The Albany Public Library announced that is opening meeting rooms and resuming in-person programs starting Monday, April 4. This means that the book reviews conducted by the Friends and Foundation of the Albany Public Library (FFAPL) are back every Tuesday at noon, starting April 19 at the Washington Avenue branch!
The Friends of the APL, one of the antecedents to the FFAPL, held book reviews or author talks Tuesdays every week when the library was open literally for decades. In recent years, these events were scheduled primarily by Eugene Damm and Jonathan Skinner. They continued until… well, you know what.
For a while, there was no book review programming at all. Then someone suggested that maybe we should utilize that new-fangled electronic device known as ZOOM. I got involved with this mostly because my computer was more robust than Jon’s or Gene’s, and because had retired. Some of the talks were recorded; you can find some of them here. A few we don’t have because the technology failed. A couple that was done outside at the Bach branch had too much noise from neighbors and the wind.
The Upper Hudson Library Council noted the effort that Jon and I had done in the remote world by awarding us as UHLS volunteers of the year. We were among several folks honored in June 2021, online, of course.
We’re BACK
Here’s the schedule thus far for the Tuesday talks. Albany people: if you can pass the word, it would be greatly appreciated.
19 April Book Review | Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human by Elizabeth Hess. Reviewer: Joseph Krausman, MA, MFA, retired policy analyst, poet, and teacher.
26 April Book Review | The Color Of Law by Richard Rothstein. Reviewer: Roger Green, a former librarian and past president of the Friends of Albany Public Library.
3 May 3 Author Talk | Pippa Bartolotti, Cornish/Welsh human rights and climate activist, discusses & reads from her poetry book, The Symmetries: Book 1 Poetic Symmetry.
10 May Book Review | The Trial of Leonard Peltier by James W. Messerschmidt. Reviewer: Larry Becker, lawyer, activist, past member of Albany’s Community Police Review Board, & producer of the Radio Free Blues Show.
17 May Book Review | Science on a Mission: How Military Funding Shaped What We Do and Don’t Know About the Ocean by Naomi Oreskes. Reviewer: Jonathan Skinner, Ph.D., retired statistician & amateur classicist.
24 May Book Review | A Wild Idea: How the Environmental Movement Tamed the Adirondacks by Brad Edmondson. Reviewer: Tom Ellis, educator, and activist.
31 May Book Review | Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate by M. E. Sarotte. Reviewer: Gene Damm, former journalist and past president of the Friends of Albany Public Library.
