The Friends of Brooks Memorial Library are pleased to bring you this season’s First Wednesdays lecture series, to be held online for at least the first three months. The season runs from October through May, with all talks beginning at 7:00 pm. Advance reservations are needed for the online talks.

Click on the links below to read topic descriptions and, for the online talks, to reserve a “seat”!

Oct. 7:  Merely Bystanders: The Psychology of Courage and Inaction
Nov. 4:  Atlantic is a Sea of Bones
Dec. 2:  The Legacy of Nicholas Black Elk
Jan. 6:  Meeting Men through Imagination
Feb. 3:  Female Husbands and Their Wives
Mar. 3:  How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish
Apr. 7:  Eating While Fat
May 5:  This is Not That: A Brief Introduction to the Black Death

The full season flyer is available here.

First Wednesdays is organized by the Vermont Humanities Council and brought to Brattleboro by the Friends of Brooks Memorial Library. The series is underwritten locally by Chroma Technology Corp. and statewide by the Institute of Museum and Library Services through the Vermont Department of Libraries.

 

From our Fall Newsletter:

With Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s recent death, Kanopy, an independent film catalog, is highlighting a documentary about her life. RBG is an Academy Award nominee concerning the personal and professional journey of the Justice’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

Free streaming of 6 films a month to your home for all library card holders is funded in part by your contributions to the Friends of Brooks Memorial Library. It has proved to be one of the most popular things we fund and, given the upending of our lives by the pandemic, one of the most popular digital services that the library provides.

Check it out and see what the buzz is all about.

See the rest of the Friends’ latest Newsletter here.

From our Fall Newsletter:

The Friends are looking into alternative ways to run our popular winter book sale, where we traditionally sell books that can be given as gifts. We call them “like new.”

Since we are not currently accepting donations of books, we would have to run it with the books we had on hand for the cancelled June book sale. The books would not necessarily be almost “like new.”

As these sales are heavily dependent on volunteers for both set-up and cashiering during the sale, we will also need to find out their level of comfort for exposure to other people. We would obviously adhere to all health guidelines and require masks and social distancing as much as possible.

It is not possible to use the library for the sale, so we are exploring alternate sites. As soon as we have any concrete plans, we will let you know. Until then, keep saving those books for us!

See the rest of the Friends’ latest Newsletter here.