Here Comes Everybody: the power of organizing without organizations, by Clay Shirky. Penguin Press, 2008.

This book should be required reading for all adults. Kids already know this stuff.

Beginning with an elaborate re-telling of a saga involving a lost cell phone, Shirky illustrates how people connected by cell phone, twitter, and other social networking tools form ad hoc groups that can have an influence far beyond the power of even well-organized and estblished groups.

On-the-scene reporting of news events (like the recent plane crash in the Hudson river) puts a new face on journalism. Invitations to be part of a flash mob give people a way to organize meetings in touchy circumstances below the news and police radars.

I believe one of the strong messages we should bring from this book is that, in order to maintain dignity and power, organizations NEED to know about these on-the-fly ways of organizing and devise ways to use them, too, in pursuit of their own goals.

"Tenderness: a novel" by Robert Cormier. Bantam Doubleday Dell Books for Young Readers, 1998, c1997.

Told in two voices, Cormier's psychological thriller for teens explores the convergence of two young lives, that of Eric, a teenaged serial killer about to be released from prison, and Lori, a street-smart, yet naive runaway, who met Eric once when she was twelve. She has heard he is to be released and runs away to meet him.

Eric seeks 'tenderness' from his victims; Lori has learned to use her sexuality to get her way in her search for true affection. In chapters told from their alternating viewpoints, their paths converge in an ever more suspenseful - maybe even inevitable - dance.

It was hard for me to read this book, because of the realism Cormier carefully injects. Each character has good and imperfect qualities, which makes it hard to draw black and white conclusions. This is a great discussion book.

"Little Brother" by Cory Doctorow. Tor Teen, 2008.

This book should be required reading for every teen and adult. Just as Orwell's "1984" explored Russian society gone wrong, so this book does the same for the United States and the western world. It might just make you turn in your FasTrak card and make purchases with cash instead of your debit card.

Marcus, aka W1n5tOn, and several friends, all seniors in high school, have ducked out of classes to play a computer game that is like a scavenger hunt. While they are looking for clues, someone blows up the Bay Bridge in San Francisco. Marcus and his friends are "detained", interrogated and tortured for several days. When released, Marcus finds the social climate of the city completely transformed to a police state by the Department of Homeland Security in their search for the terrorists. Determined to set things right, he takes on the DHS using his knowledge of networking and security hacks.

All of the technology Marcus uses is currently and freely available today, and is accessible and hackable by anyone with a little knowledge and experience. Experts Doctorow consulted in writing the novel contributed additional essays at the end of the book. There is also an annotated bibliography of books, articles and web sites that lends a great deal of credibility to the ideas proffered in the story.

Cory Doctorow is a digital rights activist and works with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He blogs at Craphound.com.

"Are You Somebody? : the Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman" by Nuala O'Faolin. Henry Holt & Co., 1998, c1996.

This was a hot title when it was first published. It started ordinarily enough, and ended fairly well. The middle, however, should probably not have been made public knowledge. Miss O'Faolin was a prominent newscaster and producer - the voyeuristic exposition of her family's troubles seems like a betrayal. It was interesting to see how attitudes have changed over the years, pre- and post-femlib, and also to see how, in modern times, the Irish are still looked down on in England. Probably her experience as a newscaster and reporter led her to "report' the circumstances of her life with the idea of making it a "case" representative of her times that could be studied as well as a vehicle for laying her demons to rest. This was a disturbing read.

"The Next Thing On My List", by Jill Smolinski. New York : Shaye Areheart Books, 2007.

It was an accident. A dresser fell off a truck on the freeway. In swerving to avoid it, June crashed her car, killing her passenger. After attending the funeral, she discovered her passenger's list of "20 things to do before my 25th birthday." Ridden by guilt, she resolves to complete all remaining tasks by Marissa's birthday, the first having already been achieved: lose 100 lbs. The others are not so easy: change someone's life, kiss a stranger, run a 5k race, make Buddy Fitch pay ...

June is witty, sympathetic, charming, and very real - we become ever more invested in rooting for the success of this woman, who, in completing Marissa's list, actually learns more about herself. The other characters grow throughout the book from two- to three-dimensional people I'd like to know, because the author manages to avoid creating the stereotypical characters that are often associated with humorous works.

I finished the novel with an urge to re-evaluate my life and create my own list.

"Listen Up! Podcasting for Schools and Libraries", by Linda W. Braun. Information Today, Inc., 2007.

Can't remember how I found this book. I borrowed it through the Link+ partnership we have with other libraries in California and Nevada. I did enjoy reading it - so much so, that [I'm buying] have bought a copy for Sacramento Public Library.

The author is currently the Vice President/President-Elect of YALSA, a division of the American Library Association. She has written a basic "what is it?" and "how do I do it" guide to creating simple podcasts in school and library settings. It's particularly good at describing the benefits of the technology for boosting the currency of the organizations' relationships with their users, and also for providing some innovative ideas for using podcasts (audio as well as video) for programming, tutorials, marketing, and staff training. The language is readable, non-intimidating, and leaves the reader with the feeling that, "I can actually do this!"

"Color of the Sea", by John Hamamura. New York : Anchor Books, 2007.

In Hawaii and California in the years bracketing the Second World War, Isamu "Sam" Hamada struggles with issues facing Nisei agricultural workers - the prejudice, the hopes and dreams, the broken promises, and the stigma of being "Japs" in America after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and of being sent to internment camp.

Hamamura vividly draws pictures of life during those years, and and skillfully evokes the essence of the time: the feelings, the settings, the loyalties and conflicts experienced by Japanese Americans before and during the war. This is an engaging and readable novel that challenges the reader to acknowledge an alternative viewpoint. It is made more poignant because it parallels the author's own life.

This video interview with Hamamura will bring an added dimension to the reader's understanding of the work. (Click on "03 - American Identity")

"Three Cups of Tea: one man's mission to promote peace-- one school at a time", by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. Penguin Books, 2007.

The One Book Sacramento title for this year has been described as "the astonishing, uplifting story of a real-life Indiana Jones." Mortensen, having failed in 1993to "summit" Pakistan's K2, the second highest mountain in the world, takes a wrong turn and arrives at one of the most remote villages in the Karakoram mountains. This starts a chain of events that results in the establishment of a succession of schools in that and other remote villages in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Both Mortensen and Relin will be speaking in Sacramento this Fall at One Book programs.

"Cathy's Book : if found call (650)266-8233" by Sean Stewart and Jordan Weisman. Running Press, 2006.

Cathy, a senior in high school, journals about events that happen to her after she starts dating Victor. He suddenly dumps her, and Cathy and her best friend, Emma, do their detective thing to find out why. They become involved in a dangerous hunt for who he really is, murder, kidnapping, and laboratories, with a twisted, surprise ending.

The jacket blurb indicates that the authors are PC Game creators (MechWarrior, I Love Bees), and invites readers to "Read. Explore. Investigate. Examine the Clues. Call the phone numbers. Access the websites. And when you're done, you'll know that the teen novel will never be the same again."

I didn't explore, investigate, or call the phone numbers, but if anyone does, I invite you to post what you find out in a comment.

(Cross Posted at grandCENTRAL)

"Hot Wired in Brooklyn" by Douglas DiNunzio. iPublish.com, 2001.

It's interesting that more librarians are not authors, working day in and day out with books - all kinds - as they do.

The story is actually the second in a series, though the first has not yet been published. Eddie Lombardi, private investigator is persuaded to prove the innocence of a kid who, up to now, has been nothing but trouble. Along the way, we meet Eddie's "goombahs", Charlotte, a sinister and troubled - but beautiful - young woman, and other colorful characters.

This title was written by a now-retired librarian, who worked at Sacramento Public Library. My book club read it this month, and then, instead of a book discussion, we invited the author to our meeting and learned all about what it takes to develop characters, a plot, and a market. He described the research done for the books, his own method of picking up the narrative after a break, and how he is compelled to remain consistent with what the characters would or whould not do if they were real people. Knowing this "back story" gave me a new take on the book, its plot, and especially its characters.

"Blink: the Power of Thinking Without Thinking", by Malcolm Gladwell. (Time Warner Audio Books, 2005)

This is a good example of a book that worked better for me in audio. The author's reading made complex ideas that I might have skipped over in the text both understandable and interesting.

Gladwell examines several examples of situations where you "know" something instantly (in the blink of an eye) but can't explain how or why you know it. How a counselor knows whether a marriage is in trouble; how you know when someone is lying, or about to do you harm; who can, in a blind taste test, can tell the difference between Pepsi and Coke - and why; whether someone is management material. Based on work done by experts in various fields, he scrutinizes the way our brains use "thin slices" - almost subliminal clues - to make decisions and judgments, and why some are very good at it and others stumble.

"The Devil in the White City" by Erik Larson. Crown Publishers, 2003.
Sick fascination - this meticulously documented narrative of the creation of the "White City" for Chicago's Columbian expo in the early 1890s is told in tandem with the gruesome story of H. Holmes, a serial killer that managed to dispatch as many as 20 women and children in the span of a couple of years within a few blocks of the fair without detection! He cremated them, then hired someone to clean the bones and reassemble the skeletons, which he sold to medical schools. Not until years later, when a distraught mom hired the Pinkerton detective agency to find her missing children, did the full story emerge and become sensationalized in the press.

The story of the fair and the depraved sociopath is so compellingly told that I couldn't put the book down until I reached the very last words. The parallel stories progress relentlessly and with graphic description. We come to know the major players, both good and evil, perpetrators and victims, as if they were alive today. No forensic TV series could have told it any better!

An unexpected side entertainment was discovering the luminaries associated with the fair: Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, Thomas Edison, Pullman and others; as well as the number of products still available today that debuted then: shredded wheat, the Ferris wheel, neoclassical public buildings, electric lighting.

"Back on Blossom Street" by Debbie Macomber. Mira, 2007.
I found this book completely by accident. I was looking for new knitting books, and this novel popped up in the list of results. I decided to give it a go, and was charmed. Macomber has a talent for creating likeable, believable characters, and presenting the small - and large - dramas in their lives in a way that makes you want to get to know them.

In this, the third in a series about Blossom Street, the characters have joined a knitting class offered by the owner of A Good Yarn, a yarn shop. The project is a prayer shawl, and for each of the participants the shawl will be a gift for someone who helps her overcome a personal challenge. The stories of the women in the class are told with quiet compassion, almost like a reflection. The conclusion is entirely satisfying.

I have heard of prayer shawls, but assumed they are intended to be worn while praying. Instead, I learned they are created as gifts, conveying in tangible form your prayers, love and good wishes for the recipient. The author includes instructions for the shawls mentioned in the story - so it turned out to be a knitting book after all: knitting stories as well as shawls. Macomber provides instructions and photos on her web site.

"Signed, Mata Hari" by Yannick Murphy. Little, Brown and Co., 2007.

In prison, accused of spying, and awaiting execution, Mata Hari tells stories to her French captors, buying time. They are stories from her early life in Holland, her schooling, marriage to a Dutch army officer, their deployment to Java, and the death of their son by poisoning. The family returned to Holland and the marriage fell apart; she tells of her life as a circus rider, artist's model, exotic dancer; of her liaisons with French, German, and Russian military personnel, and her subsequent arrest. But The Big Question is still unanswered: was she a spy?

What struck me most was the way the author seemed to be "channeling" Mata Hari's life, describing it in a way that made it seem like an alternate reality. An early experience in Hari's life was walking across the sand to an island at low tide. There was a real danger of being swept away by the incoming tide, but she returned safely. This experience was a transforming one, making her feel invincible, and it recurs throughout the novel at several of her life's turning points. As a result, she was so distanced from the life of her husband as to become "foreign" both in her lifestyle and in her way of thinking about her life's events.

This book is so new, Sacramento Public doesn't have any copies yet. The author, however, is represented in the collection by other titles.

Addendum 6/8/09: Sacramento Public now has copies.

"He She and It", by Marge Piercy. Graphics Arts Center Pub. Co., c1997

In the future world of the 21st century, global warming has reduced Earth to mostly deserts and the cities on the east coast of the United States are underwater. Ozone depletion has caused solar radiation to be a life-threatening hazard for unprotected individuals who leave their domes to venture into the "Raw." Information and "The Net" are commodities valued by individuals and multinational corporations to the extent that information pirates are infiltrating and killing programmers. Against this background, two parallel stories are told.

Avram has spent his life creating robots. Although there are rules against creating humanoid cyborgs, he has broken them to create Yod, who's job will be to defend the independent city of Tikva against the information pirates. Shira and her grandmother Malkah, who are artificial intelligence experts, have been working - also illegally - to program Yod to be as humanlike as possible, and to socialize him so he fits in with other humans. As part of this socialization, Malkah recounts to him the story of a golem, created in similarly dangerous times during the 1600s in Prague.

This book was recommended to me by a librarian classmate as a prescient example of how the boundaries between the real world and virtual worlds have become blurred, as more and more people join social networking communities and virtual worlds like Second Life.

"Go Tell It On the Mountain" by James Baldwin. Delta Trade Paperbacks, 2000, c1953

This novel, unabashedly autobiographical, explores Black life in Harlem during the early part of the 20th century. In particular, Baldwin probes the influence of autocratic religious beliefs on family relationships, daily life and the hopes and fears for a better life in the future. It was an interesting window into the pre-civil-rights era, and at the same time, spotlighted those elements that have still not changed, even today.

John, the 14-year-old protagonist, is the son of a preacher. He, unlike his brother Roy, is a good boy, but is apparently despised by his father and beaten often. He is expected to become a preacher, though he expresses a deep hatred of his family and a wish to escape. Much of the novel deals with the tension caused by this hatred and the need to accept family members as they have become, whether by personality or circumstance.

This is not an easy book to read, because it does not follow the traditional "floor plan" of a novel. It reads so much like a social case-study or a biography, it is difficult to NOT get involved in the justice - and injustice - of the characters' lives.

"The Whistling Season, a Novel", by Ivan Doig. Harcourt, 2006.

This was another in the list of adult titles of interest to teens. It starts slowly, as a reminiscence, but gradually the reader is drawn in to a year in the Minnesota dry land farm life of the early 20th century.

There's something mysterious about Rose, who comes to be the housekeeper after the death of the narrator's mother, and her brother Morrie, who fills in as teacher in the one-room schoolhouse when the incumbent marries and moved away. There's drama when Toby's foot is crushed by a workhorse, and when the Inspector comes to evaluate the school; there's a bit of history woven into lessons with the advent of Halley's Comet; there's the foreshadowing of the future as the narrator steps in with musings from his present as Superintendent of Schools, charged with abolishing rural one-room schoolhouses. And there's a heart-sinking, gut-wrenching revelation at the end, as Rose and the narrator's father prepare for marriage.

Without apparent effort, the author creates such a real world, it's hard not to treat it as a biography. I was sad to see it end.

"The Reluctant Fundamentalist", by Mohsin Hamid. Harcourt, 2007
Although the only voice we hear is the narrator's, a device maintained meticulously throughout the novel, we are treated to the sights, sounds, smells and feelings of both the evening street scene in Lahore and the vivid memories of the narrator's education and work in America. Even the responses of his listener are implied, as the story winds up to its increasingly tight, unexpected and scary end. This book would make an excellent classroom or book club discussion title.

"The Suspect" by John T. Lescroart. New York, Dutton 2007.

The entire story takes place between the time Stuart leaves Lake Tahoe and returns to his home in the Bay Area, only to discover his wife has drowned in their hot tub, and the grand jury hearing at which he is accused of her murder. With exquisite detail, Lescroart draws a bead on first one character then another, as the attorneys battle it out before the judge.

I was not totally enamoured of his writing; however, this is the "One Book" title that will be discussed in October as part of the Sacramento Public Library's sesquicentennial celebration this year. Because I fell in love after the fact with a previous One Book title, "Epitaph for a Peach," and regretted missing the author talks, I thought I'd get a head start on this year's book.

"The List of Seven" by Mark Frost. W. Morrow, 1993.
This is an implausible novel built around the outline of Arthur Conan Doyle's life before Sherlock Holmes. In it, Doyle has written a book partially lifted from the writings of Madame Blavatsky and submitted it to a publisher. Unfortunately for Doyle, the plot mimics a real plot involving the publisher, zombies, spiritualism, and a tantalizing link to Nazism. Thinking Doyle is on the verge of exposing the plot, an elaborate trap is laid: he is invited to a seance where a murder takes place, and he is launched into a chain of sinister events which threaten his life and the succession of the British monarchy.