Currents: News from the Library on the River ... in Leland
AUGUST 2020
A Note From Mark
This month I am going to discuss a little “inside baseball” or in this case “inside library”.
We have a plan set up with our major book vendor where we provide them a list of our most popular authors so that whenever that writer publishes a new book we get it through a program called Automatically Yours. Many times we have the book a few days before the official release date so we can have it ready for circulation on the day it comes out.
Due to the shutdown we stopped receiving shipments of these books and they have been very slow to get to us after we opened. The good news is last week we received over 50 of these books with publishing dates going back as far as April, all from these “automatic” authors. We want to thank all of you that have been waiting for your favorite writer and have been so patient. We especially want to thank those of you that couldn’t wait and went out and purchased the book, then donated it to us after you read it!
We have added these “new” books to the collection and you are able to see a list of them in several places. At the top of our website (lelandlibrary.org) and the top of our catalog (leland.biblionix.com) you will see them scrolling across, and all you have to do is click on one you want more information about. You can also see our new additions in the online catalog by clicking on “What’s New” to the right and setting “Added in the last:” to however far back you would like to search. For those of you that have subscribed to our Wowbrary service you will see the list in your weekly email, and don’t forget in that email you will see a select list of the most popular titles in the display area. You can see the complete list of new additions by clicking on the boxes to the left. To see the latest Wowbrary, and sign up, go to our website and scroll to the bottom of the home page and click on “See Our Newest Books-CDs-DVDs.
Of course we are always ordering new and interesting books since not all of our titles come from our favorite authors list. We especially like to find new authors (that may become favorites) as well as any local writers who are publishing. If you have any book or author suggestions, please let us know and we will be happy to check the reviews and look into getting them for our collection, and maybe you can find our next name to add to “Automatically Yours”.
Mark
*The "now" side of the above "now and then" image of the Harbor House is not from this summer, hence no masks on the pedestrians.
MARK YOUR CALENDARS! Upcoming Virtual Events
Wednesday, August 5 at 5:30pm Virtual Book Talk with the Authors of
UNION: A Democrat, a Republican, and a Search for Common Ground
Friday, August 7 at 10:30am Virtual Music Class for Families with Christy Burich
Wednesday, August 12 at 6:00pm Virtual Book Talk with the Authors of Leelanau By Kayak
Wednesday, August 12 at 6:00pm Let's Talk About Greating Writing with Norm Wheeler: Colson Whitehead
For more information on Programs and Events at the Library, please visit our website.
Programming Update
We have three virtual programs for you in August. And I realized today that together, these three programs are a reflection of the unique time we're in: If we're lucky, we're spending time outdoors enjoying these long, beautiful days sometimes alone, sometimes physically-distanced, but together. And many of us are also engaging in thoughtful, sometimes challenging, conversations about the moment swirling around us with our friends and family.
Next Wednesday, August 5 at 5:30pm, the authors of the brand new book UNION: A Democrat, a Republican and a Search for Common Ground, will be speaking with us online about their journey across the country, sharing a car and many conversations. And what struck me about their book, and something I'm hoping to talk to them about, is how they practiced having difficult conversations--sharing ideas and listening to one another's opposing viewpoints--over and over again, even and especially when it was hard. One of the authors, Chris, has a local connection. He has spent time with his godfather and his family in Leland and shares our love for the area. Many thanks to our patron and Friends Board Member, Alan Hartwick, for helping put this program together.
The following week, on Wednesday, August 12 at 6:00pm, Larry Burns and Jon Constant will also talk about their friendship--one built through a mutual love of kayaking--and their joint adventures all over Leelanau County, which they documented in their book Leelanau by Kayak.
Finally, on Wednesday, August 19 at 2:00pm, Norm Wheeler will be back to help us navigate a piece by Colson Whitehead from his book The Nickel Boys called "The Match". The essay was published in the April 1, 2019 issue of "The New Yorker" and is available here. I'm planning to take advantage of the audio version available through that link.
--Laura
Keep your family reading this summer with weekly Summer Readers Family Bags!
Leelanau County Libraries have teamed up with PoWer! Book Bags this summer to provide Summer Readers Family Bags for our youngest patrons. Each bag contains a freenew book for each child provided by PoWeR! Book Bags. The program will run for two more weeks and we have quite a few books left! Just give us a call at the Library to request a bag and arrange your pick-up time.
Introducing Our BookBags To-Go
In order to support our younger patrons and their parents, we are offering a new selection program for children’s books: BooksBags To-Go. This program gives parents and guardians the option to request children’s books based on their child's (or children's) grade level. Within 1 weekday of submitting your order, our staff will prepare 5 to 20 books per-family tailored to your request, and checked out to your account.
Here’s how it works:
1. Fill out our BookBags To-Go form. You can choose how many books you would like and make requests for specific topics there.
2. Our staff will prepare your order and contact to you when your books are ready. Please allow at least 1 weekday for our staff to select your books.
3. Once your order is ready, you can either call us for curbside pick-up outside the library during our normal open hours, or come to the front desk to pick up your books.
You may know the picture-book version of the story: 410 A.D., Rome, the mighty empire, overwhelmed by waves of foreign, barbarous invaders; Conan-the-Barbarian types with tribal names still infamous today: Goths, Vandals, Huns. Perhaps you know even a bit more than that: about the Vandals occupying Roman North Africa, the Goths under Alaric sacking the city of Rome in 3 nights of terror, the civilization of the Romans falling into a new dark age. This is the popular image of these things, but the reality suggested by textual sources and archaeology, as in so many cases, is quite different.
In Alaric the Goth, Douglas Boin attempts to present an image of this period, not through Roman eyes, but from the perspective of the most (in)famous of the Goths: Alaric. Seen in this way, the story becomes a more nuanced—even familiar—one of border crossings; empire; refugees; intra-elite competition; privilege; ethnic and religious tensions; and the vicissitudes of a society in decline, a society that sought to manipulate and utilize outsiders without extending the benefits of citizenship to compensate them. It also becomes an investigation of how a society in crisis manages—or, in this case, doesn’t manage—to respond to a rising tide of instability and fragmentation.
Boin is a scholar of this historical period, now referred to as Late Antiquity—falling between the stereotypical Greco-Roman Classical Era and the Early Middle Ages (the so-called ‘Dark Ages’). By drawing on the full range of textual sources—contemporary histories, poetry, letters, and Christian polemics—as well as today’s archaeological sciences he presents a colorful, verisimilar image of this little-known yet lively and fractious time of vast social change. It’s a period marked with uncertainty and fear to be sure, but it was also one of vibrancy; decadence, after all, tends to produce the most prismatically strange flowers of culture. The machinations of late imperial Roman rule are teeming with dramatically idiosyncratic characters, and the breakneck pace of intrigue, betrayal, and unexpected upsets among the ruling elites allows for an easy comparison to George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones series.
What Alaric the Goth does not provide is much of a general, coherent theoretical framework for how and why the Roman Empire did collapse (readers curious on a contemporary take on this topic would do well to investigate Kyle Harper’s excellent The Fall of Rome). This is, was, and probably always will be a querulously debated problem of history. Boin makes no attempt to navigate this crooked historiographical impasse, rather, he narrows in on the life of the infamous but little-understood figure of Alaric, “King” of the Visigoths.
The argument he makes about Alaric and other so-called barbarian peoples is not a novel idea; it’s generally accepted that the vast movements of peoples into the borders of the Roman Empire in the 5th century were largely made up of groups who had no interest in destroying the Roman Empire. On the contrary, they were seeking to be a part of Roman society and the material wealth, relative peace, and stability that came with it. For Roman elites of the period—always a minority of the population—a sclerotic attitude to the boundaries of privilege in the form of citizenship often made this next to impossible for the most of the refugees and migrants to attain. At the same time, the Roman elites were happy to utilize these outsiders as slaves, soldiers, political tools, even—as in the case of Alaric—as generals. When the prospective rewards for service—chiefly citizenship and land on which to settle—failed to materialize, the only option available to an outsider like Alaric was to attempt to take them by force, whence an intractable process of destabilization, internal conflict, and the eventual fragmentation of the Western Roman Empire.
In this way, Boin inverts our typical notions of Roman and Barbarian by depicting the Goths as the bearers of the kinds of values we take for granted today; in Boin’s own words, “In their fight for human decency, they torched the bigotry that lay at the heart of antiquated notions of citizenship. And in an eerily prescient way they championed the values of religious tolerance when many Christians at the time pursued heretics, imposed draconian moral laws on society, and outlawed the freedom of religious expression.” What Alaric the Goth is meant to offer, then is a correction to our cultural assumptions about the past, power, and privilege.
There are critical questions that could have been approached without excessive drag on the narrative’s momentum; what exactly constituted the identity of a Goth in the 5th-century, for instance, is a vexed question that Boin scarcely acknowledges. Nor does it feel like he ever really comes to terms with the paucity of reliable sources that remain from the period. It could be argued that a short work of history like Alaric need not trouble its readers with what seem to be irrecoverable gaps in our knowledge of the past, but without at least acknowledging the limits of historical data—particularly regarding a time of which such scarce fragments remain—Boin risks leaving the reader with an impression of this era that is too stable and certain to be justified. And while our cultural assumptions could certainly benefit from modifications and a greater depth, this anachronistic presentation of the Goths as almost a movement for social justice in the modern sense is certainly an over correction that passes over some of the, let’s say, less savory events of a chaotic time. Regardless, Alaric the Goth is a compelling and challenging read about an obscure but hugely important moment in Western history.
- Jake
Copyright 2020 Leland Township Public Library. All rights reserved.
