Shop for Children
A Gifting Idea: Using Engineering Skills With a DIY Dollhouse Kit
The creators of Roominate, Alice Brooks and Bettina Chen, didn’t grow up playing with traditional girl toys. When Brooks asked for a Barbie her father gave her a mini-saw. Chen adored Legos and built hundreds of extravagant creations with her brothers. Brooks majored in mechanical engineering at MIT, while Bettina studied electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology. When they met as graduate students at Stanford, said Chen, “We thought that there’d be a lot more women in grad school, but there weren’t.” more »
Taylor Branch, Barbara Kingsolver, Katherine Paterson, Natasha Trethewey: Authors at the National Book Festival
Authors and poets Margaret Atwood, Marie Arana, Taylor Branch, Don DeLillo, Khaled Hosseini, Barbara Kingsolver, Brad Meltzer, Joyce Carol Oates, Katherine Paterson and Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey will be among writers speaking. New Library of Congress exhibits celebrate opera, the majestic art form that has transfixed audiences for more than 400 years, and the other exhibit celebrates what Martin Luther King Jr. called "the greatest demonstration for freedom in the nation’s history." more »
OMCA Exhibits: Inspiration Points, Peter Stackpole's Bridging the Bay and Vintage Car Last Over the Old Bridge
Oakland Museum of California opened the vaults to showcase the very best in California landscape art from the museum’s holdings, including works by Ansel Adams, Thomas Hill, David Hockney, William Keith, Arthur Mathews, Richard Misrach, Thomas Moran, and more. Peter Stackpole: Bridging the Bay
features stunning black-and-white photographs chronicling the original San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and Golden Gate Bridge construction in the 1930s by a famed American photographer. more »
Nostalgia, Elegance of Language and Incomparable Ilustrations
Joan L. Cannon writes: Often to this day, I wish artists were called on to do what illustrators did in those long-gone days: make a picture for a reader who might not ever have seen anything like what she was reading about. Historical fiction especially could benefit from more than a dust jacket depiction. Oh, I understand how foolish a thought that is from the economic point of view. Books are almost too expensive now. more »