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Bradford puts money on libraries to boost city's health [17 Feb 2020|07:00am]

£700,000 could be diverted from Yorkshire council’s wellbeing budget to offset library cuts

The library at Thebes was said to have the inscription “Medicine for the soul” above its doors – a notion Bradford council is set to put to the test with plans to offset major library cuts with funds from its health and wellbeing budget.

The West Yorkshire council is just one of the local authorities up and down the country which has dealt with shrinking reserves by closing hundreds of libraries. Last year, it proposed chopping £2 million from its libraries spending over two years, a funding reduction of two-thirds. The biggest cut of £1.05m was due to hit at the start of this coming financial year, until the council came up with what could be described as a novel idea.

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Antisocial: How Online Extremists Broke America by Andrew Marantz – review [17 Feb 2020|07:00am]

A US journalist infiltrates the toxic world of alt-right ‘news’ peddlers in an absorbing study of online propaganda and its threat to democracy

Andrew Marantz is a staff writer for the New Yorker, and a pretty good one. He’s written a lot of perceptive stuff about the tech industry in recent years. One morning in 2016, he was in his office exploring “a particularly foul part of social media undergrowth”, when the magazine’s editor, David Remnick, came in, looked at the screen and asked: “What the hell is that?” Marantz told him to sit down and watch.

He repeated some of the Facebook searches he’d been doing, bringing up toxic memes and propaganda posts and reading out the “engagement” statistics below each one: 5,000 shares here, 15,000 “Likes” there. Then he pulled up the New Yorker’s Facebook page. A recent landmark piece got just 87 shares; Remnick’s own piece about Aretha Franklin had even fewer – 78 shares. And so on. “I get it,” said the editor. “It’s not auspicious, but where’s the story in it?” Marantz pressed on, exploring the maze of pro-Trump propaganda and viral memes. “What if I could find the people who are peddling this stuff?” he asked. “That could be a story,” Remnick replied.

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The best books about new beginnings [17 Feb 2020|07:02am]

Uplifting titles from Tara Westover’s memoir Educated to Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City offer escape and inspiration

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert has long been the hoary cliche of new starts, the story of a woman who apparently can’t find any decent Italian food in New York, but for my money it is not a patch on the best of that genre, Julia Child’s My Life in France, the memoir of how she wrote Mastering the Art of French Cooking. It is great on food, but even better on life, and accepting it just as it is. She finds joy everywhere, and it’s extremely hard not to fall in love with her.

If the weather is not behaving itself and you want to heat up a little, How Stella Got Her Groove Back by Terry McMillan is the sexy, sun-drenched story of a woman finding herself in the Caribbean with a handsome younger man, full of laughs and heart. You will also unfailingly be cheered by Elizabeth von Arnim’s absolutely gorgeous 1922 novel The Enchanted April, about a mismatched set of women spending a month together in Tuscany; it’s pure escapist heaven.

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The Volunteer by Jack Fairweather review – portrait of an unseen hero [17 Feb 2020|09:00am]

Humanity’s limits are laid bare in the gripping story of a Polish soldier who chronicled Hitler’s genocide from within

This year will mark the 75th anniversary of the end of the second world war, probably the most revisited period of history in history. And yet this looming event – and in particular the genocide at its heart – continues to yield revelatory stories and inspire exceptional writing.

Four years ago, Philippe Sands’s East West Street traced the roots of modern human rights law back to two Jews who emerged from the “bloodlands”, to use the historian Timothy Snyder’s term, of Lviv in what was Poland and is now Ukraine. If that extraordinary book grappled with the meaning of law in the depths of depravity, then Jack Fairweather’s The Volunteer, the deserved winner of the Costa book award, explores the limits of humanity in the same dreadful context.

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Poem of the week: Bright is the Ring of Words by Robert Louis Stevenson [17 Feb 2020|11:00am]

I was surprised how much impact this Victorian classic holds. An untarnished golden oldie? I think so

Bright is the ring of words
When the right man rings them,
Fair the fall of songs
When the singer sings them.
Still they are carolled and said –
On wings they are carried –
After the singer is dead
And the maker is buried.

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Hundreds of readers donate copies of depression memoir after Caroline Flack's death [17 Feb 2020|01:11pm]

Prompted by a reader’s offer, donations to two bookshops have already funded hundreds of giveaways of Matt Haig’s book Reasons to Stay Alive

An independent bookseller has been deluged with thousands of requests after offering to send anyone who feels they need one a copy of Matt Haig’s memoir about depression, Reasons to Stay Alive, in an initiative the author called “such a positive thing on what was a pretty bleak weekend”.

Simon Key, who runs online retailer the Big Green Bookshop, was contacted by a reader, Emma, offering to buy a couple of copies of Haig’s book for people in the wake of TV presenter Caroline Flack’s death. Haig’s book details his own descent into depression, and his climb back out of it.

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Tips, links and suggestions: what are you reading this week? [17 Feb 2020|03:10pm]

Your space to discuss the books you are reading and what you think of them

Welcome to this week’s blogpost. Here’s our roundup of your comments and photos from the last week.

Let’s start with AbsoluteBeginner76 who has been enjoying Mackintosh by W Somerset Maugham, “a master of the compressed tale”:

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