•Café Parlez’ selection for April is “Mrs. Kimble”, by Jennifer Haigh. Ken Kimble is revealed through the eyes of the women in his life: first wife Birdie, struggling to hold herself together after his desertion; second wife Joan, a lonely heiress; and third wife Dinah, a beautiful but damaged woman half his age. In 2004, this book won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first novel. We will be discussing “Mrs. Kimble” on Thursday, April 26 at 6:30 pm. Books are available at the desk, or bring your own copy. Café Parlez is sponsored by the Friends of Plumb Library.
•The Nonfiction book discussion group will meet Thursday, April 19 at 6:30 pm to discuss “Columbine”, by Dave Cullen. In this remarkable account of the April 20, 1999, Columbine High School shooting, journalist Cullen not only dispels several of the prevailing myths about the event but tackles the hardest question of all: why did it happen? Through extensive interviews and meticulous reporting, Cullen gets to the bottom of legends and rumors that started in the chaos of that day. Books are available at the desk. Our book for May will be “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother”, and copies will be available at the April meeting.
•The Plumb Library is offering a new service: Law Depot. Law Depot allows Rochester cardholders to create and print legal documents such as wills, powers of attorney, bills of sale, purchase agreements, performance contracts and more. Go to our website, www.plumblibrary.com, and click on the Law Depot icon. Have your Plumb Library card handy each time you log in. Be sure to watch the short tutorial when you first use Law Depot. The service is simple to use and covers all states, Canadian provinces, and elsewhere. Check it out!
•Have you ever wanted to learn Hungarian? How about Farsi, or Bosnian, or Scottish? If you are a Rochester cardholder, lessons in these and 76 other languages are available to you through Transparent Language on the Plumb Library’s website. You can sign up for Essential Courses—33 lessons for each language; vocabulary lists; language and culture blogs; interactive games, or byki mobile apps for iPhone and Android, which allow for language learning on the go. These lessons are done with no CDs, flash-drives, or DVDs, and can be done on your own time and your own computer. All lessons are free with your Plumb Library card. Ask the staff for a demonstration.
•The Plumb Library now has coupons for Paw Sox tickets. Each coupon is redeemable at the Paw Sox box office for up to six general admission tickets for a total of $18. There is one coupon per game day, with some games blacked out due to popularity. Having a coupon does not guarantee tickets, as they are subject to availability. Schedules are available at the library. Some highlights of the season are: May 13: Star Wars Day; July 7: Post game fireworks; August 8: poster giveaway and pre-game autograph session. You may reserve coupons up to one month in advance. Call the library at 508-763-8600 or email info@plumblibrary.com for more information or to reserve your coupon.
Quotes from Denver Westword weekly on Dave Cullen:
Anne Marie Hochhalter: “I was injured at Columbine, and Dave Cullen’s book is inaccurate and sensationalized.”
Hochhalter figures in several passages in Cullen’s book; she was one of the first students shot outside the school and was left paralyzed by her injuries. Her mother’s suicide a few months later provides another graphic scene. But Cullen never interviewed Hochhalter; his accounts of her family’s ordeal, complete with quotes, come from various news articles.
“It felt kind of violating, to be honest,” Hochhalter says of the experience of reading Cullen’s book. “He got the part about how I was injured completely wrong. I couldn’t bear to read the whole thing.”
A few of Cullen’s most vocal critics say they don’t trust his book because he relies so heavily on sources among law enforcement and school officials, including Jefferson County lead investigator Kate Battan, FBI agent Dwayne Fuselier (whose psychological analysis of the killers Cullen presents as if handed down from Mount Sinai) and principal Frank DeAngelis — people whom Columbine families accused of misleading them or providing self-serving accounts. Although Cullen deals in a roundabout way with the police cover-up concerning prior investigations of the killers and their blunders on the day of the attack, he also describes the Jeffco commanders — several of whom lied outright to the media and the victims’ families — as “essentially honest men,” and he makes a point of proclaiming that Battan “was clean.”
“He was working with Battan and Fuselier to make the police look good,” says Brian Rohrbough, who fought in court for years to establish that the official account of how his son Danny died outside the school was wrong. “He glosses over the cover-up as if it’s an incidental thing.”
Thanks for choosing my book for April, and for the nice write-up.
I hope it provokes a good discussion. There are reader’s questions and videos that might be useful at my site.
I love to see book clubs and libraries embracing the book.
Thanks.