By Dewey! New in the 100s

155.9

G

Grollman, Earl A. Straight Talk About Death For Teenagers: How to Cope With Losing Someone You Love, Boston: Beacon Press, 1993

Earl Grollman has written many books on coping with death and has traveled all over the country, speaking with groups of young people on the topic. he also writes about parenting for USA Today. This book for teens is also recommended for parents, teachers, counselors, ministers and youth leaders.

Some young people have yet to face the death of a loved one, but many of them have experienced the sudden, tragic death of a friend in an accident or from illness. Many teenagers lose grandparents, and some have to cope with the loss of a parent. This book offers practical and supportive words that speak directly to teens without condescension. Grollman talks about losing a friend to suicide, losing a sibling, death by violence or by accident, and death after an illness.

He discusses all the possible reactions to death and ways of coping. One of the main points of the book is to let the teenager know that he is not alone in feeling the way he does. He talks about the experience of attending a funeral and about what to face when returning to school and getting on with one's life.

Highly recommended for all who must face death -- and that means all of us, at some time.

By Dewey! First in a Series Featuring New Books at SDL

Melvil Dewey was a cranky old guy who believed in spelling reform, among other things, and his Dewey Decimal System is not loved as much as formerly, but school and public libraries still find it useful for our materials. I'd like to feature some of our new books by Dewey categories.. For today, we'll look at the first category, 000-099, called "Generalities." This is where books about computers go, since Dewey presumably had never dreamed of such things.

Our new book in this section in Tim Berners-Lee's Weaving the Web: the Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web By its Inventor. (HarperSanFrancisco, 1999) Besides being the inventor of the Web, Berners-Lee is a professor at MIT and a MacArthur Fellow and was named one of the100 greatest minds of the 20th century by TIME Magazine.

For a little perspective on the Web: our current students have never been aware of a world without it. On the other hand, when I was in library school at UNC in the early 1990s, the Web was so new that PhD candidates in Information Science were giving lectures on it to us Masters' candidates. Now we all take it for granted and use it without thinking about it.

This promises to be a fascinating account of a force that pervades our personal, work and academic lives. Especially now that we are at a point where commercial forces and government entities rattle their spears over possible control both content and access, while true Web believers are adamant in their desire to see it remain free and open, it's good idea for those of us who care about open access to information to understand what's behind it all.

Highly recommended for anyone concerned about the future of information.