Around Town

Best Selling Author Talks About Love of Libraries, Her Latest Book in Watertown

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Bestselling author Susan Orlean, right, poses with a fan after she spoke at the Watertown Free Public Library on Thursday. For writer Susan Orlean, trips to her hometown library in Shaker Heights, Ohio, had been a childhood ritual, a way of bonding with her mother as they collected armfuls of books to read and discussed their borrowed treasures on the ride home. Even today, she can remember the sights and smells of that small branch library, and the thump of the date-stamp machine as it gave the books their due dates. But for all the magic of those early visits, the adult Orlean became more of a bookstore customer than a library patron, a buyer rather than a borrower. She rediscovered her fascination with libraries around 2010, when she took her young son to visit their local library.

Around Town

Mother Shares Her Mission of Ending the Cycle of Violence After Losing Her Son in a Shooting

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Tina Chéry shared the story of how she became dedicated to peace after her son was gunned down in his Boston neighborhood with an audience at Watertown Middle School. In the early 1990s, Tina Chéry thought she had found her place in the world as a stay-at-home mom and good citizen, as someone who attended church and donated to people in need, even if she felt removed from the problems that affected her Dorchester neighborhood. The mother of three and her husband had cut back on spending so she could be there when her 15-year-old son Louis Brown came home from school every day. Theirs was the family who welcomed in the neighborhood children, with hotdogs and hamburgers, and lemonade and popsicles in the summer. “That was my house.