This Saturday, August 11th 2012, from 10:30am-12:30pm, the special guest speaker at the Small Business Workshop will be Santa Clara County Supervisor, Mike Wasserman. He will be talking about his personal experience in business, the upcoming Small Business Economic Summit, and how he has been changing county government to run more like a business.

This event is free and will be held in the Santa Teresa Library's community room.

Come to the Santa Teresa Library on Wednesday, July 25th 2012 at 4:30 PM, five pets are scheduled for listening to you read: Mokey the Cat, Crystal the Corgi, Chiko the Sheperd mix, Meko the Border Collie and introducing a new dog, Cooper the Shih Tsu. Come on out and practice your reading!

My first encounter with John McPhee was in a Jerseyanna class I took as an undergraduate. It was his book The Pine Barrens. From sugar sands to dwarf pine forests, tea-colored streams and Piney Power, McPhee distilled and immortalized the essence of the Pine Barrens in his elegant, concise prose.

Many years later I rediscovered McPhee’s magnificence. Annals of the Former World won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. This opus compiles several earlier works written over a period of twenty years focusing on the geological history of North America.

McPhee crisscrosses the United States on the transcontinental highway, Interstate 80, with geologists in search of visible signs of upheaval and orogenies. For laypersons, reading about geology may seem akin to watching paint dry, but McPhee makes it rock and roll.

Part of what makes the books so intriguing are the colorful geologists McPhee befriends, whose main vocation seems to be hunting down marvelous road cuts and hammering at rock formations along interstate highways and remote mountain ranges.

McPhee is a masterful non-fiction writer. His writing on geology has made many people reconsider their choice of career and has popularized an otherwise esoteric academic subject.

Check out John McPhee’s works at the San Jose Public Library and follow along with McPhee and company on a road trip through time.

The books that comprise Annals of the Former World:

Basin and Range: Interstate 80 is the route and Nevada is the destination. McPhee explains the introduction and development of plate tectonics as a theory.

In Suspect Terrain:  The Appalachian Range and Delaware Water Gap take center stage. McPhee explains how violent underground eruptions produce “diamond pipes” and how oil, silver and gold end up in geologic formations.

Rising From the Plains: Wyoming is the setting and the exhumation of the Rockies is the plot. David Love, the legendary geoscientist McPhee befriends, is born of the Wyoming landscape and leads McPhee around the rugged and beautiful Wyoming terrain.

Assembling California: McPhee explains how disparate geologic features, such at the Sierras, Wine Country and the San Andreas Fault, come together to form California and how these features have guided human exploration of the land. 

Crossing the Craton: This title does not appear as a stand-alone volume, it was written as the fifth chapter in Annals of the Former World. It discusses the stable, basement rock of the Great Plains and Great Lakes region.

The Remarkable Benjamin Franklin is part of a wonderful set of National Geographic picture book biographies by Cheryl Harness.  The beautiful illustrations and easy to read text make the story of Benjamin Franklin’s life accessible and interesting to young and old.  The book is full of Franklin’s famous quotes, experiments, inventions and life adventures.  There is also a great timeline of  “The 18^th Century World of Benjamin Franklin”  in the back of the book and  a list of recommended books for young readers who want to learn more about this fascinating man.

Did you know that Benjamin Franklin was the youngest of  ten children?  The young Ben Franklin  was both a candlemaker and a printer, as well as a statesman and postmaster.   He promoted civic institutions we take for granted such as libraries, hospitals, paved  roads and volunteer firefighters.    He was one of the great scientists of his time (he invented both the lightning rod and bifocals) as well as one of the greatest statesmen.   Find this and other books about Benjamin Franklin in the Children's Biographies section of your library.