Marina is a young girl growing up in safety and comfort in Tehran during the 70′s and early 80′s. A spirited soul with strong convictions, she questions her new government’s replacement of a teacher with a young fanatical girl. Marina asks to be taught the subject matter, calculus, instead of the political rhetoric. The result of this act of defiance culminated with the  class walking out of the classroom in quiet protest. This is remembered by the new regime who picks her out of her home and places her into Ayatollah Khomeini’s notorious Evin prison. She finds herself in a new world, full of fear and without physical or emotional comforts. She is saved from execution by  a conflicted and lonely interrogator who blackmails her with the safety of her family and those she loves, into marriage. Although still considered a prisoner, she trades one set of horrors for another in the name of survival. The lines between good and evil blur for Marina as she begins to see some semblance of humanity in her new husband while questioning what he does when he is not with her.  

Now living in Canada, the wife of her childhood sweetheart, Marina has kept silent about her life, until now. The Prisoner of Tehran honors those who were not blessed with her good fortune.

Jacquelyn Mitchard has an enviable ability with a pen; she draws characters that you feel you know or maybe could be. Still Summer chronicles four ordinary women under not so ordinary circumstances. On the other hand extraordinary events take place in all our lives. We hold our friends close, expend energy keeping our daughters safe, understand the failing of husbands, believe we are important to our families while dealing with all that life offers.  In this story, life is challenging beyond what is usually encountered, nightmares begin, suffering occurs, tragedy is dealt with, and what is important rises to the top and becomes clearly defined under new parameters. Another fine read by Mitchard.

The Laramie County Library System has had great success with book club kits for some time, and they are now able to interlibrary loan these across the state! The kits contain 10 copies of a specific book as well as notebook with a variety of helpful information . As many of you know, these kits are a wonderful resource – whether for your patrons to utilize or even for you to use for library book discussions. The items circulate for six weeks, and we’d love for you to enjoy these as much as we do.To find them in the catalog, you just have to enter “book club kits” into the search field – make sure you’re looking at all WYLD locations.  It brings up Natrona and Sheridan in addition to Laramie County, but it’s very easy to navigate and request materials once you click on our record.

Here’s a list of the items we have, listed alphabetically by author’s last name:

Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende
A Sudden Change of Heart by Barbara Taylor Bradford
March by Geraldine Brooks
The Memory Keeper*s Daughter by Kim Edwards
Wickett*s Remedy by Myla Goldberg
Stones From the River by Ursula Hegi
The Honk and Holler Opening Soon by Billie Letts
The Giver by Lois Lowry
The Color of Water by James McBride
The Memory of Running by Ron McLarty
The Tender Bar by J.R. Moehringer
Close Range by Annie Proulx
The Weight of Water by Anita Shreve
Galileo’s Daughter by Dava Sobel
The Bonesetter’s Daughter by Amy Tan
House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester

And coming soon*.

Open Season by C.J. Box
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson
My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk
Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult

Thanks Troy!

New Books on CD 

The Arctic Event by Robert Ludlum

On a remote island in the Canadian Arctic, researchers discover the wreckage of a mysterious World War II-era aircraft, a discovery that forces the Russian Federation into a shocking admission. The unmarked plane is a Soviet strategic bomber that disappeared with its crew more than fifty years ago while carrying two metric tons of weaponized anthrax.

You: on a Walk by Michael Roizen

Get your diet up and walking with YOU: on a Walk! As millions of dieters have already discovered, the key to the weight-loss plan outline in You: On a Diet is the daily thirty-minute walk. Now the bestselling authors of the YOU series, Michael Roizen and Mehmet Oz, have created an original audio program specifically designed to help you meet your daily walking goad and have fun doing it.

You: on a Diet, by Michael Roizen

For the first time in our history, scientists are uncovering astounding medical evidence about dieting.  Now Michael Roizen and Mehmet Oz translate this cutting-edge information to help you shave inches off your waist, by giving you the best weapon against fat: Knowledge.

New England White by Stephen L. Carter 

With the powers of observation and richness of plot and character, tha author of the Emperor of Ocean Park returns to the New England university town of Elm Harbor, where a murder begins to crack the veneer that has hidden the racial complications os the town’s past, the secrets of a prominent family, and the most hidden bastions of African-American political influence.

Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani

In Persia, in the seventeenth century, a young woman is forced to leave behind the life she knows and move to a   Her father’s unexpected death has upended everything-her expectation of marriage, her plans for the future-and cast her and her mother upon the mercy of relatives in the fabled city of Isfahan.

From  Newsweek (Nov 26th) The Future of Reading:

“Though the Kindle is at heart a reading machine made by a bookseller—and works most impressively when you are buying a book or reading it—it is also something more: a perpetually connected Internet device. A few twitches of the fingers and that zoned-in connection between your mind and an author’s machinations can be interrupted—or enhanced—by an avalanche of data. Therein lies the disruptive nature of the Amazon Kindle. It’s the first “always-on” book.”

Follett Is Fresh Choice for Oprah

November 14, 2007
By Kimberly Maul

Oprah Winfrey has chosen Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth as her next book club pick. The novel, which was originally published in 1989, is based around the building a Gothic cathedral during the Middle Ages.

“My publishers were a little nervous about such a very unlikely subject but paradoxically, it is my most popular book,” Follett said about Pillars on his website. “It’s also the book I’m most proud of. It recreates, quite vividly, the entire life of the village and the people who live there. You feel you know the place and the people as intimately as if you yourself were living there in the middle ages.”

Read more at The Book Standard.

One learning child. One connected child. One laptop at a time.

The mission of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is to empower the children of developing countries to learn by providing one connected laptop to every school-age child. In order to accomplish our goal, we need people who believe in what we’re doing and want to help make education for the world’s children a priority, not a privilege. Between November 12 and November 26, OLPC is offering a Give One Get One program in the United States and Canada.

During this time, you can donate the revolutionary XO laptop to a child in a developing nation, and also receive one for the child in your life in recognition of your contribution. Find out more.

New on CD

Alan Greenspan The Age of Turbulence

This book is in part a detective story. After 9/11 I knew, if I needed further reinforcement, that we are living in a new world – the world of a global capitalist economy that is vastly more flexible, resilient, open, self-correcting, and fast-changing than it was even a quarter century earlier. It’s a world that presents us with enormous new possibilities but also enormous challenges.

New on MP3

Hogan by Curt Sampson
Golf hero Ben Hogan bore a mystique that still captivates golfers: a silent, almost eerie concentration that intimidated his opponents, a presence any politician or actor would envy, and an ability to hit a ball so squarely is sizzled as it left the club.

The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs

Walker & Daughter is Georgia Walker’s little yarn shop, tucked into a quiet storefront on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.  The Friday Night Knitting club is improvised by some of Georgia’s regulars, who still into the shop looking for tips on knitting and end up finding much, much more.

The Jihad Next Door by Dina Temple-Ralston

The author uncovers a strange corner of the war on terror in Lackawanna, New York, home of the first home grown al-Qaeda terrorist call in America, or was it?

The Long Walk by Slavomir Rawicz

Twenty-six-year-old cavalry officer Slavomir Rawicz was captured by the Red Army in 1939 during the German-soviet partition of Poland and sent to the Siberian Gulag.  In the spring of 1941, he escaped with six of his fellow prisoners including one American.  Thus began their astonishing trek to freedom.

The Day the World Ended at Little BigHorn by Joseph M. Marshall

The Battle of Little Bighorn in

Johnson and Weiner Among National Book Award Winners

November 15, 2007
By Kimberly Maul

Four authors were honored at the National Book Awards ceremony last night in New York, with Denis Johnson taking the fiction prize for his Vietnam War novel Tree of Smoke. Other winners were Sherman Alexie for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Young People’s Literature), Robert Hass for Time and Materials (Poetry) and Tim Weiner for Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Nonfiction).

Some of this year’s finalists include Edwidge Danticat (Brother, I’m Dying), Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything), Joshua Ferris (Then We Came to the End), Ellen Bryant Voigt (Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006) and Brian Selznick (The Invention of Hugo Cabret).