Fall of the Berlin Wall 20th Anniversary

On November 9, 1989, twenty years ago, after weeks of civil unrest and widespread peaceful demonstrations, East-Germans were allowed to travel freely to West-Berlin and West-Germany, resulting in the opening of the Berlin Wall. The Wall, the concrete barrier erected by the East-German government in 1961, separated West-Berlin from East-Berlin and East-Germany for more than a quarter century. Click here for some interesting websites on the history of the Berlin Wall from the Librarians' Internet Index. For a fascinating glimpse of Berlin in the 1920s, check out on DVD the documentary from 1927 titled BERLIN SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY. For books on the history of Berlin and the Berlin Wall, click here.

Bauhaus 90th Anniversary Celebration

This year marks the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus ("house of building"), the most important and most influential school of design of the 20th century. It was founded by Walter Gropius in 1919 in Weimar, Germany where it was based until 1925. It was then moved to Dessau in 1932 and on to Berlin until its was closed by the Nazis in 1933. The European avant-garde taught at the Bauhaus: Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Johannes Itten, Oskar Schlemmer, Josef Albers, Anni Albers, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer and Lászlo Moholy-Nagy among others. The Museum of Modern Art in New York has organized a special exhibit on the Bauhaus which will be shown from November 8, 2009 until January 25, 2010. For a selection of books on the Bauhaus in our library click here. For a photo gallery on the Bauhaus click here. See the work of Bauhaus student, painter and printmaker Werner Drewes who immigrated to the United States in 1930.

Mrs. Delany & Her Circle

The Yale Center for British Art in New Haven is hosting a stunning exhibit that includes decoupage, natural history specimans, embroidered textiles, sketches, garden design, and live floral displays.

At the age of 72, Mrs. Mary Delany began working on a collection of botantical collages, or "paper mosaics," as she called them. She would create each work by cutting minute pieces of colored paper to represent each part of the particular specimen, then pasting them on a black background. In the next decade, she made nearly a thousand of these collages before her failing eyesight caused her to stop.

The current exhibit showcases thirty of these collages, as well as other works by Mrs. Delaney and her contemporaries. The exhibit runs through January 3, 2010.

Mrs. Delany and Her Circle, the exhibition catalogue published by the Yale University Press, is now available at the Hamden Library. We currently have a selection of botanical books on display that were inspired by this exhibit, including Maria Sibylla Merian & Daughters : Women of Art and Science by Ella Reitsma, Flora Mirabilis by Catherine Herbert Howell, and The Art of Botanical Illustration by Wilfred Blunt. Stop by our lobby to see the entire display!

10 Digit Dialing

Beginning on November 14, all telephone calls made in Connecticut will need an area code, even a call to your next door neighbor. To complete local calls, the new dialing procedure requires callers to dial area code + telephone number. This means that all local calls in Connecticut that are currently dialed with seven digits will need to be dialed using area code + telephone number. Calls outside the local calling area will still need a 1 before the area code, while local calls will require 10-digit dialing, without the 1.

National Day of Listening

NPR joins StoryCorps in declaring Friday, November 27th the National Day of Listening. On this day, Americans are encouraged to record and share an interview with a loved one and to preserve that conversation for future generations. The National Day of Listening falls on the day after Thanksgiving, when friends and family are likely to be together and able to spend an hour honoring one another by listening. StoryCorps provides a Do-It-Yourself Instruction Guide and special toolkits to assist people in recording an interview and other National Day of Listening activities.

Listen to other StoryCorps conversations to inspire you.

Check out Listening is an Act of Love, a collection of true American life stories features pieces representing every walk of life from all fifty states, in a nation-wide and thematically arranged celebration of the nation's shared humanity.

Claude Lévi-Strauss 1908-2009

The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss died on October 30, 2009 of cardiac arrest, just a few weeks before his 101st birthday. The father of structuralism and modern anthropology, and "one of the great intellectual heroes of the 20th century" (quotation by Philippe Descola, Collège de France) was born on November 28, 1908 in Brussels. He obtained advanced degrees in philosophy, literature and law at the University of Paris. While teaching sociology at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, he studied various tribes in Central Brazil. These ethnological studies later informed his groundbreaking theoretical work. In 1942 he emigrated from France to the United States and taught for several years at the New School for Social Research in New York. He returned to France after World War II and during his academic career published several influential books, namely Tristes Tropiques (1955), a memoir of his life in Brazil and the The Savage Mind (La Pensée Sauvage) (1962). For more information, see the obituary by Edward Rothstein in the New York Times.

November Literary Birthdays

 November is full of author birthdays, including Margaret Atwood, James Agee, Mark Twain, Margaret Mitchell, Sam Shepard, Anne Sexton, Marianne Moore, Kurt Vonnegut, and Albert Camus!

November 1 - Stephen Crane (1871 - 1900)
November 3 - Terrence McNally (1939 - )
November 5 - Joyce Maynard (1953- )
November 5 - Sam Shepard (1943)
November 6 - Michael Cunningham (1952 - )
November 7 - Albert Camus (1913 - 1960)
November 8 - Kazuo Ishiguro (1954 - )
November 8 - Bram Stoker (1847 - 1912)
November 8 - Margaret Mitchell (1900 - 1949)
November 9 - Anne Sexton (1928 -1974)
November 10 - Neil Gaiman (1960 - )
November 11 - Carlos Fuentes (1928 - )
November 11 - Kurt Vonnegut (1922 - 2007)
November 12 - Tracy Kidder (1945 - )
November 13 - Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 - 1894)
November 14 - Astrid Lindgren (1907 - 2002)
November 15 - Marianne Moore (1887 -1972)
November 16 - José Saramago (1922 - )
November 17 - Shelby Foote (1916 - 2005)
November 18 - Margaret Atwood (1939 - )
November 20 - Nadine Gordimer (1923 - )
November 20 - Don DeLillo (1936 - )
November 22 - George Eliot (1819 - 1880)
November 24 - Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849 - 1924)
November 26 - Eugene Ionesco (1909 - 1994)
November 27 - James Agee (1909 - 1955)
November 28 - William Blake (1757 - 1827)
November 28 - Rita Mae Brown (1944- )
November 29 - Louisa May Alcott (1832 - 1888)
November 29 - Madeline L'Engle (1918 - )
November 29 - C. S. Lewis (1898 - 1963)
November 30 - Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)
November 30 - Jonathan Swift (1667 - 1745)
November 30 - David Mamet (1947)

Count Down to Halloween

Halloween will be here soon! For last minute craft and decor ideas check out our collection of Halloween books. There is also a CD with spooky sounds. Find out about Halloween's ancient roots from Ireland and Rome to the United States by clicking here. See our program calendar for special children events this week (some require registration). Happy Halloween!