Confucius: the Golden Rule is a biography of the ancient philosopher, Confucius. Although Confucius never wrote down his thoughts, followers recorded his teachings which are still relayed today. The French artist Clément’s elegant paintings of towns, temples and the bucktoothed Confucius himself have an ancient feel that perfectly sets the story.

Jada Pinkett Smith's poem Girls Hold Up This World comes alive with photographs of women and girls from all walks of life. The tender poem highlights the balance of feminine strength and compassion.

What is the future of gas prices and gas availability?
Read these books to try to understand the situation.

Deffeyes, Kenneth Beyond Oil: the View from Hubbert’s Peak

Goodstein, David Out of Gas: the End of the Age of Oil

Heinberg, Richard The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies

Klare, Michael Blood and Oil: the Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Petroleum Dependency

Roberts, Paul. The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World

Simmons, Matthew Twilight in the Desert: the Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy

Develop an appreciation for the tree rats in your yard by reading these lovely accounts. Such Agreeable Friends: Life with a Remarkable Group of Urban Squirrels by Grace Marmor Spruch records her observations of the squirrels in Washington Square Park and of the one climbing the rubber plant inside her Greenwich Village apartment. Eugene Kinkead's Squirrel Book has wonderful squirrel stories that may convert us all to squirrel fanciers.

Ann Arbor’s own Davy Rothbart, writer and magazine publisher, can be seen on CTN Channel 17 this week, speaking on his collection Found:The Best Lost, Tossed, and Forgotten Items from Around the World. The program, part of the library’s 'Sunday Edition' series, was recorded in May. It can be viewed on October 4 at 3:30 p.m., October 6 at 1:30 p.m., October 7 at 5:00 p.m., and on October 8 at 1:30 p.m. Rothbart, a graduate of Community High and the University of Michigan, is the creator of Found magazine which publishes the text of the discarded bits of people’s lives: receipts, shopping lists, unsent letters, personal notes, etc. During the program he also reads one of the stories in his eagerly-awaited, just-released collection of stories The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas.

"Listen for me on a spring night, on a wet night, on a rainy night.…Listen for me tonight, tonight, and I'll sing you to sleep." So begins Song of the Water Boatman and other Pond Poems by Joyce Sidman. Poetry forms from Haiku to sea shanties highlight the food chain of a pond, cattails in all seasons, or late fall when a painted turtle settles into the mud. Each poem is accompanied by a paragraph that provides scientific information about a specific creature, plant, or aspect of pond life. Becky Prange's woodcuts are a natural accompaniment to Sidman’s poems. My favorite is the title poem about a Water Boatman; “Down through the jolly waters green, I stroke with legs both long and lean, like a streamlined class-A submarine…on a sunny summer’s morning.” Delightful!!

13 year old Sam Lopez is a scrappy, “pretty” boy who grew up in California with a “hippie” mother. When Sam moves to England to live with relatives, he agrees to pose as a girl for the first five days of school in order to gain acceptance into the new group. Boy2Girl offers “laugh out loud” scenes and thoughtful reflection on gender and roles. By the end, life goes on. Terence Black states "Entertainment ... often has a serious thread running through it."

The Play Ground is in the mood for a black comedy. Check out Redbud Productions new feature: HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES. It is playing at the Riverside Arts Center in Ypsilanti October 6-9 and 13-16. This award winning play is set in the mid 1960s and concerns a zoo keeper/songwriter, his star-struck girlfriend and other assorted characters who cross their paths during a few history making days in New York City.

Take your family to pick apples and I bet you'll find yourself looking for recipes. An Apple Pie Harvest will get you started. This fun book also inicudes background information on this ubiquitous fruit. If you don't quite remember what you picked, the color photographs toward the beginning may remind you. Don't fear, the recipes in the book go beyond pies and applesauce. However, do be warned a relatively high proportion of the recipes seem to involve meats like duck, veal, lamb and I even spied a rabbit recipe. Vegetarians beware!

August Wilson, award winning playwright, died Sunday, October 2, 2005, of liver cancer.

Mr. Wilson, a high school dropout who then devoted himself to education by inhaling knowledge at his local Pittsburgh public library, originally intended on being a poet. But his drive to celebrate the African American experience exploded onto paper in the form of a cycle of ten plays that forever shaped how this country sees the real Black America. The first entry in his cycle, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, was produced on Broadway in 1984. Fences, another in the cycle, won a Pulitzer in 1987, as did The Piano Lesson, in 1990. The last play in this historic body of work, Radio Golf, opened at the Yale Repertory Theater in the spring of 2005, and is the only one in the cycle that has not yet appeared on Broadway.