Thank you to everyone who stopped by the library table last week at the Thoreau Center craft fair and voted with your donations to select new books for the collection. We are happy to announce that enough was raised to acquire two of the books. Congratulations to everyone who wanted one of these books to win, and commiserations to those of you who were rooting for the others. We will look into adding them to the collection in the future.
Also, we're letting you know that the last day the library will be open this year is next Monday, December 20. When we come back next year, however, look forward to extended hours as we change the times we are open to Tuesday through Friday from 11:00 am to 2:00pm.
And without further ado, the winners are...
In first place, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology by ecologist and anthropologist David Abram. From the publisher's description:
As the climate veers toward catastrophe, the innumerable losses cascading through the biosphere make vividly evident the need for a metamorphosis in our relation to the living land. For too long we’ve inured ourselves to the wild intelligence of our muscled flesh, taking our primary truths from technologies that hold the living world at a distance. This book subverts that distance, drawing readers ever deeper into their animal senses in order to explore, from within, the elemental kinship between the body and the breathing Earth.
The shapeshifting of ravens, the erotic nature of gravity, the eloquence of thunder, the pleasures of being edible: all have their place in Abram’s investigation. He shows that from the awakened perspective of the human animal, awareness (or mind) is not an exclusive possession of our species but a lucid quality of the biosphere itself—a quality in which we, along with the oaks and the spiders, steadily participate.
With the audacity of its vision and the luminosity of its prose, Becoming Animal sets a new benchmark for the human appraisal of our place in the whole.
And in a very close second place, Local Money: How to Make it Happen in Your Community by Peter North, geographer and founding member of Transition South Liverpool. From the publisher's description:
An inspiring yet practical new Transition Book, Local Money helps you understand what money is and what makes good and bad money, and reviews how people around the world and in the past have experimented with new forms of money that they create themselves.
The book draws on the track record of experimentation with local money to show those in the Transition movement and beyond what has been tried, what works, and what to avoid. Different models of alternative currencies are reviewed, from the Local Exchange Trading System (LETS) and TimeBanks, which work within communities, to paper currencies such as Berkshares, German regional currencies and Ithaca ‘hours’, which circulate between local businesses as an alternative to their losing trade to the national chain retailers.
How can local banks and bonds help us move our cities, communities and homes on to a more sustainable footing? The book suggests how groups can create future forms of local money that can deepen local resilience and support the development of more local production of the things we need, such as food and power.
