Although summer officially began just last week, it seems as though it's been hot and dry forever. As we water our gardens and lawns, it's hard to envision a major flood. But join us for a discussion about The Johnstown Flood--still the deadliest flood in US history. It happened in 1889 when the South Fork Dam (fourteen miles upstream from Johnstown, Pa.) failed. The American Red Cross, which Clara Barton had founded in 1891, led the relief effort with Barton herself taking charge. The flood caused many sociological repercussions because the community that was spared included summer homes of many millionaires including Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon, while the community below that suffered had many poor Irish and German immigrants.
This was David McCullough's first book. McCullough went on to win two Pulitzer Prizes for later biographies of Truman and John Adams.
Books Plus meets the first Sunday of each month. All are welcome. Join the discussion or simply come to listen.
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2 p.m., First Sundays
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Memorial Day weekend is right around the corner and hot days are near. For many people this means firing up the grill. Interested in shaking up your grill routine? The library has loads of 
Before I became a librarian, I worked in the restaurant industry for 10 years. I learned to cook from my dad and had dreams of going to culinary school to become a chef. Career changes happen, but I am still drawn to cooking shows and spend a lot of time reading books about food, food policies, eating, and food history –think 
Microhistories are a subgenre of non-fiction books which take a particular subject or single event and through intensive historical research try to contextualize the chosen subject within the broader picture. Both 
The title of this book 
What a cool idea for a book. Telling the history of the world by looking at museum artifacts. To make it even more interesting, these descriptive reports of jewelry, mummies, pottery, coins, art, textiles, etc. were written by experts for radio. Luckily, for us we get to view the pictures also, hundreds of them.
One of the earliest historical reports of a far northern, snow-covered place was by Pytheas who sailed out of what is now Marseilles in 325 B.C., and discovered a place he called Ultima Thule, a six day journey north of Britain. No one knows exactly where his ship landed but people believe that it may have been Iceland, Greenland, Norway or the Shetlands. Pytheas described the remarkable midnight sun and reported that the sea surrounding Thule was “neither sea nor air but a mixture like a sea-lung that binds everything together.”