Tap-dancing saxophonist comes to Newport!

An act new to our summer reading program comes to town this week. Michael Conly is Mr. Shoehorn, a tap-dancing saxophonist who will dance and make music in Literacy Park at 1:00 p.m Wednesday. All children and families are invited to attend this free program.

Mr. Shoehorn uses his feet as percussion instruments. A Buskerfest reviewer wrote of his show, “Of particular interest was a percussion and saxophone artist named Shoehorn. This one-man show somehow digitally converted his tap dancing into keyboard solos or drum beats and combined it with masterfully played saxophone as well as more traditional percussion to create a masterpiece of live musical entertainment. The beats this guy was able to generate with nothing more than his two feet were incredible."

To see more about the Mr. Shoe Horn, check out his website or watch his video.

The Sheltering Desert

The year is 1939 and two apolitical German geologists doing fieldwork in Southwest Africa have decided they want no part of the war that their homeland is inflicting on the rest of the world. They hurriedly pack their rusty old truck with camping gear, canned food and their loyal mutt, Otto, and head off into the inhospitable Namib Desert.

Twenty years later, one of those men, Henno Martin, recounted their 3-year struggle to survive. The Sheltering Desert is an understated gem of a book, a diamond in the rough.

An English language version was not published until 1970, and the translation is not the most polished. But in some ways, the oddly-rendered English adds to the book’s charm. More importantly, the two men’s naïve enthusiasm and audacious pluck shine through.

 The men quickly realize that day-to-day survival requires most of their waking hours. They spend whole days tracking, shooting and then chasing down the wounded animals. After the kill, the pair must often trek miles back to where they started, carrying a heavy carcass. Time in their makeshift camp is spent fetching water, skinning and preparing meat, and collecting a few scrubby plants they use to supplement their mostly animal-based diet. They enjoy what little free time they have in the evenings watching ants, hearing radio broadcasts of the news or discussing the outside world’s descent to insanity while listening to classical music.

Eventually, acute illness of one of the men forces them to return to civilization and they spend the remainder of the war in a British internment camp. But their extraordinary time living in the Namib makes for riveting reading. The book includes black and white photos the pair took during their adventure.

Sixty years later, an anonymous fan of The Sheltering Desert followed in their footsteps and published beautiful color photographs of the area on a blog, One Stoned Cow. The site makes a wonderful companion to an equally wonderful book.

You can reserve The Sheltering Desert here.

The Lost Ones by Ace Atkins

I’m a bit of a grammar snob—“Don’t say ain’t or your mother will faint” can definitely be applied to me. So when I started reading Ace Atkin's new mystery The Lost Ones I nearly put it right back down. There are ‘ain’t’s everywhere, and not only within the dialogue!

BUT—I’m really glad I stuck with it.

The Lost Ones tells the story of Quinn Colson, a small-town Texas sheriff not too long back from 10 years as an Army Ranger. (It’s the second book—the first one is The Ranger. Read them in order if you can, but I stumbled on The Lost Ones by accident, not knowing it was #2, and it stood up fine.)

Colson lives and works in the same small town where he grew up, helping his mother raise his no-good sister’s kid and trying to keep a corrupt town councilman from running roughshod over the populace. It seems like plenty to deal with just as it is, but then things get more complicated. The no-good sister comes home, three weeks sober and asking for her umpteenth chance. Not only does she want back into to her little boy’s life, she wants to talk about the past, a dark place Colson isn’t willing to visit. On the sheriffing side, a child who was brought to the emergency room after ‘falling out of a grocery cart’ dies, prompting a heartbreaking investigation that ultimately riles up a Mexican drug syndicate and brings in the Feds.

Colson’s loyalty to family, to friends, to fellow soldiers, and to the law are all tested in the course of the book. The Lost Ones is a strong, well-written story, evoking small-town Texas and characters whose voices will stay you. They surely stayed with me. By the end, a little bit of Texas slang even started sneaking into my speech, but trust me, it ain’t gonna last.

Did you ever wonder why we had to run for shelter?

I like nonfiction books about really terrible things. I don’t know why, but I find it interesting to vicariously experience nightmarish suffering from a safe distance, through the pages of a well-researched book.

A Thousand Lives by Julia Scheeres is one of these. Subtitled The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown, it tells the inside story of The People’s Temple Full Gospel Church, founded by a charismatic preacher named James Jones in the mid-1950s.

When I opened this book, I knew only what everyone knows (or thinks they know) about Jonestown: it was a religious cult whose members first moved to Guyana and then, in 1978, drank cyanide together. Nearly a thousand people died, over 200 of them children.

Scheeres uses 50,000 pages of letters, journals and other documents found in Jonestown and recently released by the F.B.I. in an attempt to understand the people who belonged to the People’s Temple. Why did they follow Jones? What did they hope to find in the jungles of South America? She succeeds in helping the reader get to know them: the angry young black man who wanted to fight injustice; the elderly woman who grew up in Jim Crow Alabama, who believed Jones was a savior; the working-class man trapped by his wife’s devotion to Jones; the rebellious boy desperate to escape.

Originally, it seems the People’s Temple was a very attractive church, preaching kindness and empathy. Jones taught a gospel of racial and sexual equality, and reached out to both white and black parishioners at a time when most churches were deeply segregated. Christians who believed in social justice might well find the People’s Temple appealing.

But over the years, it evolved. Jones began to teach his followers that they were hated and feared, even going so far as to fake attacks and assassination attempts. He also began to systematically drug people, and to punish those who seemed inclined to question his authority. And that was just the beginning.

The story is chilling and heartbreaking, especially since it’s accompanied by smiling photographs of those who died. It doesn’t answer all the questions surrounding Jonestown - I don’t think any book could satisfactorily do that. It does explore the inexorably-escalating horror with compassion, and details the little-known stories of those who survived.

A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown is a work of great empathy for people caught in a terrifying trap. It is awful and fascinating.

The future, two (totally different) ways

I read two brand new science fiction novels recently. They were so completely different from each other that it’s amazing they’re both members of the same genre of fiction. They were both good, too.

The first was After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall, the newest book by award-winner Nancy Kress. The novel presents look at a post-catastrophe near-future, in which most humans have been wiped off the earth. The few people who remain are genetically damaged, and they live imprisoned in a sort of zoo enclosure. (Who runs the zoo? Good question.)

Alternate chapters describe the world as the cataclysm approaches, in the story of a young mother watching helpless to do anything but observe. With pitiless symmetry, the two plot streams - future and present - come together.

For a very different look at the future of humankind, see John Scalzi’s Redshirts, an unabashedly goofy comedy about low-ranking crewmen on a spaceship, who wonder why they and their friends keep getting killed in such stupid ways. The answer to that question will lead them into an exploration of science fiction cliche, a strange realm indeed.

Redshirts explores some interesting themes, like how to live a meaningful life when death is obviously random, unknowable, and inevitable - but it never strays far from absurdity. It’s science fiction engineered to make you laugh - how many authors are writing that, these days?

I don’t know of any other genre that embraces such wide variety - the bleakness of After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall’s onrushing holocaust, and the cheerful irreverence of Redshirts’ metafictional entertainment. I recommend them both, for different moods.

Logging in to Library2Go

As many of you know, we moved our catalog to a new system in mid-May. One of the effects of this move is that logging in to Library2Go has changed. If you have not yet created a new PIN with our new catalog, you will need to do that before logging in to Library2Go. You can call us and ask us to create your PIN, or do it yourself. Either way, have an 8-15 character code in mind (with at least one number and one letter).

To create your PIN:

• Go to the Oceanbooks catalog at http://encore.oceanbooks.org
• Click on the Login link in the upper right corner
• Enter your name (first or last will work) and barcode from the back of your library card
• Click on the Submit button
• You will be prompted to create a new PIN

Once your PIN is created in the Oceanbooks catalog, you can log in to Library2Go. The new network is listed as Ocean Books in Library2Go.

If you are notified that a hold is ready to download but you can’t find it in Library2Go within 72 hours from when the email was sent, get in touch with our library. We can work with you to get your hold and your place in the waiting list restored.

Here come the puppets!

Newport Library's Dream Big, READ! summer reading program features the very popular performers from Dragon Theater Puppets for this week’s fun at 1:00 p.m. Wednesday, July 11.  All children and families are invited to the free program held in Literacy Park. 

Jason Ropp and his company of puppets are a staple of our summer reading shows.  This year they are once again performing an original show written specifically for libraries, Rocket Hamster’s Dreamy Space Odyssey.  Jason is a very talented performer who writes the scripts, makes all his puppets and performs all the roles.  If folks have young visitors in town, this is a great show to bring them to.

To see more about the puppets, check out their website,  To see a promo for one of their shows, you can watch this video on YouTube, 

You can look here to see a full schedule of the library's summer programs.