He's At It Again

I mentioned this guy a couple of years ago and lo and behold he's up to his usual shenanigans again.  What a creep.

If you live in Gwinnett County, GA, feel free to share this info with your friends.

MICHAEL ALLEN BUCKNER

5014 SWINDON CRT

LILBURN GA 30047

(770) 923-9970

VIOLATION OF PROBATION

THEFT BY DECEPTION

Just got this email from another teacher:

"This morning, a man (caucasion, blonde, 40ish, well dressed) knocked on our door at 7:15 AM.  I live off Garner Rd , Mt Park area of Lilburn.  His story was that his son is sick with asthma and he needed money to buy his medicine because he left his wallet at church yesterday.  I did not give him money, and he drove off very quickly when my husband pulled up in our driveway after taking our son to school.  After I told my husband the story, he drove off looking for him and found him in the neighborhood behind us, and he was approaching someone else's door.  My husband pulled in behind him  and wrote his tag number down.  The man rushed toward my husband very nervously asking what he was doing, and my husband let him know that he would be calling the police and reporting his suspicious behavior.  He told my husband he was just looking for gas money and he rushed off in his car.

 

My husband did call the police.  He was driving a late model (less than 5 years old) dark blue, Jeep Cherokee 4x4 with a dealer tag.  

 

This man looks very familiar.  I feel certain he is the same man that was referenced in an email a couple of years ago that had been arrested for this type behavior on a number of occasions, usually approaching young children and moms out in their yards in the afternoon.  I don’t mind giving folks money who really need it, but I remember stories about this guy getting very agitated and threatening when people would not give him money.  That is what concerns me most about this particular guy."

Yes, he was arrested in 2008 and lives right around the corner from me. He uses that same story every time.  Think I'll post his picture around the park nearby and share his info. with friends.  Creep.

The Titan's Curse

Book three down, two more to go, right?  Of course Riordan is working on a related series, isn't he?

This is a good, strong, middle work.  It would stand on it's own if it had to, but why anyone would read it without having read the others I just don't know.  The plot is pretty much the same: Percy the half-human half-god and his pals have to save the world, battle some nasty beasts, and learn how to navigate teen-teen and teen-adult relationships.

There are some new players here and the stakes are slowly getting higher.  There's still the trademark humor, but the funny bits are giving way to more action and intensity as the real battle of the Titan's looms in the series.

I'm glad I waited to read these because I get to know there are two more books.  I remember when this came out and there was speculation on this point.  Most series are either interminable (Magic Tree House) or clear-cut (Harry Potter and his seven years of school) but they never came out and said this would be a five-book series which must have driven the kids nuts at the time.  Good for Riordan.  He knows how to milk things in a good way and he definitely knows how to get kids to read like there's no tomorrow.

The Titan's Curse (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 3)

How the Internet Gets Inside Us

The Information: How the Internet gets inside us by Adam Gopnik at the New Yorker is one of the best and most sensible things I've read about that crazy force/source called the Internet.  He reviews all the major writers on the subject and boils them all down into an amazingly clear essay.  You may have read one or two of these and made a handful of observations about our relationship with the digital world, but Adam Gopnik, one of our best essayists, writers and thinkers, sums it all up so well that you're doing yourself a disservice if you don't read his thoughts on the subject before engaging in any further ruminations of your own.

Below are all the authors and books he mentions in the article.  It's practically a syllabus for an amazing and contentious media studies class, no?  Best of all, the article is bookended by an image of Hermione Granger in the stacks of the library at Hogwarts.  Enjoy and let me know your thoughts.

Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? edited by John Brockman

The Book In the Renaissance by Andrew Pettegree

Supersizing the Mind by Andrew Clark

The Sixth Language by Robert K. Logan

The Shallows by Nicholas Carr

Hamlet's Blackberry by William Powers

Alone Together by Sherry Turkle

Too Much to Know by Ann Blair

Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander

Within the Context of No Context by George Trow

The Age of Missing Information by Bill McKibben

Cover Coincidence: Suicidal Goldfish Edition

Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

This is great.  I don't know why I eat up these man-against-nature things because I don't even like camping out.  People invented indoors for a very good reason and I'm happy there.  But I love reading about crazy people who like to go out and test the limits.

Shackleton was one of the all-time greats at this limit-testing.  But he was more than that.  It's not just the physical, um, endurance that he showed in leading a bunch of men to the ends of the earth and back.  It's the amazing leadership--an overused and almost meaningless word these days--he showed in fighting a much more difficult and slippery enemy than mere inhospitable nature.  He had to contend with the flagging morale of twenty-some men he was responsible for and keep hope alive for almost two years.  And, amazingly, he did it.  He took these guys nearly to the South Pole, lost their ship, and brought them all back alive (minus a few frostbitten digits) while battling cold, illness, near mutiny and always possible starvation.

The real mystery to me here, though, is Lansing.  He handles the subject perfectly.  Sure, Caroline Alexander ha a nice update forty-odd years later with access to more photos and some sources Lansing didn't, but she hardly replaces his achievement.  Here's a journalist who has certainly learned not to bury the lead and to finish with a bang.  It's a mesmerizing read.  But why oh why didn't he write anything else?

Alexander went on to co-write a documentary film of the expedition perfectly narrated by Liam Neeson (evoking Shackleton's Irish brogue).  It obviously has to cut many details with respect to running time but it has actual film footage!  The Lansing made me aware there were more photographs (many of them in the Alexander book) but I didn't realize Hurley had a film camera.  You actually get to see the moment the pack ice crushed the Endurance and the masts collapse into the snow and ice.  It's chilling, to say the least.

If you want to delve further into this story, Kenneth Branagh was in a pretty good dramatized version of the expedition in miniseries form that puts you right there in the middle of the action.  (He doesn't go for the accent, though.)

But to feel the full terror and mind-numbing hardships these guys faced, go with the Lansing.  Using the diaries of many of the participants, you feel like you get the real story.  That's another thing that amazed me reading this.  These guys are chased by leopard seals, nearly capsized by whales, endure all kids of horrible things, but still maintain their diaries!  That's some commitment right there.

Lansing's book stops at the final rescue.  For a bit more on how these fellows fared afterwards (not that well, seeing as how they returned to World War I) Alexander has the rest of the story, including Shakleton's return to the Antarctic a few years later.

Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition

The Endurance - Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition

Shackleton - The Greatest Survival Story of All Time (3-Disc Collector's Edition)

Ms. Yingling Reads!

And reads and read ands reads.  (I always think of the Martha Speaks theme song in my head when I think of that, but the I do have a seven-year-old).

Ms. Yingling has completed one of the coolest reading challenges you'll ever hear of.  She has finished reading all of the fiction titles in the middle school library she runs.  From Douglas Adams to Jane Zirpoli.

Of course, not only has she read all the fiction titles that the library holds, but hasn't placed a new fiction title on the shelves until she's read those as well.  So the challenge continues! (Now I'm hearing the Rocky theme song for some reason...)

Volume: Done! --Librarian Reads Entire Collection

Ms. Yingling Reads

Lawn Boy

This is just a lighthearted quick little romp, but it's so breezy and fun it's not like I'm complaining.  The main character just happens to have wide open summer and inherit a riding lawnmower right after the neighborhood yard guy runs off with somebody's wife.  He begins making money cutting yards but then just happens to run into a kid-friendly stockbroker with no cash who offers to pay him his $40 by setting up a stock portfolio.      This works better than expected and soon the kid is making more money than he knows what to do with and has employees and is unknowingly sponsoring a heavyweight fighter and on and on.

The coincidental are part of the joke and who knows, maybe the kids that read it will learn something about the stock market  Okay, not really.  If they do they'll learn absurd things and have false expectations, but then I guess that's what the stock market is all about.

I'll have to go find the second one to see what more shenanigans this kid can get himself into.

Lawn Boy

One Crazy Summer

I liked it but had some quibbles.  But overall, this is as good as you've heard.  It's the voices.  These girls come alive when they're talking and the narrator seems true to life--a real eleven-year-old.  These three sisters do go through one crazy summer indeed and are strengthened by their experience.  The language and the voices and the characters of the girls, for the most part, ring completely true.

But would their father and grandmother really send them across the country for that long without knowing what they'd be in for?  Would they really not want them to call, like every day to make sure all was well?  I mean, if their mother really abandoned them then I doubt even the most air-headed parent would send them without someone else.  That was just a big stumbling block for me.

The stuff about that time and the interactions with the Black Panthers were interesting, though.  It seemed like we were being set up to learn a lesson about indoctrination and dogmatic beliefs, but it's really a character study.  A character has to change and grow and the narrator does indeed.  Her mother does too at the very end, but that rang a bit false for me.

But like I said, these are quibbles.  It's an amazingly written book with real insight.

The book takes place in '68.  For another view of the effects of the Black Power movement in '76, check out a pretty good movie that came out last year which you may have missed; the well-made but ineptly-named Night Catches Us.  It has an amazing soundtrack and some featured actors that are easy on the eyes anyway.

One Crazy Summer

Night Catches Us

Boo!

Yesterday was crazy, what with our district's Reader's Rally and a bunch of other stuff going on.  But my monthly GLMA post went up and it's the second one that the Georgia Coordinator of Library Media Services has requested permission to reprint in their monthly media newsletter.  I told her, heck, feel free to just tell me what you want me to write and I'll write it!

In other news, I'll be attending the Georgia State Children's Literature Conference next month.  YOu may read about me in the papers because I plan on sneaking up behind Mary Downing Hahn and shouting "Boo!"  I'm sure she never gets tired of that joke.  Hope to see some of you there!

UPDATE: They have a new website!

2011 Puddly Awards

Great list of books from Powells customer and employee favorites.  Being a former book store employee, I tend to trust the employees more, but this year there is much more overlap.  Need to finish my book club book so I can get to that Rebecca Skloot one.  It's been on my list since before it came out...

Enjoy!

The Sea of Monsters

This was a solid sequel.  Riordan reminds me of Joss Whedan in his ability to take time-honored tropes and give them just the right modern twist to amp up the humor and action. There's not a lot of surprises if you have even a passing knowledge of the Greek myths but it's so funny and amazingly well-paced you just go along for the ride.

It begins with Percy finishing up another school year and looking forward to a summer at Camp Half-Blood when some weird kids show up just in time for a free-for-all dodgeball game. And I just knew the kids that liked dodgeball when I was a kid were really cannibals from the underworld.  I just knew it!

The ancients-in-the-modern world jokes are hilarious.  Chiron's satyr family likes to party like Packer fans, double drink holing hats and all! Riordan even adds in some other twists like a confederate ghost ship brought to living-dead life to help in a battle and a three hundred-year-old Blackbeard and his pirate buddies released from a delightful goddesses trap just in time to lend a ship and crew when Percy needs it.

Although Riordan hasn't been watching as many Mythbuster's as my daughter and I have recently.  When one of the ships begins to sink, Percy thinks he has to get his friends off before the sinking vessel pulls them down in a whirlpool. The Mythbuster's have twice-busted that myth, thank you very much.

And I didn't really buy that Percy was quite as thick-headed as he's made out at the beginning. After the first book of adventures he sure took a long time to catch on to the fact that his friend Tyson is a mythical creature himself.  I mean, come on! But Tyson was a great addition to the series and helped Riordan explore the themes of family and loyalty even deeper in this volume.

Favorite joke, though?  That Hermes invented the internet.

The Sea of Monsters (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 2)