Monday, January 28, 2019

The biggest butterfly of all: A Fine Way to Encourage Reading

Rocking improves sleep and memory, studies in mice and people show MedicalXpress

The biggest butterfly of all  The biggest butterfly of all SCIENCE FRICTION Finding and saving the world’s very biggest butterfly is a feat like few others, and a saga about people power.
The biggest butterfly of all

Born 1929, died 1987. Kenneth Cook was a prolific Australian journalist, film director, screenwriter, TV personality and novelist. He is best known for his novel Wake in Fright, which became a modern classic and is still in print, and for his Killer Koala trilogy.
Kenneth Cook - Social and Outback Butterfly - Books and Writing 






Wake in Fright by Kenneth Cook | AustLit: Discover Australian Stories



Fear Is the Rider by Kenneth Cook: Outback monsters from Wake in Fright author 

Here and back again « Jacqueline Kent


Lunch with: Biographer turned memoirist Jacqueline Kent - Kent's memoir Beyond Words: A Year With Kenneth Cook.

Jacqueline Kent is an expert at contemplating the lives of others through words. The author has written biographies of former Prime Minister Julia Gillard, legendary book editor Beatrice Davis and pianist Hephzibah Menuhin – but a recent subject has proven one of the most challenging.
It is a sizzling day when we sit down to discuss Kent's latest book over an alfresco lunch at Indigo, located in Double Bay in Sydney's eastern suburbs. The charming cafe has a European tone, spilling from the sidewalk onto a pedestrian strip. It bills itself as one of the suburb's best kept secrets, but it comes as no surprise to Kent who has been dining here long enough to be greeted with warm familiarity by staff...
The Kenneth Cook of the subtitle is the novelist behind the Australian gothic classic Wake in Fright (1961), which tells the story of a young teacher whose outback posting spirals into a nightmare of ultra violence, alcoholism and gambling. Few can forget the visceral kangaroo slaughtering scene of the 1971 film adaptation, and the horror was perpetuated in a TV miniseries released in 2017.

A Fine Way to Encourage Reading - Know I Know: “Imagine a bookstore that worked on a membership program — instead of buying books, you rented them. And instead of paying a per-book rental fee, they baked that cost into the cost of the membership. There are some limits on the number of books you can rent out at a time, but they’re reasonable if not extraordinarily high — so if you’re going on vacation, no worries, you’ll have plenty to read. And you don’t need to be anyone special to join this club; just about anyone could apply for membership. B

Seems like a fancy Internetty startup? Nope. It’s your local library. And it’s hard to compete with — membership is free. There’s one catch, though: if you don’t return your books on time, you have to pay a fine. The fine is typically a pretty low one — often less than 25 cents — and typically serves as little more than a reminder (with a tiny bit of bite) that you really should return that book to your local library. For a grown-up, the fines are probably no big deal. But for a kid, and particularly one from a low-income family? Try explaining to your mom why she has to spend $10 because you lost library books. It’s not going to be a fun conversation. And let’s face it, many kids with fines don’t have to have those conversations with their parents — they can avoid the fine simply by avoiding taking other books the library. (And at that point, the library is going to suspend their borrowing privileges anyway.) The result is a lose-lose situation: the kids read less and the library doesn’t get that $10 anyway.  

So, the Los Angeles County library system fixed it. They call it the “Great Read Away