We are all waiting for our library to reopen to the public. When the risk level in Alameda county is in the yellow tier we should be able to return! |
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A virtual OPL is still here for us. Some services are listed below. There are many more. See the OPL website
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OPL eBooks & Audiobooks
Access your library from anywhere. The Oakland Public Library offers a variety of eBooks and audiobooks. Library cardholders can download or stream digital content any time, to a computer or a mobile device. See them all here.
Movies
Get access to thousands of movies with your library card. Stream movies & videos at this link.
Virtual Lawyers in the Library
The Lawyers in the Library program is a free information and referral program staffed by volunteer lawyers and hosted by libraries throughout Alameda County. If legal help is required, people are referred to other agencies.
To request an appointment email eAnswers@oaklandlibrary.org or call 510-238-3134.
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Sidewalk Pickup In Acton
Emily Odza, whose regular assignment is Adult/Youth Librarian 1 at Eastmont, is the staff member who will greet you outside our Piedmont Avenue Library and deliver the books you ordered. Emily has worked at several of our area libraries and has done “Chat Duty” for students doing research at Laney College. This temporary sidewalk assignment is different - and fun when the sun shines.
Piedmont Avenue Library, even with its limited hours, has 30-50 pickups per day. Emily receives many thank yous from the grateful patrons. She says picking up books has become a ritual for many, combined with walks with their children. Emily has met many interesting people, including a 7-year-old girl who is such a voracious reader that she said she was “hungry for books.”
Thank you, Emily, and all the library staff who are there for us during the pandemic.
Curbside sidewalk service is available at Piedmont Ave Library Tuesday – Saturday, 10am to 1pm. For details go to the OPL website. .
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"Reading shaped my dreams and more reading helped me make my dreams come true."
Ruth Bader Gindsberg
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March is Women's History Month
The blog from Oakland Public Library, called Advice for Readers, gathers ten books published in the last year that highlight some incredible women, as well as the social movements and legacies they helped create. Celebrate women's history by checking out the fascinating stories you find at this link..
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Sam Davis, our local School Board Member,
recommended this movie in his Newsletter
The film titled We Are the Dream: The Kids of the Oakland MLK Oratorical Fest features a family and teacher from Piedmont Avenue Elementary School.
It is a film from HBO in Classrooms, nominated for an NAACP Image Award, showing how, every year, hundreds of children from pre-K through 12th grade take the stage at the Oakland MLK Oratorical Fest, a public speaking competition where they perform poetry and speeches inspired by the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
The film gives us an introduction to the students, the teachers, and the parents. It is a view into our own Piedmont Avenue Elementary School.
If you haven’t seen this amazing film and would like something uplifting in these trying times, you can see the full 58-minute film at this link .
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The Avid Reader by Louis Segal |
I’ve been an avid reader since I could read. In high school I used to cut school to read in the Berkeley Public Library. I’m writing this column to share some of the books I love. I hope, perhaps, you might grow to love a few of them.
Deacon King Kong by James McBride
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To paraphrase a very wise man “What affects one, affects all indirectly. All life is interrelated… we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality bound in a single garment of destiny.” In that spirit, and echoing other wise souls, Black History should not be confined to one month, Black History is inextricably tied to the history of the US every month of the year. And in that spirit, this review:
James McBride, an important novelist, memoirist, and screenwriter, was born in Red Hook, Brooklyn in 1957. His latest novel, Deacon King Kong, was published in 2020 and celebrates an unnamed neighborhood in Brooklyn. The neighborhood is clearly based on the Red Hook of McBride’s childhood and youth and particularly the life in the Projects and the surrounding, enveloping, shifting world. The action of the novel revolves around the neighborhood in 1969 and 1970 and, in his narrative, lyricism, and sentiment he honors and represents his piece of Brooklyn like Dylan Thomas honors the fictional fishing Welsh village of Llareggub in Under Milk Wood [1957].
Both McBride and Thomas, at the height of their literary powers, are invested in the bursting life of their community, both have poetic bursts of words tumbling around the lives, dreams, disappointments, and joys of their people. Thomas is pastoral and monochromatic. McBride, on the other hand, is urban to the bone, polychromatic and, indeed, is the polyglot griot of this slice of Brooklyn. Brooklyn, in his telling, centers around the public housing projects and the old diminishing presence of the Irish, Italian and Jewish Red Hook play a subsidiary role in the novel. But the heart of McBride’s tale is Latinx and African American, from the southern diaspora, from the dilapidated Projects, from Haiti, from Puerto Rico, full of dignity and pain, hunger and wit, joy, and reflection. The older denizens of the neighborhood have vivid memories of their past lives, the younger ones only know the Projects with disappearing jobs or a hardscrabble existence of marketing and selling uppers and downers, to Red Hook residents and suburban kids longing for a fix. Circling around that world is a melancholy Irish cop and a lonely Italian gangster, dancing with the new world and attracted and repelled by the people of the new Red Hook. The story permeates with love and friendship and survival of people who find themselves cast upon the post-industrial world, forced to the corners of the illegal market or into the so-called criminal justice system. And yet these people love and grieve deeply, shield themselves with dignity and wit, believe in different Gods or don’t believe at all. Their fundamental kindness and compassion speak to the best in all of us.
As long as Lent is upon us if you’re interested in partying and contrition and the sublimity of American music (AKA “Jazz”) or prefer reading history check out Ned Sublette -like McBride, also a musician- and his 2008 The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square. A wonderful tour de force of history, music, and of New Orleans. Another shout out for the month goes to the great historian Greg Grandin’s The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom and Deception in the New World, a cultural history of literature, whaling, and the slave trade from Lima to Boston. It is sprawling and ties together the history of the Americas.
Both these books again demonstrate that Black History is inextricably tied to the history of the United States and indeed the Americas every month of the year.
Louis was born in Oakland, raised his family in Oakland, dropped out of school in 1968, worked many jobs over the decades, dropped back into school in the 80s, got a Ph.D. in history, taught as an adjunct professor from 1993 to 2015. Retired but not withdrawn.
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What's Happening at the Library |
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Effective March 16, 2020 the Oakland Public Library closed all Library locations to help limit the spread of coronavirus (COVID-19). These closures will remain in effect until further notice.
There is curbside sidewalk service at Piedmont Ave Library Tuesday – Saturday, 10am to 1pm. You can pick up books, DVDs, CDs and WiFi hotspots. To find out how, go to the OPL website
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