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The COVID-19 pandemic has brought about changes in how we do just about everything, including how we watch movies and television. Over the past few months, streaming video services like Netflix and Hulu have hit record numbers. But what happens when we’ve binged all of our favorite shows and movies or when we’d like to watch something more thought-provoking than another go-around of Tiger King? The answer: Kanopy.

Kanopy is a streaming video service you can access for free with your library card. Just log on and you’ll have access to more than 30,000 mainstream movies, thoughtful documentaries, and educational videos, including the Great Courses. For children and families, Kanopy Kids offers movies, TV series, and stories for kids of all ages.

Kanopy is currently featuring films about racial and social injustice. Inspiring documentaries like “The Talk: Race in America,” “P.S. I Can’t Breathe,” and many others can help contribute to a more open dialogue about race relations in modern America.

The Great Courses include such titles as “How to Read and Understand Shakespeare,” “Big Questions of Philosophy,” and “Masterpieces of the Ancient World.” You can also learn to meditate, play the piano, and even train your dog using the Great Courses.

One of our Kanopy staff favorites is “Party Girl,” a 1995 dramedy starring Parker Posey as Mary, a free-spirited young woman who goes to raves and parties her money away. Following an arrest, Mary finds herself without bail money, so she gets a loan and takes a job as – gasp – a library clerk! Mary worries that working in a library will cramp her style, and she can’t make heads or tails of the Dewey Decimal System. No spoilers, but let’s just say Mary learns how to enjoy library life while staying true to her party girl nature. Of course, here at the Smiley, we already knew that library folks know how to party.

We encourage you to stay safe and healthy during this difficult time. We’re looking forward to the day we can safely open our doors. Until then, we’ve got you covered with our Books to Go curbside service, Kanopy, and our many other eResources.

I have a lot of favorite things about teenagers, but one of my most favorite of all is your natural gravitation towards social justice.

Now I understand that “teenagers” are not a monolith. It would be a mistake to lump you into one category with identical interests/behaviors/gravitational pulls. But so many teenagers I’ve known have been masterful at sniffing out injustice and energetic about opposing it. Does this sound like you? Then read on—the following young adult titles may get you fired up.

First up is Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You: A Remix of the National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi. Authors make it clear that this is NOT a history book. Instead, they write, it’s “a book about the here and now. A book to help us better understand why we are where we are. A book about race.”

It’s blunt and fast-paced, delivered in a down-to-earth tone that will help you wrap your head around the long and tangled relationship between race and power in America—the one that most history books leave out.

In Just Mercy (Adapted for Young Adults): A True Story of the Fight for Justice, author, lawyer, and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative Bryan Stevenson gives readers an insider’s look into the criminal justice system, revealing how it sometimes fails society’s most vulnerable.

Through the story of Walter McMillan, a Black man falsely convicted of murder, Stevenson shines a light on the economic and racial factors that affect unequal justice in America. This story is powerful and intimate and exposes in grim detail the devastating effects mass incarceration has on the nation’s poorest people.

Bernie Sanders wrote a book for young people called Bernie Sanders Guide to Political Revolution and just as the title promises, it’s a practical handbook designed to help young people transform their “idealism and generosity of spirit” into meaningful and robust social action.

From understanding and navigating the political process to mobilization, the book calls on young readers to be bold, think big, stand up, and fight back to correct inequality and imbalance in the status quo.

Because They Marched: The People’s Campaign for Voting Rights that Changed America by Russell Freedman is especially relevant in this moment. The book describes the events surrounding the 1965 march for voting rights from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, using graphic images and first-person perspectives to illuminate the energy, tenacity, courage, and single-mindedness required for social change. It’s an energy that will probably look and feel familiar to you, as it reverberates around the world right now.

Teens, these books are just the tip of the iceberg. If this topic is up your alley, here are a few more titles into which you may wish to dip your protest sign:

Unpunished Murder: Massacre at Colfax and the Quest for Justice, by Lawrence Goldstone (I’m reading this right now—it’s riveting…I’ll try to read fast.)

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States for Young People, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Stolen Justice, by Lawrence Goldstone

We are Everywhere: Protest, Power, and Pride in the History of Queer Liberation, by Matthew Riemer *Please note, this is an Adult Nonfiction title

Tomorrow Will Be Different: Love, Loss and the Fight for Trans Equality, by Sarah McBride *Please note, this is an Adult Nonfiction title

All of the titles mentioned above are available to borrow through A. K. Smiley Public Library’s Books-to-Go program. Stamped: Racism, Antiracism and You is also available to borrow as an eBook through Overdrive. So get to it! Your voices are a force and it’s inspiring to listen to you use them.

Happy Father’s Day! Happy second day of summer! Happy 70^th anniversary to my parents a few days ago! Happy almost half-way through 2020, and hopefully, a happier second half than the first half!

If you, like me, are looking for happier things to focus on or at least for some interesting distractions, look to Smiley Public Library for books, audio books, DVDs and CDs, all currently available through our Books to Go program. New items have continued to come in during our closure and are waiting for you. The library is a treasure trove of a variety of distractions.

Speaking of treasure… treasure hunters, history buffs, Anglophiles, archaeologists and just the curious will enjoy Lara Maiklem’s “Mudlark: In Search of London’s Past Along the River Thames.” Maiklem is a mudlark, someone who enjoys scavenging river banks at low tide for artifacts and her river of choice is the Thames. Among her findings are coins, pipes, medals, weapons, keys, jewelry, pottery, buttons and bottles. The age of her artifacts range from prehistoric, Roman era, Victorian era up to present-day. Research is involved in determining where to search (using old maps), what the items are, and where they came from. This really is a fascinating read and her descriptive writing may make you feel as if you are on location with her. The book does contain maps of the river to better understand her searches, but the only artifact pictures are on the cover and not in the book. I confess I took to the internet to see the types of things that Maiklem and other mudlarks have uncovered.

If you enjoyed Peggy Rowe’s memoir “About My Mother: True Stories of a Horse-crazy Daughter and her Baseball-obsessed Mother,” then you will be happy to know that her next book is now available for check out. “About Your Father and Other Celebrities I Have Known: Ruminations and Revelations from a Desperate Mother to Her Dirty Son” will again tickle your funny bone as she shares more family stories, this time focusing on her husband John, father of their three boys. Her sharp wit and warm affection for her family make for another very enjoyable and light-hearted read that is hard to put down. Peggy and John have enjoyed some celebrity status of their own besides being Mike Rowe’s parents, adding a few commercial shoots and book promotions to their own credit.

Lots of distraction comes from falling into a story and not wanting to leave it. “Running with Sherman: The Donkey with the Heart of a Hero,” by Christopher McDougall is such a story. McDougall, author of “Born to Run” captivates his audience as he tells of his family adopting and rehabilitating a severely neglected miniature donkey they call Sherman. With help from his Amish neighbors, spirited goats, other donkeys, and an equine expert who tells him Sherman needs a purpose, this becomes one humorous, touching, heartbreaking ride all the way to the finish line of the World Championship Leadville Burro Race.

Happy reading!