September 2017

From the CommitteeFilm night fundraiserThe committee was delighted that our recent film fundraiser brought in $680, despite the fact that there were other things happening on the same night. The movie Hampstead received a variety of opinions but overall it was a successful evening. 6 word competitionThere was a gathering at the library on the 11th September to announce the winners of the 6 words competition. The overall winner was Su Woodward. Runners up were Sooz Heinrich, Jess Cochrane and Lou Goggin. They all received vouchers for Readers Companion. The committee would like to extend a huge thank you to our judges Jack Bedson, Julian Croft and Kaye Mill. A big thank you to Martin Mantle for his usual excellent help.

The Focus articleThis created lots of comments within the community ... and there was a great photo of some of your hardworking committee!

Dvd discussion group and book discussion groupThis idea was a suggestion from one of our members. Ian is happy for this to be held in the Library but meetings must be held within the Library working hours. If anyone is interested in forming a group please contact the committee for help in setting up and advertising.

Peter Dennis's response to a letter re the carparkPeter Dennis is the Council’s CEO and his response included:

a. The pedestrian crossing in Rusden Street: traffic monitors have been installed and will be assessed in two or three

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weeks. Results must satisfy the Roads and Maritime Services requirements before a pedestrian crossing is approved. b. Difficulty using car park: car park complies with Australian standards c. The pedestrian access to the Library within car park is being relocated. It will not affect parking spaces. d. Tenant Parking Only signs will be changed to Customer Parking. e. There are no current plans for the vacant block next to the library to used for parking

If you have concerns about the parking and accessibility at the new library we would urge you to write to Mr. Dennis, the CEO of Armidale Regional Council.

Book review

Letters to My GrandchildrenDavid SuzukiDavid Suzuki – scientist, environmentalist, TV personality and author has written this book for his six grandchildren, offering them advice from his experience. He speaks about issues dear to his heart, asking his grandchildren to respect the natural world, man’s connection to the land, and the sensible use of natural resources. He deplores the modern obsession with electronic devices, the lack of physical exercise and the diminution of community connectedness.

Interspersed with Suzuki’s ideas is information about his own life and family, including the internship of his Japanese parents in Canada in World War 11 after the bombing of Pearl Harbour. He puts forward ideas about racism, activism, tolerance and hard work, topics he believes are useful for the next generation.

I enjoyed reading this book although the format of letters to Suzuki’s grandchildren seems an odd way to convey his messages. He clearly hopes for a wider audience, but at the end of the book he addresses specific letters to each grandchild. Occasionally, the material in the

book is dry and repetitive, sometimes nostalgic, and self congratulatory in places. It is obviously intended to inspire us, along with his grandchildren, to live lives of compassion and conviction. It is certainly worth a look, and it would be hard to disagree with the main thrust of ideas about humans and their relationship to the environment.

Marnie French.

New in the Library

Welcome to springtime, when magnolias in bloom can be hit by random below-freezing temperatures. Be inspired by Gardens for the senses, especially suited to dry climate regimes, the Spanish gardens of Javier Mariategui. Let Eleanor Morgan spin you some warm familiarity with Gossamer days: spiders, humans and their threads. Or come into a shaded place to relax with Arboreal: a collection of new woodland writing. Piet Swimberghe bridges exterior and interior worlds in urging us to Think rural.

Matt Titone takes us to the edge for a view of Surf shacks: an eclectic compilation of creative surfers’ homes from coast to coast and overseas. Beatrice Peltre adds to our appetite with La tartine gourmande: recipes for an inspired life. Juan shares his Arzak secrets of high-end Basque cooking, including green egg and dissolving black cube dishes. And Jenny Linford expands our Chef’s library by illustrating favorite cookbooks from the world’s great kitchens.

Back outside, Liz Carlisle plants a seed in Lentil underground: renegade farmers and the future of food in America; Ann Hansen tinkers with Maintaining small-farm equipment: how to keep tractors and implements running well; Robert Cameron curls up with Slugs and snails for 528 pages as part of the Collins New Naturalist Library series; and Jan Sapp researches Coexistence: the ecology and evolution of tropical biodiversity.

Coexistence is a concept at the heart of other new titles on our shelves. In the field of philosophical anthropology, Michael Tomasello sets out A natural history of human morality. Rebecca Solnit asks The mother of all questions in her essays on gender and feminism. Daniel Dennett shows how culture enables reflection in his study of consciousness From bacteria to Bach and back: the evolution of minds. Claudia Rankine’s Don’t let me be lonely cries out for coexistence, and is an experimental precursor to her recent Citizen: an American lyric – also in the Library, this won the 2015 US National Book Critics Circle Award and is the only poetry book to have ever entered the New York Times bestseller lists.

The history of people in groups is addressed by John Romer (his A history of ancient Egypt from the great pyramid to the fall of the Middle Kingdom is a sequel to another also held in the Library); by Robert Bickers (Out of China: how the Chinese ended the era of western domination is a story of the twentieth century); Jeffrey Winters (whose Oligarchy, also held in Canberra’s Parliamentary Library, reveals that “the common thread for oligarchs across history is that wealth defines them, empowers them, and inherently

exposes them to threats. The existential motive of all oligarchs is wealth defense”); and David Shulman (Tamil: a biography explores two millennia of south Indian civilisation and the 80 million members of this language and cultural group).

We have art (Portrait of the artist – an exhibition catalogue from the British Royal collection, and Josef Frank against design – an exhibition catalogue from Vienna about this inventive Austrian-Swedish twentieth-century artist), Fun! (what entertainment tells us about living a good life), Conversations with Milosevic and fear of a different kind (Haunted: on ghosts, witches, vampires, zombies and other monsters of the natural and supernatural worlds).

Also haunting is Claude Lanzmann’s 235-minute documentary The last of the unjust, featuring interviews with survivors of the Theresienstadt concentration camp. We have several films from the master Greek director, Theo Angelopoulos, also new in the collection – including Alexander the Great, The beekeeper and Landscape in the mist. Next door, in Asia Minor, we gain fictional insight into Kurdish life and thought with Bakhtiyar Ali’s I stared at the night of the city – the first Kurdish-language novel ever to be translated into English.

Nocilla experience is the second experimental novel from Agustin Fernandez Mallo, challenging enough to have spawned a recent generation of Spanish novelists. Mauro Javier Cardenas writes his first novel, The revolutionaries try again, in English in the US about the grip of complex, bitter and committed youth in Ecuador – a new leap forward for Latin American fiction. Nanni Balestrini has lived the activist life in Italy, but has had to wait 43 years to see his novel We want everything translated into English: our version is from Verso in New York and London, but they have used the Telephone Publishing version out of Melbourne. Vivek Shanbhag wrote Ghachar ghochar in Kannada, another southern Indian language (with only 40 million speakers). Faber have published this short work in English to reviews praising its Chekhovian-like insight and expression. The London Independent wrote:

Shanbhag’s protagonists are a “joint family”: the unnamed narrator, his wife, his parents, his uncle and his sister. “It is natural to wonder, I suppose, why the six of us should want to live together,” the narrator muses. “What can I say – it is one of the strengths of families to pretend that they desire what is unavoidable.”