Book of the Week (May 19, 2008)

On the New Book Shelf
Call Number QL 696.P7 B27 2008

The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman's Fight to Save the World's Most Beautiful Bird

By Bruce Barcott

Publisher's Description: “The first time we came here I didn’t know what to expect,” she told me as we paddled upstream. “What we found just blew me away. Jaguars, pumas, river otters, howler monkeys. The place was like a Noah’s Ark for all the endangered species driven out of the rest of Central America. There was so much life! That expedition was when I first saw the macaws.”

As a young woman, Sharon Matola lived many lives. She was a mushroom expert, an Air Force survival specialist, and an Iowa housewife. She hopped freight trains for fun and starred as a tiger tamer in a traveling Mexican circus. Finally she found her one true calling: caring for orphaned animals at her own zoo in the Central American country of Belize. Beloved as “the Zoo Lady” in her adopted land, Matola became one of Central America’s greatest wildlife defenders. And when powerful outside forces conspired with the local government to build a dam that would flood the nesting ground of the last scarlet macaws in Belize, Sharon Matola was drawn into the fight of her life.

In The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw, award-winning author Bruce Barcott chronicles Sharon Matola’s inspiring crusade to stop a multinational corporation in its tracks. Ferocious in her passion, she and her confederates–a ragtag army of courageous locals and eccentric expatriates–endure slander and reprisals and take the fight to the courtroom and the boardroom, from local village streets to protests around the world. As the dramatic story unfolds, Barcott addresses the realities of economic survival in Third World countries, explores the tension between environmental conservation and human development, and puts a human face on the battle over globalization. In this marvelous and spirited book, Barcott shows us how one unwavering woman risked her life to save the most beautiful bird in the world.

Book of the Week (May 5, 2008)

On the New Book Shelf on the 1st Floor

Call Number: DS 35.73 .B48 2008

Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West

By Benazir Bhutto

Publisher's Description: Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan in October 2007, after eight years of exile, hopeful that she could be a catalyst for change. Upon a tumultuous reception, she survived a suicide-bomb attack that killed nearly two hundred of her countrymen. But she continued to forge ahead, with more courage and conviction than ever, since she knew that time was running out—for the future of her nation, and for her life.

In Reconciliation, Bhutto recounts in gripping detail her final months in Pakistan and offers a bold new agenda for how to stem the tide of Islamic radicalism and to rediscover the values of tolerance and justice that lie at the heart of her religion. With extremist Islam on the rise throughout the world, the peaceful, pluralistic message of Islam has been exploited and manipulated by fanatics. Bhutto persuasively argues that America and Britain are fueling this turn toward radicalization by supporting groups that serve only short-term interests. She believed that by enabling dictators, the West was actually contributing to the frustration and extremism that lead to terrorism. With her experience governing Pakistan and living and studying in the West, Benazir Bhutto was versed in the complexities of the conflict from both sides. She was a renaissance woman who offered a way out.

In this riveting and deeply insightful book, Bhutto explores the complicated history between the Middle East and the West. She traces the roots of international terrorism across the world, including American support for Pakistani general Zia-ul-Haq, who destroyed political parties, eliminated an independent judiciary, marginalized NGOs, suspended the protection of human rights, and aligned Pakistani intelligence agencies with the most radical elements of the Afghan mujahideen. She speaks out not just to the West, but to the Muslims across the globe who are at a crossroads between the past and the future, between education and ignorance, between peace and terrorism, and between dictatorship and democracy. Democracy and Islam are not incompatible, and the clash between Islam and the West is not inevitable. Bhutto presents an image of modern Islam that defies the negative caricatures often seen in the West. After reading this book, it will become even clearer what the world has lost by her assassination.

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.