March 2017

  • Seattle Rep’s HERE LIES LOVE: Beyond the Theater

    Seattle Repertory Theatre presents HERE LIES LOVE by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim from April 7 to May 28, 2017. Librarians at Seattle Public Library created this list of books, CDs and films to enhance your experience of the show: Seattle Rep’s HERE LIES LOVE: Beyond the Theatre. Seattle Rep will transform into a wild… Continue reading

  • New to our Digital Collections: Seattle Mail and Herald

    Want to explore Seattle headlines from over 100 years ago? Take a look at our new Seattle Mail and Herald digital collection. The Mail and Herald was a weekly paper discussing the city’s news, politics, society events, entertainment and more. The paper included articles on topics such as Seattle’s regrades, the Alaskan Gold Rush, the… Continue reading

  • Wuthering Weather

    Up here at the Central Library science desk, weather conversations are often much more than small talk. Patrons often want to know how their perceptions match available data, and recently it’s been all about fat raindrops and heavy coats. Has this winter really been unusual? Our research says yes. Seattle has just experienced the coldest… Continue reading

  • 20 Essential Seattle Books, Part 5 – Tales of the City

    Arriving at our fifth and final post suggesting twenty essential Seattle books, after posts highlighting history, race, place, and Northwest classics, we finish with a handful of novels evocative of our city and its culture. There are several good mystery series set in Seattle, but when a fictional detective has been on our rain-soaked streets for three decades his casebook offers real perspective.… Continue reading

  • Bringing Women’s Stories to Life

    For Women’s History Month this year, I’d like to highlight the way fiction can take a real person’s life and help fill in the gaps about what we historically know, using imagination in order to bring that person’s story back. In particular, since the historical register generally focuses on men, women’s full lives were often… Continue reading

  • A Short Climate Change Reading List

    Climate change is an issue on the minds of many people around the world. After years of unsuccessful attempts to come together around this issue, 195 countries met in December 2015 at the Paris Climate Conference and adopted the first ever universal, legally binding deal to address climate change. Yet the issue of climate change… Continue reading

  • Recommended reading: Fall and redemption from the 1980s Detroit crack epidemic

    James White was born in the Detroit of the 1980s to a middle class African American family, but as his family broke apart in a divorce, the rebellious youth found himself a willing recruit into the front line of the burgeoning crack epidemic.  There his early dreams of being a doctor fell by the wayside;… Continue reading

  • 20 Essential Seattle Books, Part 4: Northwest Classics

    For the fourth of our posts suggesting twenty essential books for Seattleites, having focused on history, race and place, we now attempt to suggest some writers whose work best characterizes our “regional literature.” In previous posts we’ve already mentioned Richard Hugo and Sherman Alexie, both of whose works certainly belong on this post. Here are some more Northwest… Continue reading

  • Ralph Steadman: Evocative Frenzy

    I am unceasingly inspired by the artistic wizardry of Ralph Steadman, particularly his knack for evocative frenzy. Though clearly an expert draughtsman, he’s made a career out of twisting conventional imagery with a demented cartoon sensibility. What appears at first in his work to be frayed and chaotic ends up revealing character with a greater… Continue reading

  • Seattle Rep’s DRY POWDER: Beyond the Theater

    Seattle Repertory Theatre presents DRY POWDER by Sarah Burgess from March 17 – April 15, 2017. Set in the top echelons of today’s morally-compromised financial sector, this dark comedy explores the uneasy relationship between being good and doing well. Librarians at Seattle Public Library created this list of books, CDs and films to enhance your experience of the show: Seattle… Continue reading

  • Finding Potter’s Field: Indigent Burial in the United States

    A patron recently called the library to ask what happens when someone dies without means to pay for cremation or burial. In some cases, such a person might have no living relatives. In others, the identity of the deceased is simply unknown. Here’s what we learned: Continue reading

  • Handling the Material: Art Techniques, Guides and Processes

    In the blink of an eye rubber hits a road, a hand hits the mat, grabs hold of brush or pen as the wrist turns into a twist. Arms do the heavy lifting, the torso pivots. If this were the theater (and it is) the director would shout, “Action!” The whole body is engaged. This… Continue reading

  • New book round-up – March 2017

    Looking for something new? Here is a selection of books being published in March 2017. Continue reading