Back to School

The summer is winding to an end, and while there's still time to get a last trip or two in before schools start up, if you're a teacher, it may be time to start thinking about getting back behind classroom walls. Or, at least, to start planning how you are going to decorate those walls. At Booksmith we've got wall maps to illustrate your lessons, help your students see the world from a different perspective, or simply to let you daydream about new destinations.

The What's Up South? World Upside Down Map will have your students asking questions like never before. Why do we think North is Up? Who decides how we view ourselves in relation to the rest of the world?

While the Peters Projection maintains the traditional compass points, it strives to distribute area in a more accurate way. The world is round, so there is no way to portray it in a perfect projection. However, this map can get students asking more questions relating to distribution of power. Why does Africa appear smaller than the U.S. on a traditional map?

And for elementary teachers, National Geographic has a series of Kids Education maps, including the U.S., World Political, and World Physical. Lamination helps protect from sticky fingers and tears, and the large size, with each country or state delineated by a different color, turns a third grade geography lesson into a visual treat.

Why We Read

Brookline customers are a pretty smart bunch. Here are some figures:

This is pulled from Sperling's Best Places. We spend a lot on students. We have a lot of degrees; not just high school, but undergrad AND graduate degrees. With the proximity of BC and BU we have a lot of current students and professors in our midst. So as a result, there are a couple of sections in our store that get hit pretty frequently. Philosophy, for example. We don't get too many books in, but when we do they SELL. And how. So after the holiday rush, our philosophy shelves were looking pretty lean. It happens. Our stock is reliant on what people bring to us, and stuff moves and changes fast. So sometimes, our shelves get thin until magic book fairies (i.e., you) bring us more. But we make sure to only get the good stuff in, so what we do have is CHOICE.

But what to do when the books get all floppy and the shelves get empty? I dunno about those Amazon guys, but I get creative. And I put to use my undergraduate philosophy degree. I cleared off a shelf for a display and thought: what are important books in this section? Who doesn't own a copy of Kant's Groundwork that needs one? The best part of actually reading a book (for me, anyway) are those lines that stick with you forever, or finally make sense of the 120 preceding pages. The quotes we put on our Facebook profiles, in our friend's yearbooks, e-mail signatures, tattooed on arms, the lines that are mini-epiphanies that rock our worlds. In short, it's the words inside books that make us read. Sometimes there are books on a shelf that you haven't read, maybe because you're pressed for time, or you're reading Room With a View for the eightieth time, or maybe it's because book designers don't know what to do with philosophy books and the philosophers sure as heck don't know how to title their books, so they look boring but really they are GENIUS and they will change your life forever if only you knew that those brilliant quotes lived inside their pages.

So in order to jazz up a decent looking philosophy display, I wrote down some salient quotes from the books. Quotes that embody the meaning and importance of the book, or in some cases just haunted me forever. So now, hopefully, casual browsers will know why to pick up a 200 page non-fiction book on how we fall in love written in the 17th centry. Or maybe they'll just struggle at reading my awful handwritten scrawl. Either way!

Aristotle's Poetics

Kant's Groundwork

Sartre's Essays in Existentialism

Stendhal, On Love

Anyway, like I said, we're thin on philosophy. And poetry. And local stuff. Do you have some such books that are rad, have no underlining or highlighting and are just collecting dust on your ever-so-smart shelves? Let me give you money for them! Wednesdays through Saturdays, 10 AM to 4 PM. Thanks for reading!

Twesigye Jackson Kaguri

On Wednesday, Twesigye Jackson Kaguri stopped by to sign copies of his book, The Price of Stones. While I folded the jacket flap into the title page on each of the copies, I read the summary and then went on to read the first few pages of his story. This man is amazing. His ancestral village in Uganda had, while he was studying in America, been absolutely ravaged by AIDS, and especially hard hit were the children. Seeing the hopeless plight of the youngest generation in his village, he decided on the spot that they needed a place to grow, to learn, and to get the opportunity to turn the raw deal they had been handed into something meaningful and as lasting as possible.
He built a free school for children with AIDS, stone by stone, over five years, with the help of his family and friends. Faced with seemingly insurmountable obstacles and pressures to give this unlikely dream up, he nevertheless followed through on his promise, and there in the village of Nyakagyezi, Uganda, stands a fully accredited primary school filled with children who would not have been accepted in any other classroom.

So, Mr Kaguri comes in and introduces himself, and starts signing books and talking to me, my coworker Zoe, and the customers in line. He sold two books to the first two women in line, and told us we needed to get some more people in line before he finished the pile, as he could sell all of them given the chance. And I have no doubt he could.

It was a beautiful thing to behold: here was a man who saw the opportunity not to gain, but to give. For so many the goal is retirement, release from labor. But for others, the true release comes with the undertaking of great tasks, and the realization that as long as there is life there is work to be done. The key is finding out what that work is.

I don't ever want to retire. Thanks for stopping in my store, Twesigye Kaguri.