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.