| Volume 1 |
May 2006 |
Issue 10 |
New Books
| Coming Soon | Obituaries
| Awards
Book 'em looks at selected books that are on, or have
recently been, on the New Book display, as well as other news in the
world of books. A complete list of books (and other materials)
cataloged in the past month may be found at http://hiraml.hiram.edu/ftlist.
Book 'em is published monthly from August through May. Please
direct any comments to the editor, David Everett.
This is the final Book 'em of the year. Have a safe summer and if
you read something you'd like to recommend to the rest of campus, feel
free to submit to Hiram Reads! See you in August.
New Books
Fiction
The Tent (New York: Nan A.
Talese/Doubleday, 2006 - call
number F At96t) is the latest collection of short stories,
poems, and other short pieces from award-winning Canadian author
Margaret Atwood.
Non-Fiction
If you can see the humor in current events, check out Chip
Bok's The Recent History of the United
States in Political Cartoons: A Look Bok! (Akron, OH:
University of Akron Press, 2005 - call
number 973.920207 Bok). The book collects the work of the Akron
Beacon Journal editorial cartoonist and provides brief commentaries
to help understand the context of the cartoons.
If you prefer to look at a more serious examination of American
history, Sean Wilentz looks at the path of the new American republic
up to the Civil War, at both a national and local level, in The
Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New
York: Norton, 2005 - call
number 973.5 Wil).
This month introduces a lot of biography, including John
Adams: Party of One (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2005 - call
number 973.44 Ada-G), which is James Grant's study of the complex
Founding Father and second President.
Many of this month's biographies, however, are literary biographies. Award-winning writer and critic Ron Powers provides a
full-length biography of America's most famous author in Mark
Twain: A Life (New York: Free Press, 2005 - call
number 817.44 Pow 2005). Powers also wrote Dangerous
Water: The Boy Who Became Mark Twain, which was highlighted in
the October issue
of Book 'em. In Virginia Woolf:
An Inner Life (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2005 - call
number 823.912 Woo-B), Julia Briggs steps away from Woolf's social
life and the Bloomsbury group to put the focus on Woolf's writing
life. In A Year in the Life of William
Shakespeare, 1599 (New York: HarperCollins, 2005 - call
number 822.33 B Sha), James Shapiro looks at the year Shakespeare
invested in the Globe Theatre and wrote four major plays in an England
that sent an army off to put down an Irish rebellion, stopped the
Spanish Armada, and began the East India Company.
Science and writing come together in The
Best American Science and Nature Writing, 2005 (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 2005 - call
number 508 Bes 2005). Edited by Jonathan Weiner, the book
collects previously published essays from sources as diverse as Scientific
American, The New Yorker, and Wired.
Writing, publishing, and politics come together as
Jacob Soll (history, Rutgers University) looks at the role of
Abraham-Nicolas Amelot de La Houssaye in making Machiavelli's work a
classic in Publishing The Prince: History,
Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism (Ann Arbor,
MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005 - call
number 320.1 Mac-S)
The Western Reserve comes under study as Nina Freelander Gibans
looks at the region's culture by looking at Cleveland's contributions to
visual arts and architecture in Creative
Essence: Cleveland's Sense of Place (Kent, OH: Kent State
University Press, 2005 - call
number 70977132 Gib). The accompanying DVD is a film that was
selected for the 2003 Cleveland International Film Festival.
Juvenile
Last month we highlighted a couple of alphabet books. We're back
this month with B is for Bookworm: A Library
Alphabet (Chelsea, MI: Sleeping Bear Press, 2005 - call
number J 027 Pri) by Anita C. Prieto with illustrations by Renee
Graef. The topic clearly makes this the best of the three alphabet
books!
Every story has two sides and Toby Forward tells the familiar story of
Little Red Riding Hood from the wolf's point of view in The
Wolf's Story: What Really Happened to Little Red Riding Hood
(Cambridge, MA: Candlewick, 2005 - call
number JF F7799w).
In Small Steps (New York:
Delacorte Press, 2006 - call
number JF Sa142s), author Louis Sachar follows up on the character
Armpit who is back home from Camp Green Lake. This is, in some
ways, a sequel to Sachar's best-selling Holes
(and don't forget the movie on DVD!).
Coming Soon (the following
books are on order or in process)
A Prayer for the Night is the latest Ohio Amish mystery by
College of Wooster chemistry professor P. L. Gaus.
Ref Tail Captured, Red Tail Free: The Memoirs of a Tuskegee Airman
and POW is the memoir of P-51 pilot Alexander Jefferson.
Cynthia Carr looks at the 1930 lynching of two young black men in her
hometown of Marion, Indiana in Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a
Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of While America.
Thicker Than Oil: America's Uneasy Partnership with Saudi Arabia
by Rachel Bronson looks at the United States's relationship with the
Saudi kingdom.
David Black's Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of
the Game looks back at centuries to trace the evolution of America's
pastime.
Obituaries
John Kenneth Galbraith on April 29 at age 97. An economist,
teacher, and diplomat, Galbraith also wrote more than 30 books, most
notably The
Affluent Society and American
Capitalism. Galbraith also wrote three satirical novels,
as well as a memoir, A
Life in Our Times: Memoirs. For a complete list of
Galbraith books in the Hiram College Library, click
here.
Pramoedya Ananta Toer on April 30 at age 81. He is best
known for his Buru Quartet, a series of four books (This Earth of
Mankind, Child of All Nations, Footsteps, and House
of Glass) written while in prison and which were banned by the
Suharto regime in Indonesia. He was held without charges for 14
years on Buru and then held under house arrest in Jakarta until
1992.
Awards
The Mystery Writers of America announced the 2006 Edgar winners
at their 60th Gala Banquet on April 27. Among the winners were:
Best Novel - Jess Walter, Citizen
Vince (New York: Regan Books, 2005)
Best First Novel by an American Author -
Theresa Schwegel, Officer Down
(New York: St. Martin's Minotaur, 2005)
Best Critical/Biography - Melanie Rehak, Girl
Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her
(Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2005)
For a complete list of winners and nominees, see the Mystery Writers of
America web site at http://www.mysterywriters.org.
In a speech at Duke University on April 27, author Barbara Kingsolver
announced Hillary Jordan as the 2006 winner of the Bellwether Prize
for Fiction. Jordan won for her unpublished novel Mudbound.
The award includes a contract with Scribner to publish the novel.
The Bellwether Prize for Fiction, founded by Kingsolver, supports
literature dealing with social justice and social change. For more
information, see the prize's web site at http://www.bellwetherprize.org.
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