So many books, so little time

I had a meeting Monday morning at the UAA library and as I was walking out, a book in the staff picks section caught my eye.
It was the Dan Dailey book, but then the old copy of Jane Eyre was cool too.


Then there was the book of the year shelf. These two books will be used in classes across the curriculum. I know. I mentioned to the persona at the front desk that probably it should be labeled "Books" of the Year. Both are by Alaska authors. Milkweed Press which publishes Shopping for Porcupine writes

Shopping for Porcupine by Seth Kantner was recently selected as one of two Books of the Year by the University of Alaska Anchorage and Alaska Pacific University. Shopping for Porcupine will be paired with the other Book of the Year, The Whale and the Supercomputer by Charles Wohlforth, during the 2009-2010 academic year at both universities. Together, these books will be used to facilitate dialogue related to the theme "responding to climage [sic] change in Alaska." More specifically, the UAA/APU announcement notes that these texts "reveal many of the changes that have occurred [in rural Alaska] over the past half century and demonstrate what's at stake for rural communities facing the effects of climate change. . . . They call upon both Native wisdom and Western science to address the problems associated with climate change, and they illustrate how profoundly climate and cultural change can affect both people and entire ecosystems."

Of course, Palin fans know that this is part of the liberal conspiracy to end progress and destroy Alaska's economy.

Just before I got to the front desk and the exit, I passed what I thought was the new books shelves. But as I started checking on these books, some are relatively old. Still the variety of different books reminds me how much I have to learn. Here's a sampling of some of the books I saw. Click on the book covers for more info on the book and/or author.


In the case of the fish book, it turns out it was first published in 1987. Maybe this is a new edition. And you can see the ones that had plastic covers didn't come out to well. Sorry.


If you missed it above - click on book images for more info on book/author.



From the London Times review of this book (click on the book cover to link to the whole review):

Though it was domesticated more than 3,000 years ago, as the editors say in their introduction, “hardly any other food plant is as modern as the soybean”. They might have added, “or as controversial”. For, as press coverage has revealed, the clearing both of the rainforests and cerrados (savannas) of Brazil to grow soy, and the building of dams that are supposedly designed to help in its cultivation, are having dramatic effects on the survival of indigenous peoples and on climate change and biodiversity.

In the early twenty-first century, when surgery can be done microscopically and human achievement seems limitless, 2.6 billion people lack the most basic thing that human dignity requires. Four in ten people in the world have no toilet. They must do their business instead on roadsides, in the bushes, wherever they can. Yet human feces in water supplies contribute to one in ten of the world’s communicable diseases. A child dies from diarrhoea – usually brought on by fecal-contaminated food or water – every 15 seconds. . . [for more click on Big Necessity image above]

In her review of Stop High-Stakes Testing: An Appeal to America's Conscience by Dale D. Johnson et al., Luanna Meyer questions the premise that anyone can achieve "the American dream" through education. Specifically, she argues that the United States’ system of public schools and universities does not equal the playing field among the rich and the poor, and, in fact, public schools are just another place that allows poor children to fail. The book authors and reviewer alike sharply criticize the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), arguing that holding schools accountable via student test scores, without addressing fundamental issues of poverty, disparities in health care access, racism, funding inequities, etc., will only reflect what is already known—that children from middle-class and wealthy families will outperform poor children on standardized tests.. . [for more click on the cover above.]

With a title like this, I love to imagine what I would write if I were writing this book. Only then do I open it to see what was actually written. This was published in 1987.

Appadurai’s introductory article, “Commodities and the Politics of Value,” outlines a socialized view of commodities. He argues that commodities may be said to have social lives because they embody value, as created by a society. Moreover, Appadurai stresses that “commodity” is only one possible phase in the social life of an object; as it travels within different regimes of value, it may exit and reenter the commodity sphere. Commodities therefore communicate complex, context-dependent messages operating within a culturally constructed framework. . .

From what I think is the introduction of this book (click cover for link):

Distribution of scarce resources permeates almost all spheres and levels of social life. Scarce resources are not only distributed in the family, but also in the contexts of work, sports, friendship relations, the political arena, public organizations, legal settings, and more. Distribution of scarce resources is a problem affecting society at the micro, meso and macro levels. The micro level includes the family, friendship relationships, school, sport and work teams; the meso level includes work organization, the court, while the macro level includes political bodies, national economy, and others. In the family, for instance, problems with regard to the distribution of household tasks are common. In school, teachers have to decide how much attention to give to each student. On the meso level, public administrators are faced with the problem to determine whether or not to construct a new bus lane (see the chapter by Markus Müller and Elisabeth Kals in this volume) or how to tax different categories of citizens in the municipality for costs for water cleaning. The distribution and redistribution of income via taxation is an example of a distribution issue on the macro level.

You know the drill, click on the picture for more.

Bueker finds that naturalizing and voting are distinct processes. Level of education, income, and length of eligibility, predict both processes, but an immigrant?s country of origin frequently overrides these other characteristics and works differently in each. Immigrants from countries with the highest likelihood of naturalizing tend to have the lowest odds of voter turnout, while those immigrants from countries with the lowest odds of citizenship acquisition are the most likely to vote, once naturalized. Further, country of origin matters as much for how it interacts with other key characteristics, such as education and income, as for the independent influence it exerts on these two political processes.

From the book's website:

In The World Without Us, Alan Weisman offers an utterly original approach to questions of humanity's impact on the planet: he asks us to envision our Earth, without us.

In this far-reaching narrative, Weisman explains how our massive infrastructure would collapse and finally vanish without human presence; what of our everyday stuff may become immortalized as fossils; how copper pipes and wiring would be crushed into mere seams of reddish rock; why some of our earliest buildings might be the last architecture left; and how plastic, bronze sculpture, radio waves, and some man-made molecules may be our most lasting gifts to the universe.

From his NYU homepage:

My research and writing on revolutions, social movements, and terrorism have been motivated by both "real world" events and by debates among scholars. These often pull in different directions: Like many social scientists, I have been attracted to a sociology that tackles the most urgent personal and public issues of our age, but I have also felt compelled to leap into more academic debates about how this might best be done. I first became interested in revolutions in 1979, during the summer before my senior year in college. 1979 was a year of revolution – in Iran, Nicaragua, Grenada – and it was a year that saw the publication of Theda Skocpol’s classic study, States and Social Revolutions, which I quickly devoured.

The link for this is a pdf file. From the School of the Art Institute of Chicago:

To coincide with its 30th anniversary, the Video Data Bank is publishing
FEEDBACK: The Video Data Bank Catalog of Video Art and Artist Interviews (TempleUniversity Press). Founded at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1976, theVideo Data Bank is a pioneering institution in the media arts movement, and houses anddistributes one of the world’s largest collections of videotapes by and aboutcontemporary artists.
Edited by Kate Horsfield and Lucas Hilderbrand, FEEDBACK is both a catalog of theVDB’s extraordinary collection and an invaluable historical survey of over 40 years ofvideo art. The 360-page volume includes annotated listings of 1,500 titles by over 500artists, from Vito Acconci to Julie Zando, as well as essays by Gregg Bordowitz,Vanalyne Green, Kate Horsfield, and Peggy Phelan that explore the aesthetic,technological, and cultural histories and methodologies of video making as an artpractice and political tool.

This one was published in 1994 and I couldn't find any decent links for it - just people trying to sell copies.


This is becoming a much bigger task than I intended. But I'm getting close.

It’s Okay Mom is the true Alaskan story of Linda Thompson, a parent of three children all with challenges. It begins with life in the wilderness of Lake Clark region before her first son is born. Once baby Erik is in her arms, people want her to institutionalize him. When her twins are born, she faces life/death realities as they present themselves. Her husband’s job slowly draws him away from home when they move to the capital, Juneau, and he becomes the Director of Subsistence under Governor Sheffield. The marriage is slowly crushed. Linda returns to the wilderness of Alaska to be a Bush teacher, raising her surviving boys alone, standing by them, no matter what.

It's getting later and I couldn't find something good specifically about the book. This is about one of the editors, Jefferson Cowie, from Inside Higher Ed:

Everyone knows that rock and roll is all about kicking out the jams: ditching uptight squares, taking long rides in the dark of night, and being a street fightin' man -- or woman. As The Who put it, it's about hoping to die before you get old.
But what does rock mean to a new generation of uptight (if updated and wired) squares, afraid of the open road, who have little fight in them? What does rock mean for a generation that has never been allowed to be young -- let alone hope to die before they get old?


For my students, the answer is simple. Rock and roll is about family happiness.
I discovered this disturbing undercurrent of rock-as-the-soundtrack-of-familial-bliss when I began teaching a college writing class this semester. The undergraduates' first assignment was to assess the personal meaning of any song of any genre. . . [get the rest by clicking the picture]

`

Maybe it was because I thought these were all new books, I didn't realize that I had read this one until I got home. Here's a snippet from a review on booksiloved.com.

The highlight of Daisy's life is when she becomes a garden columnist for a newspaper, and has many fans who write to her, asking about remedies for blights on flowers and other such topics. When she loses her job to a man for no good reason, she never completely recovers from the shame of not having a public identity.

Why would we want to read about the rest of Daisy's existence, which is, for the most part, conventional and predictable, based on filling others' expectations and fighting despair? We read the rest of this fictionalized autobiography because Shields has a way of addressing her character's inner realities with lyrical affection and quiet irony. Because the story is told from many points of view over time, we are offered a complex, historical understanding of Daisy's life. . . [get the whole review by clicking on the book cover photo.]

From the UC Irvine Drama Department website:

Annie Loui works as a director/choreographer and creator of inter-media theater works. She trained with dancer Carolyn Carlson (at the Paris Opera), and studied with Etienne Decroux, Ella Jarosivitcz and Jerzy Grotowski. Original dance/theater pieces have been seen in France, Monaco, West Germany, and in the United States at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, among other venues. She has choreographed for the American Repertory Theater, Trinity Repertory Theater, and off-Broadway for the Signature Theater. Longtime member of the Brandeis Theater Arts Department; she also taught extensively for the Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard before coming to the University of California, Irvine, where she runs the Movement Program for the MFA Actor Training...

From booknews:

This text/reference offers a visual approach to moving target indication (MTI), moving target detection (MTD), and Air Traffic Control Radar Beacon systems, illustrating concepts, relationships, and processes with b&w illustrations, photos, and images, including illustrations of oscilloscope and spectrum analyzer displays, on every page. Early chapters cover radar's history, the role of the professional radar engineer/technician, and the science behind radar. Later chapters cover circuitry and hardware, secondary radar systems, microwave transmission, radar transmitters and receivers, the Doppler effect, and radar displays. Mathematical explanations rely only on basic trigonometric concepts, keeping the information accessible to those new to the field. . .

From a New York Times book review:

More Americans were executed in 1999 than any year since 1952, and the execution rate has gone up 800 percent in just a decade. Over 3,500 prisoners, an all-time record, now await their fate on death row. Strange, then, that Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell should state in the preface to ''Who Owns Death?'' that even as executions soar, the days of the death penalty in America are numbered. They reach this conclusion by a careful study of the psychology of capital punishment among governors, judges, prosecutors, jurors, victims' families, wardens and witnesses. They analyze our society to see if we indeed are obsessed with a ''culture of death,'' as Pope John Paul II has put it. It is a remarkable testimony to the authors' skills and the clarity of their writing that whether one is for or against capital punishment -- and few issues are as polarizing in modern society -- by the end of this book the reader will agree that, for better or worse, inexorable social forces are carrying us to the eventual abolition of the death penalty. . . [Click the photo to get the whole the review.]