January 2024 - Page 4 of 10

There Was a Party for Langston
by Jason Reynolds (Author), Jerome Pumphrey (Illustrator), and Jarrett Pumphrey (Illustrator)
@ Amazon* | Bookshop*

Booktalk: Back in the day, there was a heckuva party, a jam, for a word-making man. The King of Letters. Langston Hughes. His ABCs became drums, bumping jumping thumping like a heart the size of the whole country. They sent some people yelling and others, his word-children, to write their own glory.

Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, and more came be-bopping to recite poems at their hero’s feet at that heckuva party at the Schomberg Library, dancing boom da boom, stepping and stomping, all in praise and love for Langston, world-mending word man. Oh, yeah, there was hoopla in Harlem, for its Renaissance man. A party for Langston.

Snippet:
THERE WAS A PARTY
FOR LANGSTON at the library.
A jam in Harlem to celebrate the word-making man–

Nonfiction Monday

It’s Nonfiction Monday!

Discovering Life’s Story: Biology’s Beginnings
by Joy Hakim (Author)
@ Amazon* | Bookshop*

Booktalk: When did we start learning the scientific secrets of life? Step back to the Islamic Golden Age, when scholars ask questions about life science and medicine that will establish those fields. Chart a path through the Renaissance, as Leonardo da Vinci dissects cadavers by candlelight to learn human anatomy firsthand. In this first of four volumes spanning hundreds of years of scientific innovation and discovery, follow the evolution of life science up to the late 1800s, when a baffled Dutch biologist finds a tiny infectious particle destroying tobacco crops and gives this particle a new name: virus.

Snippet: This region, which will later be known as part of the Middle East, has a long tradition of supporting libraries. The best of the libraries are like universities: they attract brilliant minds.

It’s STEM Friday! (STEM is Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics)