Library has history display

The McKell Branch Library of the Greenup County (Ky.) Public Library will have a pictorial history of Greenup County on display at the library, 22 McKell Lane, South Shore, Ky., through Nov. 30. M. Douglas Thompson of Russell, Ky., along with the help of friends has put together this pictorial history.

For more information call the library at (606) 932-4478.

Midkiff leads discussion

Tess Midkiff, retired former director of Shawnee State University’s Clark Library, will lead a discussion of Sara Gruen’s novel Water for Elephants at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday at the Southern Ohio Museum. Titled “The Circus as an Open Book,” the program is one of several special attractions accompanying the Museum’s exhibition “Sawdust and Spectacle: Under the Big Top in Small Town America.”

Admission to the book discussion is free, and the public is encouraged to attend and join in a lively conversion of the circus world, its hierarchies, comedies and tragedies as presented in the popular contemporary novel that has remained on the New York Times Bestseller List for many months.

Gruen’s Water for Elephants, depicting “the pathetic grandeur of the Depression-era circus,” was described in Elizabeth Judd’s New York Times book review as “an enchanting escapist fairy tale.”

“It gives the flavor of those who worked in the circus and those who attended it,” said Midkiff, commenting on the book’s appropriate tie-in with the different aspects of the circus world explored in the current exhibition.

Midkiff, who served 26 years as the Clark Library Director, earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Education at the University of Kentucky and a Masters Degree in Library Science at Simmons College in Boston.

Midkiff is a member of the Portsmouth City School Board, the Portsmouth Rotary Club in which she serves as Sergeant-at-Arms, and the Literacy Council of Scioto County. She is also a board member of the Portsmouth Main Streets organization and an active member of the Great Dames Book Club.

“The Circus as an Open Book” is presented with support from the Ohio Humanities Council, a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Scioto Foundation, the Richard D. Marting Foundation, the Ohio Arts Council and the City of Portsmouth. Further information about the Nov. 18 book discussion may be obtained by telephoning the Southern Ohio Museum at (740) 354-5629.