Readers Scene
What books were winners with Library staff in 2017? From pop culture potboilers to heavy-hitting history reads, check out the favorites that lined our staff's personal shelves this past year.
During fall 2017, the Kansas City area's six public library systems join together for a community-wide reading and discussion of Tim O'Brien's seminal work about the Vietnam War, The Things They Carried. The local edition of the 2017 NEA Big Read KC offers programs exploring veterans' war experiences, music of the period, Hollywood's handling of the war, comparisons of 1960s protests with present-day movements, writing about war, civil rights, and the era's cultural and political legacy.
The Kansas City community lost an iconic writer this past week. Charles W. Gusewelle died Tuesday, November 15th at age 83. He wrote for The Kansas City Star for six decades. A few years ago, Gusewelle took part in the Library’s Dial-A-Story program. He recorded a child’s version of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. We are positing this encore reading of in celebration of Charles Gusewelle’s life.
Scholar Eric Rasmussen set the stage for the special, 23-day First Folio! The Book that Gave Us Shakespeare exhibit on Tuesday, June 7.
Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy is featured as May's FYI Book Group selection.
After a special tour of the National World War I Museum at Liberty Memorial, FYI Book Club readers gathered recently to discuss The Guns of August, the classic nonfiction work by Barbara W. Tuchman.
Angelou died Wednesday at her home in North Carolina, closing an extraordinary life that began in Missouri and yielded what President Obama described as “one of the brightest lights of our time.”
Columbia University released the roll of 2014 Pulitzer Prize winners and finalists this week, and one name — Leo Damrosch — caught our eye. He’s speaking at the Library next month.
In the decade spanning the 1950s, the U.S. government churned out roughly 400 million pieces of Civil Defense propaganda. If that fact alone is not enough to make you want to “duck and cover,” consider the actual threat of nuclear annihilation Americans lived under during the Atomic Age.