Movie of the Week (December 4, 2007)

In the IMC (3rd floor of the library)

Call Number: PN 1997.2 .J69

Joyeux Noel: Merry Christmas

Produced by Christophe Rossignon; written and directed by Christian Carion

All Movie Guide description: The year is 1914, and as World War I continues to rage across the European countryside, four individuals stuck on the front lines find themselves faced with the unthinkable in director Christian Carion's Academy Award-nominated account of the true-life wartime event that would offer hope for peace in mankind's darkest hour. When the war machines began rolling in the summer of 1914, the devastation that it waged upon German, British, and French troops was palpable. As the winter winds began to blow and the soldiers sat huddled in their trenches awaiting the generous Christmas care packages sent by the families, the sounds of warfare took a momentary backseat to the yearning for brotherhood among all of mankind. It is here that the fate of a French lieutenant, a Scottish priest, a German tenor, and a Danish soprano's lives were about to be changed forever. On Christmas Eve of that year, the lonely souls of the front lines abandoned their arms to reach out to their enemies on the battlefield and greet them with not anger or hostility, but with the simple, kindly gesture of a much needed cigarette or a treasured piece of chocolate, and to put their differences aside long enough to wish their brothers a sincere "Merry Christmas!" Jason Buchanan

Book of the Week (November 26, 2007)

On the New Book Shelf

Call Number: HN 683.5 .K236 2007

Planet India: How the Fastest-Growing Democracy is transforming America and the World

By Mira Kamdar

Publisher's Description: India is everywhere: on magazine covers and cinema marquees, at the gym and in the kitchen, in corporate boardrooms and on Capitol Hill. Through incisive reportage and illuminating analysis, Mira Kamdar explores India's astonishing transformation from a developing country into a global powerhouse. She takes us inside India, reporting on the people, companies, and policies defining the new India and revealing how it will profoundly affect our future -- financially, culturally, politically.

The world's fastest-growing democracy, India has the youngest population on the planet, and a middle class as big as the population of the entire United States. Its market has the potential to become the world's largest. As one film producer told Kamdar when they met in New York, "Who needs the American audience? There are only 300 million people here." Not only is India the ideal market for the next new thing, but with a highly skilled English-speaking workforce, elite educational institutions, and growing foreign investment, India is emerging as an innovator of the technology that is driving the next phase of the global economy.

While India is celebrating its meteoric rise, it is also racing against time to bring the benefits of the twenty-first century to the 800 million Indians who live on less than two dollars per day, to find the sustainable energy to fuel its explosive economic growth, and to navigate international and domestic politics to ensure India's security and its status as a global power. India is the world in microcosm: the challenges it faces are universal -- from combating terrorism, poverty, and disease to protecting the environment and creating jobs. The urgency of these challenges for India is spurring innovative solutions, which will catapult it to the top of the new world order. If India succeeds, it will not only save itself, it will save us all. If it fails, we will all suffer. As goes India, so goes the world.

Mira Kamdar tells the dramatic story of a nation in the midst of redefining itself and our world. Provocative, timely, and essential, Planet India is the groundbreaking book that will convince Americans just how high the stakes are -- what there is to lose, and what there is to gain from India's meteoric rise.

Book of the Week (November 15, 2007)

In the IMC on the 3rd Floor of the Library
Call Number: IMC PZ7 .A382 Ab 2007

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian

By Sherman Alexie

In honor of American Indian Heritage Month

Publisher's Description: In his first book for young adults, bestselling author Sherman Alexie tells the story of Junior, a budding cartoonist growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Determined to take his future into his own hands, Junior leaves his troubled school on the rez to attend an all-white farm town high school where the only other Indian is the school mascot. Heartbreaking, funny, and beautifully written, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which is based on the author's own experiences, coupled with poignant drawings by acclaimed artist Ellen Forney, that reflect the character's art, chronicles the contemporary adolescence of one Native American boy as he attempts to break away from the life he was destined to live.

An award-winning author, poet, and filmmaker, Sherman Alexie was named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists and has been lauded by The Boston Globe as "an important voice in American literature." Sherman Alexie is one of the most well known and beloved literary writers of his generation. His five works of fiction have received numerous awards and citations, including the PEN/Malamud Award for Fiction and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award, and have been translated into eleven languages.

Book of the Week (November 5, 2007)

On the New Book Shelf

Call Number: QK 494.5 .P66 S89 2007

Tree: A Life Story

By David Suzuki and Wayne Grady

Publisher's Description: In Tree: A Life Story, authors David Suzuki and Wayne Grady extend that celebration in a "biography" of this extraordinary - and extraordinarily important - organism. A story that spans a millennium and includes a cast of millions but focuses on a single tree, a Douglas fir. It grows close to Suzuki's beach cottage, is 50 meters (160 feet) high, about five meters (16 feet) in diameter, and may be 400 years old.

Tree describes in poetic detail the organism's modest origins that begin with a dramatic burst of millions of microscopic grains of pollen. The authors recount the amazing characteristics of the species, how they reproduce and how they receive from and offer nourishment to generations of other plants and animals. The tree's pivotal role in making life possible for the creatures around it - including human beings - is lovingly explored. The richly detailed text and Robert Bateman's original art pay tribute to this ubiquitous organism that is too often taken for granted. Wildlife artist Robert Bateman illustrates.

Book of the Week (October 29, 2007)

On the New Book Shelf
Call Number: HV 8078 .A53 2007

The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession
By Ken Alder

Publisher's Description: The story of the lie detector takes us straight into the dark recesses of the American soul. It also leads us on a noir journey through some of the most storied episodes in American history. That is because the device we take for granted as an indicator of guilt or innocence actually tells us more about our beliefs than about our deeds. The machine does not measure deception so much as feelings of guilt or shame. As Ken Alder reveals in his fascinating and disturbing account, the history of the lie detector exposes fundamental truths about our culture: why we long to know the secret thoughts of our fellow citizens; why we believe in popular science; and why America embraced the culture of "truthiness."

For centuries, people searched in vain for a way to unmask liars, seeking clues in blushing cheeks, shifty eyes, and curling toes...all the body's outward signs. But not until the 1920s did a cop with a Ph.D. team up with an entrepreneurial high school student from Berkeley, California and claim to have invented a foolproof machine that peered directly into the human heart. In a few short years their polygraph had transformed police work, seized headlines, solved sensational murders, and enthralled the nation. In Chicago, the capital of American vice, the two men wielded their device to clean up corruption, reform the police, and probe the minds of infamous killers. Before long the lie detector had become the nation's "mechanical conscience," searching for honesty on Main Street, in Hollywood, and even within Washington, D.C. Husbands and wives tested each other's fidelity. Corporations tested their employees' honesty. Movie studios and advertisers tested their audiences' responses. Eventually, thousands of government employees were tested for their loyalty and "morals" -- for lack of which many lost their jobs.

This deceptive device took America -- and only America -- by storm. Today, the CIA still administers polygraphs to its employees. Accused celebrities loudly trumpet its clean bill of truth. And the U.S. government, as part of its new "war on terror," is currently exploring forms of lie detection that reach directly into the brain. Apparently, America still dreams of a technology that will render human beings transparent. The Lie Detectors is the entertaining and thought-provoking story of that American obsession.

Book of the Week (October 8, 2007)

On the New Book Shelf

Call Number: QC 981.8 .C5 R367 2007

Degrees that Matter: Climate Change and the University

By Ann Rappaport and Sarah Hammond Creighton

Publisher's Description: Universities and colleges are in a unique position to take a leadership role on global warming. As communities, they can strategize and organize effective action. As laboratories for learning and centers of research, they can reduce their own emissions of greenhouse gases, educate students about global warming, and direct scholarly attention to issues related to climate change and energy. Degrees That Matter offers practical guidance for those who want to harness the power of universities and other institutions, and provides perspectives on how to motivate change and inspire action within complex organizations.

The authors, drawing on almost a decade of experience leading the Tufts Climate Initiative and other institutional "greening" efforts, provide both the basic facts and more detailed information about climate issues. Some chapters can be used as stand-alone action guides for specific areas, while others put climate action in scientific, economic, and political contexts. The authors discuss the major sources of greenhouse gas emissions on campus and the importance of an emissions inventory for setting goals and strategies. They consider decision making (and decision makers), costs, budgets, and institutional priorities, and describe different emission reduction projects. They look at the importance of master planning for the university and the value of action by individual community members. Finally, they suggest climate action projects for the classroom and offer guidance for tapping student energy. Their aim is to inspire others to take on global warming regardless of organizational setting.

Book of the Week (October 1, 2007)

On the New Book Shelf

Call Number: PS 3569 .O6547 A93 2007

At the Same Time: Essays & Speeches

By Susan Sontag

Publisher's Description: "A writer is someone who pays attention to the world," Susan Sontag said in her 2003 acceptance speech for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, and no one exemplified this definition more than she. Sontag’s incisive intelligence, expressive brilliance, and deep curiosity about art, politics, and the writer’s responsibility to bear witness have secured her place as one of the most important thinkers and writers of the twentieth century.

At the Same Time gathers sixteen essays and addresses written in the last years of Sontag’s life, when her work was being honored on the international stage, that reflect on the personally liberating nature of literature, her deepest commitment, and on political activism and resistance to injustice as an ethical duty. She considers the works of writers from the little-known Soviet novelist Leonid Tsypkin, who struggled and eventually succeeded in publishing his only book days before his death; to the greats, such as Nadine Gordimer, who enlarge our capacity for moral judgment. Sontag also fearlessly addresses the dilemmas of post-9/11 America, from the degradation of our political rhetoric to the appalling torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib.

At the Same Time, which includes a foreword by her son, David Rieff, is a passionate, compelling work from an American writer at the height of her powers, who always saw literature "as a passport to enter a larger life, the zone of freedom." Susan Sontag was the author of four novels, including In America, which won the 2000 National Book Award for Fiction; a collection of stories; several plays; and seven works of nonfiction. She died in New York City on December 28, 2004.

Book of the Week (September 24, 2007)

On the New Book Shelf
Call Number: HD 9130.8 .U5 B72 2007

The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America
By Allan M. Brandt

Publisher's Description: The definitive history of the cigarette, the product that shaped twentieth-century America--from modern advertising to science, from regulatory politics to our sense of glamour and style.
The industrial manufacture of cigarettes began in the late nineteenth century, but it wasn't until the invention of the modern consumer, advertising campaign--pioneered by cigarette brands--that the product really took off at the turn of the century. The cigarette became an indispensable accessory of glamour and sex appeal: from Marlene Dietrich to Humphrey Bogart to Anne Bancroft, we have imagined stars with cigarettes in their mouths, and imitated them.

The cigarette--the ultimate icon of our consumer culture--serves as a vehicle for historian Allan Brandt to explore critical aspects of American life. From agriculture to big business, from medicine to politics, The Cigarette Century shows how smoking came to be so deeply implicated in our culture, science, policy, and law. In this magisterial book, Brandt demonstrates how the cigarette reflects the most powerful debates of our time about risk, responsibility, and human health. The Cigarette Century reaches across many disciplines to form a broad and compelling synthesis, showing how one humble (and largely useless) product came to play such a dominant role in our lives and deaths.

Book of the Week (September 17, 2007)

On the New Book Shelf
Call Number: QH 442.2 .K637 2006

A Clone of Your Own?
By Arlene Judith Klotzko

Publisher's Book Description: Someday soon (if it has not happened already in secret), the first cloned human being will be born and mankind will embark on a scientific and moral journey whose destination cannot be foretold. In A Clone of Your Own?, Arlene Judith Klotzko describes the new world of possibilities that can be glimpsed over the horizon. In a lucid and engaging narrative, she explains that the technology to create clones of living beings already exists. inaugurated in 1996 by Dolly, the sheep, the first mammal clone formed from a single adult cell, Dolly was the culmination of a long scientific quest to understand the puzzle of our development from one cell into a complex organism--the outcome of a "fantastic experiment" envisioned six decades before her birth.

The human fascination with cloning goes beyond science and its extraordinary medical implications. In riveting prose full of allusions to art, music, and theatre, Klotzko explains why the prospect of human cloning triggers our deepest hopes and our darkest fears and forces us to ponder what it would mean to have a "clone of our own."

Arlene Judith Klotzko, a bioethicist and lawyer, is Writer in Residence at the Science Museum, London. She is also a Visiting Scholar in Bioethics at the Windeyer Institute, University College, London. She provides commentary on science, ethics and policy for television and radio in the U.S., UK and worldwide through Sky News, BBC World Television News, Bloomberg Television, Voice of America and the BBC World Service.

Book of the Week (September 3, 2007)

On the New Book Shelf

Call Number: PN 4888 .R3 R63 2007

The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation

By Gene Roberts & Hank Klibanoff

Publisher's Book Description: This is the story of how America awakened to its race problem, of how a nation that longed for unity after World War II came instead to see, hear, and learn about the shocking indignities and injustices of racial segregation in the South—and the brutality used to enforce it. It is the story of how the nation’s press, after decades of ignoring the problem, came to recognize the importance of the civil rights struggle and turn it into the most significant domestic news event of the twentieth century.

Drawing on private correspondence, notes from secret meetings, unpublished articles, and interviews, veteran journalists Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff go behind the headlines and datelines to show how a dedicated cadre of newsmen—first black reporters, then liberal southern editors, then reporters and photographers from the national press and the broadcast media—revealed to a nation its most shameful shortcomings and propelled its citizens to act. We watch the black press move bravely into the front row of the confrontation, only to be attacked and kept away from the action. Following the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision striking down school segregation and the South’s mobilization against it, we see a growing number of white reporters venture South to cover the Emmett Till murder trial, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the integration of the University of Alabama. We witness some southern editors joining the call for massive resistance and working with segregationist organizations to thwart compliance.

But we also see a handful of other southern editors write forcefully and daringly for obedience to federal mandates, signaling to the nation that moderate forces were prepared to push the region into the mainstream.The pace quickens in Little Rock, where reporters test the boundaries of journalistic integrity, then gain momentum as they cover shuttered schools in Virginia, sit-ins in North Carolina, mob-led riots in Mississippi, Freedom Ride buses being set afire, fire hoses and dogs in Birmingham, and long, tense marches through the rural South.

For many journalists, the conditions they found, the fear they felt, and the violence they saw were transforming. Their growing disgust matched the mounting countrywide outrage as The New York Times, Newsweek, NBC News, and other major news organizations, many of them headed by southerners, turned a regional story into a national drama.Meticulously researched and vividly rendered, The Race Beat is an unprecedented account of one of the most volatile periods in our nation’s history, as told by those who covered it.

Book of the Week (August 15, 2007)

On the New Book Shelf
Call Number: QL 737 .U4 M86 2007

Exotic Animal Field Guide: Nonnative Hoofed Mammals in the United States

By Elizabeth Cary Mungall

Publisher's Description: From axis deer to zebra, an estimated 230,000 or more foreign hoofed mammals live in the United States. These "exotics"--animals native to other places--can be found in Texas, Florida, New Mexico, Maryland, California, New Hampshire, Hawaii, and other states on ranches, in wildlife preserves, at safari parks, and sometimes just behind high fences or on a mountainside along the byroads of America.

Featuring eighty different kinds of hoofed mammals, this field guide covers common exotics, such as blackbuck antelope and fallow deer, some less common species like scimitar-horned oryx, and a few newer arrivals like defassa waterbuck. In the introduction, author Elizabeth Cary Mungall explains how these species got here, tells where people can go to view them, and gives a few simple guidelines for responsible ownership.

The main portion of the book contains fully illustrated species accounts, with native range maps and information about food habits, habitat, temperament, breeding and birth seasons, and fencing needs. A list of exotics-related organizations and a reference section round out the text. Photographs of each species make identification easy, and, in a chapter on photographing exotics, Christian Mungall shows readers how to take their own great pictures of these animals.

Book of the Week (August 1, 2007)

Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints

By Joan Acocella

On the New Book Shelf:

Call Number: NX 165 .A36 2007

Publisher's Description: From one of our most admired cultural critics, thirty-one essays on some of the most influential artists of our time––writers, dancers, choreographers, sculptors––and two saints of all time, Joan of Arc and Mary Magdalene. Among the people discussed: Italo Svevo, Stefan Zweig, Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Yourcenar, Joseph Roth, Vaslav Nijinsky, Lincoln Kirstein, Jerome Robbins, Martha Graham, Bob Fosse, H. L. Mencken, Dorothy Parker, Susan Sontag, and Philip Roth.

What unites the book is Acocella’s interest in the making of art and in the courage, perseverance, and, sometimes, dumb luck that it requires. Here is Acocella on Primo Levi, a chemist who, after the Nazis failed to kill him, wrote Survival in Auschwitz, the noblest of the camp memoirs, and followed it with twelve more books . . . Hilary Mantel, the aspiring young lawyer stuck on a couch with a chronic and debilitating illness, who asked herself, “What can one do on a couch?” (well, one could write) and went on to become one of England’s premier novelists . . . M. F. K. Fisher, who, numb with grief over her husband’s suicide, dictated to her sister the witty and classic How to Cook a Wolf . . . Marguerite Yourcenar, the victim of a ten-year writer’s block, who found in an old trunk a draft of a forgotten novel and finished the book: Memoirs of Hadrian . . . George Balanchine, who, after losing his family at age nine, survived the Russian Revolution, escaped from the Soviet Union at twenty, was for five years house choreographer for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, came to the United States with the promise that he could set up a ballet company, and had to wait another fifteen years before being able to establish his extraordinary New York City Ballet . . . And Acocella on Mary Magdalene and Joan of Arc reminds us that saints in the service of their visions–like artists in the creation of their art–draw power from the very blows of fortune that might be expected to defeat them.

Book of the Week (July 9, 2007)

The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring
By Richard Preston

Call Number: SD 397 .R3 P74 2007

Publisher's Description: Hidden away in the rain forest valleys in Northern California are the largest and tallest organisms the world has ever sustained -- the coast redwood trees, Sequoia sempervirens. Ninety-six percent of the ancient redwood forests have been destroyed by logging, but the untouched fragments that remain are among the great wonders of nature. The biggest redwoods have trunks up to thirty feet wide and can rise more than thirty-five stories above the ground, forming cathedral-like structures in the air. Until recently, redwoods were thought to be virtually impossible to ascend, and the canopy at the tops of these majestic trees was undiscovered.

In The Wild Trees, Richard Preston unfolds the spellbinding story of Steve Sillett, Marie Antoine, and the tiny group of daring botanists and amateur naturalists that found a lost world above California, a world that is dangerous, hauntingly beautiful, and unexplored.
The canopy voyagers are young -- just college students when they start their quest -- and they share a passion for these trees, persevering in spite of sometimes crushing personal obstacles and failings. They take big risks, they ignore common wisdom (such as the notion that there’s nothing left to discover in North America), and they even make love in hammocks stretched between branches three hundred feet in the air.

The deep redwood canopy is a vertical Eden filled with mosses, lichens, spotted salamanders, hanging gardens of ferns, and thickets of huckleberry bushes, all growing out of massive trunk systems that have fused and formed flying buttresses, sometimes carved into blackened chambers, hollowed out by fire, called "fire caves." Thick layers of soil sitting on limbs harbor animal and plant life that is unknown to science. Humans move through the deep canopy suspended on ropes, far out of sight of the ground, knowing that the price of a small mistake can be a plunge to one’s death.

Preston’s account of this amazing world, by turns terrifying, moving, and fascinating, is an adventure story told in novelistic detail by a master of nonfiction narrative. The author shares his protagonists’ passion for tall trees, and he mastered the techniques of tall-tree climbing to tell the story in The Wild Trees -- the story of the fate of the world’s most splendid forests and of the imperiled biosphere itself.

Book of the Week (June 15, 2007)

The faith club : a Muslim, Christian, Jew-- three women search for understanding

By Ranya Idliby, Suzanne Oliver, Priscilla Warner

In the Library main stacks
Call Number: BL 410 .I35 2006

Publisher's Description: "Welcome to the Faith Club. We're three mothers from three faiths -- Islam, Christianity, and Judaism -- who got together to write a picture book for our children that would highlight the connections between our religions. But no sooner had we started talking about our beliefs and how to explain them to our children than our differences led to misunderstandings. Our project nearly fell apart."

After September 11th, Ranya Idliby, an American Muslim of Palestinian descent, faced constant questions about Islam, God, and death from her children, the only Muslims in their classrooms. Inspired by a story about Muhammad, Ranya reached out to two other mothers -- a Christian and a Jew -- to try to understand and answer these questions for her children. After just a few meetings, however, it became clear that the women themselves needed an honest and open environment where they could admit -- and discuss -- their concerns, stereotypes, and misunderstandings about one another. After hours of soul-searching about the issues that divided them, Ranya, Suzanne, and Priscilla grew close enough to discover and explore what united them.

The Faith Club is a memoir of spiritual reflections in three voices that will make readers feel as if they are eavesdropping on the authors' private conversations, provocative discussions, and often controversial opinions and conclusions. The authors wrestle with the issues of anti-Semitism, prejudice against Muslims, and preconceptions of Christians at a time when fundamentalists dominate the public face of Christianity. They write beautifully and affectingly of their families, their losses and grief, their fears and hopes for themselves and their loved ones. And as the authors reveal their deepest beliefs, readers watch the blossoming of a profound interfaith friendship and the birth of a new way of relating to others.

Book of the Week (June 1, 2007)

On the Library's New Book Shelf
Call Number: SH 219 .F34 2006

Fish on Friday: Feasting, Fasting and the Discovery of the New World
By Brian Fagan

Publisher's Description: What gave Christopher Columbus the confidence in 1492 to set out across the Atlantic Ocean? What persuaded the king and queen of Spain to commission the voyage? It would be convenient to believe that Columbus and his men were uniquely courageous. A more reasonable explanation, however, is that Columbus was heir to a body of knowledge about seas and ships acquired at great cost over many centuries. Fish on Friday tells a new story of the discovery of America. In Brian Fagan's view, that discovery is the product of the long sweep of history: the spread of Christianity and the radical cultural changes it brought to Europe, the interaction of economic necessity with a changing climate, and generations of unknown fishermen who explored the North Atlantic in the centuries before Columbus. The Church's tradition of not eating meats on holy days created a vast market for fish that could not be fully satisfied by fish farms, better boats, or new preservation techniques. Then, when climate change in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries diminished fish stocks off Norway and Iceland, fishermen were forced to range ever farther to the west-eventually discovering incredibly rich shoals within sight of the Nova Scotia coast. In Ireland in 1490, Columbus could well have heard about this unknown land. The rest is history.

Brian Fagan is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His books include The Little Ice Age; Floods, Famines and Emperors; and The Long Summer. He lives in Santa Barbara, California.

Book of the Week (May 15, 2007)

The Calculus Wars: Newton, Leibniz and the Greatest Mathematical Clash of all time.

By Jason Socrates Bardi

Call Number: QA 303 .B2896 2006

Publisher's Description: Now regarded as the bane of many college students’ existence, calculus was one of the most important mathematical innovations of the seventeenth century. But a dispute over its discovery sewed the seeds of discontent between two of the greatest scientific giants of all time — Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

Today Newton and Leibniz are generally considered the twin independent inventors of calculus, and they are both credited with giving mathematics its greatest push forward since the time of the Greeks. Had they known each other under different circumstances, they might have been friends. But in their own lifetimes, the joint glory of calculus was not enough for either and each declared war against the other, openly and in secret.

This long and bitter dispute has been swept under the carpet by historians — perhaps because it reveals Newton and Leibniz in their worst light — but The Calculus Wars tells the full story in narrative form for the first time. This vibrant and gripping scientific potboiler ultimately exposes how these twin mathematical giants were brilliant, proud, at times mad and, in the end, completely human.

For more information visit the book's website.

Book of the Week (May 8, 2007)

Einstein: His Life and Universe

By Walter Isaacson

Call Number: QC 16.E5 I76 2007

Publisher's Description: By the author of the acclaimed bestseller Benjamin Franklin, this is the first full biography of Albert Einstein since all of his papers have become available. How did his mind work? What made him a genius? Isaacson's biography shows how his scientific imagination sprang from the rebellious nature of his personality. His fascinating story is a testament to the connection between creativity and freedom.
Based on newly released personal letters of Einstein, this book explores how an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk — a struggling father in a difficult marriage who couldn't get a teaching job or a doctorate — became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos, the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom and the universe. His success came from questioning conventional wisdom and marveling at mysteries that struck others as mundane. This led him to embrace a morality and politics based on respect for free minds, free spirits, and free individuals.
These traits are just as vital for this new century of globalization, in which our success will depend on our creativity, as they were for the beginning of the last century, when Einstein helped usher in the modern age.

Book of the Week (April 30, 2007)

The Name of the Wind

By Patrick Rothfuss

On display on the new book shelf in the library and the featured title in a free book talk by the author at the Albertson Library on Wednesday, May 2 at 3:00 pm.

Publisher's Book Description: NOT TO BE MISSED: THE POWERFUL DEBUT NOVEL FROM FANTASY'S NEXT SUPERSTAR! Told in Kvothe's own voice, this is the tale of the magically gifted young man who grows to be the most notorious wizard his world has ever seen.The intimate narrative of his childhood in a troupe of traveling players, his years spent as a near-feral orphan in a crime-ridden city, his daringly brazen yet successful bid to enter a legendary school of magic, and his life as a fugitive after the murder of a king form a gripping coming-of-age story unrivaled in recent literature. A high-action story written with a poet's hand, The Name of the Wind is a masterpiece that will transport readers into the body and mind of a wizard.

Book of the Week (April 16, 2007)

April 19 is Support Teen Literature Day, a part of this week's celebration of National Library Week!

In the IMC - on the 3rd floor of the Library
Call Number: PZ 7 .K678337 Am 2006

American Born Chinese
By Gene Luen Yang


Gene Luen Yang has won the 2007 Michael L. Printz Award for his masterful graphic novel “American Born Chinese.” Yang draws from American pop culture and ancient Chinese mythology in his groundbreaking work. Expertly told in words and pictures, Yang’s story in three parts follows a Chinese American teenager’s struggle to define himself against racial stereotypes. “American Born Chinese” is the first graphic novel to be recognized by the Michael L. Printz Committee.

Yang, who began drawing comics in the fifth grade, is a high school teacher in the San Francisco Bay area. The annual award for literary excellence is administered by the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), a division of the American Library Association, and is sponsored by Booklist magazine. The award, first given in 2000, is named for the late Michael L. Printz, a Topeka, Kans., school librarian known for discovering and promoting quality books for young adults. (Source: Young Adult Library Services Association)

Book of the Week (April 9, 2007)

In the IMC on the 3rd floor
Call Number: PZ 7 .W6367 Fl 2006

Flotsam
By David Weisner

Winner of the 2007 Caldecott Medal, presented to the illustrator of the most distinguished American picture book for children.

Publisher's description: A bright, science-minded boy goes to the beach equipped to collect and examine flotsam--anything floating that has been washed ashore. Bottles, lost toys, small objects of every description are among his usual finds. But there's no way he could have prepared for one particular discovery: a barnacle-encrusted underwater camera, with its own secrets to share . . . and to keep.

In each of his amazing picture books, David Wiesner has revealed the magical possibilities of some ordinary thing or happening--a frog on a lily pad, a trip to the Empire State Building, a well-known nursery tale. This time, a day at the beach is the springboard into a wildly imaginative exploration of the mysteries of the deep, and of the qualities that enable us to witness these wonders and delight in them.

Book of the Week (April 2, 2007)

On Display on top of the New Book shelf collection until 4/13, then in the Leisure Reading Collection in the main library's lobby

Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu

By J. Maarten Troost

Publisher's Description: After his misadventures among the natives of heat-blasted Kiribati, memorably chronicled in The Sex Lives of Cannibals, it would be understandable for Maarten Troost to be in no hurry to return to the South Pacific. But then in a strangely appropriate place for a modern epiphany, the aisle of a Super Stop & Shop, he discovers that he feels remarkably out of place among the trappings of twenty-first-century American life, and longs to return to simpler days when a shortage of beer numbered among his chief concerns.So off again he goes, this time to Vanuatu, with his girlfriend-turned-wife, Sylvia. Like Tarawa, Vanuatu proves to be a fallen paradise, breathtaking in its beauty but also maddeningly backward. With his trademark sardonic wit, Troost relates his run-ins with Mother Nature (volcanoes, typhoons, earthquakes, giant centipedes) and the kava-besotted, clothing-optional lifestyle of the islanders. Perhaps as a result of these customs, Sylvia gets pregnant, and soon their son is born in slightly-more-civilized Fiji. As they contend with new parenthood in a country known for cannibalism and government coups, their boy begins to take quite naturally to island living, in complete contrast to his dad.A rip-roaringly funny account of life in the farthest corners of the world, Getting Stoned with Savages again reveals the wry appreciation of the absurd and infectious joy of discovery that make Troost one of the most engaging and original travel writers around.

Book of the Week (March 26, 2007)

On the New Book Shelf
Call Number: PS 3563 .O8745 Z75 2006

In Search of Willie Morris

By Larry L. King

Publisher's Description: The intimate biography of the charismatic, hugely talented, influential, and troubled Willie Morris-star editor of Harper's in the 1960s and author of North Toward Home and My Dog Skip. Willie Morris, the famously talented-and complex-writer and editor, helped to remake American journalism and wrote more than a dozen books, with several classics among them. His time at the head of Harper's magazine, where he was made editor at age thirty-two, is legendary. With writers like David Halberstam, Norman Mailer, and author of this book, Larry L. King, Harper's became the magazine to read and the place to be in print. Morris was friend, colleague, or mentor to a remarkable cast of writers-William Styron, James Jones, Truman Capote, George Plimpton, Gay Talese, and later in life, Barry Hannah, Donna Tartt, John Grisham, and Winston Groom. In Search of Willie Morris is a wise, sometimes raucous, and moving look at Morris that conveys the energy and activity of the years at the top and the troubles, talents, late rallies, and mysteries of his later life. Written with the affection of a close friend and the critical insight of a fellow writer, it is an absorbing biography of an extraordinarily gifted literary man and raconteur who inspired both wonder and frustration, and who left behind a legacy and a body of work that endures.

Book of the Week (March 12, 2007)

On the New Book Shelf

Call Number: E 184 .H66 N397 2006

Enrique's Journey

By Sonia Nazario

Publisher's Description: In this astonishing true story, award-winning journalist Sonia Nazario recounts the unforgettable odyssey of a Honduran boy who braves unimaginable hardship and peril to reach his mother in the United States. When Enrique is five years old, his mother, Lourdes, too poor to feed her children, leaves Honduras to work in the United States. The move allows her to send money back home to Enrique so he can eat better and go to school past the third grade.Lourdes promises Enrique she will return quickly. But she struggles in America. Years pass. He begs for his mother to come back. Without her, he becomes lonely and troubled. When she calls, Lourdes tells him to be patient. Enrique despairs of ever seeing her again. After eleven years apart, he decides he will go find her.Enrique sets off alone from Tegucigalpa, with little more than a slip of paper bearing his mother’s North Carolina telephone number. Without money, he will make the dangerous and illegal trek up the length of Mexico the only way he can–clinging to the sides and tops of freight trains.With gritty determination and a deep longing to be by his mother’s side, Enrique travels through hostile, unknown worlds. Each step of the way through Mexico, he and other migrants, many of them children, are hunted like animals. Gangsters control the tops of the trains. Bandits rob and kill migrants up and down the tracks. Corrupt cops all along the route are out to fleece and deport them. To evade Mexican police and immigration authorities, they must jump onto and off the moving boxcars they call El Tren de la Muerte–The Train of Death. Enrique pushes forward using his wit, courage, and hope–and the kindness of strangers. It is an epic journey, one thousands of immigrant children make each year to find their mothers in the United States.Based on the Los Angeles Times newspaper series that won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for feature writing and another for feature photography, Enrique’s Journey is the timeless story of families torn apart, the yearning to be together again, and a boy who will risk his life to find the mother he loves.

Book of the Week (March 5, 2007)

In Honor of Women's History Month, on the new book shelf in the library:
Call Number: E 342.1 .M2 A45 2006

A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation

By Catherine Allgor


Publisher's Description: When the roar of the Revolution had finally died down, a new generation of politicians was summoned to the Potomac to assemble the nation’s capital. Into that unsteady atmosphere—which would soon enough erupt into another conflict with Britain—Dolley Madison arrived, alongside her husband, James. Within a few years, she had mastered both the social and political intricacies of the city, and by her death in 1849 was the most celebrated person in Washington. And yet, to most Americans, she’s best known for saving a portrait from the burning White House.

Why did her contemporaries so admire a lady so little known today? In A Perfect Union, acclaimed historian Catherine Allgor reveals how Dolley manipulated the contstraints of her gender to construct an American democratic ruling style and to achieve her husband’s political goals. By emphasizing cooperation over coercion—building bridges instead of bunkers—she left us with not only an important story about our past but a model for a modern form of politics.

Book of the Week (February 26, 2007)

On the New Book shelf at the Reference Desk
Call Number: REF HM 425 .B53 2007 (11 volumes)

The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology
Edited by George Ritzer

The BLACKWELL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SOCIOLOGY is arranged across eleven volumes in A-Z format. . .This ground-breaking project will bring together specially commissioned entries written and edited by an international team of the world's best scholars and teachers. It will provide:- Clear, concise, expert definitions and explanations of the key concepts- An essential reference for expert and newcomer alike, with entries ranging from extended explorations of major topics to short definitions of key terms- Materials that have historically defined the discipline, but also more recent developments, significantly updating the store of sociological knowledge- Introductions to sociological theories and research that have developed outside of the United States and Western Europe- Sophisticated cross-referencing and search facilities- Lexicon by subject area, bibliography, and index.Work on the project has been divided into 32 editorial areas, each of which represents a major area of inquiry within sociology. Each area has a specially selected advisory editor from an international team of eminent scholars.For further details on advisory editors and contributors together with a provisional list of entries, go online to the Encyclopedia website: http://www.sociologyencyclopedia.com

Book of the Week (February 19, 2007)

On the New Book Shelf
Call Number: HQ 777 .G37 2006

See Jane Hit: Why girls are growing more violent and what we can do about it.

By James Garbarino

Publisher Description: From one of America's leading authorities on juvenile violence and aggression, a groundbreaking investigation of the explosion in violent behavior by girls: its causes, consequences, and possible solutions... In See Jane Hit, Dr. James Garbarino shows that the rise in girls' violence is the product of many interrelated cultural developments, several of which are largely positive. Girls have learned to express themselves physically in organized sports-thirty years ago, the number of boys playing organized sports was more than ten times greater than the number of girls; now we're almost at 1:1. In a number of other ways, too, the cultural foot binding that has kept girls from embracing their own physical power has been removed, which is largely to be celebrated. But nothing happens in isolation, and there's rarely such a momentous societal shift with absolutely no downside. One problem is that girls aren't being trained to handle their own physical aggression the way boys are: our methods of child-rearing culture include all sorts of mechanisms for socializing boys to express their violence in socially acceptable ways, but with girls we lag very far behind. At the same time, the culture has become more toxic for boys and girls alike, and girls' sexuality is linked with violence in new and disturbing ways. Ultimately, this brilliant, far-reaching examination of physical aggression and the "new" American girl shows us there is much we can do differently. See Jane Hit is not just a powerful wake-up call; it's a clear-eyed, compassionate prescription for real-world solutions.

Book of the Week (February 12, 2007)

On Reserve at the Main Circulation Desk for Communication 374

Call Number: LB 1047.3 .S267 2002

How to Write Research Papers

3rd Edition

A short, concise guide with "easy to follow, practical instruction for high school and college students. Recommended by Liz Fakazis, faculty member in the UW-Stevens Point Communication department.

Book of the Week (February 5, 2007)

In Celebration of Black History Month

On the New Book Shelf
Call Number: E 185.97 .C6 A3

Target Zero: A Life in Writing
By Eldridge Cleaver, edited by Kathleen Cleaver


Publisher Description: Former Black Panther information minister Eldridge Cleaver was a complex man who inspired profound adulation, love, rage, and, among many, fear. Target Zero brings Cleaver's controversial story into focus through his own words. This books charts Cleaver's life through his writings: his quiet childhood, his youth spent in prison, his startling emergence as a Black Panther leader who became a "fugitive from justice" by the end of 1968, his seven-year exile, and his religious and political conversion following his return to the U.S. Target Zero, which brings together previously unpublished essays, short stories, letters, interviews, and poems, is the most significant collection of Eldridge Cleaver's writing since his bestselling book Soul on Ice (1968).

Book of the Week (January 29, 2007)

On the New Book Shelf
Call Number: ML 3524 .W53 2006

Will the Circle be Unbroken:
Country Music in America

Edited by Paul Kingsbury & Alanna Nash

From the Publisher: An illustrated, literary work on the history and development of Country Music. Produced in association with the Country Music Hall of Fame, the highest authority on country music. Includes essays by Rosanne Cash, Mary Chapin Carpenter and a foreword by Willie Nelson. Artifacts and memorabilia from the Country Music Hall of Fame archives give an authentic picture of the country music scene. Clear and entertaining text delves deep into the history of country music from its folk beginnings to the multi-million-dollar industry of today.