We Are New Yorkers: A Reading List for NYC Immigrant Heritage Week | April 14, 2017

Reader's Advisory | Immigrants in the U.S. | NYPL

Elizabeth Waters, Mid-Manhattan Library

 Happy Immigrant Heritage Week! Since 2004, New York City has celebrated Immigrant Heritage Week around April 17, coordinated by the Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs. April 17, 1907 is the date that New York’s immigrant receiving station, Ellis Island, saw its busiest day ever, processing a record 11,747 new arrivals in a single day. This year, New York City Immigrant Heritage Week is April 17–April 23.  Many free events celebrating our cultural diversity are scheduled for this week in NYPL branches and other locations throughout New York City.

 A great way to learn about and celebrate the histories and contributions of New York City’s diverse immigrant communities is by reading their stories. Here are some vivid representations of the New York immigrant experience in fiction,  as well as a few memoirs and biographies of New Yorkers past and present, who arrived here from all over the world and made their mark on our city. Read more...

How public libraries help build healthy communities | March 30, 2017

Public libraries | Library services | Community | Health

March 30, 2017

by Marcela Cabello and Stuart M. Butler

They say you can’t judge a book by its cover. Increasingly in the United States, you also can’t judge a library’s value to its community by simply its books. Let us explain.

In a previous blog post, we’ve noted the importance of “third places” in strengthening communities – meaning those places that are neither one’s home (first place) nor workspace (second place). A range of such third places, from churches to beauty salons, play an important role in community building. They are the informal spaces that are often mainstays in a neighborhood, places where both random and intentional in-person relationships are made. Read more...

25 Great Books by Refugees in America | By GAL BECKERMANJAN. 30, 2017

Book review | Reader's Advisory | Diversity | Immigrants in the US 

One way to regard the refugees in the news these frenzied past few days is as potential Americans, individuals and families escaping bad situations who imagine themselves building new lives here. What these particular refugees could become in this country, and how they could contribute to our society and culture, is a question stuck in suspended animation. But we do have the power to look to the past. And in the literary realm it’s unquestionable that refugees, once here, often make major contributions.

Through the 20th century and into this one, those fleeing political persecution or war have produced important works that we think of now as at least partly American, from fiction about the harrowing experiences of exile and dislocation to political treatises by thinkers who want to understand why their homelands fell apart. This is a sampling of 25 of those works.

 

Read more
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/books/review/25-great-books-by-refugees-in-america.html