In her book Leadership in Turbulent Times (DB93029, CL19000), Doris Kearns Goodwin poses these questions, pertinent in any age:  “Are leaders born or made? Where does ambition come from? How does adversity affect the growth of leadership? Do the times make the leader or does the leader shape the times?” and perhaps, most importantly, in today’s political climate, “What is the difference between power, title,…

Dark Sacred Night By Michael Connelly DB 92899 / CL 18098 Working the night shift, LAPD detective Renée Ballard catches retired cop Harry Bosch going through cold-case files at Hollywood Station. He is looking into the unsolved murder of a fifteen-year-old runaway, and when Ballard hears the details of the brutal killing, she decides to help Bosch. Unrated. Commercial audiobook. 2018. Long Road to Mercy By…

One of my favorite authors is Mercedes Lackey.  Her worlds of Valdemar and the alternate history of the Elemental Masters are among my favorite haunts.  Valdemar is sword and sorcery medieval times, which makes it sound much more bland then it is. The alternate history of the Elemental Masters is England in various time periods but mostly Victorian running up to the First World War.…

The Body of Christopher Creed (DB 52758) by Carol Plum-Ucci is a fiction novel that follows the story of a high school student named Torey as he navigates through his feelings of the disappearance of Christopher Creed. Creed, a somewhat unlikeable person, writes an ambiguous email that straddles the line between a goodbye note and a suicide note before, you guessed it, disappearing without a trace.…

The ways we gather, store and understand information are moving further into digital spaces. It is essential that we are providing access to, and creating the foundational skills necessary for, children to navigate these spaces. The BLAST (Bringing Libraries and Schools Together) team has been working to ensure that access to digital spaces remains equitable within library services.  

Vida Winter is a famous author whose stories have captivated her readers for years. A particular collection of her stories with a missing thirteenth tale only intrigues her admirers further. Reclusive and highly secretive of her own life story, Vida Winter has evaded the truth and disappointed curious biographers with varying false stories for years. All this changes the day Miss Winter enlists the young…

The introduction of "chapter books" is an exciting, if sometimes intimidating experience for children. It's a new format, with more content, and a bigger vocabulary! As a babysitter that relishes reading with kids as the path to early literacy, I've found that there are certain characteristics that are guaranteed to make a kid laugh, even in the foreign territory of chapter books: funny names are…

Recently I read my first John Grisham. It was his latest book The Reckoning (DB92511) , which would rank as one of the top books I read last year. I thought the book was so good that I decided that one of my goals this year would be to read as many John Grisham books that I could. I decided to start with the The…

Digital literacy is extremely important in any job field, but it is also necessary for those who wish to join the rest of the tightly-networked online world. At Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, we want all patrons seeking to improve their digital literacy to have the opportunity to do so. Beyond our free Internet and computer usage, we provide resources to achieve our goal of having…