Book of the Week (April 21, 2008)

In the Reference Area
Call Number: Ref ML 102 M88 H595 2007

The Rodgers and Hammerstein Encyclopedia
By Thomas S. Hischak

Publisher's Description: Still the most influential and popular songwriting team in the history of the American Musical Theatre, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein represent Broadway musicals at their finest. The team revolutionized the musical play with Oklahoma! in 1943 and then went on to explore territory never put on the musical stage before in such beloved shows as Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I and The Sound of Music. The team also worked in film, as with State Fair, and in the new medium of television, with Cinderella.

For the first time, the lives, careers, works, songs, and themes of Rodgers and Hammerstein have been gathered together in an encyclopedia that covers the many talents of these men. In addition to their plays and films together, every work that each man did with other collaborators is also discussed. Hundreds of their songs are described, and there are entries on the many actors, directors, and other creative artists who they worked with. A complete list of awards, recordings, and books about the team are included, as well as a chronology of everything either man wrote.

But The Rodgers and Hammerstein Encyclopedia is not just about facts. It explains their work, explores themes in their musicals, and illustrates why they remain a driving force in the American Theatre. This is the first encyclopedia to look specifically at the careers and works of Rodgers and Hammerstein, covering all their musicals together for stage, screen and televsion, but also everything they wrote with others. The purpose is to create a comprehensive guide to the American Musical Theatres foremost collaboration. The encyclopedia is (1) comprehensve, describing the works, the people involved in those works, and many of their famous songs; ( 2) up-to-date, including the most recent revivals of their works and new recordings of their scores; and (3) easy to use, being alphabetically arranged with cross-reference listings, chronological lists, lists of awards and recordings, and bibliographic information for further reading.

New Book of the Week (April 14, 2008)

On the New Book Shelf at the Library

Call Number: JC 599 .U5 B29 2007

Speechless: The Erosion of Free Expression in the American Workplace

By Bruce Barry

Publisher's Description: A factory worker is fired because her boss dislikes the political bumper sticker on her car in the parking lot. Another is canned after refusing to display an American flag at his workstation. A flight attendant is grounded because her airline doesn't like what she's writing in her personal blog. Is it legal to fire people for expressing themselves, even when it's unrelated to performing their jobs' Can you lose your job because of a bumper sticker? For many American workers, the answer is yes.

In Speechless, Bruce Barry confronts the state of free speech in the American workplace. He shows how employers and courts are eroding workers' abilities to express themselves on and off the job, with damaging consequences for individuals, their employers, and civil society as a whole. In defense of free speech in and around the workplace, Barry argues that the experience of liberty in a free society, as well as in life, in general, depends in part on the experience of liberty at work.

Book of the Week (March 31, 2008)

On the New Book Shelf in the Library
Call Number: GT 2485 .A84 2007

The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History

By Katherine Ashenburg

Publisher's description: The question of cleanliness is one every age and culture has answered with confidence. For the first-century Roman, being clean meant a two-hour soak in baths of various temperatures, scraping the body with a miniature rake, and a final application of oil. For the aristocratic Frenchman in the seventeenth century, it meant changing your shirt once a day and perhaps going so far as to dip your hands in some water. Did Napoleon know something we didn’t when he wrote Josephine “I will return in five days. Stop washing”? And why is the German term Warmduscher—a man who washes in warm or hot water—invariably a slightagainst his masculinity?

Katherine Ashenburg takes on such fascinating questions as these in The Dirt on Clean, her charming tour of attitudes to hygiene through time.What could be more routine than taking up soap and water and washing yourself? And yet cleanliness, or the lack of it, is intimately connected to ideas as large as spirituality and sexuality, and historical events that include plagues, the Civil War, and the discovery of germs. An engrossing fusion of erudition and anecdote, Clean considers the bizarre prescriptions of history’sdoctors, the hygienic peccadilloes of great authors, and the historic twists and turns that have brought us to a place Ashenburg considers hedonistic yet oversanitized.

Book of the Week (March 12, 2008)

Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture

By Taylor Clark

Call Number: HD 9199 .U54 S733 2007

Publisher's Description: Starbucked will be the first book to explore the incredible rise of the Starbucks Corporation and the caffeine-crazy culture that fueled its success. Part Fast Food Nation, part Bobos in Paradise, Starbucked combines investigative heft with witty cultural observation in telling the story of how the coffeehouse movement changed our everyday lives, from our evolving neighborhoods and workplaces to the ways we shop, socialize, and self-medicate.

In Starbucked, Taylor Clark provides an objective, meticulously reported look at the volatile issues like gentrification and fair trade that distress activists and coffee zealots alike. Through a cast of characters that includes coffee-wild hippies, business sharks, slackers, Hollywood trendsetters and more, Starbucked explores how America transformed into a nation of coffee gourmets in only a few years, how Starbucks manipulates psyches and social habits to snare loyal customers, and why many of the things we think we know about the coffee commodity chain are false.

Book of the Week (March 5, 2008)

Vanishing America: In Pursuit of Our Elusive Landscapes

By James Conaway

Call Number: E 169.Z83 C66 2007

Publisher's Description: The rich American landscape, both natural and cultural, is being threatened and in some cases wiped away completely. Preservation Editor-at-Large James Conaway takes to the road in Vanishing America, exploring the places, people, and traditions that have helped to shape our national identity.

Part personal narrative and part travelogue, his journey offers a smart and informative account from across the country. From D.C’s National Cathedral to a deserted cabin in Big Sur, from dinosaur bones in New Mexico’s Bisti Badlands to the weatherworn façade of New Orleans, along the way Conaway meets cowboys, hippies, real estate developers, and many others whose stories weave into a national identity at once created, disappearing, destroyed, and continually redefined. Many of the best reflections of what the country once stood for lie around us abused, exploited, or ignored. How do we resolve the notion of preservation within a culture so dependent on growth and prosperity?

With wit and acute urgency, Conaway reminds us that every bit of property, historic landmark, and distinct community, is vulnerable. These essays serve as a lament for what’s being lost, a prompt for what we still have to preserve, and a celebration of our nation’s unique characteristics.

Book of the Week (February 27, 2008)

How to Talk about Hot Topics on Campus

by Robert J. Nash

Call Number: LC 72.2 .N37 2008

Publisher's Description: How to Talk About Hot Topics on Campus fills a gap in the student services and teaching and learning literature by providing a resource that shows how to construct and carry out difficult conversations from various vantage points in the academy. It offers a theory-to-practice model of conversation for the entire college campus that will enable all constituencies to engage in productive and civil dialogue on the most difficult and controversial social, religious, political, and cultural topics.

About the Authors: Robert J. Nash is a professor in the College of Education and Social Services at the University of Vermont. He has published eight books, as well as more than one hundred articles, book chapters, monographs, and book reviews in many of the leading journals in education at all levels. He is a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Religion & Education.

DeMethra LaSha Bradley is an assistant director for academic integrity in the Center for Student Ethics and Standards at the University of Vermont (UVM). She is currently pursuing doctoral studies in the Educational Leadership and Policy Studies program at UVM. She is the co-author of several book chapters and has made various presentations at national conferences and universities across the United States.

Arthur W. Chickering is Special Assistant to the President of Goddard College in Vermont. He is the author of several Jossey-Bass books, including Education and Identity and Encouraging Authenticity and Spirituality in Higher Education.

Book(s) of the Week (February 18, 2008)

Visit the IMC on the 3rd floor of the Library to check out the winners of the 2008 American Library Association's children's book awards. The Caldecott Medal is presented to the artist of the most distinguished American picture book for children. The Newbery Medal is presented to the author of the most distinguised contribution to American literature for children.

2008 Caldecott Medal Winner:

The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick.

IMC Call Number: PZ 7 .S4654 Inv 2007

From the American Library Association: From an opening shot of the full moon setting over an awakening Paris in 1931, this tale casts a new light on the picture book form. Hugo is a young orphan secretly living in the walls of a train station where he labors to complete a mysterious invention left by his father. In a work of more than 500 pages, the suspenseful text and wordless double-page spreads narrate the tale in turns. Neither words nor pictures alone tell this story, which is filled with cinematic intrigue. Black & white pencil illustrations evoke the flickering images of the silent films to which the book pays homage.

2008 Newbery Medal Winner:

Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village
by Laura Amy Schlitz

IMC Call Number: PS 3619 .C43 C55 2007

From the American Library Association: In “Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village,” thirteenth-century England springs to life using 21 dramatic individual narratives that introduce young inhabitants of village and manor; from Hugo, the lord's nephew, to Nelly, the sniggler. Schlitz's elegant monologues and dialogues draw back the curtain on the period, revealing character and relationships, hinting at stories untold. Explanatory interludes add information and round out this historical and theatrical presentation.“Schlitz adds a new dimension to books for young readers - performance,” said Newbery Committee Chair Nina Lindsay. “Varied poetic forms and styles offer humor, pathos and true insight into the human condition. Each entry is superb in itself, and together the pieces create a pageant that transports readers to a different time and place.”