© 2024 KRCU Public Radio
90.9 Cape Girardeau | 88.9-HD Ste. Genevieve | 88.7 Poplar Bluff
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Betty Martin

Host, Martin's Must-Reads

Betty Martin was born in Boston, Massachusetts to a Lutheran pastor and his organist wife. Betty’s love of books was inspired by her father who read to all four children each night.

After graduating from the University of Connecticut with a B.A. in American History in 1975, she followed her mother’s advice and earned a Masters in Library Science from the Southern Connecticut State University. In her first professional library position she served as  the children’s librarian for the Wallingford Public Library in Wallingford, Connecticut, for fifteen years.

In 1992 she moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where she served as a Regional Youth Services Coordinator for the St. Louis Public Library. She moved to Cape Girardeau, Missouri in 1994 to marry Mark Martin and was hired by the Cape Girardeau Public Library to serve as the Adult Services Coordinator which she did for three years until being promoted to director. She served as director for twenty-one years and counts leading the organization through a building project as the highlight of her career.

She retired in July of 2018 and now has plenty of time to read. Her reading tastes lean towards historical fiction, any well-written novel with quirky characters and a few nonfiction titles. Her ultimate hope in recording book reviews is that, someday, someone will make an action figure of her just like Nancy Pearl has, or maybe a bobble-head.

  • “I hope that as you read the amazing story of Crow Mary you felt her spirit and her courage and strength as she fought to do what she knew to survive in the 1800’s. Both the author and I, Crow Mary’s great-granddaughter, felt her overwhelming spirit for the first time when we visited Fort Walsh, AKA Fort Farwell, a historical site in Saskatchewan, Canada. There I learned about the Cypress Hills Massacre and my great-grandmother’s part in it.”
  • “It began with an itch. Not a metaphorical itch to travel the world or some quarter-life crisis. But a literal, physical itch. A maddening, claw-at-your-skin, keep-you-up-at-night itch that surfaced during my senior year of college, first on the tops of my feet and then moving up my calves and thighs.”
  • “Amos Barrowfield realized something was wrong as soon as he came within sight of Badford. There were men working in the fields, but not as many as he expected. The road into the village was deserted but for an empty cart. Amos was a clothier, or “putter out.”
  • As the cover says, if you want to read “ a richly rewarding novel of women’s friendship, of true love, and of what happens when we reach beyond our grasp for the great beyond” then you must read The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes.
  • “When two young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and nonhuman characters alike.”
  • “That Veronica and I were given keys and told to come early on a frozen Saturday in April to open the school for the Our Town Auditions was proof of our dull reliability. The play’s director, Mr. Martin, was my grandmother’s friend and State Farm agent. ...Citizens of New Hampshire could not get enough of Our Town. We felt about the play the way other Americans felt about the Constitution or the “Star-Spangled Banner.”
  • “My Grandma Nene always said that early was on time, on time was late, and late was unacceptable. Fatty was unacceptably late again."
  • “One evening, during that painful time, Samuel announced to Anita and Leticia that he had something important to tell them. ....He told the woman and the girl about his traumatic childhood, about losing his family and being exiled to a strange and hostile place, about being an orphan, always lonely, always in fear, until Luke and Lidia Evans came into his life, bringing him comfort and love. ...Finally, he opened his violin case, pulled out his medal, and placed in in Anita’s hand.”
  • “The Grand Staircase. In the basement of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, below the Arms and Armor wing and outside the guards’ Dispatch Office, there are stacks of empty art crates. The crates come in all shapes and sizes... fit to ship rare treasures. On the morning of my first day in uniform I stand beside these sturdy, romantic things, wondering what my own role in the museum will feel like.”
  • People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks is a novel based on the fact of an ancient copy of the Haggadah, a Jewish text that lays out the order of the Passover Seder. This is an extremely precious, illuminated manuscript originally from medieval Spain.