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)