes and begin a transformation that included a pardon.

Google’s original corporate mantra was “Don’t be evil,” but Google, plus all of the other big tech companies that impact our lives, have not stayed true to that original sentiment. In “Don’t be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principals – and All Of Us,” Rana Foroohar, an associate editor for The Financial Times and an analyst for CNN, tells us how Big Tech lost its soul – and ate our lunch.

Did you know?

 The recent upgrade to our Evergreen software has resulted in a number of improvements you might find helpful. If you go to the library’s catalog, you will notice a New Items at the Tifton-Tift County Public Library carousel. This shows off the 50 most recently added items to our collection and it updates every evening. Click on the link and you can put the item on hold right from the carousel. It is worth noting that not everything we add to the catalog is brand new, published in 2020. Some of what you will find here are items we are replacing because they have gone missing or worn out or items we have discovered we should have purchased when they first came out, but somehow missed.

Another improvement is noticeable if you decide to change how you are notified that you have holds available for pickup. Say you have had us call you, but now you want to be notified by text. Or you used to get an email, but now you want us to call. You can change these preferences when you log into your account online (or ask us to change them for you at the desk next time you are in). When you do this, the system will then ask you if you want to change all your current holds to this new notification system. Clever, isn’t it?

The last improvement you might find useful is popularity ratings. Now, when you search the catalog, you can rate your search results by popularity. These rankings are based on information collected across the state on the number of circulations a title has had, the number of copies in the system and how many holds are (or have been) on the item. If you are interested in seeing this in action, do a keyword search in the catalog for crawdads and sing. Then sort that list by popularity.

Upcoming Events

Join Us on Friday, Feb. 14 from 3-4:30 p.m. for our FROZEN Party! Games! Treats! Crafts! And, best of all, a special showing of the Sing-Along edition of “FROZEN”!

The library will be closed on Presidents Day, Feb. 17.

Our long standing public story time continues on Thursday mornings at 10 a.m. Join Ms. Trina, a huge assortment of puppets, stuffed animals, and craft supplies galore to read some of the best of our children’s picture book collection. Children need to be accompanied by an adult and the programming is developed with children between the ages of 18 months and 4 years old in mind.

Programming for Young Adults happens on Tuesday and Thursday evenings from 5-7 p.m. For details on what is being offered on a particular day check the Google calendar attached to our website or sign up for our e-newsletter, delivered fresh to your email address every Monday afternoon. The newsletter is the most current source of what is going on with us.

Consider subscribing to our e-newsletter, liking us on Facebook or checking the Google calendar attached to our webpage (tiftonlibrary.org). You can always call the library at 386-7148 for more information as well.