What are challenged books, you say? These are books that have been asked to be removed from libraries, schools, museums, etc. If a challenge is successful, the item will be removed from the library, school, museum, etc. and be listed as a banned book. Book challenges and bans often come from concerned parents. They are worried that the material is too sexually explicit, contains offensive language and violence, or is unsuited to any age group. It is completely understandable but censoring an author and/or censoring ideas is not. Concerned parents should monitor what their children read and apply rules accordingly.

Celebrate banned books week with us (Sept. 24 – Sept. 30) by standing up against the injustice and read a banned book. Most (if not all) of the titles are available at the Pearson Library or at the Thousand Oaks Library.

Oh yes, the answer to the question above. Here’s the top 5:
1. Harry Potter (series), by J.K. Rowling
2. Alice series, by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
3. The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier
4. And Tango Makes Three, by Justin Richardson/Peter Parnell
5. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
(Reference: American Library Association wesite)

GRAD SCHOOL / INTERNSHIPS

• Admissions exam: We’ve got the test prep books that you need: GRE, GMAT, and more!  Some titles include GRE : graduate record examination (Reference LB2367.4 .G747), Writing skills for the GRE and GMAT tests (Reference PE1114 W754 2002), How to pass the GMAT: unbeatable preparation for success in the Graduate Management Admission Test (eBook), GMAT Prep Course Ebook (eBook), Barron’s how to prepare for the Medical college admission test, MCAT (R838.5 .S45 1990), and McGraw-Hill’s LSAT, 2009 Edition (eBook).  Check with your local public library for more titles.
• College/University rankings: For those interested in rankings, the U.S. News & World Report’s website gives the complete list for free.  But for more information (average test scores, average GPA, etc.): America’s best colleges (LB2331.63 .A43).
• Personal Statements and Essays: Pump up your personal statements or essays with these great books: Great personal statements for law school (eBook) and How to write a winning personal statement for graduate and professional school (LB2351.52.U6 S74 1993).
• Scholarships: Getting into grad school is one thing, but how will you pay for it?  Scholarships 101: the real-world guide to getting cash for college (eBook) can help as well as Scholarships, fellowships, and loans (Reference LB2338 S35).

FINDING A JOB
Prepare for the job search by thinking about what you want: From school to a career : a student’s guide to success in the real world (LC1037 .J44 2005) and After You Graduate: Finding and Getting Work You Will Enjoy (eBook).

• Resumes and Cover Letters: A variety of resources to help with resumes and cover letters: Resumes for First Time Job Hunters (eBook), Get the interview every time: Fortune 500 hiring professionals’ tips for writing winning resumes and cover letters (eBoook), 202 Great Resumes (eBook), Resumes for College Students and Recent Graduates (eBook), Guide to basic resume writing (eBook), 201 Killer Cover Letters (eBook), 2500 Keywords to Get You Hired (eBook), and Electronic Resumes and Online Networking: How to Use the Internet to Do a Better Job Search (eBook).
• The interview: Some great advice is available here: Manager’s Book of Questions: 1,001 Great Interview Questions for Hiring the Best Person (eBook), 24 Hours to the Perfect Interview (eBook), How to Ace the Brainteaser Interview (eBook), and Boost Your Interview IQ (eBook).

For more resources or personal advice, contact Career Services on campus.  They offer graduate school fairs, career counseling, internship workshops, and a slew of links to help with applying for grad schools or internships and many tips on finding a job.

Lastly, congrats to the California Lutheran University class of 2011
from the staff at Pearson Library/Information Systems and Services!

Don’t forget, even as Alums, the library still offers a lot of great resources and services to you: including checking out library books for free and access to two library databases.  Which ones?  Find out by clicking on this previous post.

Like the Pearson Library on Facebook.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Find it at the library: RC265.6.L24 S55 2010

Imagine your cells as the key factor in the development of the polio vaccine, treatments for AIDS, and many other medical discoveries, but your family had no idea and neither did you. That was what happened with Henrietta Lacks.

Scientists know her as HeLa. Her cells and the cells of many other cancer patients were collected without their knowledge in the “colored” ward of John Hopkins in the 1950s. All of those collected cells died, except for Henrietta’s; her’s grew, multiplied, and continue to multiply today – 60 years after her death. At first the cells were sent from one scientist to another in small vials, but soon, they were produced and shipped in mass to scientists around the world for experiments. Her family had no idea. It was not until years later when the identify of HeLa cells were revealed as belonging to a poor black woman who lived in the south named Henrietta Lacks, that her family knew about their existence. Journalists, filmmakers, book writers, and everybody wanted to know who she was and what made her cells “immortal”.

Rebecca Skloot, like the others, wanted to know more about the woman behind the cells, “what kind of life she led, what happened to her children, and what she’d think about cells from her cervix living on forever” (p. 2). We follow Skloot in her book to discover the answer to these questions and more. Her book describes to us with details of how she went from wondering about this person in college, to reading about and contacting people who knew the family in Lacks Town (Virgina), and hoe she finally uncovered the story from people who longer trusted anyone asking about HeLa. Although her story is mostly chronological, Skloot switches back and forth between her story to find the answers and Henrietta’s life and story. She describes every detail, making the story even more fascinating: the method and intervals of Radium used to try to treat Henrietta’s cancer, George Gey’s impeccably clean lab and inventions, and physical and personal descriptions of family members. All of these details were interwoven with historical and contextual information, and tidbits about the key characters: their personalities, interests, and quirks.

The story of Henrietta and her cells have been a key factor in our society learning more about illnesses and diseases, and they will be as long as her cells continue to reproduce and multiply. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot is scientific, historical, genealogical, sociological, anthropological … and just darn good! It is an interesting, unforgettable, and a must-read for everyone.

Moon Over Manifest by Clare Vanderpool

After a life of riding the rails with her father, 12-year-old Abilene can’t understand why he has sent her away to stay with Pastor Shady Howard in Manifest, Missouri, a town he left years earlier; but over the summer she pieces together his story. In 1936, Manifest is a town worn down by sadness, drought, and the Depression, but it is more welcoming to newcomers than it was in 1918, when it was a conglomeration of coal-mining immigrants who were kept apart by habit, company practice, and prejudice. Abilene quickly finds friends and uncovers a local mystery. Their summer long “spy hunt” reveals deep-seated secrets and helps restore residents’ faith in the bright future once promised on the town’s sign. Abilene’s first-person narrative is intertwined with newspaper columns from 1917 to 1918 and stories told by a diviner, Miss Sadie, while letters home from a soldier fighting in WWI add yet another narrative layer. Vanderpool weaves humor and sorrow into a complex tale involving murders, orphans, bootlegging, and a mother in hiding.*

Moon Over Manifest will soon be added to CLU’s Newbury Medal winner collection which can be located in the juvenile children’s section. This collection holds a number of other past Newbury Medal winners, Caldecott winners, and a number of other fine books for young readers.

* This description and cover has been taken from amazon.com and may have been edited.

Looking for another way to find a good book? Why not visit your CLU Library!? with their friendly Librarians and staff

Grab a picnic basket and bring a blanket to Kinsgmen Park this summer for two plays put on by the Kingsmen Shakespeare Company. Before you go, immerse yourself in literary criticisms about the two plays, The Comedy of Errors and The Winter’s Tale, in The Cambridge Collections: Shakespeare Survey, available to students, staff, and faculty at CLU.

Don’t forget to check out the library’s entire collection of BBC produced Shakespeare plays, as well as more popular movies, such as Franco Zeffirelli version of Romeo and Juliet and the Baz Luhrmann version with Leonardo DiCaprio.

Find out more about the plays by visiting the Kingsmen Shakespeare Company’s website.

Other books made into movies available at the library:
-Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
-All of William Shakespeare’s plays
-Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer
-Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
-West Side Story by Arthur Laurents
-Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
-Marley and Me by John Grogan
-Beloved by Toni Morrison
-Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling
-The King and I by Rogers and Hammerstein
-Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
-Into the Woods by Hudson Talbott
-Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
-The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks
-The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
-Antigone by Jean Anouilh
-Gone with the Wing by Margaret Mitchell

There are two options to read the book: download and read on your phone or download and read on your computer.  Some titles include:

• 20,000 leagues under the sea by Jules Verne
• Martian odyssey by Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
• War of the world by H.G. Wells
• Land that time forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs

My personal favorite: Time Machine by H.G. Wells.

For more info on the app and the company that created it:
Post from i09
Spreadsong, Inc.