Date/Time
Date(s) - Thu, 10/24/19
6:30 pm - 7:30 pm
0

Location
Andover Public Library

Adults & Teens 12+

As part of the Pushing the Limits Programs funded through the National Science Foundation, we are pleased to host the coaches and players of the Conneaut Area Senior High Eagles Football Team to discuss their use of tradition in building a football family.  Read more …

Coach Pat Gould, Assistant Coaches Todd Greenawalt, Bill Stevenson, and player Noah Richardson will discuss the traditions used by the coaches and players and their experiences in breaking tradition by finding new ways to be successful as a team and as players.  

Pushing the Limits is a reading, viewing and discussion program for adults in communities served by rural libraries, made possible by a grant from the National Science Foundation. The program is the work of a team of library professionals, scientists, and filmmakers from organizations including Dartmouth College, the Association for Rural and Small Libraries, the Califa Library Group, Public Library Association, Dawson Media Group, Institute for Learning Innovations, Goodman Research Group, and Oregon State University.   

Recommended reading for the Tradition portion of the Pushing the Limits Programs:

  • Friday Night Lights: A Town, and A Dream. (25th Anniversary Edition). By H.G. Bissinger
    • Return once again to the timeless account of the Permian Panthers of Odessa – the winningest high-school football team in Texas history. Socially and racially divided, Odessa isn’t known to be a place big on dreams, but every Friday night from September to December, when the Panthers play football, dreams can come true. [Book summary source: Amazon.com]

  • Eagle Blue: A Team, a Tribe, and a High School Basketball Season in Arctic Alaska. By Michael D’Orso

    • Eight miles above the Arctic Circle, there’s a village with no roads leading to it, but a high school basketball tradition that lights up winter’s darkness and a team of native Alaskan boys who know “no quit.” D’Orso (coauthor of Like No Other Time with Tom Daschle) follows the Fort Yukon Eagles through their 2005 season to the state championship, shifting between a mesmerizing narrative and the thoughts of the players, their coach and their fans. What emerges is more than a sports story; it’s a striking portrait of a community consisting of a traditional culture bombarded with modernity, where alcoholism, domestic violence and school dropout rates run wild.  . . . Among D’Orso’s unusual characters are the woman who built a public library in her home, the families who adopt abandoned children, and, of course, the boys for whom “hard” has an entirely different meaning (e.g., regularly trudging through “icy darkness” to board flights to Fairbanks for games). With a ghostlike presence, D’Orso lends a voice to a place that deserves to be known. [Book summary source: Publishers Weekly, January 2, 2006.]

  • The Chimes. By Anna Smaill

    • Simon is on a mission to find a person in London, and the only information he has is a song. Simon’s goal makes more sense when one understands that the England of The Chimes is one controlled by music and memory loss. Every day, the enigmatic elite ruling class known as the Order plays a particular kind of music to wipe society’s memory. To remember certain aspects of their past and daily life, citizens rely on their muscle memory and items they carry with them. Those that can’t make it from the day-to-day or lose their memory items become zombie-like creatures called the memorylost. Without the ability to retain any sort of history, collective memory, or even written language, the culture is one that revolves around the preservation of the few memories possible and music. . . . This imaginative novel from poet Smaill was longlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize. – [Book summary source: Emily Whitmore. Booklist. April 15, 2016]