Congressman Frank J. Guarini Library Blog

Here are some reliable sources: Time, Politico, Biography.com, NPR, The Washington Post, National Catholic Reporter, The New York Times and the BBC.

For those of us who grew up with her cooking shows or were the beneficiaries of dishes cooked from her Mastering The Art of French Cooking, this is indeed a milestone day. Biographies are at: biography.com, history.com, PBS(a quite extensive tribute site including a wonderful remix), and The New York Times (with a plethora of articles and links). Her career with the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, is described here. The Census Bureau also offers a tribute, and her kitchen is at the Smithsonian. Some of her recipes are at the PBS and The New York Times sites; another batch is at food.com. A long interview from 1999 is at TV Legends. Bon appetit!

For those of us who grew up reading and cherishing his work, Ray Bradbury’s death signals to some of us the demise of our youth. His work spanned the decades and genres, forcing us to confront our own fears and prejudices. Our office contains several of his works, each of which we remember with fondness. He was a champion of reading, libraries, and books. Biographical and other information can be found in: The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction; NEA; Los Angeles Times; Times Topics – Ray Bradbury; io9; Locus;  PBS NewsHour; and Washington Post (with a photo gallery). Interviews are here and dozens of YouTube interviews and conversations are available. Bradbury did a lengthy interview in the Spring 2010 issue of The Paris Review. Excerpts from some of his books are here. President Obama issued a statement on his passing. And what may be his last piece, Take Me Home, is in the June 6, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.

“Rocket summer. The words passed among the people in the open, airing houses. Rocket summer. The warm desert air changing the frost patterns on the windows, erasing the art work. The skis and sleds suddenly useless.” – from The Martian Chronicles, chapter 1.

France has a new president by the name of Francois Hollande; Russia has re-installed Vladimir Putin as president; Ratko Mladic goes on trial for mass murder; and Abdrabbuh Hadi is the newly appointed president of Yemen. Where does one find accurate information on these people? A place to start with is the  BBC News site that has a search box in which you can find biographical information by the simple expedient of typing “profile” along with the person’s name; for example, typing “profile Francois Hollande” will retrieve this biography along with other valuable links. Hundreds of valuable portraits are contained here. Another place to mine in the BBC is its Country Profiles section where you will find not only biographical information on the leaders of every country and selected NGOs, but you will also find overviews and media outlets for each entity. Times Topics People provides thousands of biographical profiles along with free access to relevant NY Times articles as well as links to outside sources. For example, here are Hadi’s entry, Mladic’s profile, and Putin’s biography. So whether you are looking for information on the president of Sri Lanka Mahinda Rajapaksa or Alekandr Lukashenko of Belarus, using either or both of these sources will yield satisfying results.

With all the media coverage focusing on the debt crisis in Europe, we thought everyone could use some help in identifying all the players. Whoiswho is the official directory of the European Union; it provides searching by name, EU institution, or hierarchical listing. The information is fairly sparse, but it does identify everyone in the various EU entities and provides their title, telephone and fax numbers as well as their email and Internet site. Additional  information can be garnered from the biographies of the European Commissioners of the EU, and the members of the European Parliament. A non-EU site, the Council of Europe, provides personal data on its officials at its leaders page and its member states page.

Here are some good sites: Sports Biographies: Women (HickokSports, quite extensive); 100 Greatest Female Athletes (Sports Illustrated);  Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame; Distinguished Women of Past and Present: Sports; Great Women of Cycling; and USA Track and Field: Women.

Harriet Tubman, born a slave, died a free woman in upstate New York. One of the most courageous women of her time, she personally risked her life on many occasions to guide escaped slaves north along the Underground Railroad. (For Jersey City’s role in this network, please come here. Two of the most important collections of documents on the  Railroad are: Wilbur Siebert’s The Underground Railroad for Slavery to Freedom published in 1898 and containing the accounts of active abolitionists from that time, and William Still’s 1872 work Underground Rail Road which included eyewitness accounts. Still himself worked with the Philadelphia Underground Railroad.) Harriet Tubman worked as a cook, nurse, and spy for the Union army. She lectured and was an ardent suffragette as well. For so accomplished and heroic figure, she left no writings, letters, or memoirs because she was illiterate. So what we have about her is derived from sources once removed. However, these sources do portray an individual of immense moral stature; John Brown, the famous abolitionist, called her “…the most of a man, naturally, that I ever met with.”(Quoted in John Brown, 1800-1859: A Biography Fifty Years After, p.327). As was the case with many who served the government, Tubman was forced to subsist on a very small monthly stipend; to supplement her income, she had Sarah Bradford help her write her autobiography Harriet: The Moses of Her People (1869). With the proceeds from this volume, she purchased a house in Auburn, N.Y. and turned it into a home for the aged and needy. She died in 1913. Additional information is at: Harriet Ross Tubman (SUNY Buffalo); Harriet Tubman (University of North Carolina); Harriet Tubman (americaslibrary.gov); Harriet Tubman: Online Resources (Library of Congress); Black Dispatches (CIA – details Tubman’s spy activities during the Civil War); Contemporary Newspaper Articles (from “Chronicling America“); and Harriet Tubman (PBS).

This collection presents current information on contemporary writers in the UK. Biographical information, along with critical appraisals, author bibliographies, and prizes awarded are listed for each profile.

Biographical information can be found here (Reuters), here (Britannica), here (Reporters Without Borders),  and here (New York Times).

Many new members have been elected to Congress; their biographies will be found here. As always, the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, 1774 to Present provides information on all those who have served in Congress, and it will be updated to reflect these new members. Other biographical sources are discussed here and here.