Book of the Week (December 18, 2006)

On the New Book Shelf
Call Number: LC 1756 .P47 2006

College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens, and Coeds, then and now
By Lynn Peril

Publisher Book Description: The author of Pink Think takes on a twentieth-century icon: the college girl.A geek who wears glasses? Or a sex kitten in a teddy? This is the dual vision of the college girl, the unique American archetype born when the age-old conflict over educating women was finally laid to rest. College was a place where women found self-esteem, and yet images in popular culture reflected a lingering distrust of the educated woman. Thus such lofty cultural expressions as Sex Kittens Go to College (1960) and a raft of naughty pictorials in men's magazines.

As in Pink Think, Lynn Peril combines women's history and popular culture—peppered with delightful examples of femoribilia from the turn of the twentieth century through the 1970s—in an intelligent and witty study of the college girl, the first woman to take that socially controversial step toward educational equity.

Book of the Week (December 11, 2006)

On the New Book Shelf

Call Number: PS 129 .L56 2006

Double Lives: American Writers' Friendships

by Richard Lingeman

Publisher's book description: Writers know they’re taking a risk when they befriend other writers. No matter how deep their mutual affection or genuine their admiration, there’s bound to be rivalry–and of course the danger that secrets and intimacies may end up in print. And yet, writers have always been irrevocably drawn to each other. In this insightful new book, veteran biographer Richard Lingeman explores the passions and betrayals that have enlivened the most significant, most fruitful friendships in American letters.From the unlikely pairing of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville to the kinetic Beat threesome of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Neal Cassady, American writers have formed friendships of high intensity, fierce competition, and extreme need. Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston revered each other’s work but fell out when they tried to collaborate on a doomed play. Henry James could never forgive Edith Wharton her success in the literary marketplace–much as he enjoyed cadging trips in her chauffeur-driven car. Theodore Dreiser and H. L. Mencken loved nothing better than exchanging acid barbs over steins of German beer, but neither could tolerate being criticized by the other. Yet all these friendships endured for years and yielded treasure troves of letters, essays, and thinly veiled fictional portraits. In Double Lives, Lingeman explores friendships that span the centuries, straddle both coasts, and take in every gender combination. Mark Twain and William Dean Howells were co-curmudgeons who shared a sense of humor and a deep streak of generosity. Willa Cather had the great good fortune to encounter the older Yankee writer Sarah Orne Jewett at the precise moment when Cather was ready to embrace her own professional and sexual identity. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway met in Paris while both were in their twenties, became fast friends for the worst reasons (Fitzgerald needed heroes, Hemingway admirers), and spent the next fifteen years disappointing each other. As Lingeman so deftly shows, this trajectory is all too common: the seesaw of fortune has challenged many of these rich and volatile friendships. Double Lives is that rare literary treat–a melding of life and letters that is at once brilliantly revealing and absolutely irresistible. In capturing the heartbeat and heartbreak of our most fascinating writerly relationships, Lingeman has fashioned a sparkling, multifaceted gem.

Book of the Week (December 4, 2006)

A Young Adult Book on the New Book Shelf
Call Number: PZ7 .M9416 Dai 2006

When you don't talk, there's a lot of stuff that ends up not getting said. Welcome to the summer that D.J. Schwenk of Red Bend, Wisconsin, learns to talk, and ends up having an awful lot of stuff to say. In Dairy Queen, an extraordinary debut novel full of humor, football, and dairy farming, Catherine Gilbert Murdock introduces one of the most likable young adult heroines to come along in quite some time. Grandpa Schwenk was a dairy farmer, and D.J.'s ex-football coach father was one, too, until he messed up his hip moving the manure spreader. With her dad injured, her mom always at work, and her football star brothers off at college and not speaking to the rest of the family, it falls to D.J. to run the struggling farm as best she can, including the five a.m. milking of all thirty-two cows by hand. If that wasn't enough to deal with, the Huge Family Fight over Christmas may mean she'll never see her brothers again. Dutiful D.J. takes it all in stride — until she decides to try out for her high school football team, her best friend, Amber, starts acting strange, and she falls in love with the opposing team's quarterback, whom she just happens to be training. Murdock's care and craft come through in every aspect of this book: the spot-on dialogue that is laugh-out-loud funny and always rings true; the stress and hard work of life on a dairy farm; the tough training, body aches, and anguish of high school football; and perhaps most important, the humor, heartache, and messiness of learning to open up to family and friends. Publisher's Book Description

Book of the Week (November 27, 2006)

On the New Book Shelf

Call Number: HV 6432.7 .W75 2006

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

By Lawrence Wright

A sweeping narrative history of the events leading to 9/11, a groundbreaking look at the people and ideas, the terrorist plans and the Western intelligence failures that culminated in the assault on America. Lawrence Wright’s remarkable book is based on five years of research and hundreds of interviews that he conducted in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan, England, France, Germany, Spain, and the United States.

The Looming Tower achieves an unprecedented level of intimacy and insight by telling the story through the interweaving lives of four men: the two leaders of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri; the FBI’s counterterrorism chief, John O’Neill; and the former head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki al-Faisal.As these lives unfold, we see revealed: the crosscurrents of modern Islam that helped to radicalize Zawahiri and bin Laden . . . the birth of al-Qaeda and its unsteady development into an organization capable of the American embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania and the attack on the USS Cole . . . O’Neill’s heroic efforts to track al-Qaeda before 9/11, and his tragic death in the World Trade towers . . . Prince Turki’s transformation from bin Laden’s ally to his enemy . . . the failures of the FBI, CIA, and NSA to share intelligence that might have prevented the 9/11 attacks. Publisher Book Description

Book of the Week (November 20, 2006)

Happy Thanksgiving - in honor of the holiday this week's selection looks at food and food advertising in America.

On the New Book Shelf

Call Number HF 5827.85 .P37 2006

Food is Love: Advertising and Gender Roles in Modern America

by Katherine J. Parkin

Modern advertising has changed dramatically since the early twentieth century, but when it comes to food, Katherine Parkin writes, the message has remained consistent. Advertisers have historically promoted food in distinctly gendered terms, returning repeatedly to themes that associated shopping and cooking with women. Foremost among them was that, regardless of the actual work involved, women should serve food to demonstrate love for their families. In identifying shopping and cooking as an expression of love, ads helped to both establish and reinforce the belief that kitchen work was women's work, even as women's participation in the labor force dramatically increased. Alternately flattering her skills as a homemaker and preying on her insecurities, advertisers suggested that using their products would give a woman irresistible sexual allure, a happy marriage, and healthy children. Beyond their own individual success, ads also promised that by buying and making the right foods, a woman could help her family achieve social status, maintain its racial or ethnic identity, and assimilate into the American mainstream.
Advertisers clung tenaciously to this paradigm throughout great upheavals in the patterns of American work, diet, and gender roles. To discover why, Food Is Love draws on thousands of ads that appeared in the most popular magazines of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, including the Ladies' Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, Ebony, and the Saturday Evening Post. The book also cites the records of one of the nation's preeminent advertising firms, as well as the motivational research advertisers utilized to reach their customers.

Book of the Week (November 13, 2006)

On the New Book Shelf

Call Number: DS 736 .P66 2006

Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the
Story of the New China

by John Pomfret

A first-hand account of the remarkable transformation of China over the past forty years as seen through the life of an award-winning journalist and his four Chinese classmates
As a twenty-year-old exchange student from Stanford University, John Pomfret spent a year at Nanjing University in China. His fellow classmates were among those who survived the twin tragedies of Mao’s rule—the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution—and whose success in government and private industry today are shaping China’s future. Pomfret went on to a career in journalism, spending the bulk of his time in China. After attending the twentieth reunion of his class, he decided to reacquaint himself with some of his classmates. Chinese Lessons is their story and his own.
Beginning with Pomfret’s first days in China, Chinese Lessons takes us back to the often torturous paths that brought together the Nanjing University History Class of 1982. One classmate’s father was killed during the Cultural Revolution for the crime of being an intellectual; another classmate labored in the fields for years rather than agree to a Party-arranged marriage; a third was forced to publicly denounce and humiliate her father. As we watch Pomfret and his classmates begin to make their lives as adults, we see as never before the human cost and triumph of China’s transition from near-feudal communism to first-world capitalism. (Publisher's book description)

Book of the Week (November 6, 2006)

On the New Book Shelf
Call Number: TX 754 .O98 K87 2006

The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell

By Mark Kurlansky

With Cod and Salt, author Mark Kurlansky proved that even the most ubiquitous foodstuff can serve as a subject for choice nonfiction. With this book, he takes a step toward prime delicacies.At first glance, this history of oysters in New York City seems fixed on a topic too slender for book-length treatment, but Kurlansky's richly anecdotal narrative convinces otherwise. Oysters and the city were once almost synonymous; the huge oyster beds on the Hudson contained half of the world's supplies. The Big Oyster is part diverting history and part cautionary tale: The exhaustion of New York's oyster beds was a needless environmental crime. Exquisite savor. (Barnes & Noble editors)

Book of the Week (Oct. 30, 2006)

And for a very different look at the Crescent City:

On the New Book Shelf
Call Number: ML 419 .A75 B78 2006

Louis Armstrong's New Orleans
By Thomas Brothers

In the early twentieth century, New Orleans was a place of colliding identities and histories, and Louis Armstrong was a gifted young man of psychological nimbleness. A dark-skinned, impoverished child, he grew up under low expectations, Jim Crow legislation, and vigilante terrorism. Yet he also grew up at the center of African American vernacular traditions from the Deep South, learning the ecstatic music of the Sanctified Church, blues played by street musicians, and the plantation tradition of ragging a tune.Louis Armstrong's New Orleans interweaves a searching account of early twentieth-century New Orleans with a narrative of the first twenty-one years of Armstrong's life. Drawing on a stunning body of first-person accounts, this book tells the rags-to-riches tale of Armstrong's early life and the social and musical forces that shaped him. The city and the musician are both extraordinary, their relationship unique, and their impact on American culture incalculable. (Publisher's book description)

Book of the Week (Oct. 23, 2006)

On the New Book Shelf
Call Number: HV 636 2005 .L8 B75 2006

The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast

By Douglas Brinkley

Bestselling historian Douglas Brinkley, a professor at Tulane University, lived through the destruction of Hurricane Katrina with his fellow New Orleans residents, and now in The Great Deluge he has written one of the first complete accounts of that harrowing week, which sorts out the bewildering events of the storm and its aftermath, telling the stories of unsung heroes and incompetent officials alike. (Amazon.com book description)

Book of the Week (Oct. 16, 2006)

On the New Book Shelf

Call Number: PS 3557 .O315 Z468 2006

The Making of a Writer: Journals, 1961-1963

by Gail Godwin; edited by Rob Neufeld

Gail Godwin was twenty-four years old and working as a waitress in the North Carolina mountains when she wrote: “I want to be everybody who is great; I want to create everything that has ever been created.” It is a declaration that only a wildly ambitious young writer would make in the privacy of her journal. In the heady days of her literary apprenticeship, Godwin kept a daily chronicle of her dreams and desires, her travels, love affairs, struggles, and breakthroughs. Now, at the urging of her friend Joyce Carol Oates, Godwin has distilled these early journals, which run from 1961 to 1963, to their brilliant and charming essence. . . An inspired and inspiring volume, The Making of a Writer opens a shining window into the life and craft of a great writer just coming into her own.

Gail Godwin is a three-time National Book Award nominee and the bestselling author of many critically acclaimed novels, including A Mother and Two Daughters, Violet Clay, Father Melancholy’s Daughter, Evensong, The Good Husband, Evenings at Five, and, most recently, Queen of the Underworld. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts grant for both fiction and libretto writing. She has written libretti for ten musical works with the composer Robert Starer. Rob Neufeld is a librarian and a book reviewer for the Asheville Citizen-Times. He directs the “Together We Read” program for Western North Carolina. Publisher Book Description

Book of the Week (Oct. 9, 2006)

On the New Book shelf:
Call number: QC 16 .F49 A3 2006

Classic Feynman: All the Adventures of a Curious Character
Edited by Ralph Leighton

Richard Feynman (1918-1988) thrived on outrageous adventures. In the phenomenal national bestsellers "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" and "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" the Nobel Prize-winning physicist recounted in an inimitable voice his adventures trading ideas on atomic physics with Einstein and Bohr and ideas on gambling with Nick the Greek, painting a naked female toreador, accompanying a ballet on his bongo drums, solving the mystery of the Challenger disaster, and much else of an eyebrow-raising, hugely entertaining, and astounding nature. One of the most influential and creative minds of recent history, Feynman also possessed an unparalleled ability as a storyteller, a delightful coincidence celebrated in this special omnibus edition of his classic stories. Now packaged with an hour-long audio CD of the 1978 "Los Alamos from Below" lecture, Classic Feynman offers readers a chance to finally hear a great tale in the orator's own voice. (Publisher's book description)

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