Book of the Week (September 14, 2009)

On the New Book Shelf in the Library
Call Number: PS 508 G39 .G39 2009

Gay American Autobiography: Writings from Whitman to Sedaris

Edited by David Bergman

Publisher's Description: In the first anthology to survey the full range of gay men’s autobiographical writing from Walt Whitman to the present, Gay American Autobiography draws excerpts from letters, journals, oral histories, memoirs, and autobiographies to provide examples of the best life writing over the last century and a half.

Volume editor David Bergman guides the reader chronologically through selected writings that give voice to every generation of gay writers since the nineteenth century, including a diverse array of American men of African, European, Jewish, Asian, and Latino heritage. Documenting a range of life experiences that encompass tattoo artists and academics, composers and drag queens, hustlers and clerks, it contains accounts of turn-of-the-century transvestites, gay rights activists, men battling AIDS, and soldiers attempting to come out in the army. Each selection provides important insight on the wide spectrum of ways gay men have defined and lived their lives, highlighting how self-awareness changes an author’s experience.

The volume includes an introduction by Bergman and headnotes for each of the nearly forty entries. Bringing many out-of-print and hard-to-find works to new readers, this challenging and comprehensive anthology chronicles American gay history and life struggles over the course of the past 150 years.

Book of the Week (September 7, 2009)

On the New Book Shelf in the Library

Call Number: GV 1045 .M36 2009

Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists are Changing American Cities

By Jeff Mapes

Publisher's Description: In a world of growing traffic congestion, expensive oil, and threats of cataclysmic climate change, a grassroots movement is carving out a niche for bicycles on the streets of urban cityscapes. In Pedaling Revolution, Jeff Mapes explores the growing urban bike culture that is changing the look and feel of cities across the U.S. He rides with bike advocates who are taming the streets of New York City, joins the street circus that is Critical Mass in San Francisco, and gets inspired by the everyday folk pedaling in Amsterdam, the nirvana of American bike activists. Mapes, a seasoned political journalist and long-time bike commuter, explores the growth of bike advocacy while covering such issues as environmental safety, and health aspects of bicycling for short urban trips. His rich cast of characters includes Noah Budnick, a young bicycle advocate in New York who almost died in a crash near the Brooklyn Bridge, and Congressman James Oberstar (D-MN), who took to bicycling in his fifties and helped unleash a new flood of federal money for bikeways. Chapters set in Chicago and Portland show how bicycling has become a political act, with seemingly dozens of subcultures, and how cyclists, with the encouragement of local officials, are seizing streets back from motorists.

Pedaling Revolution is essential reading for the approximately one million people who regularly ride their bike to work or on errands, for anyone engaged in transportation, urban planning, sustainability and public health-and for drivers trying to understand why they're seeing so many cyclists. All will be interested in how urban bike activists are creating the future of how we travel and live in 21st century cities.

Review from the New York Times Sunday Book Review

Badgerlink Upgrades

Library Expands Database Offerings

Badgerlink is celebrating its 10th Anniversary. It supplies Wisconsin universities, schools, libraries and all residents with access to many article and newspaper databases. Three major resources that are part of our library's holdings from EbscoHost were upgraded over the summer.

Academic Search Premier, an upgrade of Academic Search Elite, covers a broad range of academic disciplines and offers full-text access to an additional 2,500 journal titles. Business Source Premier, an upgrade of Business Source Elite offers full text of over 2,000 business journals, as well as market research reports, industry reports, company profiles and SWOT analyses. Newspaper Source Plus includes full text for over 1,500 papers including the New York Times, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor and the Chicago Tribune.

On a not so positive note, the subscription to Proquest National and Wisconsin newspapers was cancelled by Badgerlink. A majority of the newspapers covered are included in the Ebsco upgrades, but an analysis of possible replacement of the lost coverage is underway.

Book of the Week (August 24, 2009)

On the New Book Shelf in the Library Lobby
Call Number:QC 903 .G53 2009

The Politics of Climate Change
By Anthony Giddens

Climate change differs from any other problem that, as collective humanity, we face today. If it goes unchecked, the consequences are likely to be catastrophic for human life on earth. Yet for most people, and for many policy-makers too, it tends to be a "back of the mind" issue. We recognise its importance and even its urgency, but for the most part it is swamped by more immediate concerns. Politicians have woken up to the dangers, but at the moment their responses are mainly on the level of gesture rather than being, as they have to be, both concrete and radical.

Political action and intervention, on local, national and international levels, is going to have a decisive effect on whether or not we can limit global warming, as well as how we adapt to that already occurring. At the moment, however, Anthony Giddens argues controversially, we do not have a systematic politics of climate change. Politics as usual won't allow us to deal with the problems we face, while the recipes of the main challenger to orthodox politics, the green movement, are flawed at source. Giddens introduces a range of new concepts and proposals to fill in the gap, and examines in depth the connections between climate change and energy security.

This book is likely to become a classic in the field. It will be of appeal to everyone concerned about how we can cope with what amounts to a crisis for our civilisation.

About the Author
Anthony Giddens is the former director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is now a member of the House of Lords. His many books include The Third Way and Europe in the Global Age.