Here are the booktalks that I've written for various booktalking occasions. Feel free to tweak, reuse, and share.
What do you think of when you think of mummies? Maybe King Tut? Or horror movies? Natalie Jane Prior is going to set you all straight in The Encyclopedia of Preserved People. She covers Egyptian mummies, bog bodies, and even Einstein’s brain.
Where would you turn if you decided you wanted to become popular? To teen movies? To popular friends? To a 1950s guide to teenage popularity? No? That’s what Maya did. She picked up Betty Cornell’s Teenage Popularity Guide and decided to give Betty’s advice a whirl for a year and see if it would take her from the bottom of the social ladder all the way to the top.
Anybody here watch Bones? The identification of a human being from skeletal remains seems like a miracle, but it isn’t. It’s science. Written in Bones shows how scientists reveal pictures of the lives, cultures, and beliefs of ancient societies just from studying their bones.
One of the influences for Hazel Grace Lancaster in The Fault in Our Stars was Esther. Esther Earl was diagnosed with thyroid cancer at the age of 12. These are her journals, stories, letters, and sketches. They tell the true story of how a young person lives with cancer.
Adolf Eichmann was one of the engineers of the Final Solution, what Hitler called his plan to round up an exterminate all of the Jews in Europe. He managed to slip out from under the Allies’ nose at the end of the war, but his plan and his crimes were never forgotten. Neal Bascomb lays out the tangled path that intelligence agents followed to find Eichmann and bring him to justice.
(ALTERNATIVE: The Nazi: He commanded a network that stretched across Europe, targeting and delivering millions of people to the death camps. He followed every order and was very good at his job, but when the war ended, he disappeared without a trace. The Hunters: a teenage girl, her blind father, a secret agent, a lawyer, and a man who dedicated his life to tracking Nazis. The mission: capture Eichmann and bring him to trial before the world.)
Christopher McCandless is dead. He died alone in a bus in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness. A group of hunters found his body with this note: SOS I need your help. I am injured, near death, and too weak to hike out of here. I am all alone, this is no joke. In the name of God, please remain to save me. Thank you, Chris McCandless. Into the Wild is Chris’s story: how he grew up, what drove him, and how he ended up in that bus in Alaska.
Have you heard about Ebola? Do you know what it is? Richard Preston tells the true story of a “hot” virus – a virus that is extremely dangerous to humans, very infections, has a high fatality rate, and no known preventions, treatments or cures. In 1989, a relative of the Ebola virus, the Reston virus, was discovered at a primate quarantine facility in Reston, VA, less than 15 miles from Washington, D.C. The Hot Zone tells the story of the discovery and containment of that virus by brave doctors and scientists.
This contains all my library adventures in my teeny tiny library in Northern Minnesota. I will feature programming, storytime plans, book reviews, and other musings on stuff that I find interesting. Thanks for visiting!
