Great Books for March

I wanted to share a few books that would be great to use in the month of March. The first two are story books that would go great together in a Good Luck theme. The first, The Good Luck Cat by Joy Harjo, focuses on a young girl and her cat who has used up eight of its nine lives. What will happen when the cat doesn't return? Has the cat used up all nine lives? This beautiful story is wonderfully illustrated and also includes a Native American family. The second book, Good Luck Bear by Greg E. Foley, features a tiny bear who is in search of a four-leaf clover for good luck. With help from his mouse friend, the little bear finds something even more special!

 If you are planning a program about the myths and folklore and culture of Ireland, these two books would be perfect. The Leprechaun's Kingdom: The World of Banshees, Fairies, Demons, Giants, Monsters, Mermaids, Phoukas, Vampires, Werewolves, Witches, and Many Others by Peter Haining features descriptions of fairies and other mythological creatures from Ireland along with illustrations and stories. A Pot O' Gold: A Treasury of Irish Stories, Poetry, Folklore, and (of Course) Blarney by Kathleen Krull and David McPhail features stories, poetry, and beautiful illustrations all focusing on Ireland. Both of these books would add interesting facts and beautiful images to any program.

The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore

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.