Reviews

Want to know what our librarians and staff are reading? Browse through a variety of reviews added to our catalog from a variety of genres.

Showing 1 to 20 of 3,035

Filter

  • Training camp by King, Wesley.
    ★★★★★

    Reviewed by Ellen A on Mar 7, 2023

    Tagged: Children Fiction

    "The West Bottom Badgers are the worst youth basketball team in the league. That is until one summer when a new coach gives them the chance to change everything. Rolabi Wizenard and his magical coaching techniques cover offense, defense, individual strengths and weaknesses, and physical conditioning. Through basketball, he shows his players that working at each of these will not only make them stronger physically, but also mentally and emotionally.The Badgers players - Rain, Twig, Cash, Lab, and Peño - each have their own story, their own challenges, and their own fears. Over the course of a two-week basketball camp, we get to know each character and their struggles, where they've come from, and where they are going.Each story teaches readers empathy, the understanding that there are multiple sides to every story, and that accepting our differences will help us become better friends as well as better athletes." As quoted from the inside flap.

    Check out this item

  • Wired.
    ★★★★★

    Reviewed by Ellen A on Mar 7, 2023

    Tagged: Science Technology

    Check out the latest copy of Wired Magazine available in the Science and Wellness department. WIRED covers the latest gadgets, tech trends, and complex questions about the metaverse. Also available online via the Libby app.

    Check out this item

  • Broad city.
    ★★★★★

    Reviewed by Ellen A on Feb 14, 2023

    Tagged: Humor

    Hilarious BFFs Abbi and llana take on NYC. Real comedic drama, like sketch comedy but for whole seasons

    Check out this item

  • Creative quest by Questlove.
    ★★★★★

    Reviewed by Ellen A on Feb 14, 2023

    Tagged: African American

    Short on time? Try the audio-book version of CreativeQuest 

    Check out this item

  • Black Adam
    ★★★★★

    Reviewed by Ellen A on Feb 14, 2023

    Tagged: Comics and Graphic Novels

    Black Adam played by Dwayne The Rock Johnson is awoken from his 5000 year sleep and comes back to free modern civilation from it's enslavement using the powers of ancient Egypt.

    Check out this item

  • A song for you : my life with Whitney Houston by Crawford, Robyn,
    ★★★★★

    Reviewed by Ellen A on Feb 9, 2023

    Tagged: African American Music

    The truth comes out in this once in a life time memoir of Whitney Houston. All the truth about the music industry pressures, her relationships and more are in this biographical account as told by her longtime friend and once lover Robyn Crawford.

    Check out this item

  • Choosing the President : 1980. by League of Women Voters
    ★★★★★

    Reviewed by Ellen A on Feb 3, 2023

    Tagged: Politics Social Science

    The only nonpartisan guide to the complex and often baffling process that decides the nation’s next president. League of Women voters produces excellent resources on educating voters about issues and processes.

    Check out this item

  • Wired.
    ★★★★★

    Reviewed by Ellen A on Feb 3, 2023

    Tagged: Computers Newspapers, Magazines, & Journals

    Wired Magazine is great for keeping up with the tech industry, computers, and gadgets. They cover a variety of topics monthly and it's approachable for most readers. Wired is available through the Libby app directly to your phone as well.

    Check out this item

  • A million miles in a thousand years what I learned while editing my life by Miller, Donald,
    ★★★★★

    Reviewed by Ellen A on Feb 2, 2023

    Tagged: Psychology Religion Social Science

    Donald Miller is great at writing about spiritual growth, young adulthood, aspirations, and his journey with and without his father present. This book is sort of a culmination of some of the themes covered in his earlier works. Very heartfelt.

    Check out this item

  • How to be a (young) antiracist by Kendi, Ibram X.
    ★★★★★

    Reviewed by Ellen A on Feb 2, 2023

    Tagged: African American Philadelphia General Research Social Science Teens Humanities

    The conversation on how to end racism is an ongoing one. Here is a young adult version of X Kendi's adult book How To Be Antiracist (still appropriate for adults!) with scenarios and facts to help you continue the work and carry on the fight in your every day relationships and at school and socially. 

    Check out this item

  • Coco
    ★★★★★

    Reviewed by Ellen A on Feb 2, 2023

    Tagged: Children Movies & Television Music

    Great family movie for all ages: "Despite his family's baffling generations-old ban on music, Miguel dreams of becoming an accomplished musician like his idol, Ernesto de la Cruz. Desperate to prove his talent, Miguel finds himself in the stunning and colorful Land of the Dead following a mysterious chain of events. Along the way, he meets charming trickster Hector, and together, they set off on an extraordinary journey to unlock the real story behind Miguel's family history."

    Check out this item

  • Elsewhere, home by Aboulela, Leila,
    ★★★★★

    Reviewed by Matthew G on Feb 1, 2023

    Tagged: Fiction

    "Could you not look beyond the hijab?"

    Such is the question for one of Aboulela's protagonists in the collection of short stories, "Elsewhere, Home." Aboulela exquisitely and acutely describes the thoughts and reflections of Muslim, Arab women living between Scottland, England, Sudan, and Egypt.

    In a time when millions of people have been displaced from their homes, its beautiful and heartwrenching to read reflections such as Aboulela's, and to consider, "What makes a home?"

    I do wish more people read Aboulela's works and reflected on their significance in Philadelphia, for the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who reside here. Can we dare to make our city, and our neighborhoods, more friendly, and to welcome strangers into our homes?

    Check out this item

  • Circe : a novel by Miller, Madeline,
    ★★★★★

    Reviewed by Ellen A on Jan 31, 2023

    Tagged: Fiction

    It's a greek myth from Circe's perspective on the Odessey, it's descriptive, heart-warming, and adventurous. Check it out.

    Check out this item

  • Recorder the Marion Stokes project.
    ★★★★★

    Reviewed by Ellen A on Jan 31, 2023

    Tagged: General Research Library Science

    This review contains spoilers! Click to reveal...

    Check out this item

  • Web service APIs and libraries by Michel, Jason Paul.
    ★★★★★

    Reviewed by Ellen A on Jan 31, 2023

    Tagged: Library Science

    APIs go to work for us in our daily lives. Learn about how they can be implemented within the framework of libraries, social media and user engagement. 

    Check out this item

  • Cack-handed : a memoir by Yashere, Gina,
    ★★★★★

    Reviewed by Ellen A on Jan 30, 2023

    Tagged: Biography and Autobiography History

    Check out this new memoir from British Nigerian comedian Gina Yashere. This memoir is quite witty and enjoyable.

    Check out this item

  • You are my favorite color by Sze, Gillian,

    Reviewed by Mary D on Jan 26, 2023

    Tagged: Children

     Words are by poet Gillian Sze , a telling of a mother explaining the beauty to her children of their brown color, when a child asks why am I brown color, the mother explains what brown skin means .  This book empowers and embraces and is a reminder for young readers that they have shades of color that only they can discover and express.

     

     

    Check out this item

  • Why we sleep unlocking the power of sleep and dreams by Walker, Matthew P.,
    ★★★★★

    Reviewed by Ellen A on Jan 26, 2023

    Tagged: Health and Fitness Social Science

    Reconsider the importance of your sleep and learn about interesting studies affecting memory. Refresh your knowledge of REM versus NREM. Also a great evening read to encourage relaxation and induce sleep.

    Check out this item

  • Orientalism by Said, Edward W.
    ★★★★★

    Reviewed by Matthew G on Jan 25, 2023

    Tagged: Politics History Humanities

    I read this book and wrote this review in 2010, when I was staying in a Palestinian refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. So the text, and the life of the author, were laid out in front of me in plain view.

    Understanding Western views of “terrorism,” “Islam,” “Muslims,” and “the East”

    I want you to read through the following excerpt from Edward Said’s, Orientalism. Take your time to understand it, and perhaps read through it a couple of times.  Then, if you’re in your home, share it with a family member.  If you’re online, share it with a friend via facebook.  Perhaps post a link to this blog on your profile.  If you’re at work, call over a coworker and see what they think of it.

    Then, after you’ve read it, consider what you know about Terrorism, Terrorists, Muslims, Islam, Saddam Hussein, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Osama Bin Laden, al Qaeda, or Afghanistan.  What is your source of information regarding these topics: is it from local or national media?  Is it from friends or family, colleagues or strangers?  What informs us about our views of these topics, and how have we been taught to NOT LISTEN to these very people when they present their own viewpoints and beliefs?  As if people in America who know absolutely nothing of their lives and opinions, their struggles and beliefs, can be greater experts on people on this side of the world than the very people who live here.

    Without any more exposition, Edward Said:

    "In the first place, it would be wrong to conclude that the Orient was essentially an idea, or a creation with no corresponding reality… There were – and are – cultures and nations whose location is in the East, and their lives, histories, and customs have a brute reality obviously greater than anything that could be said about them in the West.  About that fact this study of Orientalism has very little to contribute, except to acknowledge it tacitly.  But the phenomenon of Orientalism as I study it here deal principally, not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient (the East as career) despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a “real” Orient.  My point is that Disreali’s statement about the East refers mainly to that created consistency, that regular constellation of ideas as the pre-eminent thing about the Orient, and not to its mere being, as Wallace Stevens’s phrase has it.

    A second qualification is that ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied.  To believe that the Orient was created – or, as I call it, “Orientalized” – and to believe that such things happen simply as a necessity of the imagination, is to be disingenuous.  The relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony, and is quite accurately indicated in the title of K. M. Panikkar’s classic Asia and Western Dominance. The Orient was Orientalized not only because it was discovered to be “Oriental” in all those ways considered commonplace by an average nineteenth-century European, but also because it could be – that is, submitted to being – made Oriental.  There is little consent to be found, for example, in the fact that Flaubert’s encounter with an Egyptian courtesan produced a widely influential model of the Oriental woman; she never spoke of herself, she never represented her emotions, presence, or history.  He spoke for and represented her.  He was foreign, comparatively wealthy, male, and these were historical facts of domination that allowed him not only to possess Kuchuk Hanem physically but to speak for her and tell his readers in what way she was “typically Oriental.”  My argument is that Flaubert’s situation of strength in relation to Kuchuk Hanem was not an isolated instance.  It fairly stands for the pattern of relative strength between East and West, and the discourse about the Orient that it enabled.

    This brings us to a third qualification.  One ought never to assume that the structure of Orientalism is nothing more than a structure of lies or of myths which, were the truth about them to be told, would simply blow away.  I myself believe that Orientalism is more particularly valuable as a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient than it is as a veridic discourse about the Orient (which is what, in its academic or scholarly form, it claims to be).  Nevertheless, what we must respect and try to grasp is the sheer knitted-together strength of Orientalist discourse, its very close ties to the enabling socio-economic and political institutions, and its redoubtable durability.  After all, any system of ideas that can remain unchanged as teachable wisdom (in academies, books, congresses, universities, foreign-service institutes) from the period of Ernest Renan in the late 1840s until the present in the United States must be something more formidable than a mere collection of lies.  Orientalism, therefore, is not an airy European fantasy about the Orient, but a created body of theory and practice in which, for many generations, there has been a considerable material investment.  Continued investment made Orientalism, as a system of knowledge about the Orient, an accepted grid for filtering though the Orient into Western consciousness, just as that same investment multiplied – indeed, made truly productive – the statements proliferating out from Orientalism into the general culture.

    Gramsci has made the useful analytical distinction between civil and political society in which the former is made up of voluntary (or at least rational and noncoercive) affiliations like schools, families, and unions, the latter of state institutions (the army, the police, the central bureaucracy) whose role in the polity is direct domination.  Culture, of course, is to be found operating within civil society, where the influence of ideas, of institutions, and of other persons works not through domination but by what Gramsci calls consent.  In any society not totalitarian, then, certain cultural forms predominate over others, just as certain ideas are more influential than others; the form of this cultural leadership is what Gramsci has identified as hegemony, an indispensable concept for any understanding of cultural life in the industrial West.  It is hegemony, or rather the result of cultural hegemony at work, that gives Orientalism the durability and the strength I have been speaking about so far.  Orientalism is never far from what Denys Hay has called the idea of Europe, a collective notion identifying “us” Europeans as against all “those” non-Europeans, and indeed it can be argued that the major component of European culture is precisely what made that culture hegemonic both in and outside Europe: the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures.  There is in addition the hegemony of European ideas about the Orient, themselves reiterating European superiority over Oriental backwardness, usually overriding the possibility that a more independent, or more skeptical, thinker might have had different views on the matter."

    Check out this item

  • A New Year's reunion by Yu, Li-Qiong.

    Reviewed by Mary D on Jan 25, 2023

    Tagged: Children

    Maomao's father works very far distances from home but comes home once a year during Chinese New Year.  She hardly recognizes him when she sees him , once he gets a haircut and cleaned up Maomao recognizes him better.  They have lots of fun and make rice balls .  They hear firecrackers all night outside and she lays between her momma and poppa.

    They go New Year visiting , they watch the dragon dance on main street.  It snows really hard they go out to play with other children they build a snowman and snowball fights.  

    But all too soon it's time for Papa to go away again.  

    This well illustrated book if the winner of the prestigious Feng Zikai Chinese children's book award .

     

    Check out this item