Staff Picks
Check the blog every week for updates on what our staff is reading and watching and recommendations for our new and all-time favorite books and movies. What is your favorite book or movie? Post your answer in the comments section below. To see all previous Staff Picks posts, simply type "Staff Picks" in the search box at the top left of this blog and click the "search blog" button.

A Good and Happy Child by Justin Evans - recommended by Andrew
Thirty-year-old George Davies can't bring himself to hold his newborn son. After months of accepting his lame excuses and strange behavior, his wife has had enough. She demands that he see a therapist, and George, desperate to save his unraveling marriage and redeem himself as a father and husband, reluctantly agrees. As he delves into his childhood memories, he begins to recall things he hasn't thought of in twenty years.

Events, people, and strange situations come rushing back. The odd, rambling letters his father sent home before he died. The jovial mother who started dating too soon after his father's death. A boy who appeared one night when George was lonely, then told him secrets he didn't want to blow. How no one believed this new friend was real and that he was responsible for the bad things that were happening. Terrified by all that he has forgotten, George struggles to remember what really happened in the months following his father's death. Were his ominous visions and erratic behavior the product of a grief-stricken child's overactive imagination (a perfectly natural reaction to the trauma of loss, as his mother insisted)? Or were his father's colleagues, who blamed a darker, more malevolent force, right to look to the supernatural as a means to end George's suffering? Twenty years later, George still does not know. But when a mysterious murder is revealed, remembering the past becomes the only way George can protect himself - and his young family. -BOOK JACKET.

Waiting for Snow in Havana by Carlos Eire - recommended by Lulu

As a child of the Cuban Revolution, Carlos Eire experienced the turbulent time firsthand. The author had never written about his childhood experience because he felt that he didn’t have enough “critical distance”. The summer of 2000 changed his feelings.

Elias Gonzalez was returned to Cuba after a debate that lasted months, his own son turned 11 (the same age as Carlos Eire when sent away during the “Pedro Pan” airlift) and the author tarted writing and he didn’t stop for four months. This book is the product of this work. The author has the ability to take most of us to a place and experience something most of us have not: What it was like when Fidel Castro was on the rise. This personal memoir is worth the read!

MOVIE WATCH - Come watch this movie at the library Film Festival @ 6:30 p.m. in the City Council Chamber

Charlie Wilson's War - Recommended By Jeff
In the early 1980s, Charlie Wilson is best known as a womanizing US congressional representative from Texas. He seemed to be in the minor leagues, except for the fact that he is a member of two major foreign policy and covert-ops committees. However, once Charlie is prodded by his major conservative supporter, Joanne Herring, Wilson learns about the plight of the people who are suffering from the effects of the brutal Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. With the help of the maverick CIA agent, Gust Avrakotos, Wilson dedicates his canny political efforts to supply the Afghan mujahideen with the weapons and support needed to defeat the Soviet Union. Ultimately, Charlie learns that while military victory can be obtained, there are other consequences and prices to that fight that are ignored to everyone's sorrow. Based on a true story.