Book 'em

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.

This has been a very busy month on the New Book Shelf!  We have some new fiction (with more coming next month) and a lot of juvenile books - a lot more than can be highlighted below.  Plus, of course, the usual interesting non-fiction titles you've come to expect.  Enjoy!

New Books

Fiction

Fanon (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008 - call number F W6337f) is a fictionalized life of philosopher, activist, and writer Frantz Fanon by award-winning writer and Brown University professor John Edgar Wideman.

Richard Russo (Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls) is back with Bridge of Sighs (New York: Knopf, 2007 - call number F R9218b).

Away: A Novel (New York: Random House, 2007 - call number F B6232a), by Amy Bloom is the epic odyssey of Lillian Leyb, whom emigrates from Russia when her family is killed in a pogrom and travels from New York city across the United States and ultimately to Alaska.

Loving Frank: A Novel (New York: Ballantine Books, 2007 - call number F H780l), the first novel by former journalist Nancy Horan, is a fictionalized account of the love affair between architect Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Borthwick Cheney.

Vikram Chandra (Red Earth and Pouring Rain) returns with Sacred Games (New York: HarperCollins, 2007 - call number F C3618s), an epic of modern India revolving around Inspector Sartaj Singh, one of the few Sikhs on the Mumbai police force.

Coal Black Horse (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2007 - call number F O15c), by Robert Olmstead, is set in the Civil War and follows 14-year old Robey Childs, who loses his innocence to the horrors of war.

Ha Jin's A Free Life (New York: Pantheon, 2007 - call number F J5647f) looks at the Chinese immigrant's transition from Chinese to Chinese American in this novel set in the 1990s.



Non-Fiction

The environment is a big topic this month.  In Nature's New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008 - call number 333.720973 Mah), Neil M. Maher provides a history of the CCC, while also looking at how it shaped the environmental debate in ways that continue to this day.  Jay Inslee, a U. S. Congressman, and Bracken Hendricks call for a revolution in how we produce and consume energy arguing we need to set goals and find new technologies and solutions to create clean, efficient energy in Apollo's Fire: Igniting America's Clean Energy Economy (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2008 - call number 333.790973 Ins).  In Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy (New York: Knopf, 2007 - call number 333.7924 Cra) Gwyneth Cravens argues that nuclear power is the answer, that nuclear power is safe, and that the science behind it is solid.

Those interested in music will find a couple of interesting books this month.  Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007 - call number 782.5164092 War-W) is the story of Fred Waring and his band, who were popular from the late 1920s to the early 1960s (though they preformed into the 1980s), as told by his wife, Virginia Waring.  Don't forget the accompanying CD in the CD collection!  Columbia Records has been a major recording company for more than one hundred years.  Gary Marmorstein recounts that history in The Label: The Story of Columbia Records (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2007 - call number 781.6409 Col-M) 

Three very different books have an Ohio connection.  In Early Akron's Industrial Valley: A History of the Cascade Locks (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2008 - call number 386.4809771 Gie), Jack Gieck (a retired engineer and past president of the Canal Society of Ohio) looks at the history of the Cascade Locks, a system of 16 locks used to raise canal boats to the Akron Summit, the highest point on the 309 mile Ohio & Erie Canal.  John Vacha's From Broadway to Cleveland: A History of the Hanna Theatre (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2007 - call number 792.0977132 Han-V) is a history of the Cleveland theatre, build as a tribute to Marcus Hanna by his son and which opened in 1921 and is still operating.  Portraits of Power: Ohio and National Politics, 1964 - 2004 (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 2007 - call number 977.1043 Zai) collects ninety essays by veteran political reporter Abe Zaidan covering a forty year period of Ohio politics. (And if you want to see the continued importance of Ohio in national politics, check out the documentary video Swing State Ohio.)

Speaking of politics, it is campaign season again and Ohioans just cast votes in the primary.  This might be a good time to consider how voting is actually done.  To that end, Paul S. Herrnson, et. al. examine five commercially available voting systems, plus one prototype system in Voting Technology: The Not-So-Simple Act of Casting a Ballot (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2008 - call number 324.65 Vot).

Media technology and its impact is the subject of two new books.  In Blogging @merica: The New Public Sphere (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008 - call number 303.4833 Bar), Aaron Barlow looks at the current blogosphere; how blogs are used, the growth of blogging, and the relationship between blogs and other media.   The subtitle pretty much says it all in Jarice Hanson's 24/7: How Cell Phones and the Internet Change the Way We Live, Work, and Play (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007 - call number 303.4833 Han).

What would an issue of Book 'em be without biographies?  In Edith Wharton (New York: Knopf, 2007 - call number 813.52 Wha-L 2007), Hermione Lee (English literature at Oxford) provides a new biography of the writer and gives Wharton a different image: tough, modern, and as complex and brilliant as her writing.  Micahel J. Nenfeld (chair of the Space History Division of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum) provides a full-length biography of the man who build the V-2 rockets for the Nazis, helped launch the first U. S. satellite, and became known as one of the fathers of the U. S. space program in Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (New York: Knopf, 2007 - call number 629.4092 Von-N).

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is the subject of two books this month.  Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters (New York: Penguin, 2007 - call number 823.912 Doy 2007) is a collection of letters written by Doyle with annotations from editors Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower, and Charles Foley.  Andrew Lycett's The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes: The Life and Times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (New York: Free Press, 2007 - call number 823.912 Doy-L) is the latest biography of Sir Arthur.

Memoirs are also present this month.  Touch and Go: A Memoir (New York: New Press, 2007 - call number 070.92 Ter 2007) is the first memoir from Studs Terkel, the 95-year old Chicago institution as a writer and an oral historian.  The World's Best Memoir Writing: The Literature of Life from St. Augustine to Gandhi, and from Pablo Picasso to Nelson Mandela (Napierville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2007 - call number 920.02 Wor) collects excerpts of the best memoirs and autobiographies with an introductory essay on the genre by editor Eve Claxton.

Two books look at two writers of juvenile literature.  Part of the Scarecrow Studies in Young Adult Literature series, Mary Ann Tighe's Sharon Creech: The Words We Choose to Say (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006 - call number 813.54 Cre-T) is part biography, part literary criticism focusing on the young adult novels of the Newbery Medal winner.  Part of that same series, Angela Johnson: Poetic Prose (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006 - call number 813.54 Joh-H), by KaaVonia Hinton, is partly a biography, partly a sketch of how Johnson, a Kent, Ohio author works, and partly a criticism of her works.

Islam is the focus of two books.  In The Qu'ran: A Biography (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006 - call number 297.122 Law), Duke University professor Bruce Lawrence tells the life story of the Qu'ran in this recent addition to the Books That Changed the World series.  Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger (religion, Emory University) looks at the life and thought of a female Muslim spiritual healer in the city of Hyderabad in south India in In Amma's Healing Room: Gender and Vernacular Islam in South India (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006 - call number 305.4869739 Flu).

The founding of Iraq is the topic of Peter Sluglett's Britain in Iraq: Contriving King and Country, 1914-1932 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007 - call number 956.7041 Slu) in which the author explains how Britain obtained and ruled Iraq through a League of Nations mandate and why the British chose to marginalize the Shi'ite majority and instead rule through the Sunni minority.

Iraq and the Middle East is a good segue into the first of two books on American government.  In The Israel Lobby and U. S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007 - call number 327.7305694 Mea), John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt expand an argument, first posed in a 2006 London Review of Books article, that the Israel lobby has been extremely successful in winning American support for Israel and its policies even when at odds with American interests and values.  Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones (American history, Edinburgh University) traces the history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from the 1870s (rather the the official founding date of 1908) to the present in The FBI: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007 - call number 363.250973 Jef).

Sport and society are the general topic of Reuben A. Buford May's Living Through the Hoop: High School Basketball, Race, and the American Dream (New York: New York University Press, 2008 - call number 796.32362 May), in which the Texas A&M sociologist, who spent eight years as an assistant high school basketball coach in Georgia, looks at the role of basketball in the lives of the players, especially African American players.

Sport and religion come together as William J. Baker (history, emeritus, University of Maine) provides a history of the relationship between sports and religion and how they came to blend together in Playing With God: Religion and Modern Sport (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007 - call number 201.6796 Bak).

John F. Haught merges evolution and theology in God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution, second edition (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2008 - call number 231.7652 Hau 2008) in an update of his 2000 publication.

In The History of Special Education: A Struggle for Equality in American Public Schools (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008 - call number 371.90973 Osg), Robert L. Osgood (education, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis) looks at how public schools have dealt with special education needs fro the past 120 years.

Devra Davis argues that we have fought the wrong war in the war on cancer.  In The Secret History of the War on Cancer (New York: Basic Books, 2007 - call number 616.994 Dav), she explains we have wrongly focused on detecting, treating, and curing the disease when we should be focusing on cancer's causes, such as tobacco, alcohol, and environmental hazards.

The World Without Us (New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, 2007 - call number 304.2 Wei) has this month's most interesting premise as award-winning journalist Alan Weisman explains what would happen on earth if mankind suddenly disappeared completely.

In Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007 - call number 599.865 Che), Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth (biology and psychology, respectively, at Penn) study baboon social organization and the intelligence behind it.




Juvenile

Hiram graduate and Newbery winner Sharon Creech is back with The Castle Corona (New York: Joanna Cotler Books, 2007 - call number JF C8612c 2007), the story of two peasant orphans who discover a mysterious pouch.

There are two books from Sharon M. Draper this month.  Fire From the Rock (New York: Dutton Children's Books, 2007 - call number JF D7918f 2007) is a fictionalized account of an African American girl asked to consider being one of the group to integrate the high school in Little Rock in 1957.  November Blues (New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2007 - call number JF D7918n) continues the story begun in The Battle of Jericho.

Alison Jay's 1 2 3: A Child's First Counting Book (New York: Dutton Children's Books, 2007 - call number JF  J330o) is just what the subtitle says using a fairy-tale world motif.

Powers (Orlando: Harcourt, 2007 - call number JF L5273p) by Ursula Le Guin is the third in her Annals of the Western Shore series.

There are two new books in the Scientists in the Field series.  Mary Kay Carson's Emi and the Rhino Scientist (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007 - call number J599.668 Car) follows Terri Roth (from the Cincinnati Zoo) as she studies rhinos in Sumatra and works to breed rhinos leading to the first Sumatran rhino calf born in captivity in more than a century.  The Whale Scientists: Solving the Mystery of Whale Strandings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007 - call number J 599.5 Hod), by Fran Hodgkins, follows scientists as they try to determine why whales strand themselves.

Two-time Newbery winner E. L. Konigsburg is back with The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World (New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2007 - call number JF K8368m), the story of Amedo, the new in town who has a dream - he wants to discover something and have a friend to share the discovery.

Robert Sabuda takes C. S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia and turns them into an intricate pop-up book in The Chronicles of Narnia: Pop-ups (New York: HarperCollins, 2007 - call number JF Sa139c).

In 1939 Hardie Gramatky published the classic Little Toot, the story of a tugboat that doesn't want to work, but overcomes his fear of rough seas to save the day.  To commemorate the 100th anniversary of Gramatky's birth comes a new edition of Little Toot (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2007 - call number JF G7618l) that restores the brightness of the original artwork, adds some artwork never before seen, and restores the original endpapers to the book.

 

Coming Soon

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.

Dan Koeppel.  Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World.

Beans: A History by Ken Albala.

Nicholas P. Sullivan.  You Can Hear Me Now: How Microloans and Cell Phones are Connecting the World's Poor to the Global Economy.

A Class of Their Own: Black Teachers in the Segregated South by Adam Fairclough and Houston Diehl's Dream Not of Other Worlds: Teaching in a Segregated Elementary School, 1970.


Darren S. Wershler-Henry.  The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting.  You do remember typewriters, don't you?
 

Obituaries

Phyllis A. Whitney on February 8 at age 104.  Whitney, who received the Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement from the Mystery Writers of America, wrote adult suspense novels, novels for young adults, children's mysteries (Mystery of the Haunted Pool) and books on writing (Writing Juvenile Fiction).

Alain Robbe-Grillet on February 18 at age 85.  Robbe-Grillet, who helped establish the New Novel genre, is probably best known for his screenwriting, especially for his work with Last Year at Marienbad, and his directing.

Raymond Smith on February 18 at age 77.  Smith, the husband of author Joyce Carol Oates, is best known for founding and editing The Ontario Review, a literary journal, as well as founding Ontario Review Books, a small publishing company.  Smith also wrote a study of Charles Churchill, the 18th-century poet and satirist.

Robin Moore on February 19 at age 82.  Moore, who co-wrote the song "The Ballad of the Green Berets" with SSgt. Barry Sadler, is known primarily for two books, The Green Berets and The French Connection, both of which became movies.

Stephen Marlowe on February 22 at age 79.  Marlowe, who wrote popular fiction in a variety of genres, is probably best known for his detective novels, especially those featuring private eye Chester Drum.

George Fredrickson on February 25 at age 73.  A historian, Fredrickson is often credit with ground breaking use of comparative history, particularly in White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. 

William F. Buckley, Jr. on February 27 at age 82.  Buckley, known for his intellectualism and conservative political views, wrong some 50 books from non-fiction  to spy novels, as well as a regular newspaper column.  Click here for a list of his books in the Hiram College Library.

Barbara Seaman on February 27 at age 72.  Seaman, a patients' rights activist who helped found the National Women's Health Network, is best known for two books, The Doctors' Case Against the Pill and Free and Female: The Sex Life of the Contemporary Woman. 
 

Awards

The winners of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced on March 7, 2008.  Winners included:

Criticism: The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross
Poetry: Elegy by Mary Jo Bang
Biography: Stanley, the Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer by Tim Jeal
General Nonfiction: Medical Apartheid by Harriet Washington
Autobiography: Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat
Fiction: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

For a complete list of finalists and special award winners, see the National Book Critics Circle Web site.


Tom Sleigh is the winner of the 2008 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for his collection Space Walk.  Janice Harrington won the 2008 Kate Tufts Discovery Award for Even the Hollow My Body Made is Gone.


The Poetry Society of America has awarded the 2008 Frost Medal to Michael S. Harper, the first poet laureate of Rhode Island and an English professor at Brown University.


Lucette Lagnado won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature for her memoir, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World.

The Great Man, by Kate Christensen, won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.  For more on this award and the complete list of finalists, go to the PEN/Falukner Foundation Web page.

Australian author Sonya Hartnett, who has written some 20 books for children including Surrender, won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award.  Established by the Swedish government, the award is named for the author who created Pippi Longstocking.