The end of the year is hog heaven for those who love a list, especially when favourite authors provide their best reads Did they agreed with you, thus displaying impeccable literary taste? Who else do they like?
Music Onlinebrings together on a single cross-searchable platform the entire suite of Alexander Street Press music products that we now subscribe to. Music Online can potentially cross-search all of these or using the drop down box, any of these individual databases:
American Song– an eclectic collection of music from America’s past and present. Songs from American Indians, slaves and singing cowboys! Content includes protest songs, folk, blues, Motown, funk and more….
Classical Music Library – Tens of thousands of licensed recordings that users can listen to. The audio selections are cross referenced to a database of supplementary reference information. Hear the music and also understand what they are on about!
Contemporary World Music – Global sounds? How about some Arab swing or Balkanic jazz. Perhaps the flamenco and a bit of Bollywood to have us dancing in the aisles?
Jazz Music Library– An Alexander Street strength. Provides online listening to thousands of jazz artists, albums and genres. Listen to New Orleans Jazz, Big Bands, Acid Jazz and more! Am I the only one who knew nothing about Acid Jazz??
Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries– A virtual encyclopaedia of the world’s musical and aural traditions. Includes more than 35,000 individual tracks of music, spoken word and natural and human made sounds!?
This database complements our music collection such as the Naxos Music Library. You can access these database and many others from home with your library card number and PIN, or at our community libraries through our Premium Sites! Enjoy and “get down” with Christchurch City Libraries music resources!
Being a modest sort of outfit, Christchurch City Libraries blog has recently only been asking our readers for the best and worst books of 2009.
Not so the Guardian. This cultural behemoth has been taxing its readers with the vexatious question: what were your worst books of the decade? With 878 blog comments so far, this has clearly struck a chord and some of the responses are hilarious in a book-geeky kind of way. Several well-known authors and titles have been turning up with almost monotonous regularity: Ian McEwan’s Saturday has quite rightly taken a good kickin’, as has Vernon God Littleby DBC Pierre, White Teeth by Zadie Smith, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, John Updike’s Terrorist, Don DeLillo’s The falling man, David Mitchell’s Cloud atlasand anything published by Martin Amis, Dan Brown or Jeffrey Archer.
I too felt compelled to put my ten cents worth in and poured scorn onThe divine secrets of the Ya-Ya sisterhood by Rebecca Wells. It was actually published in 1996 but I have never been able to shake off my absolute and profound hatred for this book. Anyway, have a chuckle at the sight of high-brow, prize-winning authors being shredded and roundly abused by the good readers of the Guardian.
And remember to get your Best and Worst reads of 2009 into us before December 16th and be in to win a lovely $50 book voucher.
I was very lucky on Saturday 5th December. I was able to park in the car park before the streets were closed off for the annual Santa Parade in New Brighton.
Along by the beach, the scene was on of quiet excitement mixed with organized chaos. The fire trucks were lined up and Christmas stocking hung from their grills. Scouts, Guides, gymnasts and small children in Santa hats and fairy rings were marshalled by parents. All were awaiting the arrival of Santa.
Santa’s boat finally arrived and he quickly disappeared behind a crowd of kids – big and small. All trying to convince Santa that they had been really good and deserved the latest must have. The mall was packed with people enjoying the market stalls and sausage-sizzle and waiting for the parade to begin.
Now some parades have big, flash expensive floats. New Brighton’s floats were community efforts made with paper flowers and recycled materials. Even Harcourt’s real estate signs were utilized. Mary, Joseph and the shepherds sported striped tea-towels. The pirate’s boat was cardboard. The police and the volunteer fire brigade lent their support to our local community. The Salvation Army and Chisnallwood Intermediate School provided the music.
For me, the highlight was seeing families out together enjoying, being a part of the community and waving and cheering when colleagues from the New Brighton Library passed by.
Tears in the darkness : the story of the Bataan Death march by Elizabeth & Michael Norman
This book’s title came from a Japanese kanji for “the loneliest despair” imaginable. So be warned, it is as heart-wrenching as it is compelling a read as you will ever find on the Second World War. The book recounts the desperate fighting in 1942 in which the American and Filipino force fought the Japanese until near starvation in the worst military defeat ever incurred by the United States. This was but a foretaste of the horrors which the 76,000 allied POWs faced on the notorious 70 mile long “death march” to the POW camps after surrender to the Japanese. During the march and their subsequent two and a half year long incarceration thousands of POWs were literally starved, worked and/or beaten to death.
Tears gives us a dimension that other recent books of ‘wartime voices’ (which tend to give excerpts of accounts from one side) often don’t – a biographical account of Ben Steele (one of the American soldiers) and accounts of his American comrades are juxtapsed with Filipino and Japanese accounts of the same events. So we get powerful insights into what this hell did to the bodies and minds of the POWs. It also lifts the veil on the psyche of the Japanese soldier. Certainly callous indifference through to deliberate cruelty typified many a Japanese soldier but some quite startling insights emerge as well. A film The Beast of Bataan about the post-war trial of the Japanese commander has been slated but appears to have stalled for the time being. If you would like this as an audio book it is available for download at Christchurch City Library’s Overdrive.
Slavery by Another Name : The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War 2 by Douglas A. Blackmon
The history of race relations in the U.S. has for long told of how slavery was abolished with Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation in 1863. Black Americans endeavouring to merge into mainstream American Society met fierce resistance from mainly white Southerners who waged a campaign of violence and enacted many laws that deprived Black Americans of their social and political entitlements. The Federal government’s resolve to help Blacks or to even roll back the so called ‘Jim Crow’ laws of the South quickly waned after the Civil War ended. But there was always more to the picture than this because it never fully answered the question of why the integration of Blacks into mainstream American economic and political life is still far from complete and why Black America is still littered with families and communities torn apart by violence, delinquency, drug addiction, crime and low self-esteem. At last, this book reveals the missing chapter. A chapter in U.S. history far more sinister than segregation ever was.
Blackmon’s book documents a little known but widespread and systemic exploitation and appalling mistreatment of large numbers of black American men by several Southern states between the Civil War and the Second World War. After it’s defeat in the Civil War, the South resolved it’s desperate shortage of labour through a very peculiar means which Blackmon reveals was often more barbaric, cynical and deadly than slavery ever was. He also shows how Federal officials investigating abuses were often meek or ignored in the interests of rebuilding relations with the South.
Ironically, it was the U.S. entry into the Second World War that quickly brought an end to this neo-slavery because President Roosevelt knew that his country’s own dirty little secrets could compromise its efforts to fight a moral crusade against regimes that brutalised their subject minorities. Reading Tears in the darkness soon after Slavery by another name certainly put the undeniable suffering of the American POWs and Black Americans into a jarring perspective. The POWs suffered and died for their country. Many Black Americans suffered and died because of their country.
I don’t know about you but sometimes there is nothing like a wee cry. I seem to be rather inclined to these at the moment. I am not sure if it is my Christmas bank balance, end of year fatigue or the $45 parking ticket I got for shopping too long at Riccarton Mall the other day, but I do need to vent. If you feel a little bit melancholy and need a book to fit your mood then read Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay.
This book is a fictional account of the factual 1942 Paris roundups and deportations, in which thousands of Jewish families were arrested, held at the Vélodrome d’Hiver outside the city, then transported to Auschwitz. What made these round ups so unsettling was that they were all done with the full co-operation of the French authorities and that the majority rounded up were women and over 4,000 children who had not bothered to hide thinking men were the main target.
This book is split into two experiences – Sarah who is ten years old at the time of the round up and Julia who is writing for a Paris based American magazine about the 60th anniversary of the Vél’ d’Hiv’ roundups many years later. Julia soon learns that the apartment she and her French husband Bertrand plan to move into was acquired by Bertrand’s family when its Jewish occupants were dispossessed and deported 60 years before. She resolves to find out what happened to the former occupants: Wladyslaw and Rywka Starzynski, parents of four-year-old Michel and 10 year old Sarah.
The two stories effortlessly combine into a very sad story that contained much grief. Perhaps not the happiest book to blog about in the festive season you say? I would say perspective on your own sorrows as well as a few tears is needed even more at this time. Even when your family are driving you nuts this book will make you want to hug them all a lot closer.
Recently I had the pleasure of helping the Nelson band Minuit with an image order from our library. Their request was a stunning portrait of Ngaio Marsh for their new music video titled “Aotearoa“. The video is filled with New Zealand images (in their credits they thank “the awesome librarians at our national libraries and archives” for their help). With powerful imagery old and new they have managed to create a patchwork of New Zealand history and modern life. If New Zealand made it’s own home video, I imagine it would look something like this. The band informed me that they had 10,000 views in the first 5 days making it the #1 most viewed music clip in New Zealand that week. So, have a watch and keep supporting New Zealand music.
T. Armstrong & Co’s Christmas float outside their High Street store. 1930
Like what you see? Complete this form to order an image. If you have any further information on any of the images, or if you would like to donate images to our collection please contact us. Want to see more? You can browse our collection here.
Yep it’s Messiah time again. One of the enduring musical traditions of Christmas is the performance of Handel’s Oratorio Messiah, often by an amateur or semi professional community choir. Written in 1741 it became an instant favourite in England, where over the centuries developed into massive performance featuring a hundreds of singers and musicians all blasting away in the local town hall. Then there was a counter movement back to smaller choirs and orchestras in the style that Handel would have known and written for.
There are traditions surrounding the performance. Audiences stand at the opening bars of the Hallelujah chorus , allegedly because when King George II attended a performance he was so moved by the power of the music that he rose to his feet and of course everyone had to stand as well (other reasons include his gout was giving him gyp and so on) Another traditional sight is people following the music with their own score. Singalong Messiahs are very common too and I once stumbled into a Messiah performance in Melbourne by a group of pretty non musical amateurs who had undertaken the performance as a self improvement challenge! Handel’s music is so great that it can still rise above nearly every challenge thrown against it but really – have a Christmas treat and listen to some Messiah highlights performed by good choirs and soloists. The Hallelujah Chorus ceases to be a cliche when you listen to it as a beautifully performed dramatic piece of music. It is no surprise that Handel was a prolific writer for dramatic performances of both oratorios and operas. Explore some of the other great music in the oratorio. My favourites include “The trumpet shall sound” “I know that my redeemer liveth” “For unto us a child is born” and a fabulous Amen chorus.
This year was the 25oth anniversary of Handel’s death and the library has a dvd of a special anniversary performance of Messiah by the orchestra and chorus of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, conducted by Neville Marriner and featuring Sylvia McNair, soprano, Anne Sofie von Otter, mezzo-soprano ; Michael Chance, alto ; Jerry Hadley, tenor ; Robert Lloyd, bass.
A lot of adults are sick of Christmas with only two and a half weeks to go, but there are lots of children out there who are excited and eagerly awaiting the big day. There are plenty of ways to celebrate Christmas in these last few weeks:
1. Read some of the magical Christmas stories that we have here in the library. One of my favourite new Christmas books is Father Christmas needs a wee by Nicholas Allan about Father Christmas who has too many drinks when he is out delivering presents and desperately needs to get home for a toilet break. We have plenty of other great Christmas books in the library and you can check out a selection of these in our Children’s Christmas Reading Booklist.
2. Bake some special Christmas cookies, cupcakes or mince pies using recipes in our Christmas cookbooks.
4. Listen to some Christmas music. There are plenty of traditional Christmas carols that you can sing along to or new Christmas songs by The Wiggles, Hi-Five or Bob the Builder.
If you want more ideas of Christmasy things to do or want to find out some information about Christmas and how different people celebrate it, you could check out our Children’s Christmas pages.
