Cambridge Springs Public Library

The Handmaid's Tale is not only a radical and brilliant departure for Margaret Atwood, it is a novel of such power that the reader will be unable to forget its images and its forecast. Set in the near future, it describes life in what was once the United States, now called the Republic of Gilead, a monotheocracy that has reacted to social unrest and a sharply declining birthrate by reverting to, and going beyond, the repressive intolerance of the...

How has information and communications technology changed the world of commerce and industry? This wide-ranging film tells a remarkable story of our times. Impact on work: In the 1970s office work was done with typewriters and paper and correcting fluid. Computers were giant devices in air-conditioned rooms. Then in the 1980s computers got smaller and began to appear on people's desks. Whole industries and professions vanished. Simon Steele, a sub-editor...

The Illusionists examines how global advertising firms, mass media conglomerates, and the beauty, fashion, and cosmetic surgery industries are changing the way people around the world define beauty and see themselves. Taking us from Harvard to the halls of the Louvre Museum, from a cosmetic surgeon's office in Beirut to the heart of Tokyo's Electric Town, the film explores how these industries saturate our lives with narrow, Westernized, consumer-driven...

Some "cultural givens" are so deeply imbedded in thought patterns they lead to communication breakdowns. View and discuss this series of eye opening cross-cultural situations. Observe how "cultural givens" such as "getting right to the point", "saving face," taking turns in conversation, and saying "yes" or "no" complicate inter-cultural communication. Allow a multi-cultural cast to teach your students practical guidelines for communicating between...

Dirty water has killed more humans than all the wars of history combined, but in the last 150 years, a series of radical ideas, extraordinary innovations and unsung heroes have changed our world. Johnson plunges into a sewer to understand what made a maverick engineer decide to lift the city of Chicago with screw jacks in order to build America's first sewer system. He talks about John Leal, who deliberately "poisoned" the water supply of 200,000...

Join best-selling author Steven Johnson to discover extraordinary stories behind six remarkable ideas that made modern life possible, the unsung heroes who brought them about and the unexpected and bizarre consequences each of these innovations triggered.

Johnson considers how the invention of the mirror gave rise to the Renaissance, how glass lenses allow us to reveal worlds within worlds and how, deep beneath the ocean, glass is essential to communication. He learns about the daring exploits of glassmakers who were forced to work under threat of the death penalty, a physics teacher who liked to fire molten glass from a crossbow and a scientist whose tinkering with a glass lens allowed 600 million...

Dirty water has killed more humans than all the wars of history combined, but in the last 150 years, a series of radical ideas, extraordinary innovations and unsung heroes have changed our world. Johnson plunges into a sewer to understand what made a maverick engineer decide to lift the city of Chicago with screw jacks in order to build America's first sewer system. He talks about John Leal, who deliberately "poisoned" the water supply of 200,000...

What do popular television makeover programs like What Not to Wear, The Biggest Loser, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and The Swan tell us about how to look and feel? What do they tell us about what a good life looks like in contemporary America? This new film based on Katherine Sender's book The Makeover explores these questions against the backdrop of American ideals of self-invention and upward mobility. Asking what it means to be an authentic...

Nice, reasonable people like us are "we," and strangers with weird beliefs are "they." This is how many of us see the world. But every "us" is somebody else's "them." Those who hold hidden assumptions or stereotypes consider them a recognition of reality, not a prejudice. A common reaction is "you might be prejudiced", but "I'm a realist". What is prejudice for "them" is merely a recognition of "the way things are" for "us". Them and Us explores common...