Starting December 10th - Contactless Service at the Library
Library Champion,
To protect you and our staff, we are switching to contactless service on Thursday December 10th. All the details below…
What is contactless service? Our main lobby will be closed to the public and we will not be offering curbside service. You can now pick up your hold requests out front of the library and return your materials in our book drop.
Why did you decide to move to contactless service? COVID-19 case counts are spiking in Juniata county, our local hospital has reached max capacity, and there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight. The flu season will start soon and many people will spend time in-person with friends and family for the holidays. All it takes is one cold or slip-up for a patron or library employee to become sick, exposed, or test positive. We can (and will) still offer outstanding service while limiting contact and the potential to spread or contract COVID-19.
How do I get books? The easiest way is to use our online card catalog and request items. You can also call us at 717-436-6378.
What else is changing when you start contactless service? Office services (copying, printing, faxing) will be unavailable as well as public computer use.
How long will this go on for? We will issue an update in mid-January 2021 and detail what we plan on doing next. You can follow all of our COVID-19 related updates on our website by clicking here.
Here is one book I am reading and some books I just ordered.
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson (Adult Nonfiction, available in print and digital formats and now a motion film. Click here to get the book today!)
I am continuing to see Bryan Stevenson on TV and I took it as a sign to read his 2014 book. It focuses on capital punishment in America and his role as a lawyer working with death row inmates. I find this book emotionally profound and essential reading.
Stevenson began law school at Harvard knowing only that the life path he would follow would have something to do with the lives of the poor. An internship at the Atlanta-based Southern Prisoners Defense Committee (SPDC) in 1983 not only put him into contact with death row prisoners, but also defined his professional trajectory. In 1989, the author opened a nonprofit legal center, the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), in Alabama, a state with some of the harshest, most rigid capital punishment laws in the country. Underfunded and chronically overloaded by requests for help, his organization worked tirelessly on behalf of men, women and children who, for reasons of race, mental illness, lack of money and/or family support, had been victimized by the American justice system. One of Stevenson’s first and most significant cases involved a black man named Walter McMillian. Wrongly accused of the murder of a white woman, McMillian found himself on death row before a sentence had even been determined. Though EJI secured his release six years later, McMillian “received no money, no assistance and no counseling” for the imprisonment that would eventually contribute to a tragic personal decline. In the meantime, Stevenson would also experience his own personal crisis. “You can’t effectively fight abusive power, poverty, inequality, illness, oppression, or injustice and not be broken by it,” he writes. Yet he would emerge from despair, believing that it was only by acknowledging brokenness that individuals could begin to understand the importance of tempering imperfect justice with mercy and compassion.
Moonflower Murders by Anthony Horowitz
(Adult Fiction, Book 2 in the Magpie Murders series)
Eight years ago, the wedding weekend of Cecily Treherne and Aiden MacNeil at Branlow Hall, the high-end Suffolk hotel the bride’s parents owned, was ruined by the murder of Frank Parris, a hotel guest and advertising man who just happened to be passing through. Romanian-born maintenance man Stefan Codrescu was promptly convicted of the crime and has been in prison ever since. But Cecily’s recent disappearance shortly after having told her parents she’d become certain Stefan was innocent drives Lawrence and Pauline Treherne to find Susan in Crete, where they offer her 10,000 pounds to solve the mystery again and better. Susan’s the perfect candidate because she worked closely with late author Alan Conway, whose third novel, Atticus Pünd Takes the Case, contained the unspecified evidence that convinced Cecily that Detective Superintendent Richard Locke, now DCS Locke, had made a mistake. Checking into Branlow Hall and interviewing Cecily’s hostile sister, Lisa, and several hotel staffers who were on the scene eight years ago tells Susan all too little. So she turns to Atticus Pünd Takes the Case, whose unabridged reproduction occupies the middle third of Horowitz’s novel, and finds that it offers all too much in the way of possible clues, red herrings, analogies, anagrams, and easter eggs. The novel within a novel is so extensive and absorbing on its own, in fact, that all but the brainiest armchair detectives are likely to find it a serious distraction from the mystery to which it’s supposed to offer the key.
Our new books show as “on order,” so you can click Place Hold and be on the list to get it once its ready. Look those books up and more by browsing our online card catalog.
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Never miss a new release: view our lists of all new books and our stand-out recommendations made by library staff. Click here
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Write off your donations from 2020
2020 will soon end and now is the time to get organized with your tax write-offs for charitable donations. We send in the mail to you a letter acknowledging your donation to the library that you can file for your taxes. If you did not receive such a letter and you gave to the library in 2020, contact us. You can make a donation to the library in under 2 minutes. Click here to do just that.
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Your library misses you. We wish you and your family health and wellbeing during these (and all) times.
Vince
P.S.- You don’t need to make an account or jump through any hoops to be 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.