Teresa Letizia

I recently lost a friend who had been in poor health for quite a while—a delightful lady who made me smile. This week (May 19-26) is National New Friends, Old Friends Week, a time set aside to remember how vital friends are to our emotional and physical health and well-being. Celebrating friends of any and all kinds seems an appropriate way to honor my friend, especially in the form of books, because she loved them and our library so.

The month of May, a time when we strive to bring awareness to our mental health, furthers the theme of the connection between friendship and health. At one time or another, most of us are in need of some kind of special care with life’s challenges and illnesses. Whether we are suffering from the effects of (in no particular order) grief, a broken heart, stress, anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, addiction, autism, ADHD, OCD, schizophrenia, etc., we need, at the very least, some kind of guidance and kindness to get us through. Though we need to be aware that professional help may be required, the concern of a friend or a friendly stranger, or just a sincere smile on a face can often make all the difference.

Visit us, your friends at Smiley Public Library, if you need to locate resources for help, including finding some helpful books in the area of concern, even it’s just to hear another’s story. Here is a small sampling from our new book collection.

“The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions” is a dramatic, yet unfortunately, an increasingly common version, of how mental illness can spill over from the sufferer to those around him. The memoir, a Pulitzer Prize finalist of 2023, recounts author Jonathan Rosen’s investigation of the forces that led his closest childhood friend from success and great potential to the psychiatric hospital where he has lived since killing the woman he loved. A story about friendship, love, and the price of self-delusion, The Best Minds explores the ways in which we understand–and fail to understand–mental illness.

On a lighter note, another memoir, “I’ll Just Be Five More Minutes: (and Other Tales from My ADHD Brain),” is a collection of heartwarming and humorous essays by Emily Farris. Using her own experience as a woman diagnosed with ADHD at age 35, she addresses the topic of neurodivergent thought processing and the emerging discovery of its previously undiagnosed effects on girls/women. At its core, Farris’s account is about not quite fitting in and not really understanding why–something we’ve all felt whether we’re neurodivergent or not.

“Stand By Me: A Guide to Navigating Modern, Meaningful Caregiving” focuses on the very special friends we find in unpaid, untrained, usually family, caregivers. Author and clinical psychologist Dr. Allison Applebaum is the founder of the only devoted Caregivers Clinic in the country, as well as someone who has been on a personal journey as the primary caregiver for her own father, composer Stanley Applebaum. With this volume, she empowers caregivers to provide their loved one with the best quality of life and care possible, while promoting their own well-being.

Ultimately, in whatever we’re going through, we usually have to get to know ourselves better in order to begin healing. You may remember Julia Cameron’s 1992 classic “The Artist’s Way,” designed to provide tools to access artistic creative recovery. This year Cameron has released a supplement, “Living the Artist’s Way: An Intuitive Path to Greater Creativity: A Six-Week Artist’s Way Program.” In it she shares an additional technique, ‘writing for guidance,’ as a way to connect with the intuitive power within ourselves and trusting the answers we receive. Cameron details how writing for guidance can help readers quell anxiety, “slow down” amid life’s stressors, and surrender control. As if to bring our discussion full circle, she describes how she and other artists use the tool in practice by grounding her meditative guide with chapters “Believing Friends” and “The Inspiration of Friends.”

Two more days… Not just the Daylight Savings time change (spring forward!), but the 96^th annual Academy Awards ceremony at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood takes place this Sunday. Did your invitation get lost in the mail? Yeah, mine too. That’s O.K.—the ceremony will be televised (earlier than usual) at 4 p.m., on ABC.

Even if we aren’t eligible to receive a shiny gold Oscar and are not invited to party among the stars, we can find quite a few new books about movies at Smiley Library with which to console ourselves. There’s a great variety too—including movies, critics, the film industry, and the awards themselves.

Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears  Michael Schulman, author of New York Times bestseller Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep, delves into the gripping history of the Academy Awards, some stories never before revealed, often connecting incidents to a broader cultural change. The publisher notes, “The road to the Oscars may be golden, but it’s paved in blood, sweat, and broken hearts.”

The Academy and the Award: The Coming of Age of Oscar and the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences  Author Bruce Davis, former executive director of the Academy for over 20 years, was given unprecedented access to its archives for this book, and was able to discount many long-held myths, including how the Oscar got its name.

Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel and Ebert Changed Movies Forever  You may remember a time when film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert ruled the television airwaves with their movie review show (late 1970s-1990s). Each renowned in their work for rivaling Chicago newspapers, they were often diametrically opposed in their opinions making for lively discussions, but oh, the rare occasions when they gave it “two thumbs up!” Author Matt Singer goes behind the scenes of the show learning from its staff, and other sources, how the rivals, and eventual friends, transformed critique-as-opinion into critique-as-discussion, a whole new way of viewing the art of movie-making.

Steven Spielberg: All the Films: The Story Behind Every Movie, Episode, and Short  Spielberg fans will enjoy this comprehensive, detailed, and photo-filled account of the prolific director’s life and work, from his early direction of television episodes to his more than 30 feature-length films. The three film journalist authors especially shine in highlighting Spielberg’s use of visual symbolism which viewers may have been previously missed.

Other new books break down genres such as horror, Monsters on the Couch: The Real Psychological Disorders Behind Your Favorite Horror Movies, and comic book – superhero – science fiction, MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, or eras like Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties.

And to get the inside scoop on these three classic movies:  The Exorcist Legacy: 50 Years of Fear; No Crying in Baseball: The Inside Story of A League of Their Own: Big Stars, Dugout Drama, and a Home Run for Hollywood; and Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!

Check out the movie DVD to watch while you’re reading the book: The Exorcist, A League of Their Own, and Airplane!