What are MiddKids reading?
| by Laksamee Cave
Librarians at the Community Care Fair asked Middlebury students to share some of their favorite books. Check out a few of them highlighted here or come by the Davis Family Library to see a display of titles in the Lobby!
But books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.
When everything is lost, it’s our stories that survive.
How do we weather the end of things? Cloud Cuckoo Land brings together an unforgettable cast of dreamers and outsiders from past, present and future to offer a vision of survival against all odds.
Go check the shelves:
Cloud cuckoo land
Davis Family Library - Browsing
PS3604.O34 C56 2021
You don’t have to choose between being scientific and being compassionate.
Why do we do the things we do?
More than a decade in the making, this game-changing book is Robert Sapolsky’s genre-shattering attempt to answer that question as fully as perhaps only he could, looking at it from every angle. Sapolsky’s storytelling concept is delightful but it also has a powerful intrinsic logic: he starts by looking at the factors that bear on a person’s reaction in the precise moment a behavior occurs, and then hops back in time from there, in stages, ultimately ending up at the deep history of our species and its evolutionary legacy.
Go check the shelves:
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
Davis Family Library - Browsing
QP351 .S27 2017
All the men I did get to know, every single man of them, has filled me with but one desire: to lift my hand and bring it smashing down on his face.
From her prison cell, Firdaus, sentenced to die for having killed a pimp in a Cairo street, tells of her life from village childhood to city prostitute. Society’s retribution for her act of defiance - death - she welcomes as the only way she can finally be free.
Go check the shelves:
Woman at point zero
Davis Family Library - Main Stacks
PJ7862.A3 W6 1983
The evening’s the best part of the day. You’ve done your day’s work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it.
In the summer of 1956, Stevens, a long-serving butler at Darlington Hall, decides to take a motoring trip through the West Country. The six-day excursion becomes a journey into the past of Stevens and England, a past that takes in fascism, two world wars, and an unrealised love between the butler and his housekeeper.
Go check the shelves:
The Remains of the Day
Davis Family Library - Main Stacks
PR6059.S5 R46 1990
In an unjust society a man may violate laws for valid social or economic reasons. In a just society there are no valid reasons except mental illness.
Chief Homicide Investigator Arkady Renko’s investigation of three mutilated bodies reaches to the highest levels of the Communist hierarchy.
Go check the shelves:
Gorky Park
Davis Family Library - Main Stacks
PS3569.M5377 G6
An ugliness unfurled in the moonlight and soft shadow and suffused the whole world. If I were an amoeba, he thought, with an infinitesimal body, I could defeat ugliness. A man isn’t tiny or giant enough to defeat anything.
The tale of a band of savage thirteen-year-old boys who reject the adult world as illusory, hypocritical and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call “objectivity.” When the mother of one of them begins an affair with a ship’s officer, he and his friends idealize the man at first; but it is not long before they conclude that he is in fact soft and romantic. They regard their disappointment in him as an act of betrayal on his part, and react violently.
Go check the shelves:
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
Davis Family Library - Main Stacks
PL833.I7 G62
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.
Seconds before the Earth is demolished to make way for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is plucked off the planet by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised edition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy who, for the last fifteen years, has been posing as an out-of-work actor.
Go check the shelves:
The hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy
Davis Family Library - Main Stacks
PR6051.D3352 H5 1995
Reason is the first casualty in a drought.
Marc Reisner writes of the earliest settlers, lured by the promise of paradise, and of the ruthless tactics employed by Los Angeles politicians and business interests to ensure the city’s growth. He documents the bitter rivalry between two government giants, the Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, in the competition to transform the West.
Go check the shelves:
Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water
Davis Family Library - Main Stacks
HD1739.A17 R45 1993