Search the Blog
Categories
- Books & Reading
- Broadband Buzz
- Census
- Education & Training
- General
- Grants
- Information Resources
- Library Management
- Nebraska Center for the Book
- Nebraska Memories
- Now hiring @ your library
- Preservation
- Pretty Sweet Tech
- Programming
- Public Library Boards of Trustees
- Public Relations
- Talking Book & Braille Service (TBBS)
- Technology
- Uncategorized
- What's Up Doc / Govdocs
- Youth Services
Archives
Subscribe
Tag Archives: Memoir
New Nebraska Memoir on BARD!
“Our Life Our Way: A Memoir of Active Faith, Profound Love, and Courageous Disability Rights” by Nebraska author William L. Rush and Christine F. Robinson is now available on cartridge and for download on BARD.!
“Our Life Our Way, A Memoir of Active Faith, Profound Love, and Courageous Disability Rights explores an extraordinary love story grown out of engagement with both disability rights advocacy and Christian faith communities. This important memoir contains thoughtful, often-entertaining, and sometimes heart-wrenching anecdotes of a couple’s journey to create their profoundly intimate relationship and Christian marriage, in a world not yet ready for them.”
Book Jacket
This memoir was written by a husband and wife, and is narrated by Christine Robinson, it is the sequel to Rush’s autobiography, “Journey Out of Silence,” which is also available on BARD and cartridge.
TBBS borrowers can request “Our Life Our Way,” DBC01986, or download it from the National Library Service BARD (Braille and Audio Reading Download) website. If you have high-speed internet access, you can download books to your smartphone or tablet, or onto a flash drive for use with your player. You may also contact your reader’s advisor to have the book mailed to you on cartridge.
#BookFaceFriday “The Calamities of Kalamity Kate”
Yeehaw! Get along, lil’ #BookFaceFriday!
In honor of a true Nebraska legend, today we are highlighting Leta Powell Drake’s memoir, “The Calamities of Kalamity Kate: A History of Nebraska’s Children’s TV Shows” (J & L Lee Co., 2014). Leta Powell Drake was a celebrity in Nebraska and throughout the world of entertainment with a 50-year career in broadcasting. To us, at NLC, she holds a special place as a narrator for our Talking Book and Braille Service. Many of her famous interviews have been archived by History Nebraska and can be found on their YouTube channel. We highly recommend her memoir and as part of our permanent collection, it’s available for check out to anyone. Just ask our amazing Information Services staff! This title is published by the University of Nebraska Press, which we collect from for our state document program. In 1972, the Nebraska Legislature created the Nebraska Publications Clearinghouse. Its purpose is to collect, preserve, and provide access to all public information published by Nebraska state agencies.
“The Calamities of Kalamity Kate is a nostalgic trip into the past that is not only enjoyable but edifying.” — foreword by Ron Hull
Love this #BookFace & reading? We suggest checking out all the titles available for book clubs at http://nlc.nebraska.gov/ref/bookclub. Check out our past #BookFaceFriday photos on the Nebraska Library Commission’s Facebook page!
Posted in Books & Reading, General
Tagged Book Covers, bookface, bookfacefriday, books, Leta Powell Drake, Memoir, Reading, The Calamities of Kalamity Kate
1 Comment
#BookFaceFriday “Brat” by Andrew McCarthy
If someone doesn’t believe in #BookFaceFriday, I can’t believe in them.
“Blaine!? That’s a major appliance, that’s not a name!” But whatever his name is, we are like totally here for his memoir. Dive into the world classic 80’s movies with “Brat: An 80’s Story” by Andrew McCarthy (Grand Central Publishing, 2021) as this week’s #BookFaceFriday. It’s available as an eBook at Nebraska OverDrive Libraries. New titles, both nonfiction and fiction, are added daily to Nebraska Overdrive Libraries!
“[A] heartful memoir…McCarthy is clear-eyed and unsparing about Hollywood but takes the emotional intensity of the actor’s craft and life seriously. The result is a riveting portrait of the artist as a young man.”
―Publishers Weekly
Find this title and many more through Nebraska OverDrive. 180 libraries across the state share the Nebraska OverDrive collection of 25,520 audiobooks, 32,303 eBooks, and 3,403 magazines. As an added bonus it includes 130 podcasts that are always available with simultaneous use (SU), as well as SU ebooks and audiobook titles that publishers have made available for a limited time. If you’re a part of it, let your users know about this great title, and if you’re not a member yet, find more information about participating in Nebraska Overdrive Libraries!
Love this #BookFace & reading? Check out our past #BookFaceFriday photos on the Nebraska Library Commission’s Facebook page!
Friday Reads: Nobody Will Tell You This But Me: A true (as told to me) story by Bess Kalb
I listened to this audiobook from Lincoln City Libraries through my Libby App. Narrated by the author, it’s a short 4 hours, the perfect listen for a road trip. I looked up Bess Kalb’s book after reading the following statement “Last year at a party a writer I respect called my pregnant stomach a ‘career-ender’ and now I’m the head writer of a show I sold to a major network and yesterday I signed the deal paying me to write a movie based on the book I finished 5 weeks postpartum, so do you like apples?” and I thought… yes, this is a woman whose book I’d like to read.
Some relationships are meant to be memorialized, the voices of our loved ones with us even after they’re gone. Such is the memoir of Bess Kalb and her maternal grandmother “Grandma Bobby.” Kalb recounts three generations of family history, mostly focused on the women, in a succinct and heartwarming account. The author doesn’t gloss over the true-to-life relationships of her family but displays them in all their messy glory. The result is a series of recounted conversations, family tales, and verbatim voicemail messages left by her grandmother. Kalb saved every one her Grandma Bobby ever left her. I admit, I laughed and cried as these people, flaws and all, came to life. Relationships and family especially can be messy, filled with misunderstanding, pride, and rough edges that rub, but through all of this, the spunky voice of Grandma Bobby is clear, that and her love for her granddaughter.
Kalb, Bess. Nobody Will Tell You This But Me: A true (as told to me) story. Penguin Random House Audio. 2020.
Posted in Books & Reading
Tagged Audiobook, Bess Kalb, Book Review, Friday Reads, Memoir, Nobody Will Tell You This But Me
Leave a comment
Friday Reads: Inheritance by Dani Shapiro
What do our parents really leave us? Is it money, or a house? Seeing my father’s eye’s when I look in the mirror or my mother’s nose? Is it memories, the good and the bad? What if you found your dad wasn’t your biological father? That all the family history, the aunts and uncles, the cousins and grandparents, that they didn’t really belong to you. At least not in the way you thought. This is the basis for Dani Shapiro’s poignant and timely memoir, “Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love.” This is not just the tale of the author’s search for her biological father, but her desire to know the secrets her parents kept.
I listened to the audiobook, published by Random House, and narrated by the author herself. Listening to the author tell her own story, hearing her voice and emotion as she recounts the journey she takes after this discovery made the experience even more enjoyable. I choose this book in my attempt to read more non-fiction this year, and it didn’t disappoint.
Shapiro, D. (2019). Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love.
Posted in Books & Reading, General
Tagged #FridayReads, Book Review, Dani Shapiro, Friday Reads, Inheritance, Memoir
Leave a comment
#BookFaceFriday “Songs of the Humpback Whale”
Today we’re giving it our best shot at speaking whale… HhhAaapEEE BooookffAaace FrrrriiiidAAaayyy!
While we didn’t see any whales off the coast of Puerto Rico, we did take advantage of the beach for this week’s #BookFaceFriday “Songs of the Humpback Whale: A Novel in Five Voices” by Jodi Picoult (Washington Square Press, 1992). This familial drama between a disgruntled wife and her renowned oceanographer husband plays out in a cross country road trip. This book is a part of our NLC Book Club Kit collection; get it reserved for your book club today!
“Picoult has become a master almost a clairvoyant — at targeting hot issues and writing highly readable page-turners about them . . . It is impossible not to be held spell bound by the way she forces us to think, hard, about right and wrong.” ―Carolyn See, The Washington Post
Today’s #BookFace model is my very accommodating sister, who stared into the ocean for a good long time so I could get this shot.
Love this #BookFace & reading? We suggest checking out all the titles available for book clubs at http://nlc.nebraska.gov/ref/bookclub. Check out our past #BookFaceFriday photos on the Nebraska Library Commission’s Facebook page!
Posted in Books & Reading, General
Tagged Augusten Burroughs, Book Art, Book Club Kits, Book Covers, bookface, bookfacefriday, books, Memoir, Reading, Running with Scissors
Leave a comment
#BookFaceFriday “Running With Scissors”
I’d hate to have a Freudian slip with this #BookFace…
Get off your therapist’s couch and check out “Running with Scissors: A Memoir” by Augusten Burroughs (Picador, 2003). This New York Times Bestseller is one of those instances where real life is more outlandish than any fictional story. This book is a part of our NLC Book Club Kit collection, and is the perfect selection to get your book club through the winter doldrums!
“I just finished reading the most amazing book. Running with Scissors is hilarious, freaky-deaky, berserk, controlled, transcendent, touching, affectionate, vengeful, all-embracing….It makes a good run at blowing every other [memoir] out of the water.” ―Carolyn See, The Washington Post
This week’s #BookFaceFriday model apparently has a love for running around with boxes on his head. I’m so glad his mother knew how to take advantage of it! Mr. Asher is the son of our Information Services Librarian, Aimee Owen! She and her family get all the credit for this week’s #BookFace photo!
Love this #BookFace & reading? We suggest checking out all the titles available for book clubs at http://nlc.nebraska.gov/ref/bookclub. Check out our past #BookFaceFriday photos on the Nebraska Library Commission’s Facebook page!
Posted in Books & Reading, General
Tagged Augusten Burroughs, Book Art, Book Club Kits, Book Covers, bookface, bookfacefriday, books, Memoir, Reading, Running with Scissors
Leave a comment
#BookFaceFriday “What Is Gone”
This week’s Bookface is a smash hit!
#BookFaceFriday is celebrating the Nebraska Book Award winning memoir “What Is Gone” by Amy Knox Brown (Texas Tech University Press, 2017). The author, Amy Knox Brown, will be at the 2018 Celebration of Nebraska Books on December 1st to accept her award and sign books! You don’t want to miss it! The Celebration, free and open to the public, will feature presentations of the Nebraska Center for the Book’s Mildred Bennett Award, and Jane Geske Award, along with the 2018 Nebraska Book Award winners. There will also be a special presentation by the editors of 2018 One Book One Nebraska selection, “Nebraska Presence: An Anthology of Poetry.”
“This book speaks to a current tragedy that will bring up what is yet to be dealt with from the author’s past. The back and forth writing works well in this text and references to life in Lincoln and Omaha are numerous for readers who can easily imagine exactly where events took place. The abduction and murder of Candice Harms is described in gruesome detail beyond what those of us who lived through it remember, and violence against women needs to be highlighted again and again as an ill we have not yet solved in our society. An important read for all.”—from the Nebraska Book Award Judges.
This week’s #BookFace model is the beautiful and historic Nebraska Telephone Company Building in downtown Lincoln, it also houses one of our favorite local bookstores, Francie and Finch!! Don’t worry, no vandalism was committed in the creation of this #bookface.
Love this #BookFace & reading? We suggest checking out all the titles available for book clubs at http://nlc.nebraska.gov/ref/bookclub. Check out our past #BookFaceFriday photos on the Nebraska Library Commission’s Facebook page!
#BookFaceFriday “Short Hair Detention”
And the Book Award goes too…
#BookFaceFriday is celebrating the Nebraska Book Award winning memoir “Short Hair Detention: Memoir of a Thirteen-Year-Old Girl Surviving the Cambodian Genocide” by Channy Chhi Laux (Archway publishing, 2017). The author, Channy Chhi Laux, will be at the 2018 Celebration of Nebraska Books on December 1st to accept her award for and sign books! You don’t want to miss it! The Celebration, free and open to the public, will feature presentations of the Nebraska Center for the Book’s Mildred Bennett Award, and Jane Geske Award, along with the 2018 Nebraska Book Award winners. There will also be a special presentation by the editors of 2018 One Book One Nebraska selection, “Nebraska Presence: An Anthology of Poetry.”
“In a moving narrative, Channy recounts the intimate details of her journey through four devastating years of the Cambodian genocide that killed more than two million of her people. From the first six months of starvation to the agonizing moments when the Khmer Rouge separated her from her parents, Channy details how she found friendship despite dire circumstances, learned to rely on her animal instincts, endured emotional pain, and found the courage to look past her misery and persevere for the sake of her mother. Through it all, Channy reminds all of us that it is possible to survive unforgiving conditions through faith in God, a fierce determination, and unwavering inner strength..”—from the book jacket
This week’s #BookFace model is the completely adorable Kayleigh Nguyen!!
Love this #BookFace & reading? We suggest checking out all the titles available for book clubs at http://nlc.nebraska.gov/ref/bookclub. Check out our past #BookFaceFriday photos on the Nebraska Library Commission’s Facebook page!
Posted in Books & Reading, General, Nebraska Center for the Book
Tagged Book Art, Book Covers, bookface, bookfacefriday, Celebration of Nebraska Books, Channy Chhi Laux, Memoir, Nebraska Book Awards, Reading, Short Hair Detention: Memoir of a Thirteen-Year-Old Girl Surviving the Cambodian Genocide
Leave a comment
