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Tag: staff picks

Staff Pick – Page One: Inside the New York Times

Page One: Inside the New York Times

page one poster

Page One looks at the future of print media in America. The documentary takes us inside the New York Times at a time when newspapers are going bankrupt and folding at an alarming rate. The Times tries to adapt to the digital age and a generation with new attitudes toward what “news” is, while trying to maintain the ethics of fact-based, professional journalism. The newspaper competes with blogs, social media, Wikileaks, and the aggregation of mainstream media through sites such as The Huffington Post and Gawker.

Page One on IMDB

You may also like:
The Paper
The Third Element: Canada’s Diverse Media
Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism

Page One : Inside the New York times and the Future of Journalism (the book)

Staff Pick: Just Kids

Just Kids by Patti Smith

Cover image of "Just Kids"

In her beautiful memoir Just Kids, poet, artist and punk rock godmother Patti Smith writes about her early years in New York City with her lover, best friend and lifelong source of inspiration, Robert Mapplethorpe. Theirs is a story of true love: for each other, for the streets around them and for the art that they created and inspired in each other. Smith’s poetic prose transforms the reader to iconic places such as the artist’s haven that was the Hotel Chelsea and Max’s Kansas City, a hangout of Andy Warhol and his gang.

If you like this, try:

Mapplethorpe : a biography / Patricia Morrisroe

Life / Keith Richards, with James Fox

Girls like us : Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon–and the journey of a generation / Sheila Weller

Staff Pick: The Hurt Locker

Movie Poster for The Hurt Locker

Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker is an intense film about the dangerous work of an American bomb squad during wartime in the Middle East. A tense and action-packed film, The Hurt Locker is well-paced and well-written, providing a new way of looking at a long-standing conflict outside gun fare and politics. The characters particularly add a personal dimension to the story, amplifying the danger of their work.

The Hurt Locker is located on the 5th floor. Check for availability.

If you like this one, try:
Jarhead
Redacted
Embedded in Baghdad

Staff Pick: Bossypants

New to the Collection: Bossypants

Bossypants book cover

In her autobiography, comedienne Tina Fey takes us through her life in an endless series of laugh-out-loud moments. In this hilarious look at the comedy industry from a female perspective, we watch Fey grow up, from the incident that caused the scar on her face all the way to the birth of her child. Of special note are the chapters about her father and her initial experiences working at Saturday Night Live.

If you like this one, try:

The Worst Date Ever
Look Back in Hunger
Love, Ellen

In addition, check out more titles in our Popular Reading Collection.

Staff Pick: Waiting for Superman

New to the collection: Waiting for Superman

Waiting for Superman poster

Filmmaker Davis Guggenheim reminds us that education “statistics” have names: Anthony, Francisco, Bianca, Daisy, and Emily, whose stories make up the engrossing foundation of WAITING FOR SUPERMAN. As he follows a handful of promising kids through a system that inhibits, rather than encourages, academic growth, Guggenheim undertakes an exhaustive review of public education, surveying “drop-out factories” and “academic sinkholes,” methodically dissecting the system and its seemingly intractable problems. Written by Sundance Film Festival.

Waiting for Superman is currently on Reserve in the library.

If you like this, try:
The end of education
Theories of development II
Adult-child interaction: communicating to support learning