🥇 Library Champion Newsletter #98 | Our 2023 Annual Report 📝
Library Champion,
👋 Welcome to our new subscribers! I am SO GLAD to have you aboard!
"The library saved my life"
We had a fantastic year and want to share it with you.
Click here to view the full annual report (or scroll down to see it)
Passport Services at the Library! ✈️
This year alone we have processed 600 new passport applications!
Make an appointment at the Juniata County Library to get or renew your passport!
Visit our website to learn more about this service and how you can get a passport or renew your current passport.
Borrow a mobile hotspot 🛜
In need of affordable, high-speed internet? Or do you want to take the internet with you on your upcoming trip?
Check out a mobile hotspot at the library for only $20 for 2-weeks, $30 for 4-weeks or $75 for 3 months!
What is a mobile hotspot? It’s a portable device that provides a Wi-Fi internet connection. It’s perfect if you live in an area that can’t get broadband internet or if you don’t have a data plan on your cell phone. Hotspots are also great to have if you want to go on a trip and take the internet with you.
Hotspots will work with laptops, tablets, phones, TVs and most other devices that can connect to a Wi-Fi internet connection.
Thanks to the Friends of the Library we were able to purchase 5 more hotspots, bringing our total to 33!
Book of the week! – if you are going to read one book, give this one a try…
Dear Mom and Dad: A Letter about Family, Memory, and the America We Once Knew by Patti Davis
(Adult nonfiction: memoir/biography, political, history) ~ 192 pages
In a nutshell: The daughter of Ronald and Nancy Reagan offers an intimate glimpse into the life she shared with her two iconic parents.
In this deeply personal epistolary memoir, Davis, the author of The Long Goodbye and Angels Don’t Die, examines the “private reality” behind the couple’s public image that only she knew as their rebellious first-born daughter.
The tone in which she addresses her parents is as loving as it is forgiving. Yet the author still continues her search for “truths” to help her understand the “distance and dissonance in our family.” Her earliest memories are happy ones that included “laughter and warmth,” even from the mother who made Davis the target of her “formidable” rages and kept the author’s brother, Ron, from associating with her when they grew older.
The author writes warmly about the father who taught her how to ride horses and ignore bullies, but also loved America enough to make Davis feel “a bad case of sibling rivalry with this country.” Distanced from her father by his ambitions (and later, the conservatism of his beliefs) and victimized by her mother, Davis became a woman whose own anger “ruined romantic relationships, turned me down wrong paths, blinded me.”
A desire to understand her parents’ secret griefs — e.g., the maternal abandonment that scarred her mother and paternal alcoholism that disrupted her father’s childhood — eventually brought Davis closer to understanding her parents. But it was her father’s Alzheimer’s disease that ultimately helped her make a separate peace with both “Mom and Dad” and own the “broken pieces” of her family.
Humane, elegiac, and wise, this book moves smoothly through its portrait of a complicated family and of the daughter who learned the lessons of patient acceptance that family had to offer.
Bottom line: A fully candid and profoundly moving memoir.
Borrow the book: Dear Mom and Dad: A Letter about Family, Memory, and the America We Once Knew by Patti Davis
Is your library card current?
If you have to think about it, it's time to renew it! Click here to get started. It's one of the most powerful things you can have.
Your donation ensures that a library card is valuable and free to all!
Thank you for being a library champion. You make a difference each dayNice to meet you!
--Vince Giordano
Librarian and Director of the Juniata County Library.
P.S.- You don't need to make an account or jump through any hoops to donate to the library and become a library champion. I wouldn't say this if it wasn't true. You can make this happen in less than a minute. Just click here.