Long Island Reads

Save the Date!

2009-12-01T13:48:00.003-05:00

The Long Island Reads Author Event with Candice Millard will take place on Tuesday, April 13th. Save the Date!

Our 2010 Long Island Reads pick is in!

2009-09-23T13:48:00.003-04:00

River of Doubt by Candice Millard
Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey

The 26th U.S. president, failing re-election, goes on an adventure that nearly kills him. In an admirable debut, historian and National Geographic contributor Candice Millard records Theodore Roosevelt's exploration of a hitherto uncharted river in the heart of the Amazon and turns the incredible story of Teddy Roosevelt’s South American adventure into one that easily matches an Indiana Jones screen adventure.

Why River of Doubt?

Teddy Roosevelt lived on Long Island from 1885 until his death in 1919.
The book covers a part of Teddy Roosevelt’s life that is both fascinating and not well known.
The book will appeal to readers of American history, Long Island History, American Presidents, adventure stories, and travel narratives.
River of Doubt is available in hardcover, paperback, large type, audio CD and downloadable audio.
Programming opportunities are numerous.

For more information, contact:

Nassau co-chair Maureen Garvey at maureengarvey@merricklibrary.org
Suffolk co-chair Deborah Clark Cunningham at dcunning@suffolk.lib.ny.us

The Reviews Are In!

2009-05-12T14:25:00.003-04:00

Here are some of the the things that people who attended the May 6th author event with Doris Kearns Goodwin had to say:

Marvelous, very professional in every way...

FABULOUS!

Spectacular-she is delightful and entertaining-a perfect choice.

Wonderful to be transported back to a gentler era...

It was absolutely wonderful! Couldn't be better!
The Best!Superb! Very inspiring.

Doris Kearns Goodwin brings everything she writes to life. She is a marvleous speaker as well as a great writer!

Thank you! What a special treat and joy to see and hear this intelligent, talented lady-she brought tears to my eyes as she touched me and my memories!

Amazing. Doris Kearns Goodwin is the most enjoyable speaker I have heard in my life!

Excellent! Ms. Goodwin is so real, refreshing, honest, funny & intelligent.Very enjoyable, delightful, touching story. A great storyteller.

More pictures

2009-05-08T09:31:00.005-04:00

Doris with Sr. Mary, whose family owned the butcher shop in Rockville Centre. That's Brentwood Library Director Tom Tarantowicz in the background.
Here is the link to all the event photos on Flickr

Sneak Preview of Event Photos

2009-05-07T18:00:00.003-04:00

The Big Day!

2009-05-06T20:26:00.002-04:00

Doris Kearns Goodwin's appearance at the Brentwood Library was a rousing success. A packed house, a witty and gracious speaker, a staff and committee members working like a well-oiled machine-even the weather cooperated. The coyotes on the runway at Logan Airport were, unfortunately, not on board, but nothing is perfect!
Pictures will soon be posted, so check back soon.

Reader Review

2009-04-30T13:12:00.002-04:00

Here's what one Huntington Public Library patron had to say about Wait Till Next Year:

I really enjoyed this book: it made me feel I was back in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, enjoying my neighborhood, my family, my friends and the Dodgers. I now feel homesick for the past, it was so good and the make up of Bensonhurst has now changed, just as Doris' Rockville Centre has changed.

I guess you can't go home again!

Frances B.

New York Times Review

2009-04-15T18:00:00.003-04:00

Here's what the Times had to say...

Keeping Score
By ANN HULBERT

WAIT TILL NEXT YEAR
A Memoir.
By Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Illustrated.
261 pp.
New York:Simon & Schuster.

$25.

Her father, who inspired in her a passion for the Brooklyn Dodgers, called his daughter Bubbles because she ''seemed to enjoy so many things.'' The butchers in her hometown of Rockville Centre on Long Island called her Ragmop, and fondly taunted the irrepressible fan. (They were Giant loyalists.) Doris Kearns Goodwin, as her disarming memoir shows, was a born mascot -- an endearing emblem of high hopes and undauntable energy. Or rather, like all mascots, she was made, not born, but the role clearly took and stuck. The daddy's girl who so avidly shared in his baseball dreams and in the dramas of her close-knit neighborhood casts herself here as a booster on a larger stage as well: Goodwin recounts an exemplary coming-of-age story from an often maligned era. Born in 1943, just a few years too soon to make the baby boom cutoff, she paints a portrait of feisty girlhood in the prefeminist 1950's.

In a season awash in X-rated memoirs, ''Wait Till Next Year'' is an anomaly: a reminiscence that is suitable, in fact ideal, for a preadolescent readership of not just girls but boys too. Move over, Judy Blume, Matt Christopher and the American Girl doll books. For self-esteem-building female role models, for baseball lore and inning-by-inning action and for a lively trip into the recent American past, you could hardly do better. And Goodwin manages to be refreshingly untherapeutic even as she is being unabashedly didactic about the difficulties of growing up. It's an unusual feat in our Oprah-ized culture, but her trick is simple: she fixates on sports rather than on sex, and she is fascinated more by history than by quirks and crises of personal identity.
Though Goodwin probably didn't have the youth niche in mind for her memoir, it's a strength, not a weakness, of her book that it so readily lends itself to that audience. The essence of her prose, her approach and her appeal is unaffected directness. She allows herself some self-conscious nostalgia for a time when community spirit thrived and ''my country'' still felt like an extension of ''my family.'' But Goodwin, who has been a sympathetic biographer of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, the Kennedys and Lyndon Johnson, relies above all on the meticulously exact memory of a well-trained baseball scorekeeper. She isn't peddling any particular ideology, and she displays not a trace of sophisticated, disillusioned irony. She is a fan, whose piles of Dodger scorebooks contain diagrams that help her recapture not just runs, hits and errors but an era.
''Wait Till Next Year'' is a revisionist ''Memories of a Catholic Girlhood'' (Goodwin explicitly alluded to Mary McCarthy's book in a subtitle she later discarded, ''Recollections of a 50's Girlhood''). McCarthy cast herself as the rule breaker, the outre intellectual woman who emerged from an eccentric and rebellious past. Growing up a generation later, Goodwin presents herself as the ultimate team player, the girl who joined in all the games during a time when community did not mean conformity -- and when solidarity went hand in hand with self-reliance. As in baseball, everyone worked together knowing that it all came down to the individual in the end. What Roger Angell has written of the game, Goodwin seems to feel about the deceptively neat 50's. ''It all looks easy, slow and, above all, safe,'' Angell said. ''Yet we know better, for what is certain in baseball is that someone, perhaps several people, will fail.'' Or it's certain at any rate that almost every advance has a downside.

This is a 50's success story that is able to acknowledge the strains in the prosperous decade as a fact rather than an indictment of the time. Doris thrived in the privileged position of the late-born youngest daughter in the Kearns family, happily settled in a bustling, heterogeneous neighborhood of not-quite-suburbanites. Every year, the families on the block had more money. As cartons containing television sets arrived in each house, the kids added another stop on their weekly group-viewing schedule: at 5:25 P.M., it was time to gather in the Kearnses' living room for ''Howdy Doody.''

And Doris could now watch, as well as imagine, every move of her beloved Dodgers, whose rivalry with the Giants and the Yankees kept Rockville Centre happily stirred up. The team ''liberated my spirit,'' and so did the father she adored and who adored her, and who ''did not agree that girls should subdue their competitive instincts, or alter their behavior to make themselves attractive to men. He urged me to run for class office, try out for the school plays and speak up in class if I had something to contribute.'' Even more important, he seized every chance to take her to Ebbets Field. She clung to the ritual, begun when she was 6, of recounting to him the games she followed so intently on the radio while he was at work. (Unaware that newspapers printed box scores, she believed he relied on her for every statistic.)

Goodwin hasn't lost her sportscaster's flair, and she has plenty of I-was-there stories to tell. During the 1951 season, she hurried to an autograph signing and gave Gil Hodges, then in a batting slump, the St. Christopher medal that she'd won in Confirmation class; the saint, she hoped, ''would watch over his swing so that he could return home safely each time he went to bat.'' Hodges's comeback began immediately, and a month later he had hit 17 home runs in 44 games, ''three ahead of Babe Ruth's mark.'' In the summer of what turned out, at last, to be the triumphant season of 1955, Doris finally made contact with her by now aging hero and came away with an autograph she would never trade: ''Keep your smile a long, long while. Jackie Robinson.''

But just as those promising Dodgers had for years delivered disappointments to their fans, there were shadows all along in the cozy Kearns household and in Rockville Centre, and soon enough there were shake-ups in her ''web of familiar places and familiar people.'' Goodwin expertly paces her tale, ending with the seventh-chapter stretch, when the 15-year-old Doris has lost her mother, and her grieving father has to move away from the house and the town his daughter loves.

Goodwin dares some sentimentalism because she's prepared the way with realism. Domestic bliss has never reigned; her mother has been very sick from the start. Polio has been a menace. Her best friend, Elaine, has had a difficult adolescence and moved away, and America has hardly been enjoying an idyll of innocence. Goodwin is deftly deadpan in recounting her anxious quest for a bomb shelter big enough to accommodate the whole neighborhood (she found it in the basement of the butcher shop) and her worries about the fate of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg's sons, one of them a baseball fan her age.

She and her friends, primed by the McCarthy hearings, put one another on trial in their living rooms, a game that became ever more ''vicious and meanspirited.'' She was devastated when the Dodgers abandoned Ebbets Field in September 1957. The Little Rock crisis the same month roused urgent discussion in Rockville Centre and in school; a classmate's father, covering the story for The New York Times, was beaten as he helped a tearful child threatened by the angry mob. Sputnik is the rare landmark event about which, Goodwin confesses, she has no eyewitness story. With her boyfriend and a blanket, Doris went out at night to glimpse the satellite and she got distracted.

Baseball, ''marked by no clock,'' has a way of evoking the illusion, Angell has remarked, that ''you remain forever young.'' Dusting off her scorebooks and memories, Goodwin achieves an earnest clarity that can be hard to pull off in maturity, but that speaks well to and of youth. Her book is being marketed to adults, who should make sure that it also finds a place on kids' summer reading lists. Then again, why wait till next year?

Ann Hulbert, the author of ''The Interior Castle: The Art and Life of Jean Stafford,'' is a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Keeping Score

2009-04-15T18:12:00.002-04:00

Want to learn how to keep score like Doris? Read this!

While Waiting Till Next Month

2009-04-15T17:15:00.002-04:00

While waiting for the big day, here's some reading to do about this year's Long Island Reads pick:

CNN review

Yale Review of Books review

DKG's website

Author Event

2008-12-18T10:37:00.002-05:00

We are thrilled to have received a commitment from Doris Kearns Goodwin to appear at the 2009 Long Island Reads "One Island, One Book" author event. Ms. Goodwin will discuss her book Wait Till Next Year on May 6th at the Brentwood Public Library.
Watch this space for more information.

The 2009 Pick Is In!

2008-11-25T16:19:00.010-05:00

Wait Till Next Year
by Doris Kearns Goodwin

The Pulitzer Prize winner's memoir of growing up on Long Island in the 1950s, and her devotion to the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Reviewers called this a "must-read" for baseball fans, and it certainly is a must-read as well for anyone who grew up on Long Island. The book recalls a time when baseball truly was the national past time, and everyone in the neighborhood knew everyone else.

Why Wait Till Next Year?

* The story takes place on Long Island.

* In addition, to being a well-known author and speaker, Doris Kearns Goodwin gained recognition among baseball lovers through her commentary in Ken Burns' documentary Baseball.

* The subject matter has appeal for both men and women, and would be a good choice for high school reading lists.

* It is available in hardcover, paperback, large type, audio and downloadable audio formats.

* The baseball theme works well since our big author event will be held in April.

Stay tuned for more information!

Long Island Reads Podcast

2008-05-28T18:04:00.003-04:00

For those who may have missed,

or would just like to hear him again,

a snippet of Chang-rae Lee's

April 12th appearance can be heard here!

The Big Event!

2008-04-14T14:36:00.004-04:00

The Long Island Reads author event this past Saturday at the Farmingdale Public Library was absolutely awesome. Professor Lee was warm, charming, patient, and a wonderful speaker. The audience eagerly listened to a reading from the book and then asked very meaty questions. Thanks to all who worked on and attended the event. Professor Lee is pictured at right with several members of the Long Island Reads committee. On to Long Island Reads 2009!!!

Chang-rae Lee at Farmingdale Public Library

2008-04-10T15:26:00.004-04:00

This Saturday, April 12, author Chang-rae Lee will give a talk on and sign copies of his book, Aloft, the Long Island Reads Committee's 2008 pick for One Island, One Book.
Although tickets have been distributed, there may be some seats left for non-ticket holders on a first-come, first-served basis.
The program begins at 2PM at the Farmingdale Public Library (for directions, click here).
Hope to see you there!

More About Aloft

2008-03-18T19:31:00.002-04:00

The Google Book page about Aloft has links to many, many resources about the book and Chang Rae Lee : reviews, blog entries, articles, profiles and more. It's like one-stop shopping.

Chang Rae Lee Podcast

2008-03-14T10:36:00.002-04:00

Click here to hear the podcast of an interview of Chang Rae Lee by Peter Ward, director of the Lindenhurst Public Library.

Reader's Guide

2008-02-07T12:01:00.001-05:00

The Reader's Guide for Aloft can be found here!

The 2008 Selection

2007-09-17T16:36:00.000-04:00

The 2008 selection for "One Island, One Book" is Chang-rae Lee's Aloft. The Chicago Sun-Times said "It's a book about a vast slice of American society, its changing ethnicities and colors, its blurring of urban-suburban life, its ethical and moral choices, and its seemingly inherent optimism. In short, it's a terrific book."

The Committe had a very difficult time choosing this year's book. The fact that Aloft is set on Long Island and should, we think, have appeal for men and women, was one factor in its favor. Another was the fact that Lee has been recognized as being "one of the 20 best American writers under 40". The author has said he will be available to work with us in April, and the title is available in all formats.

The flyer should be going out to all libraries this week.

What is Everyone Else Reading?

2007-10-25T15:10:00.000-04:00

Thanks to Nancy Pearl, the librarian's librarian, the idea of community reading projects has spread across the country. Here's a look at what other community reading groups are perusing and discussing, courtesy of the Library of Congress.

A few weeks ago, I had the chance to talk to one of the librarians on the Omaha Reads committee...I was able to pick her out of a crowd because she was wearing an Omaha Reads "concert tour" T shirt, featuring a photo of the Omaha reads author and the dates of his public readings, while she was in NYC. That's dedication for you.

It Only Looks Easy...A Look at the Process of Picking "The Book"

2007-11-12T15:15:00.000-05:00

Here's a link to a New York Times article detailing the difficulties involved in picking a "the book" for a community reading program. Interestingly, James McBride (last year's Long Island Reads author) and Chang Rae Lee (this year's author) were among the contenders in 2002 when New York City launched a city-wide reading initiative .

We're Famous!

2008-01-10T14:58:00.000-05:00

This year's Long Island Reads project recently got some nice publicity in Newsday recently, courtesy of Aileen Jacobson, a Newsday reporter.

Here's the story... with apologies to Newsday for the cut and paste rather than a link:

Reading program selects next book
Aileen Jacobson
Newsday
(Combined editions)
Long Island, N.Y.: Oct 25, 2007. pg. A.34

Want to get a flying head start on the coming year's Long Island Reads selection? It's "Aloft," Chang-Rae Lee's 2000 novel about a Long Island widower and retired landscape contractor who glides through the sky solo in his small airplane as he deals with family problems on earth.

Lee teaches at Princeton University, although at the moment he's on sabbatical in Hawaii while writing another book, said Diane Eidelman, adult services coordinator for the Suffolk Cooperative Library System and one of the leaders of Long Island Reads. But by coincidence, Eidelman said, he'll be back East just as the Nassau and Suffolk library systems are launching the program, and he's agreed to come to the Farmingdale Public Library on April 12, 2008, to talk about his book. Local libraries will host events related to "Aloft" during April.

Last year, when James McBride, author of "The Color of Water," came to speak, "tickets went fast," Eidelman said. Some libraries are considering giving away "Aloft" copies, so readers can get them signed in April. It's available as a free audiobook at Suffolkwave.org.

"This book was selected because it's very Long Island, and it had wonderful reviews," she said. The South Korean-born Lee, who immigrated when he was young, was named by The New Yorker as one of its 20 writers for the 21st century. Comments are welcome at longislandreads.blogspot.com. There's also more information at longislandreads.org.

Facebook

2007-12-26T18:28:00.000-05:00

Are you on Facebook? Join the new Long Island Reads group there.

Do Something Good For The World With All Those Words In Your Head

2007-10-31T09:48:00.000-04:00

A Halloween treat for you today:

FREE RICE