Ferndale Public Library Staff Recommends: Jordan’s Super Thought-Provoking Picks

This article was written by Jeff Milo

Checking in from the Circulation Desk at the Ferndale Public Library – more of our weekly reading recommendations from our staff – these Patch picks act as not only an insightful list of suggestions for anyone plum-out of good stuff to read this season, but also a way to get to know each of the individuals serving the community from the stacks, records and hushed desks of your local library.

This week, Assistant Youth Services Librarian Jordan Wright will dazzle (or daunt) you with his list of socially, historically, anthropologically and environmentally-concerned non fiction titles.

Indeed, this dude, who doubles as a guitarist/singer for local indie rock quartet Due North will not help out anyone looking for breezier, junkfood reads. Let the man take you to school!

Or…perhaps, when he’s working at the Library, let you forget about school and just have plain old FUN! Super fun.

“Super Hero Story Time was a blast,” says Wright, who, during the DIY Street Fair, co-hosted an interactive reading program for kids with Jillean McCommons, Head Librarian of Youth Services. “We had kids attending dressed in full superhero garb.  We shared songs (with music courtesy of Jillean's banjo and my guitar), read stories, and danced!  Ferndale's Police Chief even showed up to talk about real like super heroes!”

Just a sample of the consistently cool, engaging programming offered here, inside the doors of your public library.

Jordan’s Picks

Arc of Justice by Kevin Boyle
345.73 B
The story of Dr. Ossian Sweet is pretty well known to most metro Detroiters with a taste for history, but for anyone who isn’t familiar, here is the run down.  It’s Detroit. 1925. A young, educated African American doctor buys a house in a working class white neighborhood. After an angry mob assembles outside the home to intimidate Dr. Sweet into leaving, gunfire erupts from the house. Clarence Darrow (of the Scopes “Monkey” Trial fame), the legendary “Attorney of the Damned”, takes up the Sweet’s defense. Native Detroiter Kevin Boyle has written an incredibly in depth, yet readable book that will surely not leave any history lover disappointed.

The Bonobo and the Atheist:  In Search of Humanism among the Primates by Frans De Waal
NEW NONFICTION 591.5 W
Everyone’s got a favorite animal right?  Mine just so happen to be chimpanzees and their smaller, more romantic cousins the bonobos (formerly known as pygmy chimpanzees).  One of the world’s most renowned primatologists, Frans De Waal, writes about his lifelong work with these animals and argues that the roots of our morality lie not in traditions or holy texts but in our closest cousins, the great apes. Aside from well-documented accounts of altruism, sharing, and friendships amongst primates, the book also touches on other many other species throughout the animal kingdom that are known to exhibit these behaviors.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
364.973 A
After the United States elected its first African American president in 2008, many Americans believed that we had now entered an age of colorblindness.  Michelle Alexander offers a much needed wakeup call. In this relatively short but engaging book, she argues that the data suggests anything but colorblindness: Young African American men are being incarcerated more often and with longer sentences than their white counterparts. Through the war on drugs and the subsequent, long-term mass incarceration of young black men, Alexander argues that the U.S. Justice system has created the next era of Jim Crow.

Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet by Bill McKibben
304.2 M
In this book, Bill Mckibben argues that within the next century, humans around the world are going to have to adjust to the very serious reality of a warmer planet. While offering easy to understand explanations of sometimes difficult scientific concepts, McKibben believes that our planet has already passed the point of preventing the serious effects of climate change, and that we know must focus on preventing the situation from getting any worse and adjusting our lifestyles to live on a hot, strange new planet: Eaarth.

The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies?
305.89 D
Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse, returns with a much more optimistic book that focuses on “traditional societies” and what we can learn from them. As the number of hunter-gatherer communities around the planet continues to dwindle, Diamond argues that many of these cultures offer valuable knowledge and insights to the human experience that “modern societies” would be wise not to ignore.

More info: ferndalepubliclibrary.org

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