From Love To War - New Books At UAA

I checked the new books shelves at UAA library the other day and I'm finally getting around to putting up a short sampling.  I'm trying to spend more time off the computer, so this will be brief.  There were also some more technical books, but social sciences and humanities seemed to dominate.

These two books with practically the same title:

From an interview with Nancy Sherman the author of Afterwar:

"The concept of ‘moral injuries’ associated with combat experience, an affliction of growing interest to both military and healthcare communities, features prominently throughout the book."

And from a review of Zoë Wool's After War:

"In After War: The Weight of Life At Walter Reed, Zoë Wool shares her experience working with some of the most grievously wounded veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. During a year of research from 2007-2008, Wool conducted fieldwork with amputees recovering at Walter Reed Medical Center, the military hospital complex that has become emblematic of the post-war experience of American combat wounded service members."

There were two books about Yiddish - one on short stories and one on theater.
















These covers seemed a bit out of place at a university library - but they're Alaska stories.

And now that I've looked it up, it seems that sometimes you can judge a book by its cover.  From Lifeway, where you can watch a video of the author and/or read the transcript :

"Christian Romance Fiction author Dani Pettrey talks about her books Shattered and Submerged. We also find out more about her writing process, the role of fiction in ministry, and her favorite authors."

Here's a more academic look at romance.  You can read a review of Brossard's On Romantic Love.

This one deals with a subject dear to my heart - how we know things.  In particular it looks at how the stories sent from the New World back to Europe reflected what Europeans thought about the New World as much, if not more, than it reflected the New World.  From the back cover:

"Comparing the official 1784 edition of [Captain James] Cook's journal for that voyage with Cook's actual journal accounts, Curie demonstrates the representation of North America's northwest coast in the late eighteenth century was shaped as much by the publication process as by British notions of landscape, natural history, cannibalism, and history in the new world.  Most recent scholarship on imperialist representation of the non-European world takes these published accounts at face value.  Constructing Colonial Discourse combines close textual analysis with the insights of postcolonial theory to critique the discursive and rhetorical strategies by which the official account of the third voyage transformed Cook into an imperial hero."

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is one of the UAA/APU Books of  the Year along with The Color of Water.

These books should show up in a lot of different classes and discussed from the perspective of the course subject.  The "Topics of Relevance" for 2015-2017 is "Negotiating Identity in America."

From Project Muse:

"Networks of Modernism offers a new understanding of American modernist aesthetics and introduces the idea that networks were central to how American moderns thought about their culture in their dramatically changing milieu. While conventional wisdom holds that the network rose to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s in the context of information technologies, digitization is only the most recent manifestation of networks in intellectual history. Crucial developments in modern America provide another archive of network discourses well before the advent of the digital age. The rise of the railroad recast the American landscape as an assortment of interconnected hubs. The advent of broadcast radio created a decentralized audience that was at once the medium’s strength and its weakness. The steady and intertwined advances of urbanization and immigration demanded the reconceptualization of community and ethnic identity to replace the failing “melting pot” metaphor for the nation. Indeed, the signal developments of the modern era eroded social stratification and reorganized American society in a nodal, decentralized, and interpenetrating form—what today we would label a “distributed” network that is fully flattened and holds no clustered centers of power."

You can look at the table of contents here.

From a Journal of Europe Studies review of the book:

“Inner emigrants were nonconformist writers ‘dealing in ambiguity’, whose works had - and retain - ‘the potential to be read and understood simultaneously as both a form of tacit opposition to and acquiescence in the regime.’

From an interview with the author on why she chose to write about social media in the war zone:

"A: My brother was on his first deployment in Iraq while I was in graduate school studying communication. At the time, he and I mostly wrote letters back and forth. But I began paying closer attention to advancements in digital communication technologies, especially when the infamous Abu Ghraib photos emerged. At the time, it seemed like new communication technologies (MySpace, YouTube, Facebook) were becoming available at the same time we were becoming increasingly entrenched in Iraq and Afghanistan. So I was personally and academically invested in keeping a close eye on both of these “fronts.” I wondered how all this connection would change what it’s like to be at war."