MDCC Library Blog: GHEC, Greenwood Campus, Moorhead Campus, Drew Campus

New DVDs and Grisham's The Litigators

2011-11-16T09:52:00.000-06:00

These are new DVDs ready to be checked out:

The Tourist

What Would Jesus Do

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

The Dilemma

127 Hours

Pure Country

Unstoppable

The Social Network
Secretariat

The Litigators by John Grishman- Book and Book on Tape

The partners at Finley & Figg—all two of them—often refer to themselves as “a boutique law firm.” Boutique, as in chic, selective, and prosperous. They are, of course, none of these things. What they are is a two-bit operation always in search of their big break, ambulance chasers who’ve been in the trenches much too long making way too little. Their specialties, so to speak, are quickie divorces and DUIs, with the occasional jackpot of an actual car wreck thrown in. After twenty plus years together, Oscar Finley and Wally Figg bicker like an old married couple but somehow continue to scratch out a half-decent living from their seedy bungalow offices in southwest Chicago.

And then change comes their way. More accurately, it stumbles in. David Zinc, a young but already burned-out attorney, walks away from his fast-track career at a fancy downtown firm, goes on a serious bender, and finds himself literally at the doorstep of our boutique firm. Once David sobers up and comes to grips with the fact that he’s suddenly unemployed, any job—even one with Finley & Figg—looks okay to him.

With their new associate on board, F&F is ready to tackle a really big case, a case that could make the partners rich without requiring them to actually practice much law. An extremely popular drug, Krayoxx, the number one cholesterol reducer for the dangerously overweight, produced by Varrick Labs, a giant pharmaceutical company with annual sales of $25 billion, has recently come under fire after several patients taking it have suffered heart attacks. Wally smells money.

A little online research confirms Wally’s suspicions—a huge plaintiffs’ firm in Florida is putting together a class action suit against Varrick. All Finley & Figg has to do is find a handful of people who have had heart attacks while taking Krayoxx, convince them to become clients, join the class action, and ride along to fame and fortune. With any luck, they won’t even have to enter a courtroom!

It almost seems too good to be true. And it is.

New Titles

2011-11-01T09:35:00.000-05:00

Here are some of the new titles recently cataloged and ready for checkout:

Books

The Necklace by Cheryl Jarvis One day in Ventura, California, Jonell McLain saw a beautiful diamond necklace in a jewelry store window and wondered: Why are personal luxuries so plentiful yet accessible to so few? What if we shared what we desired? Several weeks, dozens of phone calls, and one great leap of faith later, Jonell and twelve other women bought the necklace together–to be passed along among them all.
The dazzling treasure weaves in and out of each woman’s life, reflecting her past, defining her present, making promises for her future. Lending sparkle in surprising and unexpected ways, the necklace comes to mean something dramatically different to each of the thirteen women. With vastly dissimilar histories and lives, they transcend their individual personalities and politics to join together in an uncommon journey–and what started as a quirky social experiment becomes something far richer and deeper

A Memoir: Coming Back Stronger by Drew Brees When a potentially career-ending shoulder injury left quarterback Drew Brees without a team—and facing the daunting task of having to learn to throw a football all over again—coaches around the NFL wondered, Will he ever come back? After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, leaving more than 80 percent of the city underwater, many wondered, Will the city ever come back? And with their stadium transformed into a makeshift refugee camp, forcing the Saints to play their entire 2005 season on the road, people questioned, Will the Saints ever come back? It takes a special person to turn adversity into success and despair into hope—yet that is exactly what Super Bowl MVP Drew Brees has done—and with the weight of an entire city on his shoulders. Coming Back Stronger is the ultimate comeback story, not only of one of the NFL’s top quarterbacks, but also of a city and a team that many had all but given up on. Brees’s inspiring message of hope and encouragement proves that with enough faith, determination, and heart, you can overcome any obstacle life throws your way and not only come back, but come back stronger.

Rogue Forces by Dale Brown What happens when America's most lethal military contractor becomes uncontrollably powerful?
Newly inaugurated President Joseph Gardner pledged to start pulling U. S. forces out of Iraq on his first day of office-no questions asked. Meanwhile, former President Kevin Martindale and retired Air Force Lieutenant-General Patrick McLanahan have left government behind for the lucrative world of military contracting. Their private firm, Scion Aviation International, has been hired by the Pentagon to take over aerial patrols in northern Iraq.
Yet when Iraq quickly re-emerges as a hot zone, can the president rein Scion in? And just where does McLanahan's loyalty ultimately lie: with his country, his commander-in-chief, his fellow warriors . . . or his company's shareholders?

The Best of Me by Nicholas Sparks (Also in Audio) In the fall of 1984, high school students Amanda Collier and Dawson Cole fell deeply, irrevocably in love. Though they were from opposite sides of the tracks, their love for one another seemed to defy the realities of life in the small town of Oriental, North Carolina. But as the summer of their senior year came to a close, unforeseen events would tear the young couple apart, setting them on radically divergent paths.
Now, twenty-five years later, Amanda and Dawson are summoned back to Oriental for a funeral. Neither has lived the life they imagined . . . and neither can forget the passionate first love that forever changed their lives. Forced to confront painful memories, the two former lovers soon realize that everything they thought they knew-about themselves and the dreams they held dear-was not as it seemed. And in the course of a single, searing weekend, they will ask of the living, and the dead: Can love truly rewrite the past?

Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy In 1964, Jacqueline Kennedy recorded seven historic interviews about her life with John F. Kennedy. Now, for the first time, they can be heard and read in this deluxe, illustrated book and 8-CD set.
Shortly after President John F. Kennedy s assassination, with a nation deep in mourning and the world looking on in stunned disbelief, Jacqueline Kennedy found the strength to set aside her own personal grief for the sake of posterity and begin the task of documenting and preserving her husband s legacy. In January of 1964, she and Robert F. Kennedy approved a planned oral-history project that would capture their first-hand accounts of the late President as well as the recollections of those closest to him throughout his extraordinary political career. For the rest of her life, the famously private Jacqueline Kennedy steadfastly refused to discuss her memories of those years, but beginning that March, she fulfilled her obligation to future generations of Americans by sitting down with historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and recording an astonishingly detailed and unvarnished account of her experiences and impressions as the wife and confidante of John F. Kennedy. The tapes of those sessions were then sealed and later deposited in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum upon its completion, in accordance with Mrs. Kennedy s wishes. The resulting eight and a half hours of material comprises a unique and compelling record of a tumultuous era, providing fresh insights on the many significant people and events that shaped JFK s presidency but also shedding new light on the man behind the momentous decisions. Here are JFK s unscripted opinions on a host of revealing subjects, including his thoughts and feelings about his brothers Robert and Ted, and his take on world leaders past and present, giving us perhaps the most informed, genuine, and immediate portrait of John Fitzgerald Kennedy we shall ever have. Mrs. Kennedy s urbane perspective, her candor, and her flashes of wit also give us our clearest glimpse into the active mind of a remarkable First Lady.

Lifeguard by James Patterson The danger isn't in the water. As a lifeguard in Florida resort, Ned Kelly meets the woman of his dreams. It feels perfect except that she prefers caviar and Manolo Blahniks, and he is used to burgers and flip flops.
So when Ned's cousin offers him a rich deal, Ned can't turn him down. It is just a fast break and enter. The risk is high, and the reward even greater - $5 million.

Books on CD

Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett Ken Follett is known worldwide as the master of split-second suspense, but his most beloved and bestselling book tells the magnificent tale of a twelfth-century monk driven to do the seemingly impossible: build the greatest Gothic cathedral the world has ever known.
Everything readers expect from Follett is here: intrigue, fast-paced action, and passionate romance. But what makes The Pillars of the Earth extraordinary is the time—the twelfth century; the place—feudal England; and the subject—the building of a glorious cathedral. Follett has re-created the crude, flamboyant England of the Middle Ages in every detail. The vast forests, the walled towns, the castles, and the monasteries become a familiar landscape. Against this richly imagined and intricately interwoven backdrop, filled with the ravages of war and the rhythms of daily life, the master storyteller draws the reader irresistibly into the intertwined lives of his characters—into their dreams, their labors, and their loves: Tom, the master builder; Aliena, the ravishingly beautiful noblewoman; Philip, the prior of Kingsbridge; Jack, the artist in stone; and Ellen, the woman of the forest who casts a terrifying curse. From humble stonemason to imperious monarch, each character is brought vividly to life.
The building of the cathedral, with the almost eerie artistry of the unschooled stonemasons, is the center of the drama. Around the site of the construction, Follett weaves a story of betrayal, revenge, and love, which begins with the public hanging of an innocent man and ends with the humiliation of a king.
At once a sensuous and endearing love story and an epic that shines with the fierce spirit of a passionate age, The Pillars of the Earth is without a doubt Ken Follett's masterpiece.

Fall of Giants by Ken FollettKen Follett's World Without End was a global phenomenon, a work of grand historical sweep, beloved by millions of readers and acclaimed by critics. Fall of Giants is his magnificent new historical epic. The first novel in The Century Trilogy, it follows the fates of five interrelated families-American, German, Russian, English, and Welsh-as they move through the world-shaking dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for women's suffrage.
Thirteen-year-old Billy Williams enters a man's world in the Welsh mining pits...Gus Dewar, an American law student rejected in love, finds a surprising new career in Woodrow Wilson's White House...two orphaned Russian brothers, Grigori and Lev Peshkov, embark on radically different paths half a world apart when their plan to emigrate to America falls afoul of war, conscription, and revolution...Billy's sister, Ethel, a housekeeper for the aristocratic Fitzherberts, takes a fateful step above her station, while Lady Maud Fitzherbert herself crosses deep into forbidden territory when she falls in love with Walter von Ulrich, a spy at the German embassy in London...
These characters and many others find their lives inextricably entangled as, in a saga of unfolding drama and intriguing complexity, Fall of Giants moves seamlessly from Washington to St. Petersburg, from the dirt and danger of a coal mine to the glittering chandeliers of a palace, from the corridors of power to the bedrooms of the mighty. As always with Ken Follett, the historical background is brilliantly researched and rendered, the action fast-moving, the characters rich in nuance and emotion. It is destined to be a new classic.
In future volumes of The Century Trilogy, subsequent generations of the same families will travel through the great events of the rest of the twentieth century, changing themselves-and the century itself. With passion and the hand of a master, Follett brings us into a world we thought we knew, but now will never seem the same again.

New Titles--Books and CDs

2011-09-20T10:48:00.000-05:00

Tasmine Moore, our cataloger, has been busy cataloging books along with her duties of taking IDs. Here are a few of our new titles* ready to be checked out:

The Fall of the House of Zeus by Curtis Wilkie “Over the past four decades no reporter has critiqued the American South with such evocative sensitivity and bedrock honesty as Curtis Wilkie.” —Douglas Brinkley

The Fall of the House of Zeus tells the story of Dickie Scruggs, arguably the most successful plaintiff's lawyer in America. A brother-in-law of Trent Lott, the former U.S. Senate Majority Leader, Scruggs made a fortune taking on mass tort lawsuits against “Big Tobacco” and the asbestos industries. He was hailed by Newsweek as a latter day Robin Hood, and portrayed in the movie, The Insider, as a dapper aviator-lawyer. Scruggs’ legal triumphs rewarded him lavishly, and his success emboldened both his career maneuvering and his influence in Southern politics—but at a terrible cost, culminating in his spectacular fall, when he was convicted for conspiring to bribe a Mississippi state judge.

Here Mississippi is emblematic of the modern South, with its influx of new money and its rising professional class, including lawyers such as Scruggs, whose interests became inextricably entwined with state and national politics.

Based on extensive interviews, transcripts, and FBI recordings never made public, The Fall of the House of Zeus exposes the dark side of Southern and Washington legal games and power politics: the swirl of fixed cases, blocked investigations, judicial tampering, and a zealous prosecution that would eventually ensnare not only Scruggs but his own son, Zach, in the midst of their struggle with insurance companies over Hurricane Katrina damages. In gripping detail, Curtis Wilkie crafts an authentic legal thriller propelled by a “welter of betrayals and personal hatreds,” providing large supporting parts for Trent Lott and Jim Biden, brother of then-Senator Joe, and cameos by John McCain, Al Gore, and other DC insiders and influence peddlers.

Above all, we get to see how and why the mighty fail and fall, a story as gripping and timeless as a Greek tragedy.

A Secret Gift by Ted Gup "A wonderful reminder that economic hardship can bring suffering but can also foster compassion and community." -The Boston Globe

In hard economic times like these, readers will find bestselling author Ted Gup's unique book uplifting as well as captivating. Inside a suitcase kept in his mother's attic, Gup discovered letters written to his grandfather in response to an ad placed in a Canton, Ohio, newspaper in 1933 that offered cash to seventy-five families facing a devastating Christmas. The author travels coast to coast to unveil the lives behind the letters, describing a range of hardships and recreating in his research the hopes and suffering of Depression-era Americans, even as he uncovers the secret life led by the grandfather he thought he knew.

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by Michio Kaku In Physics of the Future, Michio Kaku—the New York Times bestselling author of Physics of the Impossible—gives us a stunning, provocative, and exhilarating vision of the coming century based on interviews with over three hundred of the world’s top scientists who are already inventing the future in their labs. The result is the most authoritative and scientifically accurate description of the revolutionary developments taking place in medicine, computers, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, energy production, and astronautics.

In all likelihood, by 2100 we will control computers via tiny brain sensors and, like magicians, move objects around with the power of our minds. Artificial intelligence will be dispersed throughout the environment, and Internet-enabled contact lenses will allow us to access the world's information base or conjure up any image we desire in the blink of an eye.

Meanwhile, cars will drive themselves using GPS, and if room-temperature superconductors are discovered, vehicles will effortlessly fly on a cushion of air, coasting on powerful magnetic fields and ushering in the age of magnetism.

Using molecular medicine, scientists will be able to grow almost every organ of the body and cure genetic diseases. Millions of tiny DNA sensors and nanoparticles patrolling our blood cells will silently scan our bodies for the first sign of illness, while rapid advances in genetic research will enable us to slow down or maybe even reverse the aging process, allowing human life spans to increase dramatically.

     In space, radically new ships—needle-sized vessels using laser propulsion—could replace the expensive chemical rockets of today and perhaps visit nearby stars. Advances in nanotechnology may lead to the fabled space elevator, which would propel humans hundreds of miles above the earth’s atmosphere at the push of a button.
     But these astonishing revelations are only the tip of the iceberg. Kaku also discusses emotional robots, antimatter rockets, X-ray vision, and the ability to create new life-forms, and he considers the development of the world economy. He addresses the key questions: Who are the winner and losers of the future? Who will have jobs, and which nations will prosper?
     All the while, Kaku illuminates the rigorous scientific principles, examining the rate at which certain technologies are likely to mature, how far they can advance, and what their ultimate limitations and hazards are. Synthesizing a vast amount of information to construct an exciting look at the years leading up to 2100, Physics of the Future is a thrilling, wondrous ride through the next 100 years of breathtaking scientific revolution.

The Confession by John Grisham For every innocent man sent to prison, there is a guilty one left on the outside. He doesn’t understand how the police and prosecutors got the wrong man, and he certainly doesn’t care. He just can’t believe his good luck. Time passes and he realizes that the mistake will not be corrected: the authorities believe in their case and are determined to get a conviction. He may even watch the trial of the person wrongly accused of his crime. He is relieved when the verdict is guilty. He laughs when the police and prosecutors congratulate themselves. He is content to allow an innocent person to go to prison, to serve hard time, even to be executed.
     Travis Boyette is such a man. In 1998, in the small East Texas city of Sloan, he abducted, raped, and strangled a popular high school cheerleader. He buried her body so that it would never be found, then watched in amazement as police and prosecutors arrested and convicted Donté Drumm, a local football star, and marched him off to death row.
     Now nine years have passed. Travis has just been paroled in Kansas for a different crime; Donté is four days away from his execution. Travis suffers from an inoperable brain tumor. For the first time in his miserable life, he decides to do what’s right and confess.
     But how can a guilty man convince lawyers, judges, and politicians that they’re about to execute an innocent man?

True Compass: A Memoir by Edward Kennedy. Edward M. Kennedy is widely regarded as one of the great Senators in the nation's history. He is also the patriarch of America's most heralded family. In this landmark autobiography, five years in the making, Senator Kennedy speaks with unprecedented candor about his extraordinary life.

The youngest of nine children born to Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, he came of age among siblings from whom much was expected. As a young man, he played a key role in the presidential campaign of his brother, John F. Kennedy. In 1962, he was elected to the U.S. Senate, where he learned how to become an effective legislator.

His life has been marked by tragedy and perseverance, a love for family and an abiding faith. He writes movingly of his brothers and their influence on him; his years of struggle in the wake of their deaths; his marriage to the woman who changed his life, Victoria Reggie Kennedy; his role in the major events of our time (from the civil rights movement to the election of Barack Obama); and how his recent diagnosis of a malignant brain tumor has given even greater urgency to his long crusade for improved health care for all Americans.

Written with warmth, wit, and grace, True Compass is Edward M. Kennedy's inspiring legacy to readers and to history.

*Summaries taken from Barnes and Noble

Books on CD

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

First Family by David Baldacci

The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova

The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver

The Last Time I Saw You by Elizabeth Berg

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

A Red Herring without Mustard by Alan Bradley

The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag by Alan Bradley

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin

The Last Child by John Hart

Hell's Corner by David Baldacci

Absolute Power by David Baldacci

Deliver Us from Evil by David Baldacci

Library News

2011-09-20T10:42:00.000-05:00

It is hard to believe we are in our sixth week of school, but the library staff on our four campus sites would like to welcome everyone to the 2011-12 school year. We hope all your classes are well under way and that business also is going well in your offices and elsewhere on your campus. We have been busy in our libraries over the summer.

Moorhead Campus
New Policy: The library on the Moorhead campus is open on Sunday evenings from 6:00 until 9:00 pm.

We welcome Mrs. Walden and Mrs. Webster to our building. Over the summer a new Computer Apps classroom was added to part of the reading area.

Mrs. Edwards is back with us again. She is the new Student Navigator, and her office is located on the south side of the library. She is ready, willing and able to help students who have questions about any aspect of MDCC. Her hours are on Monday/Wednesday 9:30 am until 12:30 pm and Tuesday/Thursday 8:30 until 11:30 pm.

Greenwood Campus
We would like to welcome Merrie Knight as a full-time librarian. Merrie is based in Greenwood, but also will be working at the other centers as needed. Mrs. Knight has worked part time at the Greenwood Center for several years, and we are excited to have her full time.

Drew Center
The library is open now full-time.

New Titles Ready for Checkout

2011-03-30T19:41:00.000-05:00

BOOKS
The Eighth Day by Thornton Wilder

This new edition of Thornton Wilder's renowned 1967 National Book Award–winning novel features a new foreword by John Updike and an afterword by Tappan Wilder, who draws on such unique sources as Wilder's unpublished letters, handwritten annotations in the margins of the book, and other illuminating documentary material.

In 1962 and 1963, Thornton Wilder spent twenty months in hibernation, away from family and friends, in the Rio Grande border town of Douglas, Arizona. While there, he launched The Eighth Day, a tale set in a mining town in southern Illinois about two families blasted apart by the apparent murder of one father by the other. The miraculous escape of the accused killer, John Ashley, on the eve of his execution and his flight to freedom triggers a powerful story tracing the fate of his and the victim's wife and children. At once a murder mystery and a philosophical story, The Eighth Day is a "suspenseful and deeply moving" (New York Times) work of classic stature that has been hailed as a great American epic.

The New Bedside, Bathtub, &Armchair Companion

The New Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair Companion to Agatha Christie is even juicier than the best-selling first edition. More than thirty pages of articles, photos and movie posters have been added to this popular celebration of "Christiana". Back by popular demand are witty synopses of all the novels, plays, and short story collections, (without revealing the whodunits), Christie's own comments of the stories, feature articles on themes in her work, a Christie mystery map, puzzles and poems.

The Postmistress
Those who carry the truth sometimes bear a terrible weight...

It is 1940. France has fallen. Bombs are dropping on London. And President Roosevelt is promising he won't send our boys to fight in "foreign wars."

But American radio gal Frankie Bard, the first woman to report from the Blitz in London, wants nothing more than to bring the war home. Frankie's radio dispatches crackle across the Atlantic ocean, imploring listeners to pay attention as the Nazis bomb London nightly, and Jewish refugees stream across Europe. Frankie is convinced that if she can just get the right story, it will wake Americans to action and they will join the fight.

Meanwhile, in Franklin, Massachusetts, a small town on Cape Cod, Iris James hears Frankie's broadcasts and knows that it is only a matter of time before the war arrives on Franklin's shores. In charge of the town's mail, Iris believes that her job is to deliver and keep people's secrets, passing along the news that...

AUDIO BOOKS

Angels and Deamos by Dan Brown

An ancient secret brotherhood. A devastating new weapon of destruction. An unthinkable target.

When world-renowned Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is summoned to a Swiss research facility to analyze a mysterious symbol -- seared into the chest of a murdered physicist -- he discovers evidence of the unimaginable: the resurgence of an ancient secret brotherhood known as the Illuminati...the most powerful underground organization ever to walk the earth. The Illuminati has now surfaced to carry out the final phase of its legendary vendetta against its most hated enemy -- the Catholic Church.

Langdon's worst fears are confirmed on the eve of the Vatican's holy conclave, when a messenger of the Illuminati announces they have hidden an unstoppable time bomb at the very heart of Vatican City. With the countdown under way, Langdon jets to Rome to join forces with Vittoria Vetra, a beautiful and mysterious Italian scientist, to assist the Vatican in a desperate bid for survival.

Embarking on a frantic hunt through sealed crypts, dangerous catacombs, deserted cathedrals, and even the most secretive vault on earth, Langdon and Vetra follow a 400-year-old trail of ancient symbols that snakes across Rome toward the long-forgotten Illuminati lair...a clandestine location that contains the only hope for Vatican salvation.

An explosive international thriller, Angels & Demons careens from enlightening epiphanies to dark truths as the battle between science and religion turns to war.

Cold Sassy Tree by Olive Ann Burns

If the preacher's wife's petticoat showed, the ladies would make the talk last a week. But on July 5, 1906, things took a scandalous turn. That was the day E. Rucker Blakeslee, proprietor of the general store and barely three weeks a widower, eloped with Miss Love Simpson -- a woman half his age and, worse yet, a Yankee! On that day, fourteen-year-old Will Tweedy's adventures began and an unimpeachably pious, deliciously irreverent town came to life. Not since To Kill A Mockingbird has a novel so deftly captured the subtle crosscurrents of small-town Southern life. Olive Ann Burns classic bestseller brings to vivid life an era that will never exist again, exploring timeless issues of love, death, coming of age, and the ties that bind families and generations.

The Blind Assin by Margaret Atwood

The Blind Assassin opens with these simple, resonant words: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge." They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister's death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental. But just as the reader expects to settle into Laura's story, Atwood introduces a novel-within-a-novel. Entitled The Blind Assassin, it is a science fiction story told by two unnamed lovers who meet in dingy backstreet rooms. When we return to Iris, it is through a 1947 newspaper article announcing the discovery of a sailboat carrying the dead body of her husband, a distinguished industrialist. Brilliantly weaving together such seemingly disparate elements, Atwood creates a world of astonishing vision and unforgettable impact.

DVDs

The Town

The Last Exorcism

Salt

Eat, Pray, Love

Paul Blart

Inception

Grown Ups

The Hannibal Lecter

The Hurt Locker

Love Happens

The Proposal

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Neil White Conducts Workshop

2011-03-23T19:07:00.000-05:00

Author Neil White conducted a writiers workshop on the MDCC Moorhead Campus Wednesday, March 23. Later in the day he was honored at a reception where he read from his book and then answered questions.

White with some of the workshop participants: Keangela Riley of Cleveland; Emily Riser, Creative Writing Instructor; White; Audrey Beach, Series Coordinator; Brand Head of Indianola; Kristen Cassidy of Indianola.

Neil White to Visit MDCC Campus

2011-03-08T19:52:00.000-06:00

Author of In the Sanctuary of Outcast to hold writers’ workshop and honored at reception

The Stanny Sanders Library on the Moorhead Campus of Mississippi Delta Community College will host Mississippi writer Neil White on Wednesday, March 23. Each semester the Library hosts a writer, art exhibit, or musician as part of their Come to the Library Series.

Neil White has been a newspaper editor, magazine publisher, advertising executive and federal prisoner. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi, where he operates a small publishing company, writes plays and essays, and teaches memoir writing. White will conduct a writers’ workshop for MDCC creative writing students and English students selected by their instructors who show promise in writing. The emphasis of the workshop will be memoir writing. In the afternoon at 2:00 there will be a reception along with White reading from In the Sanctuary of Outcasts and a question and answer session. Campus personnel and the public is invited to the reception, which will be held in the Abrams Fine Art Gallery.

White’s memoir, In the Sanctuary of Outcasts (Morrow/HarperCollins 2009) tells the story of the year he lived in the last operating facility in the United States for patients diagnosed with leprosy. The facility in Louisiana is the backdrop for the poignant look at those affected by the disease along with his own redemptive story.

The book was described by Publisher’s Weekly as “Brisk, ironic, perceptive . . . White’s introspective memoir puts a magnifying glass to a flawed life, revealing that all of life is to be savored and respected.” Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler added, “At once surreal and grittily naturalistic, funny and poignant, White’s tale is fascinating and full of universal resonance.”

In the Sanctuary of Outcasts was an Indie NEXT Great Reads Selection. The book was a finalist in the “Books for a Better Life” Award. Sanctuary was a finalist for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance “Book of the Year” award. Barnes & Noble selected White as one of the top three emerging writers in the country through their Discover Great New Writers Program. And White was selected by the Southeastern Library Association as the 2009 “Outstanding Author of the Year.” Foreign language translations have been published in Germany, Croatia and the Netherlands.

Neil is also editor and publisher of the best-selling coffee-table book, Mississippians.

White has family ties in Indianola and is married to Deborah Hodges Bell, a law professor at The University of Mississippi. They have three children — Lindsay Bell, Neil White IV, and Maggie White.

Come on and Get One

2011-02-28T09:36:00.001-06:00

Our paper back book swap on the Moorhead Campus is ready for business. If you have a paper back you would like to swap for another, come by the library and check out our selection. We have books by James Patterson, Jody Picoult, Robert Ludlum, and Greg Isles to name a few. If you do not have a paper back to swap, you can buy one of ours for .50 to start your exchange. Also, we still would like to have more books if you have some you would like to donate. Happy Reading!

Calling all Paperbacks

2011-01-11T16:18:00.002-06:00

The Stanny Library System wants to wish everyone a Happy New Year and hopes this is a successful semester for students, instructors, and staff. We have a lot planned for the library on the Moorhead Campus and hope you will join us.

First, we are setting up a Paperback Exchange on the Moorhead Campus and need your help in getting started. The new year always brings resolutions, and one of yours may be to do some cleaning and throwing away. We are asking that you not throw away your paperback books, but instead, bring them to the library.

We will get them in order and begin the exchange in February. The only requirement for giving paperbacks to the library is that they are in good condition with no pages or covers falling out or off. You can repair or mend them before you drop them by the library.

In this age of electronic everything, the electronic reader, the Kindle and Nook for instance, appears to be the novelty that is replacing books. Yet, some still like to hold a book while reading. So, if you are one of those readers and one looking for a bargain and a quick read, our paperbacks will be just the thing to satisfy your reading urge.

We will post more information beginning in February, Now, bring us your paperbacks!

The Pioneer Woman

2010-10-06T18:20:00.000-05:00

This post is for all you cooks and bakers out there. You may be familiar with the Pioneer Woman, Ree Drummond. If you are not, she is a phenomenon that has hit the last several years and all the younger girls have been following her online. She is an interesting person, and her journey into the blogsphere and as an aclaimed cook has been amazing. http://www.thepioneerwoman.com/

We now have her cookbook cataloged and ready to be checked out. You might want to consider some of her recipes for your holiday cooking. An interesting aspect of her recipes is that she takes step by step pictures of the cookinig process from the start to the finish.

Following is the synopsis found on the Barnes and Noble website:

My name is Ree.

Some folks know me as The Pioneer Woman.

After years of living in Los Angeles, I made a pit stop in my hometown in Oklahoma on the way to a new, exciting life in Chicago. It was during my stay at home that I met Marlboro Man, a mysterious cowboy with steely blue eyes and a muscular, work-honed body. A strict vegetarian, I fell hard and fast, and before I knew it we were married and living on his ranch in the middle of nowhere, taking care of animals, and managing a brood of four young children. I had no idea how I'd wound up there, but I knew it was exactly where I belonged.

The Pioneer Woman Cooks is a homespun collection of photography, rural stories, and scrumptious recipes that have defined my experience in the country. I share many of the delicious cowboy-tested recipes I've learned to make during my years as an accidental ranch wife—including Rib-Eye Steak with Whiskey Cream Sauce, Lasagna, Fried Chicken, Patsy's Blackberry Cobbler, and Cinnamon Rolls—not to mention several "cowgirl-friendly" dishes, such as Sherried Tomato Soup, Olive Cheese Bread, and Crème Brûlée. I show my recipes in full color, step-by-step detail, so it's as easy as pie to follow along.

You'll also find colorful images of rural life: cows, horses, country kids, and plenty of chaps-wearing cowboys.

I hope you get a kick out of this book of mine. I hope it makes you smile. I hope the recipes bring you recognition, accolades, and marriage proposals. And I hope it encourages even the most harried urban cook to slow down, relish the joys of family, nature, and great food, and enjoy life.

Ree Drummond began blogging in 2006 and has built www.ThePioneerWoman.com into an award-winning website, where she shares recipes, showcases her photography, and documents her hilarious transition from city life to ranch wife. Ree lives on a working cattle ranch near Pawhuska, Oklahoma, with her husband, Ladd, and their four ranch hands.

New Arrivals*

2010-09-21T12:15:00.001-05:00

Mrs. Moore is busy cataloguing books to be added to our collection. Here are a few that have been added this week.

A Mercy By Toni Morrison

Early American life was punishing. The scythe of sickness has never been sharper in this country, the fickleness of crops quite so lethal. Everyone involved in the

"settlement" suffered, especially when smallpox epidemics scorched through towns and villages. In her meditatively hopeful A Mercy, set on a Virginia farm in the 1690s as pox rages like a fire, Toni Morrison reminds that in these horrific conditions the tenderness of humans could cross boundaries one might assume were unbreachable at the time.

The Happiness Project By Gretchen Rubin
Rubin is not an unhappy woman: she has a loving husband, two great kids and a writing career in New York City. Still, she could-and, arguably, should-be happier. Thus, her methodical (and bizarre) happiness project: spend one year achieving careful, measurable goals in different areas of life (marriage, work, parenting, self-fulfillment) and build on them cumulatively, using concrete steps (such as, in January, going to bed earlier, exercising better, getting organized, and "acting more energetic"). By December, she's striving bemusedly to keep increasing happiness in every aspect of her life. The outcome is good, not perfect (in accordance with one of her "Secrets of Adulthood": "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good"), but Rubin's funny, perceptive account is both inspirational and forgiving, and sprinkled with just enough wise tips, concrete advice and timely research (including all those other recent books on happiness) to qualify as self-help. Defying self-help expectations, however, Rubin writes with keen senses of self and narrative, balancing the personal and the universal with a light touch. Rubin's project makes curiously compulsive reading, which is enough to make any reader happy.

South of Broad By Pat Conroy

Charleston, S.C., gossip columnist Leopold Bloom King narrates a paean to his hometown and friends in Conroy's first novel in 14 years. In the late '60s and after his brother commits suicide, then 18-year-old Leo befriends a cross-section of the city's inhabitants: scions of Charleston aristocracy; Appalachian orphans; a black football coach's son; and an astonishingly beautiful pair of twins, Sheba and Trevor Poe, who are evading their psychotic father. The story alternates between 1969, the glorious year Leo's coterie stormed Charleston's social, sexual and racial barricades, and 1989, when Sheba, now a movie star, enlists them to find her missing gay brother in AIDS-ravaged San Francisco. Too often the not-so-witty repartee and the narrator's awed voice (he is very fond of superlatives) overwhelm the stories surrounding the group's love affairs and their struggles to protect one another from dangerous pasts. Some characters are tragically lost to the riptides of love and obsession, while others emerge from the frothy waters of sentimentality and nostalgia as exhausted as most readers are likely to be. Fans of Conroy's florid prose and earnest melodramas are in for a treat.

Letters to a Young Sister By Hill Harper

In the follow-up to his award winning national bestseller, Letters to a Young Brother, actor and star of CSI: NY shares his powerful wisdom for young women everywhere, drawing on the courageous advice of the female role models who transformed his life. Letters to a Young Sister unfolds as a series of letters written by older brother Hill to a universal Young Sistah. She's up against the same challenges as every young

woman: from relating to her parents and dealing with peer pressure, to juggling schoolwork and crushes and keeping faith in the face of heartache. In his straight-talking style, Hill helps his young sister build self-confidence, self-reliance, self-respect, and encourages her on her journeys towards becoming a strong and successful woman. The book also includes contributions from admirable women like Angela Basset, Ciara, Michelle Obama, Tatyana Ali, Nikki Giovanni, Congresswoman Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrikck, Eve, Malinda Williams, Kim Porter, and more.

Signature in the Cell By Stephen Myer

The first major scientific argument for Intelligent Design by a leading spokesperson within the scientific community.

13 ½ By Nevada Barr

Reaching beyond her successful Anna Pigeon series (Borderline, etc.), bestseller Barr comes up with the brass ring: a stand-alone psychological thriller with grit, teeth and heart. At 15, Polly Farmer escapes an alcoholic mother and a trailer-park no-future, hitchhikes to New Orleans and makes a life for herself as an English professor. Polly, divorced with two daughters, romantically intersects with handsome restoration architect Marshall Marchand—who's really Dylan Raines, who was incarcerated as the 11-year-old “Butcher Boy” who axe-murdered his parents 25 years earlier in Minnesota. As Barr artfully unfolds this mystery of wickedness and pain in eerie post-Katrina New Orleans, she tackles a multitude of societal evils, from psychiatric drug abuse to the juvenile justice system, but her central conflict, Polly's fierce determination to keep her daughters safe while trying to believe in the man she loves, makes this a terrifying, utterly convincing glimpse into the abyss.

Ford County By John Grisham

In the years since his first novel, A Time to Kill, John Grisham said he has often returned to the people and places of that book: "I've had dozens of ideas for Ford County novels, almost all of which peter out for one reason or another...The good stories stick, but they're not always long enough to become novels." His first collection of short fiction, Ford County, collects seven of those tales set in the titular Mississippi region where his characters are "always in the vicinity of trouble." While none of the stories are out-and-out courtroom dramas, most of them are populated with felons, ex-felons, and the kind of lawyers of who are one bad decision away from a jail sentence. In one story, three good ol' boys start driving to Memphis to donate blood for an injured friend, but they're distracted by beer joints and strip clubs along the way. In another, a down-and-out divorce lawyer gets a second chance to make some big money on an old class-action lawsuit. Like his literary predecessors Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and that other icon from Oxford, Mississippi, William Faulkner, Grisham knows how southerners tick. The characters in Ford County are rendered with great humor and tenderness; even the worst rapscallion and the slimiest scallywag can be loved here in these pages. Ford County may just be Grisham's best book to date. Gone are the problems which have long plagued his novels: paper-thin characters, trite dialogue, and sentences that tangle in a traffic jam of adverbs and adjectives. By winnowing his "ideas" to the shorter form, Grisham has, by necessity, dispensed with the padding and come closer to richer, deeper writing than ever before.

Outliers By Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"--the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band. Brilliant and entertaining, OUTLIERS is a landmark work that will simultaneously delight and illuminate.

*Reviews are from the Barnes and Noble website.

50th ANNIVERSARY

2010-09-14T15:00:00.000-05:00

July 18 was the 50 anniversary recognition of the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird. Our library plans to highlight this anniversary this semester with several activities. Mrs. Kenneth is planning a display to showcase the author and the book; we have ordered posters to hang in the library; we will be showing the movie several times for students; and we will have a trivia quiz for faculty and students. Finally, we will have a day of readings from the book, and we hope to recruit instructors and staff who may have a favorite passage from the book to share.

We have ordered the 50th anniversary edition of the novel, plus the book Scout, Atticus and Boo: A Celebration of 50 "Years of To Kill a Mockingbird," to add to our book collection. The book is a collection of essays by celebrities and writers who have been affected by the book. The essays are interesting since they reveal how many different ways the book can be seen through the various characters and themes. Some of these contributors are Oprah Winfery, Rick Bragg, Tom Brokaw, Rosanne Cash, Scott Turow, James Patterson, Wally Lamb and Allen Gurganus. There is hardly anyone who has read To Kill a Mockingbird the book has not touched.

Along with a copy of the book, we also have a copy on audio read by Sissy Spacek.

We hope you will join us in this celebration and reconnect to a part of you childhood or introduce yourself to one of the best books ever written.

Click on the link to view Dianne Sawyer's report on To Kill a Mockingbird.

http://abcnews.go.com/WN/50th-anniversary-famous-harper-lee-book-kill-mockingbird/story?id=11126933

Click on the link to view scenes from the movie.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27x0YSmMrrc

Welcome Back

2010-09-07T10:44:00.000-05:00

Although we started to school a week later than usual, we are probably all wondering where the summer has gone. Some of us were not on the Moorhead campus over the summer and lots of changes have taken place, including some in the library. Word has it that the student Union will be demolished fairly soon, so the offices in it have been moved to temporary offices around our campus. In the library, we are happy to welcome the office and computer area for General Education II, along with two classrooms. Erica Pruett, Suzanne McDuffie, and Edwina Edwards will be with us this year. We welcome them.

Mrs. Edwards makes herself at home in her new "classroom."

Computer Services sets up the General Ed II temporary lab

Art Exhibit

2010-04-21T10:10:00.003-05:00

In recognition of National Library Week, April 11-17, students from Patricia Williams’ eighth grade class at Moorhead Middle School visited the MDCC Stanny Sanders Library on the Moorhead campus. The class toured the library under the direction of their middle school librarian Beverly Hale and MDCC librarian Audrey Beach. Pictured above are some young artists who enjoyed viewing the art exhibit on display by artist Bob Colman of Yazoo City. Those pictured are from front left: Beach; Jernilluis Nicholson; Charlie Watson, Jr.; Demarquise Dean; back left: O.J. Roscoe; Hale; and Darrell Johnson.

The Stanny Sanders Library at Mississippi Delta Community College in Moorhead held a reception for Yazoo City artist Bob Coleman on Tuesday, April 20. Colman’s exhibit entitled New Millennium Art Show has been on exhibit as part of the Come to the Library series offered each semester. The paintings have been on display since the first of August and will be at the library until the end of the month. Coleman is an accomplished artist and writer whose work has been displayed across the state. Above discussing Coleman’s work are from left Audrey Beach, event coordinator, Wallace Mallette, MDCC art instructor and Coleman.

Bob Coleman to Visit MDCC

2010-04-06T10:53:00.000-05:00

Murals of local artist, Bob Coleman, are on display in the Stanny Sanders Library on the Moorhead campus of Mississippi Delta Community College. Coleman, a native of Doddsville, now lives in Yazoo City. He attended MDCC, then Sunflower Junior College, where he played football for the Trojans.

During his early years at home, Coleman’s mother encouraged her children to draw and paint, and she would display their art work which she rotated on a weekly basis in a special frame. Little did Coleman know that his talent would pay off after the failure of his farm in 1951. Encouraged by his boss at the lumber yard in Ruleville, Coleman began painting again and painted signs to make a living. He moved his business to Yazoo City in 1952 and has never looked back. Coleman’s signs are created by free hand and his first mural was of a tree on a Yazoo City hillside painted on the side of a building in downtown Yazoo City. Many of these murals have been destroyed or painted over or have faded with time.

Coleman is highlighted on the website of the Mississippi Art Commission and has display his art across the state, the latest being at the Powerhouse Community Arts Center in Oxford. He is also an accomplished poet and has two self-published books, entitled “Rays of Light” and “Father’s Prayer.”

Coleman’s work, which he calls “New Millennium Art,” revolves around his inspiration from a preacher’s sermon.” His work will be on display in the library until the end of April. On April 20th at 10:30 a.m., the library will hold a reception for Coleman. The exhibit is free and the community is invited to visit the library to view Coleman’s work and attend the reception.

DVDs Ready for Viewing

2010-03-23T14:33:00.000-05:00

Several new DVDs have been cataloged and are ready to be checked out.

Angels Fall
Australia
Follow the Stars Home
Doubt
Faith Like Potatoes
The Five People You Meet in Heaven
Mamma Mia
Ghosts of Girlfriends Past
Daniel's Daughter
Angels & Demons
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
Obsession
Of Mice and Men
Virginia Woolf, Novelist
Thomas Hardy
James Joyce
The Day the Towers Fell
The Tuskegee Airmen

New Titles

2010-03-03T10:30:00.001-06:00

These are just a few of our new titles. Come over to the library and check them out. The synopsis for each book is from Barnes and Noble.

The Supremes Greatest Hits: The 37 Supreme Court Cases That Most Directly Affect Your Life by Michael G. Trachtman--Does the government have the right to seize your house in order to build a shopping mall? Can it determine what you can do to your own body? How far can it go in regulating your use of the Internet? The answers to those questions come from the Supreme Court—and its rulings have shaped American life, justice, and culture. Here are 37 of the most significant issues the Court has grappled with—from equal rights to privacy rights, from the limits of speech to the boundaries between church and state. Many of these cases read like thrillers…right down to their cliff-hanging endings.

The Fibromyalgia Controversy by Michael C. Hall--As many as fifteen million American women, or 5 percent of the adult female population in the US, suffer from the disabling medical condition known as fibromyalgia. If one takes into account husbands, partners, children, and other close relatives, the proportion of the American population directly or indirectly affected by fibromyalgia could be as high as 10 percent, or thirty million persons. Nonetheless, the medical community is divided over the reality of this condition. One side argues, sometimes heatedly, that the patients are masquerading - pretending a disability they know they do not have. The other side counters, with equal passion, that fibromyalgia sufferers are abused by a society that fails to give them the support they deserve while painfully suffering from this severely debilitating illness. Without taking sides, Dr. M. Clement Hall presents six fictional, though factually based, case studies of typical patients from differing socioeconomic backgrounds and describes the varying investigations, diagnoses, and treatments they have undergone. Each of these case studies represents a composite of many years of clinical practice rather than one specific patient. Collectively, they cover the range of experiences fibromyalgia patients are likely to have encountered. By taking this unique approach, Dr. Hall presents an objective overview of the fibromyalgia situation today in North America. Patients, family members, and physicians will see themselves reflected in the descriptions and will gain a broader understanding of this challenging illness.

This Day in Civil Rights History by Randall Williams--This Day in Civil Rights History, by renowned civil-rights activist Randall Williams, is a day-by-day survey of the people, places, and events that impacted the civil rights movement and shaped the future of the United States. Flip to any date and you’ll find fascinating, informative facts and anecdotes:

February 1, 1960 — Four African-American college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, entered the local Woolworth’s department store, sat down at the lunch counter, and demanded to be served. This courageous act launched the student sit-in movement throughout the region.
March 2, 1955 — Nine months before the historic arrest of Rosa Parks, fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested for violating the segregation laws on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus.
September 30, 1962 — James Meredith became the first African-American student allowed to enroll at the University of Mississippi.
November 4, 1960 — The U.S. Supreme Court decided the case of Gomillion v. Lightfoot, establishing an important precedent in the voting rights of African-American citizens.

$20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline will Change Our Lives for the Better by Christopher Steiner--Imagine an everyday world in which the price of gasoline (and oil) continues to go up, and up, and up. Think about the immediate impact that would have on our lives.Of course, everybody already knows how about gasoline has affected our driving habits. People can't wait to junk their gas-guzzling SUVs for a new Prius. But there are more, not-so-obvious changes on the horizon that Chris Steiner tracks brilliantly in this provocative work.Consider the following societal changes: people who own homes in far-off suburbs will soon realize that there's no longer any market for their houses (reason: nobody wants to live too far away because it's too expensive to commute to work). Telecommuting will begin to expand rapidly. Trains will become the mode of national transportation (as it used to be) as the price of flying becomes prohibitive. Families will begin to migrate southward as the price of heating northern homes in the winter is too pricey. Cheap everyday items that are comprised of plastic will go away because of the rising price to produce them (plastic is derived from oil). And this is just the beginning of a huge and overwhelming domino effect that our way of life will undergo in the years to come.

The Morehouse Mystique byJohn Eves--More than just an institutional biography, this story of Morehouse College discusses how the all-male African American school in Atlanta continues to build its legacy as an institution that develops its students into successful men of the highest caliber. Though Morehouse offers its students an excellent liberal arts education in an environment that is conducive to academic, social, and spiritual growth, the book posits that it has something more to explain its extraordinary success rate. The analysis of this quality—deemed “the Morehouse Mystique”—includes an appraisal of the challenges of being black and male in America and examines the college’s astute approach to leadership development, which has produced such famed alumni as Martin Luther King Jr., and Spike Lee. By carefully dissecting the way that Morehouse nurtures its students, the discussion maintains that other institutions, and by extension American society, can take better strides toward helping black men reach their full potential.

A Return to Values by Bob Beauprez-- Acknowledging that the Republican Party's compass is askew, former congressman Bob Beauprez makes the case for the GOP to return to its founding values and principles. Analyzing the successes, failures, and lost opportunities of the Republican-controlled Congress and White House, Beauprez indentifies several crumbling foundations that led to the election defeats in 2006-including his own. He explains his own guiding principles by drawing upon his real-world experience to examine why he became both a conservative and a Republican, reaching the conclusion that trust from voters must be earned through substantive action, not bought by empty political rhetoric.

New Director of Library Services

2010-02-10T09:18:00.003-06:00

The Stanny Library System is pleased to announce the appointment of Kristy Bariola as the new Director of Library Services. Kristy was appointed after the death of Lawrence Kenneth in December. Kristy has worked the past three and a half years at the libraries on the Moorhead and Greenwood campuses as Techology Services Coordinator and Assistant Director of Library Services.

Before coming to MDCC, Kristy was a Media Specialist at both East Elementary and Amanda Elzy Elementary Schools in Greenwood where she specialized in implementing several software programs, including the Follett and Accelerated Reader programs. She was also the Site Coordinator for the GEAR UP MS Grant and Design Coach for America's Choice Education Program. Other duties included Staff Develpoment Coordinator and School Test Coordinator, along with collaborating with faculty on class assignments and special projects. She was awarded the Teacher of Year at East Elementary twice.

Kristy began her career as a fifth grade teacher at East Elementary School, where she attended elementary school.

Since coming to MDCC, Kristy has been a part of the Mississippi Community College Leadership Academy and the Mid South Community College Fellowship Program, along with serving on several committees on campus.

Kristy says she is looking forward to working with the faculty and staff of MDCC and wants to expand the services of the library to all who want to take advantage of the resources the Stanny Sanders Library System offers. She is especially interested in helping online students become aware of the reasources available to them to enhance their online study.

In Memory of Lawrence Kenneth

2010-01-12T10:06:00.000-06:00

As you know, Lawrence Kenneth, Director of Library Services, passed away on December 30, 2009. His funeral service was on Monday, January 4th. As part of that service, Dr. Bailey, President of MDCC, gave the eulogy. His comments were so spot on about Lawrence that many of us were laughing, making a sad day, a day to remember Mr. K and his love for MDCC.

Dr. Bailey's words follow:

Eulogy

for

Lawrence A. Kenneth, III

May 16, 1947 - December 30, 2009

Given by:

Larry G. Bailey

Monday, January 4, 2010

Good morning,

To Bonnie, Scott, Marsha, and other members of the Kenneth family; the Mississippi Delta Community College Family; and friends, we are here to celebrate the life of a true Trojan and a special man who was a friend to all of us.

Lawrence loved and was proud of his family. He often talked about his son, Scott; step daughters; step grandchildren, Mary Ashley and James; Bonnie; and Marsha. He also loved his extended family from MDCC.

Lawrence spent over four decades at MDCC where he was the Director of Media Services for many years before becoming the Director of Library Services for the Stanny Sanders Library. He served with four presidents during his career –Dr. James T. Hall, Dr. David Powe, Dr. Bobby Garvin, and Dr. Larry Bailey. He also worked very closely with and learned from the former Director of Library Services, the late Beverly Browning Nobile.

He was proud of his college where he began his education and his career. His college was also proud of him by recognizing him with pins for 20, 25, and 30 years of service, the 2007 Humanities Award for MDCC given by the Mississippi Humanities Council for his outstanding contributions to the field of art, and the 2009 Trojan Spirit Award, the highest recognition given by the MDCC Alumni Association for outstanding service to the College by a faculty/staff member.

I first came to know about Lawrence in 1990, when Gail came to work at the College. She kept coming home talking about this man with two first names that was so helpful and really made her transition to the College so much easier as he did for many of us in attendance today. Gail and Lawrence have maintained a very special relationship and friendship since those early years.

Lawrence was an individual that loved life and a job that he considered a very important part of his life. His job allowed him to express himself through his artistic talents of photography, painting, and craftsmanship.

His attitude was one of service to the faculty, staff, and student to meet whatever needs arose. Lawrence always wanted to remain behind the scenes with no recognition, but in reality he and his staff were the individuals that often made events happen.

Lawrence was wise and often shared his wisdom with members of the staff and students. He was a teacher without realizing that he had that role. He took hundreds of thousands of pictures during his career and he often shared his skills with others. His knowledge of technology was amazing. He would come in talking about new innovations that he was implementing in the Library before I had ever heard of them, such as pod casting, e-books, etc.

Lawrence’s skills in photography helped provide the pictorial documentation of MDCC in the yearbooks, newspapers, an even the books recording the history of the community/junior college system in Mississippi from the early 1990’s until 2002. He was recognized in numerous shows at Cottonlandia, MDCC, and others for his paintings and photography of scenes of his beloved Delta farm and his family.

The thing that everyone noticed about Lawrence when they met him was that he was real and genuine. He wanted students to enjoy their experiences at MDCC as he did as a student. He wanted faculty and staff to enjoy working at the College as much as he did.

Lawrence wanted to please others and wanted the Library to be an inviting place. He worked hard to make it an inviting place for all.

Lawrence was one of the brightest and most intelligent people that I have ever known. He was a great listener and problem solver. He was what I always called a “man with the plan”. When I was struggling as a Dean to decide where to move all the faculty and staff in Horton so that the building could be remodeled, he already had a plan to move everyone into the Library including teachers teaching in the open parts of the Library, the entire nursing department into the conference rooms, and the nursing lab into his studio. When it came time for the Center of Learning to be established, he again stepped up and already had a plan to make the Center a part of the Library and he welcomed the staff to the Library family.

Lawrence was also one of the most organized individuals that I have ever known with his small calendar book he kept in his front pocket. Everything was always done ahead of time and to the specifications of whoever requested his assistance. Someone needing his help did not have to ask but once and for annual events one did not have to ask at all – he already had the event on his calendar.

Lawrence loved to eat also. The cafeteria knew when it was time to serve lunch because at 11:30 a.m. every day, Lawrence was there.

Everything with Lawrence was fast pace. He would get so busy that one would look at him and notice that his shirt tail would be out. I often wondered if he took time to tuck it in. When his shirt tail was out was when one knew he was busy and that he was on a mission. Bonnie told me during a recent visit that when she would ask him to tuck his shirt in, he would turn around and say “yes, Dr. Bailey”.

Lawrence also loved challenges and would tackle them with all he had. Such as establishing libraries at three off-campus sites, establishing the video-conferencing network with the state for MDCC, taking on the responsibility of making ID pictures for all MDCC students, and even finding a way to have a sound system and podium on a cotton trailer in the middle of a cotton field for the ground breaking ceremony for the Greenville Higher Education Center.

I could talk to Lawrence about any challenge and he would give it his all to meet the challenge. No matter what though, he took on whatever he was asked with a smile. He really enjoyed being around people, laughing and smiling. He had a great wit and sense of humor. He was caring and committed with charm and grace of a southern gentleman.

He spent 40 years of his life devoted to the education and service of people he loved in a region that the loved – the Mississippi Delta. Today, Lawrence is wearing his MDCC ID tag.

Lawrence was a true Christian that loved his family, his church, and his college. Today, yes we mourn the loss of him on earth, but we celebrate the life of a true Trojan and his after life with our Lord and Savior. He was ready to meet our Lord as was evidenced by his recent baptism, which he and his family were so gracious to share with Gail and me.

On a personal note, Lawrence, thank you for being such a wonderful coworker, but most of all thank you for being such a great friend and mentor for me and all of us present today. Thank you so much for taking me as a young Dean under your wing and for making my career at MDCC so much easier, as you did for so many.

We will definitely miss you. May God bless you until we meet again.

Holiday Bazaar

2010-01-06T10:27:00.000-06:00

The Stanny Sanders Library on the Moorhead Ccampus held its annual Holiday Bazaar on December 2. A number of students and faculty satisfied their hunger and purchased Christmas gifts to get the season off to a start.

Suzanne McDuffie sells her homemade candy, and all the proceeds went to help a student who was the victim of a car wreck.

Pat Ellis of the bookstore decides what wonderful goodie she wants to purchase from the Student Christian Center.

MDCC student, Jermaine Townsend, displays his art work.

Sandra Moore waits to sell her beauty wares.

Linda Waldrup displays her creative handiwork.

Jack Catlette appeals to our nostalgia with his beautiful photography.

Library workstudy, Michael Williams, helps man the Dental Hygiene table.

Ready for Checkout

2009-11-10T10:27:00.000-06:00

The following purchases are ready to be checked out:

DVDs
Hope Floats
Carolina Moon
Hancock
Freedom
Wanted
Days of Thunder
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Gridiron Gang
Bride Wars
The Happening
The Bucket List
Changeling

Books
The American Plague by Molly Crosby In a summer of panic and death in 1878, more than half the population of Memphis, Tenn., fled the raging yellow fever epidemic, which finally waned when cooler weather set in. The disease had been transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which came in swarms on ships from the Caribbean or West Africa. This account has a narrower scope than James Dickerson's recent Yellow Fever, focusing on the Memphis tragedy, but journalist Crosby offers a forceful narrative of a disease's ravages and the quest to find its cause and cure. Crosby is particularly good at evoking the horrific conditions in Memphis, "a city of corpses" and rife with illness characterized by high fever, black vomit and hemorrhaging, treated by primitive methods. Crosby also relates arresting tales of heroism, such as how two nuns returned to the quarantined city from a vacation to nurse the victims. The author profiles scientists, some of whom died in their fight to identify the cause of this deadly disease. She also describes more recent outbreaks in Africa: yellow fever is making a frightening comeback despite the existence of a vaccine.
from Publisher's Weekly

The Devil's Punch Bowl by Greg Isles From New York Times bestselling author Greg Iles comes his most electrifying thriller yet. The Devil's Punchbowl reveals a world of depravity, sex, violence, and the corruption of a Southern town. As a prosecuting attorney in Houston, Penn Cage sent hardened killers to death row. But it is as mayor of his hometown — Natchez, Mississippi — that Penn will face his most dangerous threat. Urged by old friends to try to restore this fading jewel of the Old South, Penn has ridden into office on a tide of support for change. But in its quest for new jobs and fresh money, Natchez, like other Mississippi towns, has turned to casino gambling, and now five fantastical steamboats float on the river beside the old slave market at Natchez like props from Gone With the Wind. But one boat isn't like the others. Rumor has it that the Magnolia Queen has found a way to pull the big players from Las Vegas to its Mississippi backwater. And with them — on sleek private jets that slip in and out of town like whispers in the night — come pro football players, rap stars, and international gamblers, all sharing an unquenchable taste for one thing: blood sport — and the dark vices that go with it. When a childhood friend of Penn's who brings him evidence of these crimes is brutally murdered, the full weight of Penn's failure to protect his city hits home. So begins his quest to find the men responsible. But it's a hunt he begins alone, for the local authorities have been corrupted by the money and power of his hidden enemy. With his family's lives at stake, Penn realizes his only allies in his one-man war are those bound to him by blood or honor.
from Barnes & Noble

The Help by Kathryn Stockett If you've enjoyed the southern charm of Fannie Flagg or The Secret Life of Bees, you'll find The Help a delight. Miss Eugenia Phelan ("Skeeter" to her friends) is a young woman of privilege who enjoys her fellow Junior Leaguers but sometimes finds their ways at odds with her own principles. She plays the part of her station in 1960s Mississippi but can't help feeling dissatisfied with keeping house and acting as recording secretary at league meetings, and yearns for something more. Minny, Miss Celia, Aibileen, and Yule May are maids employed by Skeeter's friends. Each woman cooks, cleans, and cares for her boss's children, suffering slights and insults silently and sharing household secrets only among themselves. In the wake of the Junior League push to create separate bathrooms for the domestic help within private homes, Skeeter contacts a New York book editor with an idea. Soon she's conducting clandestine meetings with "the help" to capture their stories for publication. It is a daring and foolhardy plan, one certain to endanger not only the positions but the lives of the very women whose stories she transcribes -- as well as her own. from Barnes & Noble

The Most They Ever Had by Rick Bragg In spring 2001, a community of people in the Appalachian foothills has come to the edge of all they had ever been. Now, they stood looking down, bitter, angry, afraid. Across the South, padlocks and logging chains bound the doors of silent mills, and it seemed a miracle to blue-collar people in Jacksonville Alabama, that their mill still bit, shook, and roared. The century-old hardwood floors still trembled under whirling steel, and people worked on, in a mist of white air. The mill had become almost a living thing, rewarding the hard-working and careful with the best payday they ever had, but punishing the careless and clumsy, taking a finger, a hand, and more. from book jacket

High Cotton : Four Seasons in the Mississippi Delta by Gerard Helferich The rich, flat topsoil of the Mississippi Delta has seen both astonishing economic production and some of the most tragic history in our nation's past. It is, in Richard Ford's apt phrase, "the South's South." Contested ground since European explorers first set foot there three centuries ago, it turned out to have the ideal climate for growing cotton, a crop that seemed destined to a marginal role in America's economy until technology and politics combined to make it one of the driving forces behind our bloodiest war. Its legacy echoed in the racial divide of the century that followed. Against this historical backdrop, Gerard Helferich traces the life of a modern cotton farmer, exploring the traditions of growing cotton that have endured since ancient times-and the current forces that threaten to drive small farmers from the land. High Cotton spends a year with small-time farmer Zack Killebrew and his family, recording the annual cycle of planting, cultivation, and harvest, as Zack teeters between the promise of a six-figure payoff and the ever-present peril of financial ruin. Combining an engaging personal narrative, a strong sense of time and place, and a McPheelike attention to process, High Cotton is a story with deep roots in American history. from Barnes & Noble

Books on Tape
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
We Are All Welcome Here by Elizabeth Berg
Between Georgia by Joshilyn Jackson
Home Safe by Elizabeth Berg

Dalby Visits Moohread Campus

2009-11-03T12:23:00.001-06:00

Mississippi writer Robert Dalby visited the Moorhead campus this past Wednesday in conjunction with the Author Series sponsored each semester by the Stanny Sanders Library. Dalby is the author of the Piggly Wiggly series of books centered in the town of Second Creek, Mississippi, and which involve a group of older ladies known as the Nitwits. The books have the charm that exposes the odd and eccentric southern characters that we all know and love or even with which we put up in our small towns across the delta.

During the morning session, Dalby spoke to students in several of the English classes and answered questions.

Below is a quick photo opt with Dalby. Left is Audrey Beach, coordinator of the Author Series, Dalby, Elizabeth Vance, a student from Greenville, and Mary Ruth Brindley, English Instructor.

After the program Dalby offers advice to Elizabeth, who is an aspiring young writer.

During the afternoon session, Dalby spoke to the public and also signed books as part of a reception honoring the writer. A treat of the afternoon was the attendance of Hambone, a well-know fixture of the Piggly Wiggly store in Indianola. He worked at the store from the early 1950s until the store closed in 1999. When he heard that a writer about a Piggly Wiggly store was going to be on campus, Hambone talked Enterprise-Tocsin publisher, Wayne Parham, into bringing him to the event.

Below Hambone talks with Dalby.

Dalby signs a book for Mary Ann Brocato.

Signe Adams talks with Dalby during the reception.

Author of Dancing at the Piggly Wiggly to Visit Moorhead Campus Oct. 28

2009-10-20T17:44:00.005-05:00

Mississippi author Robert Dalby is coming to speak at Mississippi Delta Community College on Wednesday, October 28, at the invitation of the Stanny Sanders Library. Dalby, a native of Natchez, currently lives in Oxford, Mississippi.

Dalby was born into a large, extended Southern family, consisting of nearly two-dozen first cousins, two uncles, four aunts, two sets of grandparents and any number of ‘further-removed’ among the cousinly. Dalby grew up in Natchez, Mississippi, and obtained a B.A. at the University of the South (Sewanee).

His previous novels, Waltzing at the Piggly Wiggly and Kissing Babies at the Piggly Wiggly grew out of his own fascination with the eccentricities of the small-town South he grew up with and loved. As a native and resident of Natchez, Mississippi during his formative years, Dalby learned to expect eccentricity and quirky behavior as par for the course – he often only had to look as far as his own family and friends for inspiration.

A Piggly Wiggly Wedding, the third novel by Robert Dalby, was published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons on August 6, 2009. Readers were introduced to Second Creek, Mississippi in Waltzing at the Piggly Wiggly and Kissing Babies at the Piggly Wiggly, which was awarded the Best Fiction of 2008 by the Mississippi Library Association. Small-town living is always an adventure in Second Creek, where life is full of second chances, quirky neighbors and the odd – and oddly funny – events that bring people together.

Dalby will be speaking to students during the 10:50 class period. Instructors are encouraged to bring their students. Also, Dalby will be speaking to the public at 2:00 p.m. He will be signing his new book, and the public is cordially invited to attend. The library will host a reception afterwards. Turn Row Books of Greenwood will be on campus to sell copies of Dalby's three books.

For more information on Dalby go to http://www.mswritersandmusicians.com/writers/robert-dalby.html

For details regarding Dalby’s visit to MDCC contact: Audrey Beach, 662-246-6235. Email: abeach@msdelta.edu

New Purchases

2009-10-14T17:54:00.000-05:00

Over the summer we received and processed new purchases. Here are few:

DVDs
National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets
All the King's Men
Seven Pounds
Wanted
Slumdog Millionaire
Fireproof
The Secret Life of Bees

BOOKS
Dr. Mary's Monkey by Edward Haslam. The 1964 murder of a nationally known cancer researcher sets the stage for this gripping exposé of medical professionals enmeshed in covert government operations over the course of three decades. Following a trail of police records, FBI files, cancer statistics, and medical journals, this revealing book presents evidence of a web of medical secret-keeping that began with the handling of evidence in the JFK assassination and continued apace, sweeping doctors into cover-ups of cancer outbreaks, contaminated polio vaccine, the arrival of the AIDS virus, and biological weapon research using infected monkeys.

Twilight Series by Stephanie Meyer. Isabella Swan's move to Forks, a small, perpetually rainy town in Washington, could have been the most boring move she ever made. But once she meets the mysterious and alluring Edward Cullen, Isabella's life takes a thrilling and terrifying turn. Up until now, Edward has managed to keep his vampire identity a secret in the small community he lives in, but now nobody is safe, especially Isabella, the person Edward holds most dear. The lovers find themselves balance precariously on the point of a knife -- between desire and danger.

Anatomy of a Job Search by Jeanna Bozell. Anatomy of a Job Search provides the absolutely essential information you need to find - and land - the most rewarding jobs in nursing. Whether you're a nursing student looking for your first job or a veteran nurse planning career advancement, this book will take you step-by-step through the job search.

Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience. Over the past five years, the United States has provided nearly fifty billion dollars for the relief and reconstruction of Iraq. This unprecedented rebuilding program, implemented after the March 2003 invasion, was developed to restore Iraq’s essential services, build Iraq’s security forces, create a market-based economy, and establish a democratic government—all in pursuit of U.S. interests in a stable and free Iraq. Did the U.S. rebuilding program achieve its objectives? Was the money provided well-spent or wasted? What lessons have we learned from the experience?

Where Are You Now by Mary Higgins Clark. It's been ten years since twenty-one-year-old Charles "Mack" MacKenzie, Jr. went missing. A Columbia University senior, about to graduate and already enrolled in Duke University Law School, he walked out of his room in Manhattan's Upper West Side without a word to his roommates and has never been seen again. However, he makes one ritual phone call to his mother every year, on Mother's Day. Each time, he assures her he is fine, refuses to answer her frantic questions, and hangs up. Even the death of his father on 9/11 does not bring him home. Mack's sister Carolyn, now twenty six, is a law school graduate applying to work as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan. She has endured two family tragedies: her brother's inexplicable disappearance and the loss of her father. Realizing that neither she nor her mother will ever get on with their lives without some answers, she sets out to discover what happened to Mack, and why he finds it necessary to hide from them.

BOOKS-ON-TAPE
The Way the Crow Flies by Ann Marie McDonald
Instant Immersion Spanish
The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
Still Alice by Lisa Genova
The Piano Teacher by Janice Y. Lee

New Library Blog Site

2009-09-15T15:57:00.001-05:00

The Stanny Sanders Library System is excited about our new web page design. It is more attractive, user friendly, and easier to navigate. We hope to get our users to the resource they want within 4 or less clicks. Our page is still under construction so you may notice some changes in the next few weeks. We hope everyone will become familiar with the new web page, and if you have questions either e-mail us at the at mdcc_library@msdelta.edu . We will try our best to answer your question.

At the present you can access our blog at http://www.mdcclibrary.blogspot.com/ . Soon you will be able to link to the blog through our web page. We plan to use the blog to keep faculty, staff, and students updated on happenings in the Library, new purchases of books, DVDs, books-on-tape, and new databases. We want to remind instructors that we can give any class a subject specific orientation to help your students use the library to its fullest to benefit them in your class. If you would like for your class to have an orientation, e-mail dbaria@msdelta.edu , kbariola@msdelta.edu , or abeach@msdelta.edu , or msample@msdelta.edu (on the GHEC campus).

We want to thank Melaney Steele for her work as she continually updates our site to keep it current and easy to navigate.