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Letters Home | The Words Of Illinois’ Civil War Soldiers

By SIU Press

“A vital lifeline to home during the Civil War, the letters of soldiers to their families and friends remain a treasure for those seeking to connect with and understand the most turbulent period of American history.
“Rather than focus on the experiences of a few witnesses, this impressively researched book documents 165 Illinois Civil War soldiers’ and sailors’ lives through the lens of their personal letters.
“Editor Mark Flotow chose a variety of letter writers who hailed from counties throughout the state, served in different branches of the military at different ranks, and represented the gamut of social experiences and war outcomes.

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Posted on November 29, 2019

WOMEN: The National Geographic Image Collection

Powerful, Iconic

“The National Geographic team has gone through their archives to choose 450 iconic images to show women of all backgrounds. Susan Goldberg stopped by Sway In The Morning to elaborate on the process of determining what was included in the book.”

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Posted on November 25, 2019

For Small Creatures Such As We

By Ramin Skibba/Undark

Religion, and Christianity in particular, appears to be becoming less important among younger Americans, declining dramatically in the past two decades, according to a recent Wall Street Journal poll.
So where can people turn to share a common culture and community?
For Sasha Sagan, the author of For Small Creatures Such as We, even a dinner party tradition or a shared song can generate the camaraderie people may be missing.
Aimed primarily at atheist and agnostic readers, her book is both a memoir of growing up as the daughter of astronomer Carl Sagan and writer Ann Druyan in Ithaca, New York, where her father was a professor at Cornell University, as well as an exploration of connections and universal themes among religions, cultures and secular communities around the world.

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Posted on November 19, 2019

Three New Books On Consciousness To Blow Your Mind

By Dan Falk/Undark

At the moment, you’re reading these words and, presumably, thinking about what the words and sentences mean. Or perhaps your mind has wandered, and you’re thinking about dinner, or looking forward to bingeing the latest season of The Good Place. But you’re definitely experiencing something.
How is that possible? Every part of you, including your brain, is made of atoms, and each atom is as lifeless as the next. Your atoms certainly don’t know or feel or experience anything, and yet you – a conglomeration of such atoms – have a rich mental life in which a parade of experiences unfolds one after another.

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Posted on November 13, 2019

Rez Ball

By Liz Willen/The Hechinger Report

Nachae Nez is a basketball star at the largest high school on the Navajo Nation, 17.5 million acres sprawling across parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. He lives in a trailer next to his two grandmothers and earns grades good enough for a four-year college.
Yet on the morning of the SAT college admissions exam, Nachae drives to the testing site from his home near Chinle, Arizona, looks around – and drives away.
“I couldn’t see my future off the reservation,” he tells Michael Powell, author of the new book Canyon Dreams: A Basketball Season on the Navajo Nation, due out from Blue Rider Press this month.

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Posted on November 12, 2019

Publishers Should Be Making E-Book Licensing Better, Not Worse

By Gennie Gebhart/Electronic Frontier Foundation

Macmillan, one of the “Big Five” publishers, is imposing new limits on libraries’ access to e-books – and libraries and their users are fighting back.
Starting last week, the publisher is imposing a two-month embargo period on library e-books. When Macmillan releases a new book, library systems will be able to purchase only one digital copy for the first eight weeks after it’s published.
Macmillan is offering this initial copy for half-price ($30), but that has not taken away the sting for librarians who will need to answer to frustrated users.
In large library systems in particular, readers are likely to experience even longer hold queues for new Macmillan e-book releases.
For example, under the new Macmillan embargo, the 27 branches of the San Francisco Public Library system, serving a city of nearly 900,000 people, will have to share one single copy right when the demand for the new title is the greatest.

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Posted on November 9, 2019

How Italian Labor Shaped Chicago

Peter Pero Presented By The Chicago Public Library and CAN TV

“Author Peter Pero pays tribute to Italian-American heritage, but the focus is not on Columbus, Mother Cabrini, or Michaelangelo. Instead, he looks to the working men and women of Italian Chicago who have built our city, brick-by-brick. They funded our churches, built Chicago’s skyline, and raised generations of children from immigrant succession to ethnic success.”
At Little Italy on October 25.

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Posted on November 4, 2019