| Volume 1 |
October 2005 |
Issue 3 |
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.
New Books
Books ordered in this new fiscal year are starting to roll out of Tech
Services. That means more new books than usual. To make it
easier for you to find what you want to know about, this issue of Book
'em will break new books into Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Juvenile
sections.
Fiction
Plan B: A Novel ((Jackson, MS: University Press of
Mississippi, 1993 - call
number F H572p) by Chester Himes is a look at racism in
America. Himes, part of the black protest movement who died in
1984, left the novel unfinished and it was edited and published in
France before appearing in the United States.
Eleanor Rigby: A Novel
(NY: Bloomsbury, 2004 - call
number F C83297e) by Douglas Coupland is not the Beatles' song, but
both share a theme of loneliness.
Deborah Crombie's And Justice There is None
(NY: Bantam, 2002 - call number F
C8802a) is her eighth novel to feature
detectives Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James. It was also the most
recent read for the Classic
Hill Hounds.
Non-Fiction
Northeast Ohio takes center stage in two books. Journalist
Melanie Payne provides a history of the Soap Box Derby in Champions,
Cheaters, and Childhood Dreams: Memories of the Soap Box Derby
(Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 2003 – call number 796.6
Pay).
Did you know the event actually began in Dayton? In Lake
Effects: A History of Urban Policy Making in Cleveland, 1825-1929
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005 – call number 330.977132
Wei), Ronald Weiner (Professor of History at Cuyahoga Community College)
provides a historical analysis of early policy in Cleveland.
Biography and memoirs are well-represented, as usual. Again,
this month, Mark Twain – or at least his childhood – is the subject
of study, this time by journalist Ron Powers in his book Dangerous
Water: A Biography of the Boy who Became Mark Twain (NY:
Basic Books, 1999 – call number 817.44 Pow). History professor Sylvia
D. Hoffert’s Jane Grey Swisshelm: An
Unconventional Life, 1815-1884 (Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press, 2004 – call number 305.42092 Swi-H)
looks at the life of the nineteenth-century newspaper editor who owned
and edited newspapers in Pittsburgh, Washington, DC, and St. Cloud (MN)
and who was one of the founders of the Minnesota Republican Party.
Three other books combine biography/memoir and history. Lithuania,
Independent Again: The Autobiography of Vytautas Landsbergis
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000 – call number 947.93086
Lan) is not only the autobiography of the former President of Lithuania,
but also his telling of Lithuania regained its independence. Many people don’t realize that thousands of Jews fled Nazi Europe
(Germany, Poland, and Austria) for Shanghai, in part because Shanghai
required no visa or any other official document. In Ten
Green Bottles: The True Story of One Family’s Journey from War-Torn
Austria to the Ghettos of Shanghai (NY: St. Martin’s
Press, 2002 – call number 940.5318092 Kar-K), Vivian Jeanette Kaplan
tells her mother’s story of how that Jewish family undertook a
five-thousand mile journey to seek refuge in Shanghai. In Strange
Haven: A Jewish Childhood in Wartime Shanghai (Urbana,
IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999 – call number 951.13205 Tob),
Sigmund Tobias, now a Distinguished Scholar in the Educational
Psychology Program at Fordham, tells of us family’s flight from
Germany, growing up in a Jewish community in Shanghai, and finally
leaving Shanghai in the late 1940s as the Communists gained strength.
U.S. History is represented by Seduced,
Abandoned, and Reborn: Visions of Youth in Middle-Class America,
1780-1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2005 - call
number 305.2350973 Hes) by Hiram College's own Rodney Hessinger.
The book looks at how adults such as authors, educators, and reformers
viewed youth in early America.
Psychology and Memory are covered by Harvard psychologist
Daniel Schacter as he looks at the seven memory miscues we all suffer in
Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets
and Remembers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001 - call
number 153.12 Sch). The seven sins? They are, according to
Schacter, transience, absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution,
suggestibility, bias, and persistence.
Juvenile
Two young adult novels (read by all of us!) highlight the new Juvenile
books. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the
Half-Blood Prince (NY: Arthur A. Levine Books, 2005 –
call number JF R797h v.6) covers the boy wizard’s sixth year at
Hogwarts. Eldest (NY: Knopf,
2005 – call number JF P1969e
v.2) is Christopher Paolini’s second
volume in the Inheritance trilogy.
Coming Soon (the following
books are on order or in process)
Replay is the latest from Newbery Award winner and Hiram graduate Sharon Creech.
Runny Babbitt is a posthumous work from children's author,
songwriter, and Playboy cartoonist Shel Silverstein.
13 Seconds by Philip Caputo takes a look back at the Kent State
shootings.
Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling by Richard Lyman Bushman is a look
at the founder of the Church of Latter Day Saints with an emphasis on
Smith's religious beliefs.
Understanding Iraq: The Whole Sweep of Iraqi History from Genghis Kahn's
Mongols to the Ottoman Turks to the British Mandate to the American
Occupation by William R. Polk. The subtitle pretty much says
it all.
Obituaries
Stanley Burnshaw on September 16th at age 99. A poet and a
critic, Burnshaw was a friend of Robert Frost and wrote a Frost
biography, Robert
Frost Himself.
M. Scott Peck on September 25th at age 69. A psychiatrist,
Peck is best known for The Road Less Traveled.
August Wilson on October 2nd at age 60. Wilson wrote a
number of plays chronicling the African-American experience, winning two
Pulitzers along the way (in 1987 for Fences and in 1990 for Piano
Lesson).
Awards
John Banville won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction for
his novel The Sea. The Man Booker Prize for Fiction is for
the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or
the Republic of Ireland. For more about the Man Booker Prize for
Fiction and to see past winners, go to http://www.themanbookerprize.com.
Harold Pinter was awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in
Literature. The British playwright is known for such plays as The
Caretaker, The Birthday Party, The Room, and The
Dumb Waiter. For more on the Nobel Prize in Literature and to
see past winners, go to http://nobelprize.org/literature/.
The National Book Awards has announced its list of finalists for the
year. Among the nominees are E.L. Doctorow for The March, Joan
Didion for The Year of Magical Thinking, and Walter Dean Myers for
Autobiography of My Dead Brother. A complete list of the nominees
is available at http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2005_finalistlist.html.
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