Books & Ideas
The Martha’s Vineyard Library Association kicks off its 2008 summer reading program, Wild Reads at Your Library, with a lively performance by Bill Ross at the agricultural hall in West Tisbury at 11 a.m. on Saturday, July 5.
Mr. Ross, of Easthampton, has been performing as a professional juggler and clown since 1984. He appeared a number of years ago at the Vineyard schools as the Tick Man, using his trademark humor to teach tick bite prevention.
Sea Education Association president and former New Bedford mayor John Bullard presents Global Warming: What’s Going On Here? What Do I Do About It? on Thursday, July 3, free at 5 p.m. at the Chilmark Public Library.
Mr. Bullard, who adapted his presentation from Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, served in the Clinton/Gore administration. He will summarize the science of global warming, the impacts already being felt, future threats and actions we can all take.
Art for Kids
Art for Kids with Mickey Stone is a new program at the M.M. Stone Gallery at 671 State Road in West Tisbury. Opening this week, weekdays from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., the summer season offers classical art classes in drawing, painting, sculpture and design.
Make a reservation or just drop in. Cost is $15 an hour per student with all materials included. For details, call 508-693-0396 or e-mail [email protected].
A SURVIVAL GUIDE FOR LANDLOCKED MERMAIDS by Margot Datz, Beyond Words, $16.
Vineyard artist and writer Margot Datz posits a universe where men, taking a page from Darwin, descended as apes from the trees, whereas women “rose up from the frothy sea, as resplendent as Aphrodite on her scalloped chariot.” But the mating call is more persistent than the tug of a thick rope, so we mermaids have “abandoned our psychic habitat to seek mates on shore, and we have been like fish out of water ever since.” Ain’t that the truth?
Finding space in the shade to read, under a tree or a beach umbrella, is really its own reward. But there are even more rewards for kids who join the Vineyard Haven Public Library’s annual summer reading program. The program is now officially on for children of all ages. The theme this year is Wild Reads @ Your Library.
The litany of complaints of the squeezed middle class is familiar.
Three million jobs gone overseas this decade. People working all their lives on the promise of pensions they don’t get. Declining availability of health care. Parents believing, for the first time in U.S. history, that their children will not do as well as they did.
“Everyone knows that recitation,” said Philip Dine.