Jan Berenstain Passes Away

Berenstain Bears Co-creator Jan Berenstain Dies

By Associated Press | Parenting – 3 hours ago

PHILADELPHIA (AP) - Jan Berenstain, who with her husband, Stan, wrote and illustrated the Berenstain Bears books that have charmed preschoolers and their parents for 50 years, has died. She was 88.

Berenstain suffered a severe stroke on Thursday and died Friday without regaining consciousness, her son Mike Berenstain said.

The gentle tales of Mama Bear, Papa Bear, Brother Bear and Sister Bear were inspired by the Berenstain children, and later their grandchildren. The stories address children's common concerns and aim to offer guidance on subjects like dentist visits, peer pressure, a new sibling or summer camp.

The first Berenstain Bears book, "The Big Honey Hunt," was published in 1962. Over the years, more than 300 titles have been released in 23 languages - most recently in Arabic and Icelandic - and have become a rite of passage for generations of young readers.

"They say jokes don't travel well, but family humor does," said Jan Berenstain told The Associated Press in 2011. "Family values is what we're all about."

Stan and Jan Berenstain, both Philadelphia natives, were 18 when they met on their first day at art school in 1941.

They married in 1946, after Stan Berenstain returned home from serving as a medical illustrator at a stateside Army hospital during World War II. During that time, Jan Berenstain worked as a draftsman for the Army Corps of Engineers and as a riveter building Navy seaplanes.

Before their family of bear books was born, the young couple had already built a successful career in periodicals. A cartoon series they produced called "All in the Family" ran in McCall's and Good Housekeeping magazines for 35 years, and their art appeared in magazines including Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post.

Stan and Jan Berenstain created hundreds of books until Stan Berenstain's death in 2005 at the age of 82.

Mike Berenstain is an illustrator who collaborated on the books with his mother in recent years. His elder brother, writer Leo Berenstain, is involved with the business end of the family franchise.

The books in recent years have tackled modern subjects such as online safety and childhood obesity, and the bears (or their human helpers) answer children's emails and letters, but the goal is to tell enduring, universal stories. Perennial favorites cover challenges of getting kids to doing chores, defuse fears of the first day of school and teach values of kindness and generosity.

"It's wonderful to do something you love for so many years," Jan Berenstain told the AP in 2011. "Not everyone has that."

About 260 million copies of Berenstain Bears books have been held in the hands of children and their parents since the earliest books were published with the help of Theodor Geisel, a children's books editor at Random House better known as Dr. Seuss.

Mike Berenstain said his mother worked daily at her home studio in an idyllic part of Bucks County, north of Philadelphia, which served as inspiration for the books' setting. He said he will continue writing and illustrating future Berenstain books.

"Every day she was very productive," he said. "She was working on two books and had been doing illustrations until the day before she passed away."

Jan Berenstain is survived by her two sons and four grandchildren.

___

Online:

http://www.berenstainbears.com/

[Source]

Great Christmas Books

Christmas is one of my most favorite times of the year, and I wanted to share a few picture books that I have come to love along with traditional classics such as The Night Before Christmas.

The first, Where Teddy Bears Come From, by Mark Burgess and Russell Ayto, is a beautiful story about a little wolf who wants a teddy bear, but doesn't know where they come from. He travels through the forest asking three little pigs and a little girl and her grandmother, but no one knows, until he bumps into a kind old man with a white beard who has the answer.

The second book, Stick Man, by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler, is about a Stick Man with three stick children and his Stick Lady Love, who all live together in the Family Tree. While out for a run one day, Stick Man is taken far from his family, until he helps a kind old man with a white beard come down a chimney after he gets stuck. Stick Man helps the kind old man deliver gifts, and in return is given a gift of his own.

I really love how these two stories both involve a character who does not know that they have just bumped into Santa Claus, and that because of their kindness and help towards Santa Claus, they get a gift themselves in return. I think these two would be good for a Christmas storytime because of this similarity.

The third book, Santa's New Suit by Laura Rader, is a really fun read that could be combined with another fun Christmas book such as Merry Christmas Splat by Rob Scotton. Santa Claus finds that all his suits are old and dirty and torn and red, and goes out to buy a new suit. The problem is that while he loves his new suit, no one else seems to, and children even have trouble recognizing him. Mrs. Claus helps him go back to his traditional suit in the end without even saying a word. The fun voice bubbles in this book make it really fun to read, and it is fun to see Santa Claus's humor in this book.

CIA's 'ninja librarians' track revolts through Twitter and Facebook

McLEAN, Va. (AP) — In an anonymous industrial park, CIA analysts who jokingly call themselves the "ninja librarians" are mining the mass of information people publish about themselves overseas, tracking everything from common public opinion to revolutions.

The group's effort gives the White House a daily snapshot of the world built from tweets, newspaper articles and Facebook updates.

The agency's Open Source Center sometimes looks at 5 million tweets a day. The analysts are also checking out TV news channels, local radio stations, Internet chat rooms — anything overseas that people can access and contribute to openly.

The Associated Press got an apparently unprecedented view of the center's operations, including a tour of the main facility. The AP agreed not to reveal its exact location and to withhold the identities of some who work there because much of the center's work is secret.

From Arabic to Mandarin, from an angry tweet to a thoughtful blog, the analysts gather the information, often in a native tongue. They cross-reference it with a local newspaper or a clandestinely intercepted phone conversation. From there, they build a picture sought by the highest levels at the White House. There might be a real-time peek, for example, at the mood of a region after the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden, or perhaps a prediction of which Mideast nation seems ripe for revolt.

Yes, they saw the uprising in Egypt coming; they just didn't know exactly when revolution might hit, says the center's director, Doug Naquin.

The center already had "predicted that social media in places like Egypt could be a game-changer and a threat to the regime," he said in an interview.

The CIA facility was set up in response to a recommendation by the 9/11 Commission, its first priority to focus on counterterrorism and counterproliferation. Its predecessor organization had its staff heavily cut in the 1990s — something the CIA's management has vowed to keep from happening again, with new budget reductions looming across the national security spectrum.

The center's several hundred analysts — the actual number is classified — track a broad range of subjects, including Chinese Internet access and the mood on the street in Pakistan.

While most analysts are based in Virginia, they also are scattered throughout U.S. embassies worldwide to get a step closer to their subjects.

The center's analysis ends up in President Barack Obama's daily intelligence briefing in one form or another almost every day. The material is often used to answer questions Obama poses to his inner circle of intelligence advisers when they give him the morning rundown of threats and trouble spots.

"The OSC's focus is overseas, collecting against foreign intelligence issues," said CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood. "Looking at social media outlets overseas is just a small part of what this skilled organization does," she said. "There is no effort to collect on Americans."

The most successful open source analysts, Naquin said, are something like the heroine of the crime novel "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," a quirky, irreverent computer hacker who "knows how to find stuff other people don't know exists."

An analyst with a master's degree in library science and multiple languages, especially one who grew up speaking another language, makes "a powerful open source officer," Naquin said.

The center had started focusing on social media after watching the Twitter-sphere rock the Iranian regime during the Green Revolution of 2009, when thousands protested the results of the elections that kept Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in power. "Farsi was the third largest presence in social media blogs at the time on the Web," Naquin said.

After bin Laden was killed in Pakistan in May, the CIA followed Twitter to give the White House a snapshot of world public opinion.

Since tweets can't necessarily be pegged to a geographic location, the analysts broke down reaction by language. The result: The majority of Urdu tweets, the language of Pakistan, and Chinese tweets, were negative. China is a close ally of Pakistan's. Officials in Pakistan protested the raid as an affront to their nation's sovereignty, a sore point that continues to complicate U.S.-Pakistani relations.

When President Obama gave his speech addressing Mideast issues a few weeks after the raid, the tweet response over the next 24 hours came in negative from Turkey, Egypt, Yemen, Algeria, the Persian Gulf and Israel, too. Tweets from speakers of Arabic and Turkic contended that Obama favored Israel, while Hebrew tweets denounced the speech as pro-Arab.

In the following days, major news media came to the same conclusion, as did analysis by the covert side of U.S. intelligence based on intercepts and human intelligence gathered in the region.

The center is also in the process of comparing its social media results with the track record of polling organizations, trying to see which produces more accurate results, Naquin said.

"We do what we can to caveat that we may be getting an overrepresentation of the urban elite," said Naquin, acknowledging that only a small slice of the population in many areas being monitored has access to computers and Internet. But he points out that access to social media sites via cellphones is growing in such areas as Africa, meaning a "wider portion of the population than you might expect is sounding off and holding forth than it might appear if you count the Internet hookups in a given country."

Sites such as Facebook and Twitter have become a key resource for following a fast-moving crisis such as the riots that raged across Bangkok in April and May of last year, the center's deputy director said. The AP agreed not to identify him because he sometimes still works undercover in foreign countries.

As director, Naquin is identified publicly by the agency although the location of the center is kept secret to deter attacks, whether physical or electronic.

Naquin says the next generation of social media will probably be closed-loop, subscriber-only cellphone networks, like the ones the Taliban uses to send messages among hundreds of followers at a time in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Those networks can be penetrated only by technical eavesdropping by branches of U.S. intelligence, such as the National Security Agency — but Naquin predicts his covert colleagues will find a way to adapt, as the enemy does.

[Source] | Associated Press | By KIMBERLY DOZIER - AP Intelligence Writer

Books for Halloween

A quick post to suggest some really good titles for Halloween.

For younger children (and older children as well, as I personally enjoy this book myself), I really recommend The Witch Who Was Afraid of Witches by Alice Low. This is a really good friendship and confidence book, with a lot of fun Halloween images. A great book I discovered this year is Vampire Boy's Goodnight by Lisa Brown. This book has some especially wonderful references to classic monsters and the legend of Dracula. I would also recommend Moonlight: the Halloween Cat by Cynthia Rylant, especially for its wonderful, calming tone.

For older readers I would like to recommend (again) the Scary Stories collection by Alvin Schwartz and any of Daniel Cohen's stories, especially The Headless Roommate and Other Tales of Terror. There are a few others I think are really good reads, including Scary Stories, illustrated by Barry Moser, and Tales for the Midnight Hour by J. B. Stamper. There is a story in Tales for the Midnight Hour that I find particularly chilling titled The Attic. Definitely do not read it alone at night when everyone else is asleep, especially if you have an attic.

Happy Halloween!

Picture Book of the Month: Bark, George

The picture book of the month for August is Bark, George by Jules Feiffer. I used this book for a bilingual story time and it is very easily translated to Spanish. I first came across this book while I was a shelving assistant and it was used during a story time at the library where I worked. I thought it was such a funny book, and the children did too. I love how George's mother takes him to the veterinarian, and I especially love the expressions his mother makes, along with the different colors used in the pages.

There is some repetition in the book and there are different animals that make different sounds that children can repeat, which makes the book a lot of fun. What will especially put a smile on the faces of children (and adults) reading this is the ending. If you have not read this book, please do, you will not regret it and will find yourself laughing at the ending.

Borders Succumbs to Digital Era in Books

By MIKE SPECTOR and JEFFREY A. TRACHTENBERG

Borders Group Inc.'s imminent demise marks the first major casualty of the digital era in buying and reading books. But the store closings also will mean fewer opportunities for shoppers to wander the book aisles, a loss that will affect publishers as well as competitors and authors.

The bookseller is expected to ask a bankruptcy judge Thursday to approve plans to start liquidating as soon as Friday. By the end of September, the remaining 399 stores of the second-largest U.S. bookstore chain will be shut down for good.

The closures will make Barnes & Noble the only national bookstore chain in the U.S., leaving some Americans to drive long distances to find the largest collections of new bestsellers or wile away the hours among the stacks. Publishers, meantime, are losing one of their biggest customers as they struggle with declining demand for physical books.

Borders filed for bankruptcy protection in February and continued to bleed cash as it raced, unsuccessfully, to find a buyer.

Its failure will hasten the dramatic changes under way in how consumers buy and read books. Tom and Louis Borders started the company 40 years ago in Ann Arbor, Mich. by stocking rich assortments of books that rivals couldn't match. Now, many consumers prefer having books delivered to their doorsteps or downloading them to electronic devices by touching a screen.

Amazon.com Inc., the nation's dominant online bookseller by sales, is driving those changes that felled Borders. Apple Inc. and Google Inc., too, have started selling books.

Underscoring Borders's inability to adapt, the company handed its Internet operations to Amazon about a decade ago and didn't relaunch its own website until 2008. Then, too late, it relied on a Canadian company for an electronic-book reader.

Publishers, already grappling with seismic shifts in their business, including the demand for e-books, now are trying to gauge how many fewer books they should print, both in terms of physical copies and the number of new titles.

"There will be fewer titles on display," said the head of one large publishing house. "We're going to have to make a lot of different assumptions."

Writers, too, have lost a place to promote their works through talks and signings. The author Kristina Laferne Roberts, who uses the pseudonym Zane and also operates Stebor Books, a publishing joint venture with CBS Corp.'s Atria Books, said Borders was particularly open to African-American writers. "Many of my own signings were at Borders, as were signings of a lot of my authors," she said. "We're going to have to find alternative ways to market books."

Borders's failure disappointed many. "I felt we were on the right track," said George Jones, who served as Borders's chief executive from mid-2006 to January 2009. Mr. Jones said he inherited about $750 million in debt, and that financial markets had turned south when he tried to refinance.

After Borders unsuccessfully put itself up for sale in March 2008, his hopes of creating a proprietary e-reader to match Amazon's Kindle fizzled. "I would have loved to have had the money to develop something like Barnes & Noble's Nook, but our company was up for sale, and nobody would partner with us."

Barnes & Noble, weighing a buyout offer from Liberty Media Corp., also faces challenges but could attract Borders's customers. "It's not unrealistic to think that they'll capture $600 million to $1.1 billion in sales," said Edward Latessa, portfolio manager for Aria Partner, a Boston-based investment firm that owns a large stake in Barnes & Noble.

At Borders's flagship store in Ann Arbor this week, customers expressed dismay at the chain's closing but weren't surprised. Joel Zaretsky, a 73-year-old painter from Woodstock, N.Y., was curled up in the store's front window, wearing a tie-dyed shirt, cargo shorts and sandals. His glasses perched on the end of his nose, which was buried in a magazine devoted to Photoshop.

Mr. Zaretsky said he had been coming to the store s every summer for the city's art festival. "I don't like it," he said of the chain's fate. "This is a case of Internet outsourcing," he added, before admitting that he, too, bought books online.

Yuching Lin, a 20-year-old college junior, said she sees little reason to buy a book in a bookstore when shopping online is more convenient. "It's like an old kitchen in here," she said while chatting with a friend at a table in the store. Barnes & Noble "is classier," she added.

For several weeks, Borders looked like it might survive. Jahm Najafi, a vice chairman of the Phoenix Suns who runs private-equity firm Najafi Cos., had agreed last month to buy it. But Mr. Najafi's agreement didn't preclude him from later liquidating the chain. That didn't fly with creditors, who felt they could get paid more by liquidators. Borders reluctantly consented to a deal with liquidators after discussions with Mr. Najafi collapsed last week amid concerns about support from landlords and publishers.

Over the past weekend, others, including Birmingham, Ala.-based chain Books-A-Million Inc., contacted Borders's financial adviser, Jefferies & Co., about possible bids. A bidding deadline passed Sunday without an offer to save Borders.

"We gave it everything we had, but ultimately we lost," said Borders Group President Mike Edwards.

[Source]

Jane Austen Manuscript sells for $1.6 Million

Secret bidder nabs Jane Austen manuscript for $1.6 million
By Liz Goodwin | The Lookout

An unfinished, handwritten manuscript penned by Jane Austen has just sold for more than three times its expected price at a Sotheby's auction, fetching a whopping $1.6 million from an unknown buyer over the telephone.

Entitled The Watsons, it is the only handwritten Austen manuscript still in private hands. No original manuscripts exist of her six finished works, making The Watsons all the more unique and valuable to Austen fans.

Associate Professor of English at Manhattanville College Juliette Wells tells The Lookout that it's "fascinating" the manuscript sold for so much more money than Sotheby's predicted.

"Anyone can go on the web and look at the facsimiles that just sold for 1.6 million dollars," she adds. "So why would you pay unless you thought owning them would bring you closer to Jane Austen in some way?" (Check out the manuscript online here.)

Austen has a very devoted following, and this book is the "most precious Jane Austen relic that's come up to auction in our lifetime," Wells says. Dozens of fan fiction spin-offs, movie adaptations and even, of course, a zombie-infused take on Pride and Prejudice have sprouted up in Austen's honor, nearly two hundred years after the writer's death.

The marked-up draft affords a rare glimpse into Austen's writing process, Wells adds. The 68-page manuscript is made up of booklets that Austen created herself by folding her writing paper in half.


The Guardian writes that the famous author began the novel in 1804, when she had just had one manuscript rejected and another spiked by a publisher. Some speculate that she never finished The Watsons because its story hit too close to home: the novel's heroine is worried her ill clergyman father will die and leave the family penniless, which happened to Austen in real life only one year later.

Even though she wrote the book during a difficult time, it shows off Austen's trademark wit. The critic Margaret Drabble called it "a tantalizing, delightful and highly accomplished fragment, which must surely have proved the equal of her other six novels, had she finished it," according to Reuters.

It's unknown whether the Austen devotee who won the bidding war will make the manuscript publicly available or keep it private.

[Source]