NYPL Blogs

CUNY Career PATH is a low-to no cost program funded by the grant program of the U.S. Department of Labor Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training, also know as TAACCCT.

I've always been fascinated by the possibility of traveling backwards and forwards in time, and scientific opinion is still divided on whether or not such a thing is even theoretically possible. Noted physicist Stephen Hawking seems to believe in the possibility of time-travel, but only forward, no backward time travel according to his work on black-holes and cosmological constructs. The worlds that art, literature and science inhabit are joined together by imagination, multiple dimensions and endless possibilities.

The April 13, 2013 Economist included its quarterly business book reviews. Here is a listing.

For those interested in the articles, you can find them through some of our electronic resources—We recommend our ProQuest Research Library database, available from home with a library card. Or you can find them on The Economist's website (if you're a subscriber). For those who are too impatient to read those, I've included for each book, based on the articles, a short squib.

If you are a businessperson already engaged in international trade or just a small businessperson interested in international trade then World Trade Week NYC 2013 may be of interest to you. The New York international business community celebrates World Trade Week to underscore the importance of the foreign trade in goods and services to the New York City metropolitan area economy.

Are you ready to explore your potential? If yes! Save the date. Meet our dynamic Career Coach Robyn Saunders and let her work with you. Come and join this FREE informative series workshop at your local Francis Martin Library.

Tinta, Papel, y...Café, una serie de tertulias que nace en la biblioteca Mid-Manhattan, cuenta con un grupo muy interesante de participantes. Todas tienen una historia que contar, como lo demostraron los escritos leídos el primer día de la reunión. Poemas que nos hicieron añorar nuestros países de origen, relatos que parecían haber sido sacados de un mundo garcíamarquezco, historias neoyorquinas come de película, relatos biográficos que nos sacaron más de una lágrima.

One day, librarian Molly decided to drive her mobile library van into the zoo, and all of the animals were flummoxed! She read from Dr. Seuss and the zoo animals were drawn toward her. They were fascinated by reading, and went wild over the many different kinds of books that the library van displayed. The animals read together or alone or while eating lunch, and some, unfortunately, had overdue books.

For the week of May 5th, 2013 we have hardcover fiction, hardcover non-fiction, and young adult fiction.

This coming fall, perhaps in September, I will be giving a library talk called "Edith Wharton: A Writing Life." In preparation, I have been immersing myself in Wharton's novels and stories. Although the fiction is often set in a New York as remote from us as an ancient city, among a wealthy and exclusive class many generations removed from today's social elite, what strikes me most powerfully is how modern it all seems. Her characters have passions, needs, joys, and frustrations which are as piercing and poignant as our own. They breathe the same air as we do.

It can be a special experience when students make contact with primary resources. I have written previously about a class visit to examine documents from the life of Johann Sebastian Bach. A few weeks ago I had the great opportunity to introduce students to a fundamental primary resource: music manuscripts. My colleague Fred Fehleisen (of Mannes College the New School for Music) brought his class to the Music Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts to provide students with first-hand experience of looking at and handling actual music manuscripts.

For the month of April, the Epiphany book discussion group discussed the novel Home by Toni Morrison. It is the story of Frank Money, a poor man from the South who goes to fight in the Korean War as a way of escaping his rural town. In the process he leaves behind his fragile sister Cee who has to learn to navigate her world without her big brother/protector.

On Thursday, April 25th the Fort Washington Library held a special screening of the film Bully, a 2011 documentary about bullying in U.S. schools directed by Lee Hirsch, followed by a conversation about how to deal with this serious problem. Our discussion was lead by T. Burgess, an Information Assistant with an MA in School Counseling. To promote this event all the staff wore buttons, created and designed in house a few weeks before the program. These buttons were also given to teens who agreed to participate in the program. They were a huge hit!

Are you 24 or over and are looking for a career in the green advanced manufacturing industry?

Green Advanced Manufacturing Collaborative (GAMC), a partnership between New York City College of Technology's Department of Mechanical Engineering Technology and Industrial Design and the Business and Industry Training Center, is responsive to workforce education needs of NYC's revitalized manufacturing sector.

"I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you." (imdb.com)

This summer at Mid-Manhattan Library: revisit the vital, gritty streets of 1970s New York City on Film, discuss great NYC books online with Reader's Den, and relax as librarian Lois Moore reads you short stories from The New Yorker and New York-based authors during Mixed Bag.

All of these events are part of our summer reading program for older teens and adults called NYC Summer. Watch this space for announcements of even more events and book recommendations! You can also quickly access this page at: bit.ly/nycsummer-nypl.

15-year-old exercise rider Jack Walsh hopes and dreams that someone will promote him to "bug boy," a.k.a. apprentice jockey. However, in no way, shape or form did he aspire to take advantage of the misfortune of Showboat, the leading jockey at his barn. 116 pounds is much too heavy for a jockey; ten pounds to lose in two days.

May is Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month. This month celebrates the contributions of Asians and Pacific Islanders in the United States.

What does a ballot from the first post-apartheid election in South Africa have in common with the first Russian-language edition of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital?

Here we are in the middle of spring; and I'm still embarrassingly waffling over which sport I should focus on in the beautiful weather. I've once again missed my opportunity to do cross-country skiing. Perhaps table tennis will be within reach for me this summer...

Though I myself am a bit indecisive, I love the idea of each of us finding at least one sport or other athletic activity that's fun and right for us, and participating on a regular basis.