Book of the Week (December 15, 2008)

New Reference work (on the first floor in the Reference Collection)
Call number: REF GR 74 .G73 2008

The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales & Fairy Tales (3 volumes)

Edited by Donald Haase

Publisher's description: Folk and fairy tales exist in all cultures and are at the heart of civilization. This Encyclopedia gives students and general readers a broad, multicultural survey of folk and fairy tales from around the world. Included are hundreds of alphabetically arranged entries written by numerous expert contributors.

Entries cover themes and motifs, individuals, characters and character types, national traditions, genres, and a range of other topics. Each entry cites works for further reading, and the Encyclopedia closes with a bibliography of print and electronic resources. Literature students will welcome this book as an aid to understanding and analyzing folk and fairy tales as literary forms, while social studies students will appreciate it as an exploration of the essence of world cultures.

Book of the Week (November 24, 2008)

In Government Documents on the 6th Floor of the Library

Superintendent of Documents Number: LC 1.2 W15

On These Walls: Inscriptions and Quotations in the Buildings of the Library of Congress

By John Y. Cole

About this Book: The Library of Congress may hold the nation's collection of books, but those aren't the only words in the building worth a visit.

The white marble building is a cathedral to the written word. Lofty inscriptions peer out from among the stone columns, murals of classical figures and twining vines that decorate the Great Hall. All the inscriptions go together, says historian John Cole, author of "On These Walls: Inscriptions and Quotations in the Library of Congress." Cole has spent more than four decades in the building, and says it took him years to realize the message behind the quotations.

According to Cole, "There are very few buildings that really aspire in such a way to the noble side of life. Collectively, the inscriptions tell us that if this country can be an educated country, through books and the accumulation of other knowledge, then it will be a better country. It's a very optimistic message."

Take your own personal tour of the Library of Congress, courtesy of National Public Radio

Book of the Week (November 17, 2008)

On the New Book Shelf
Call Number: HD 9349 .M542 R69 2008

Bottlemania: How water went on sale and why we bought it

By Elizabeth Royte

Publisher's Description: In the follow-up to Garbage Land (@ UWSP library: HD 4484.N7 R68 2005), her influential investigation into our modern trash crisis, Elizabeth Royte ventures to Fryeburg, Maine, to look deep into the source—of Poland Spring water. In this tiny town, and in others like it across the country, she finds the people, machines, economies, and cultural trends that have made bottled water a $60-billion-a-year phenomenon even as it threatens local control of a natural resource and litters the landscape with plastic waste.

Moving beyond the environmental consequences of making, filling, transporting and landfilling those billions of bottles, Royte examines the state of tap water today (you may be surprised), and the social impact of water-hungry multinationals sinking ever more pumps into tiny rural towns. Ultimately, Bottlemania makes a case for protecting public water supplies, for improving our water infrastructure and—in a world of increasing drought and pollution—better allocating the precious drinkable water that remains. For more information visit the Bottlemania website.

Book of the Week (November 3, 2008)

On the New Book Shelf

Call Number: DS 555.34 .M5 V38 2008

A History of the Hmong: from Ancient Times to the Modern Diaspora

By Thomas Vang

Publisher's Description: This is the first completely up-to-date Hmong history book ever written by a member of the Hmong people. It describes the earliest civilizations of the Hmong and Miao in China, and why some of the Hmong migrated into Southeast Asia in the early 19th century, particularly to Vietnam, Laos and Thailand; and how the Hmong of Laos were involved with the Lao civil war, especially the secret war from 1962 to 1975 that caused almost a hundred thousand Hmong to flee to Thailand and Western countries as political refugees after the Communists takeover. This book also includes backgrounds on the current Hmong refugee crisis at Nam Khao refugee camp in Thailand and the arrest of former General Vang Pao by the U.S. authorities.

Book of the Week (October 20, 2008)

To enjoy as a companion to the World Series:

On the New Book Shelf in the Library
Call Number: GV 863 .A1 M644 2008

But Didn't We Have Fun? The Pioneer Age of Baseball
By Peter Morris

Author's Description: I’m very excited about my new book, But Didn’t We Have Fun?. It tells the story of the first generation of ballplayers -- the men who saw baseball transformed from a boy’s game into a professional sport -- in an entirely new way. In fact, what I’ve tried to do as much as possible is to give these pioneers the opportunity to tell their own story for the first time. I’ve collected dozens of the previously unpublished or unavailable reminiscences of these earliest ballplayers and woven them together to bring those extraordinary years back to life.

Standing alone, these men’s recollections can be difficult to follow -- after all, they were addressing their contemporaries and did not have twenty-first-century readers in mind. And even if they had, they could not possibly have anticipated how much the game they loved has changed and grown. So while compiling But Didn’t We Have Fun? I had to be careful to put everything in context and to explain or leave out obscure references. I also had to leave out a lot of names and dates and places that would simply have made the essential parts of their stories more difficult to follow.

What is left is, I think, an extraordinary story -- about how much work these men put in to make the baseballs and the playing fields that made the game possible, about how much belonging to a baseball club meant to them, about what they thought of the changing rules and the coming of professionalism, about the special moments on the diamond that stuck with them for the rest of their lives, and most of all of how they came to love baseball. Best of all, it’s all true, or at least true in the way any person’s honest recollections are -- the details may get confused over time, but their essence becomes clearer. It was a privilege for me to be able to help these men tell their tales.

Book of the Week (October 13, 2008)

On the New Book Shelf in the Library Lobby.
Call Number: PS 3563.O8749 A6 2008

What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction
By Toni Morrison
Edited by Carolyn C. Denard

Publisher's Description: What Moves at the Margin collects three decades of Toni Morrison's writings about her work, her life, literature, and American society. The works included in this volume range from 1971, when Morrison (b. 1931) was a new editor at Random House and a beginning novelist, to 2002 when she was a professor at Princeton University and Nobel Laureate.

Even in the early days of her career, in between editing other writers, writing her own novels, and raising two children, she found time to speak out on subjects that mattered to her. From the reviews and essays written for major publications to her moving tributes to other writers to the commanding acceptance speeches for major literary awards, Morrison has consistently engaged as a writer outside the margins of her fiction. These works provide a unique glimpse into Morrison's viewpoint as an observer of the world, the arts, and the changing landscape of American culture.

The first section of the book, "Family and History," includes Morrison's writings about her family, Black women, Black history, and her own works. The second section, "Writers and Writing," offers her assessments of writers she admires and books she reviewed, edited at Random House, or gave a special affirmation to with a foreword or an introduction. The final section, "Politics and Society," includes essays and speeches where Morrison addresses issues in American society and the role of language and literature in the national culture.

Among other pieces, this collection includes a reflection on 9/11, reviews of such seminal books by Black writers as Albert Murray's South to a Very Old Place and Gayl Jones's Corregidora, an essay on teaching moral values in the university, a eulogy for James Baldwin, and Morrison's Nobel lecture. Taken together, What Moves at the Margin documents the response to our time by one of American literature's most thoughtful and eloquent writers.

Book of the Week (October 6, 2008)

On the New Book Shelf

Call Number: JK 1764 .W635 2008

Millennial Makeover: My Space, YouTube and the Future of American Politics

By Morley Winograd

Publisher's Description: It happens in America every four decades and it is about to happen again. America's demand for change in the 2008 election will cause another of our country's periodic political makeovers. This realignment, like all others before it, will result from the coming of age of a new generation of young Americans-the Millennial Generation-and the full emergence of the Internet-based communications technology that this generation uses so well. Beginning in 2008, almost everything about American politics and government will transform-voting patterns, the fortunes of the two political parties, the issues that engage the nation, and our government and its public policy.

Building on the seminal work of previous generational theorists, Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais demonstrate and describe, for the first time, the two types of realignments-"idealist" and "civic"-that have alternated with one another throughout the nation's history. Based on these patterns, Winograd and Hais predict that the next realignment will be very different from the last one that occurred in 1968. "Idealist" realignments, like the one put into motion forty years ago by the Baby Boomer Generation, produce, among other things, a political emphasis on divisive social issues and governmental gridlock. "Civic" realignments, like the one that is coming, and the one produced by the famous GI or "Greatest" Generation in the 1930s, by contrast, tend to produce societal unity, increased attention to and successful resolution of basic economic and foreign policy issues, and institution-building.

The authors detail the contours and causes of the country's five previous political makeovers, before delving deeply into the generational and technological trends that will shape the next. The book's final section forecasts the impact of the Millennial Makeover on the elections, issues, and public policies that will characterize America's politics in the decades ahead.