Posts by Hyacinth Persad

Fresh from my mid-winter cruise, and a bit disappointed because the ship did not make one of its appointed stops in the Cayman Islands due to stormy weather, I was looking for something new to read, especially if it had to do with travel. Back on terra firma, and ignoring my "For Later" shelf (books to read later), a feature which I use on the New York Public Library's newly acquired interface to the catalog, Bibliocommons, I picked up Paul Theroux's The Tao of Travel. In it, he surveys travel writings and includes excerpts from a variety of writers, including the essayist and novelist, Pico Iyer. A short time after completing Theroux's book, I happened to 

Perhaps you've read books by Pat Conroy, or, like me you are a newcomer to his works. While retrieving My Reading Life for a library user, I picked up another copy that was on the shelf. So began the second half of my serendipitous summer reading.

Shortly after landing in New York City from Greece, Fotis Flevotomos walked into Mid-Manhattan Library on June 11, 2011. As Brigid Cahalan, The New York Public Library's Outreach Coordinator, was showing him the space in the Corner Room where his art would adorn the shelves from June 11 through June 23, I was staffing the Popular Library Desk and thought that he must have been jet-lagged — if he was, that didn't stop him from installing all of his pieces that day. Flevotomos's art was on display as part of the Low Vision and Blindness Resource Day. The New York Public Library, in collaboration with Lighthouse International, the Xavier Society for the Blind, and 

On a rainy, spring evening in May, Patricia T. O’Conner, former editor of the New York Times Book Review and author of Woe is I  and Origins of the Specious gave a talk at the Mid-Manhattan Library, for the 4th year in a row, entitled, “How Words Evolve… a Darwinian look at the English Language."  You might think a talk on grammar would be drab—it was anything but.  She briefly discussed how new words are formed, how old ones change, and even how the dinosaurs among them become extinct.  Did you know that the color, puce, has a Greek origin; that “Serendip” is the former name of Sri Lanka, and that