Need Research Help?
Chat With A Librarian!
|
Volume 2 |
December 2006 |
Issue 5 |
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 and is distributed to
"subscribers" by email notification. If you would like to
become a subscriber or just make a comment, email the editor, David
Everett at everettdd@hiram.edu.
Fiction
Ray Bradbury's Farewell Summer
(New York: William Morrow, 2006 -
call number F B7268f) is the sequel to
Dandelion Wine, published almost thirty years ago.
Non-Fiction
Biographies lead the way this month, especially biographies
of business leaders. Indeed, Henry Ford alone accounts
for two new biographies. The
People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century
(New York: Knopf, 2005 -
call number 338.76292 For-W) by Steven Watts looks at the life
of Ford and the contradictions in it, such as welcoming African
American workers to his plants while being a rabid anti-Semite and
creating a modern, sophisticated factory while also building a
re-created 19th-century village. In
Henry Ford and the Jews: Mass Production of Hate
(New York: Public Affairs, 2001 -
call number 338.76292 For-B), Neil Baldwin focuses on Ford's
anti-Semitism and his leadership in the Anti-Semitic movement in
Europe before World War II.
Staying in the area of business biography are two other new
books. Michael D'Antonio's
Hershey: Milton S. Hershey's Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire,
and Utopian Dreams (New York: Simon and Schuster,
2006 -
call number 338.7664153 Her-D) is the story of America's
chocolate king, his business success, and his philanthropy.
Edward J. Renehan, Jr. attempts to re-interpret life of Jay Gould,
whose attempt to corner the gold market led to the Black Friday
panic in 1869, in Dark Genius of Wall
Street: The Misunderstood Life of Jay Gould, King of the Robber
Barons (New York: Basic Books, 2005 -
call number 332.092 Gou-R). Renehan prefers to see Gould
not as one of Wall Street's greatest villains, but as a creative
genius who helped create modern business.
John Lynch (emeritus professor of Latin American history at the
University of London) tells the story of Simon Bolivar, South
American revolutionary and liberator, from birth to death to legacy
and myth in Simon Bolivar: A Life
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006 -
call number 987.05 Bol-L 2006).
Two sports biographies are also on the new book shelf this
month. In All-American: The Rise
and Fall of Jim Thorpe (New York: John Wiley and
Sons, 2005 -
call number 796.092 Tho-C), Bill Crawford tells the story of one
of the all-time greatest athletes in the world from Thorpe's
childhood on a reservation to attending the Carlisle Indian
Industrial School to winning Olympic gold medals to the scandal
(accepting payments that violated his amateur standing) that cost
him those gold medals. Timothy M. Gay's
Tris Speaker: The Rough-and-Tumble Life of a Baseball Legend
(Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2005 -
call
number 796.357092 Spe-G) is the life - with a heavy emphasis on
his baseball career - of the Hall of Fame centerfielder who played
for the Red Sox and the Indians.
Keeping with the sports theme is
Shattering the Glass: The Remarkable History of Women's Basketball
(New York: New Press, 2005 -
call number 796.323082 Gru) by Pamela Grundy and Susan
Shackelford covers the history of the sport from 1892 into the
21st-century with the emphasis on high school and college.
American history is the subject of several new books.
In The Barbary Wars: American
Independence in the Atlantic World (New York: Hill
and Wang, 2005 -
call number 973.47 Lam), Frank Lambert (history, Purdue) tells
the story of the two wars with pirate city-states in North Africa
that preyed on shipping in the Mediterranean. Barely
remembered today (except, maybe, for the mention in the first line
of the Marine's Hymn - "From the halls of Montezuma to the
shores of Tripoli"), this may well have been America's first
"undeclared" war and its first against state-sponsored terrorism.
Robert Remini, the leading historian on Andrew Jackson and the
Jacksonian era, provides a more popular history of the House of
Representatives with an emphasis on the people and personalities in
The House: The History of the House of
Representatives (New York: Smithsonian Books, 2006 -
call number 328.73072 Rem). At
Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006 -
call number 323.1196073 Bra v. 3) is Taylor Branch's third and
concluding volume on the life of King. Branch won a Pulitzer
Prize for
Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963
(the first in the series) and this new one was a National Book Award
nominee. Dixee R. Bartholomew-Feis tells the unlikely alliance
between the OSS (forerunner of the CIA) and Ho Chi Minh and his Viet
Minh in efforts to defeat the Japanese in World War II and following
it to America's involvement in opposing Ho in the Vietnam War in
The OSS and Ho Chi Minh: Unexpected
Allies in the War Against Japan (Lawrence, KS:
University Press of Kansas, 2006 -
call number 940.548673 Bar).
U. S. education policy is the topic of Patrick J. McGuinn's
No Child Left Behind and the
Transformation of Federal Education Policy, 1965 - 2005
(Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2006 -
call number 379.73 Mcg) in which McGuinn provides a history of
federal policy on education, with an emphasis on the role of
education in American politics, from the Great Society of Lyndon
Johnson to the current Bush administration's No Child Left Behind
Act.
East meets West in medical history in
Needles, Herbs, Gods, and Ghosts: China Healing and the West
to 1848 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2005 -
call number 610.951 Bar) in which Linda L. Barnes (pediatrics
and family medicine, Boston University School of Medicine) provides
a history of Chinese medicine in Europe and the United States and
shows that, while most people think of Chinese medicine as coming to
the West in the 1970s, it actually began in the 13th century.
There has been very little press coverage of the events and
suffering in Darfur. Two new books try to improve
American concern for the area and its people. Jen Marlowe's
Darfur Diaries: Stories of Survival
(New York: Nation Books, 2006 -
call number 962.7043 Mar) contains the conversations and
interviews with Darfurians by three documentary film makers and
gives a first-hand account of the suffering in Darfur. The DVD
of the documentary that followed is on order.
Darfur: A Short History of a Long War
(London: Zed Books, 2005 -
call number 962.7043 Fli) by Julie Flint and Alex de Waal is
exactly what the subtitle says.
Three new books look at the relationship between gays and
Christianity. In "Be Not
Deceived": The Sacred and Sexual Struggles of Gay and Ex-Gay
Christian Men (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 2006 -
call number 261.8357662 Wol), Michelle Wolkomir looks at the
struggles of gay men to reconcile their sexual identities with their
religious beliefs by focusing on two organizations: the Universal
Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (which believes God
made gay people for His purpose) and Exodus International (which
says homosexuality is a sin) and how the members of each
organization become gay or ex-gay Christians. In a similar
vein, Tanya Erzen's Straight to Jesus:
Sexual and Christian Conversions in the Ex-Gay Movement
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006 -
call number 306.6618357 Erz) uses filed work with an ex-gay
movement, New Hope, to look at how gays from a conservative
Christian background reconcile their religious and sexual beliefs.
Meanwhile, Michael Cobb (English, University of Toronto) uses
literature and other writings to look at how both the gay and the
anti-gay movements use religious imagery in
God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence
(New York: New York University Press, 2006 -
call number 306.7660973 Cob).
Michael Bonner's Jihad in Islamic
History: Doctrines and Practice (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2006 -
call number 297.7209 Bon), originally published in France,
studies on the concept of Jihad throughout the history of Islam with
an emphasis on the earlier years.
Pompeii: The Living City
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005 -
call number 937.7 But) by Alex Butterworth and Ray Laurence is a
history of Pompeii from its earliest times to the eruption of
Vesuvius in A. D. 79. The book has several dozen color
illustrations.
Juvenile
This month's juvenile titles are highlighted by four of the five
nominees for the National Book Award:
M. T. Anderson won the award for The
Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, volume
1: The Pox Party (Cambridge, MA: Candlewick Press,
2006 -
call number JF An240p), which is the first of two volumes. Set
is Revolutionary-era Boston, it is the story of Octavian, a captive
African-American youth, raised in the house of scientists and
philosophers who are using him as part of an experiment.
Sold (New York: Hyperion,
2006 -
call number JF M1374s) by Patricia McCormick is the story of
thirteen year-old Lakshmi from a poor Nepalese family who is sold
into prostitution.
Nancy Werlin's The Rules of Survival
(New York: Dial Books, 2006 -
call number JF W494r) is the story of seventeen year-old Matthew
and his attempts to protect himself and his younger sisters from
their abusive mother by following his rules of survival.
Keturah and Lord Death
(Asheville, NC: Front Street, 2006 -
call
number JF L489k) by Martine Leavitt mixes fantasy and romance in
the story of Keturah, lost in the woods, meeting death in the form
of Lord Death, a young lord.
On the non-fiction side, Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberto Menchu
collects the traditional stories from her childhood in Guatemala in
The Honey Jar (Toronto:
Groundwood Books, 2002 -
call
number J 398.2097281 Men).
The following titles are about to be published,
on-order, or are in process. Keep an eye out for them on the
New Book Shelf in the library.
Unbowed is a memoir by Kenyan Wangari Maathai, the 2004
winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Maureen Ogle takes on a fun topic in Ambitious Brew: The Story of
American Beer.
Rescue Mission is a collection of stories from the late
Frederick Busch.
The subtitles says it all in Significant Gestures: A History of
American Sign Language by John Tabak.
Tom Shachtman takes a look at an element of Amish religion in
Rumspringa: To Be or Not to Be Amish.
Ernestine Gilbreth Carey
on November 4 at age 98. With her younger brother, Frank
Gilbreth, she wrote
Cheaper by the Dozen, their account of growing up in a
family of 12 children. The book led to several movies of the
same name, including a
1950 version with Clifton Webb and a 2003 version with Steve
Martin.
Nicholas Proffitt on November 10 at age 63. A war
correspondent for Newsweek, Proffitt is best known for his first
novel Gardens of Stone, which Francis Ford Coppola made into
a movie.
Jack Williamson on November 10 at age 98. Williamson,
an award-winning science fiction writer, was probably best known for
his novel The Humanoids. Among his other novels were
Manseed
and
Terraforming Earth.
Curtis Cate on November 16 at age 82. Cates was best
known for his biographies of writers, including
George Sand,
Andre Malraux, and Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
William Diehl on November 24 at
age 81. Diehl wrote best-selling novels such as Sharky's Machine
and Primal Fear, both of which were turned into movies.
Bebe Moore Campbell on November 27 at age 56. Campbell, who was among the first African American novelists to make upwardly mobile African Americans the subject of fiction, was probably best known for her first novel, Your Blues Ain't Like Mine. Among her other works were Brothers and Sisters, Singing in the Comeback Choir and 72 Hour Hold, her most recent novel.
The National Book Foundation
awarded its 57th National Book Awards on November 15 in New
York. Winners were:
Fiction - Richard Powers,
The Echo Maker (New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006)
Nonfiction - Timothy Egan,
The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of
Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006)
Poetry - Nathaniel Mackey,
Splay Anthem (New York:
New Directions, 2006)
Young People's Literature
- M. T. Anderson, The Astonishing Life
of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume 1: The Pox Party
(Cambridge, MA: Candlewick Press, 2006)
For more information, including a complete list of nominees, see the
National Book Foundation's Web site at
http://www.nationalbook.org.