News of the Library for the Blind and Print Disabled
The newsletter is published by the New Mexico Regional Library for the Blind and Print Disabled (LBPD) and is distributed free to patrons and other interested parties. In addition to large print, the newsletter can be requested in braille, heard in audio on New Mexico Newsline for the Blind, or viewed at the State Library’s web site at www.nmstatelibrary.org. For information, call LBPD at 1-800-456-5515 or 505-476-9770, or email sl.lbph@dca.nm.gov.
Winter 2024
Updates and Information
The NLS has released BARD Mobile version 2.0.0 for Fire OS. Build 226 is for 32-bit tablets and build 227 is for 64-bit tablets.
The following enhancements are included in this release:
- The app supports Fire OS versions 7 and 8.
- WebView is replaced with a full in-app search, including search for music and titles in international languages.
- Improved Spanish language app version support.
- Refined deleting and moving selected titles.
- Improved VoiceView experience, e.g., announcements for selected tabs/sorting options.
- Improved issue tracking.
- Various bug fixes, including:
- Fixed skipping back by chapter.
- Only one tap now required to accept Terms of Service.
- Sleep timer no longer toggles off when user navigates away from tab.
- Moving books to a subfolder no longer causes other books to disappear from the Audiobooks folder.
The version is available in Amazon Appstore.
NLS Music Notes
In the January 2024 installment of what’s new on BARD we added a number of braille books for piano, including some more from the popular Alfred’s “Basic Piano Library” series. We also have a good number of new vocal works for you to enjoy. In the audio realm, we’ve added popular tunes in both our piano-by-ear and guitar-by-ear series. Click here for new items.
Music Appreciation
Have you ever wanted to learn to play an instrument? Maybe you played before but need a refresher? The NLS, our parent organization in the Library of Congress, has a wide selection of music instruction and appreciation materials available. The collection spans a variety of instruments and subjects, with many written specifically to help the visually impaired create music. If you’re interested, you can contact the Music Section directly at 800-424-8567 ext. 2 or email: sl.lbpd@dca.nm.gov
New From Our Recording Studio
DBC10421 – All in a Day’s Riding: Stories of New Mexico’s Range
By Stephen Zimmer; read by William Sheer
Selections of historical cowboy narratives illuminate the stories of cattle people in the past. The stories the writers tell are from their own experience, or as told to them by contemporaries, with introductions by the author Stephen Zimmer.
DBC10449 – People of Chaco
by Kendrick Frazier; read by Bruce Herr
In northwestern New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon lies a spectacular array of ruins. Like Stonehenge, they are both a monument to our pre-history and a cryptic puzzle. We know that in Chaco Canyon, one thousand years ago, there arose among the Pueblo people a great and culturally sophisticated civilization. But many questions remain: Just what function did Chaco Canyon fulfill? How great was its extent and influence? Why did its culture collapse? First published in 1986 and now updated with the latest archaeological and anthropological evidence, People of Chaco is an essential book for the general reader on the Chaco culture and ruins. With grace and erudition, Kendrick Frazier scours the canyon for clues about its unique cultural system, confirms its importance to archaeology, and saves this vital American narrative from the oblivion of history.
DBC10457 – Worn Smooth Between Devourings
by Lauren Camp; read by Lauren Camp
Poems that travel through fears of ecological devastation and national and global tragedy, and map routes away from despair. Worry remains in the background, even in landscapes that still hold time’s beginning. These precise, sonically-driven poems investigate a confessed gaze for contentment with the conviction of quiet rebellion. Through repeating distance, multiplying birds and crisscrossing storylines, they offer a testament to land and lack, grief, faith, and endurance.
This new book of poetry was written and performed by the New Mexico State Poet Laureate, Lauren Camp.
New Local Recordings from Other States
DBC19015 – Chasing the California Dream: a Solo Horseback Journey along the California Coast
by Lisa F. Wood; read by Sandra Swafford
Armed with a roll of duct tape and a good sense of humor, the author rode her Appaloosa horse along the coast from the Santa Monica Mountains near Los Angeles to the Oregon border. On her unusual quest, she explored California’s spectacular, remote landscapes, took life-threatening risks, met generous, helpful strangers, and gained a new perspective on the most basic needs of body and soul.
DBC19611 –Exotic Tails: A Veterinarian’s Journey
by Steven B. Metz; read by Louise Coates
Exotic Tails shares the humorous, dreadful, and heart-warming stories of one man’s dogged determination to follow his dreams. Dr. Metz recounts his unlikely journey from being a young boy frightened of even a fluffy puppy to becoming a skilled veterinarian treating and caring for a wild, exotic, and domestic medley of animals and companion pets. Metz has countless stories to tell with a cast of unforgettable characters: treating a circus tiger named Princess, and Anna Mae, an elephant with conjunctivitis; rescuing a napping boa constrictor caught in a guitar; reviving a ferret found in a freezer, and of course, a circus of curious dogs, frightened kitties, injured birds, and sickly fish.
DBC00904- John Mullan: the Tumultuous Life of a Western Road Builder
by Keith C. Peterson; read by Sue Vap
John Mullan’s celebrated road, a 625-mile link that connected the Missouri and Columbia Rivers, established the West Point graduate as an accomplished engineer. After completing the Northwest’s first engineered highway at age thirty-two, he lived for nearly another half century, a period of dynamic change. When he died in 1909, automobiles were making their initial crossings along his route. The arterial eventually became a critical link in America’s longest interstate freeway, I-90. Yet despite frequent mentions in books about the nineteenth century Northwest, the soldier-explorer has remained little more than a caricature: a dashing young Army officer who come West, builds one of its most important thoroughfares, and then disappears from regional literature. Now in lively prose, Idaho State Historian Keith Peterson takes a fresh look at Mullan, whose road significantly impacted the development of the Northwest.
DBC29161 – Kansas City Beer: A History of Brewing in the Heartland
By Pete Dulin; read by Melanie Melton
Food and beer writer Pete Dulin explores Kansas City’s hop-infused history and more than sixty breweries from the frontier era to the twenty-first century.
DBC00877 – Better an Honest Scoundrel: Chronicles of a Western Lawman
by Stephen T Watts; read by Maryan Stephens
From California to Texas to Europe to Alaska, Steve Watts grew up living a life of excitement and adventure. Coming from a broken home, he was in and out of trouble early in life. Always learning from his experiences, he reached a point when settling down became attractive, and with his new wife Marilyn chose Idaho as the place. But his journey through his career was not all roses. He soon developed ideas of what policemen should be like and when police fell short of his standards, Learning, growing, and experiencing every facet of law enforcement, Steve Watts became the lead investigator in thousands of criminal cases of every conceivable variety.
DBC29717 – Bryant & May: Peculiar London
by Christopher Foewler; read by Holly Sylvester
Thinking of a jaunt to England? Let Arthur Bryant and John May, London’s oldest police detectives, show you the oddities behind the city’s facades in this tongue-in-cheek travel guide. The detectives are joined by their boss, Raymond Land, and some of their most disreputable friends. They make all sorts of connections and show us why it’s almost impossible to separate fact from fiction in London.
DBC24843 – Eye of the Wolf
by Margaret Coel; read by Steven R. Allen
In 1874, Shoshone warriors led Captain Alfred Bates’s cavalry to Arapaho tribal grounds, and nearly everyone living there was massacred. As a nation, the Arapaho were finished, but their people survived. Now, someone has left three dead Shoshones on the old battlefield, positioned to mimic the bodies of those Arapaho killed in the historic slaughter. Someone is trying to tear open the painful wounds of the past and stir up a war between the Arapaho and Shoshone people.
DBC02052 –Dancing With the Octopus: a Memoir of a Crime
By Dan Jorgensen; read by Tom Speich
One Omaha winter day, in November 1978, when Debora Harding was just fourteen, she was abducted at knife point from a church parking lot. She was thrown into a van, assaulted, held for ransom, and then left to die as an ice storm descended over the city. Debora survived. She identified her attacker to the police and then returned to her teenage life in a dysfunctional home where she was expected to simply move on. It wasn’t until decades later, when beset by the symptoms of PTSD, that Debora undertook a radical project: she met her childhood attacker face-to-face in prison and began to reconsider and re-imagine her complex story.
What Are Your Reader Advisors Reading?
Yavar
“In celebration of Black History Month, I’d like to offer a book that’s perhaps a little off the beaten path, but absolutely fascinating and eye-opening: Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (DB053325) by noted civil rights activist Angela Davis. Davis examines the musical works of legendary blues singers Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday in historical and political context that was a total revelation for me. If you’re inclined to learn more about and better appreciate both black history and great music, give this book a try.”
Jeremy
“Sweeping and magisterial Honore Jeffers’ The Love Songs of W. E. B. DuBois (DB104944) charts the course of a single American family over the course of centuries. Deeply considered and moving this is an intimate epic well worth diving into.”
Jon
“Do you enjoy Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series, but you’ve read them all? Well, if you’ve ever wondered what it would be like if Reacher was The Bad Guy, you might enjoy Richard Stark’s Parker novels. Starting with The Hunter (DB077057), this series stars a tough, skilled and implacable criminal in a series of intricate heist novels where the best laid plans go wrong and Parker must escape trouble without violating his rigid, but amoral, code of professional ethics.”