Larry Grieco, Librarian.    It’s time for a mid-year retrospective and so we looked back at some of the “oldest new books” on the new non-fiction shelf. We discovered some gems that should have been highlighted long ago and been enjoyed by numerous library users.

First there’s the insightful offering from Barbara Ehrenreich, upon whom Senator Al Franken once bestowed the “Communist-Socialist-Marxist Seal of Approval.” In Living With a Wild God: a Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth About Everything, she gives us “a searing memoir and a profound reflection on science, religion, and the human condition.”

Ehrenreich was educated as a scientist, and works as an author, journalist, activist, and advocate for social justice. Since childhood she has sought “the Truth,” asking the questions, “What’s really going on? Why are we here?” She wanted to know the truth about the universe and “everything else.”

In her adolescent days, she kept a journal and she revisits it now from the perspective of middle age—that journal “records an event so strange, so cataclysmic, that she had never, in all the intervening years, written or spoken about it to anyone.” Until now.

The New York Times calls her “one of today’s most original writers.” And the Chicago Tribune says she is “passionate, public, hotly lucid, and politically engaged.” This is a book for everyone, but especially for you radicals out there—you know who you are.

Lawrence Buell, the Powell M. Cabot Research Professor of American Literature at Harvard University, has written a book—nay, a treatise—of over 500 pages, on The Dream of the Great American Novel. Apparently this concept began in the nineteenth century and yet continues to thrive “defying 150 years of attempts to dismiss it as amateurish or obsolete.”

If you’re like me, you will grab this book and quickly turn to the index to find references to your personal favorites, and when you do, you’ll turn to any given page and find yourself hooked on the narrative. Lovers of reading and literature will enjoy this sweeping history of American letters.

[Librarian’s note: For what it’s worth, here are the five books I would argue might indeed be called “the great American novel.”—In the order of my preference: 1. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; 2. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye; 3. Twain, Huckleberry Finn; 4. Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises; 5. Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March.]

And last, as a special treat for college football fans (again, you know who you are), we’ve got the wonderful story of this uniquely American pastime, “one of the unifying cornerstones of American culture.” The book, written by sportswriter Michael Weinreb, is called Season of Saturdays: a History of College Football in 14 Games.

According to Weinreb, the origins of college football can be traced back to November 6, 1869, “in a cow pasture along College Avenue in New Brunswick, New Jersey.” This game pitted Rutgers against Princeton, and it went something like this: “The ball was round, but it kept deflating and the participants took turns blowing it back up again, and so its shape was often ambiguous. Points were scored by booting it between a pair of vertical posts…Rutgers won 6-4, and then, by at least one account, they ran the Princeton players straight out of town, sending them hastening toward their wagons and carriages, hence marking the intercollegiate debut of a sport whose caretakers have spent every year since then attempting to sow order from the seeds of barbarism.”

From its origins as a “disjointed offshoot of rugby to a ubiquitous part of our national identity,” Weinreb discusses 14 significant games from that first game in 1869 to the Penn State-Miami game in the Fiesta Bowl in 1987, taking us from “that was then” to “this is now.” ESPN’s Wright Thompson: “Weinreb journeys through the black-and-white college football world of the nostalgia junkie and the cynical critic and finds both of them wrong: college football, like America, is a culture of troubling, electrifying gray. This is our story.”

The library will soon be gearing up for the 2015 Gilpin Art Studio Tour, taking place on the weekend of September 19 and 20. As in the past, this will offer “free, self-guided tours of artists’ studios in Gilpin County. There will be an art show at the Gilpin library of representative works from each of the participating artists, and an opening reception on Thursday evening, September 10. The Studio Tour brochures, featuring a map to the artist studios, are available at the library.