Read local—August 13, 2010
This weekend Hastings will be celebrating our very own hometown beverage during Kool-Aid Days so it seems appropriate that we should also celebrate our local authors and Read Local!
If you want to bone up on your local history, there are three books that you should read, or at least look through. Jeff O’Donnell’s “Adams County Nebraska: A Pictorial History” takes a thematic approach to the county’s history and is lavishly illustrated with photographs from the Adams County Historical Society archives and the “Hastings Tribune” collection. Monty McCord uses a chronological approach in his “Hastings: The Queen City of the Plains” title. “Hastings Then & Now” by Elizabeth Spilinek tells the story of the community through our architecture and there is also an accompanying dvd titled “Connections to the Past.” The video will be shown Saturday afternoon during Kool-Aid Days at the library.
But local authors don’t just write books about history. Dr. Leo Lemonds has written several volumes of stories from his many years as a local veterinarian, one of them “Doc’s Dog and Cat Stories” while Wendy Keele shares her fascination and in-depth knowledge about Swedish knitting in “Poems of Color: Knitting in the Bohus Tradition.” This is a beautiful book to look at and includes patterns for knitters. Another example of the wide ranging interests of local authors is Dan Deffenbaugh’s “Learning the Language of the Fields: Tilling and Keeping as Christian Vocation.” What Deffenbaugh suggests is a “theology of place” that incorporates organic gardening and Christian tradition to “reconnect spirituality and community.”
You can also find good fiction titles being written locally. Monty McCord has an audio book featuring Nebraska Marshall Joe Mundy called “Mundy’s Law”. Jeff O’Donnell has written several fiction titles including “Dismal River” and “Blood on the Republican”. A very prolific romance writer lives in a community south of Hastings, but we claim her because we see her in the library frequently. She writes under the name Kristin Gabriel and her titles include “Bullets over Boise”, “Third Time’s the Charm” and “Good Night, Gracie”.
So be part of the Go Local movement by celebrating Kool-Aid, visiting the Farmer’s Market and checking out one of these local authors at the Hastings Public Library.
