New Books, Films, Databases, and other Resources: September 2011

Musical Score

History of jazz that explains what jazz is, where it came from, and who created it and why, all within the broader context of American life and culture. Emphasizing its African American roots, Jazz traces the history of the music over the last hundred years. From ragtime and blues to the international craze for swing, from the heated protests of the avant-garde to the radical diversity of today's artists, Jazz describes the travails and triumphs of musical innovators struggling for work, respect, and cultural acceptance set against the backdrop of American history, commerce, and politics

In this vivid tale of adultery and intrigue, witchcraft and murder, Glenn Watkins explores the fascinating life of the Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo--a life suffused with scandal and bordering on the fantastical. An isolated prince, Gesualdo had a personal life that was no less eccentric and bewildering than the music he composed; his biography has often clouded our perception of his oeuvre, which has periodically been dismissed as a late Renaissance deformation of little consequence. Today, however, Gesualdo's music, once deemed so strange as to be unperformable, stands as one of the most vibrant legacies of the late Italian Renaissance, with an undeniable impact on a host of twentieth-century musicians and artists. The incendiary details of Gesualdo's life recede, and his grip on our musical imagination comes to the fore.

A compilation of quotations from the speeches and writings of our thirty-third President.

.....Diana Kleiner shows us in this provocative book, which opens an entirely new perspective on one of the most intriguing women who ever lived. Cleopatra and Rome reveals how these iconic episodes, absorbed into a larger historical and political narrative, document a momentous cultural shift from the Hellenistic world to the Roman Empire. In this story, Cleopatra's death was not an end but a beginning-a starting point for a wide variety of appropriations by Augustus and his contemporaries that established a paradigm for cultural conversion. In this beautifully illustrated book, we experience the synthesis of Cleopatra's and Rome's defining moments through surviving works of art and other remnants of what was once an opulent material culture: religious and official architecture, cult statuary, honorary portraiture, villa paintings, tombstones, and coinage, but also the theatrical display of clothing, perfume, and hair styled to perfection for such ephemeral occasions as triumphal processions or barge cruises. It is this visual culture that best chronicles Cleopatra's legend and suggests her subtle but indelible mark on the art of imperial Rome at the critical moment of its inception. Read less

"In 1958, angry Venezuelans attacked Vice President Richard Nixon in Caracas, opening a turbulent decade in Latin American-U.S. relations. In Yankee No! Alan McPherson sheds much-needed light on the controversial and pressing problem of anti-U.S. sentiment in the world.....

Containing essays on the American Civil War, this work explores the sources of the nation's and the author's own history. It offers a fresh perspective on the United States' central historical event.

Published to coincide with a first authorized biography about the Nobel Peace Prize-winning archbishop, a volume of more than one hundred selections from his speeches, sermons, and writings shares his views on such topics as faith and social responsibility, nuclear disarmament, and women in the church.

Excerpts from a wide range of period newspapers offer a detailed account of the Civil War and reveal how the media skewed how Northerners and Southerners viewed the war.

Offers a perspective on American slavery. Starting with a view across the temporal and spatial boundaries of world slavery, this work traces continuities from the ancient world to the era of exploration.

From the Publisher: A global history of ancient warfare, covering Egypt, the Near East, Greece, Rome, Central Asia, India, China, Korea, Japan, and the Americas. In this new survey of ancient warfare, a group of distinguished historians and archaeologists discusses major battles and wars from around the world. The book ranges in time from 8000 BC and the earliest evidence of warfare in northern Iraq to the armies of the Aztecs and Incas half a millennium ago, and includes Alexander the Great's triumphant campaigns against Persia in the fourth century BC, Caesar's Gallic Wars, the Han Chinese defeat of the nomadic Xiongnu horsemen, and the Inca ruler Atahualpa's last stand against Pizarro.

Photographs of, and candid interviews with, soldiers of the Iraq War, documenting the extraordinary challenges they face.

Systematic exploration of the nature and extent of sympathy for Nazi Germany at American universities during the 1930s

Historian Painter centers her momentous study of racial classification on the slave trade and the nation-building efforts which dominated the United States in the 18th century, when thinkers led by Ralph Waldo Emerson strove to explain the rapid progress of America within the context of white superiority. Her research is filled with frequent, startling realizations about how tenuous and temporary our racial

Describes the passionate struggles that have taken place in order to utilize, protect and understand the wonder that is the Amazon. This book features the adventures and misadventures down the centuries of the explorers, missionaries, indigenous Indians, naturalists, rubber barons, scientists, anthropologists and archaeologists.

A history of graphic design that charts over a century of creative brilliance, showcasing the most influential graphic designs from 1900 to the present. Organized chronologically to illustrate how one great concept can inspire the next, each year features a seminal piece of work by a graphic artist some famous, some anonymous the designs that originally inspired them and later works that show their influence.

"One Block follows the reconstruction of a single New Orleans block in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, delivering a powerful portrait of the storm's ongoing physical and psychological impact on the city and its residents"

The stories in the Bible present some of the most memorable approaches to justice ever described. Legal scholar Daniel Friedmann explores the legal, moral, and political aspects of well-known and dramatic biblical tales. Friedmann's analyses include reference to ancient law codes, mythology, literature, the history of law, as well complex contemporary issues, ranging from marriage and maternity disputes to religious and national identity. To kill and take possession reveals how ancient attitudes have had continuing relevance throughout history and up to the present.

Making and having babies--what it takes to get pregnant, stay pregnant, and deliver--has mystified women and men for the whole of human history. Over the last one hundred years, depending on the latest prevailing advice, women have taken morphine, practiced Lamaze, relied on ultrasound images, sampled fertility drugs, and shopped at sperm banks. Here, the insatiably curious Randi Hutter Epstein journeys through history, fads, and fables, and to the fringe of science, where audacious researchers have gone to extreme measures to get healthy babies out of mothers. The result is an entertaining and enlightening celebration of human life

In this forthright and incisive book, Nobel Laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz explains how America exported bad economics, bad policies, and bad behavior to the rest of the world, only to cobble together a haphazard and ineffective response when the markets finally seized up. Stiglitz then outlines a way to restore the balance between markets and government, address the inequalities of the global financial system, and demand more good ideas (and less ideology) from economists

Graphic novel

Presents the life of the nineteenth century orator, noted for his support of the abolition of slavery and the suffrage of women, as well as his friendships with some of the century's most famous writers, including Henry Thoreau, Mark Twain, and Walt Whitman.

Explores prions, enigmatic brain proteins, and their influence on human life, examining the case of an Italian family victimized for two centuries by a fatal familial insomnia, and the links between prions and various brain maladies.

Percy Gloom, cautious and oversheltered to an extreme, dreams of working for Safety-Now, a company that puts warning signs on household objects--but the road getting there forces him to confront questions about life and death (and safety, of course).

"Do concepts life war and enemies hold a people together? Does conflict have an irresistible cultural momentum? These are the questions the cartoonist Cathy Malkasian explores in Temperance. After a brutal injury sustained in battle, Lester has no memory of his prior life. For the next thirty years his wife does everything to keep him from remembering-- and re-constructing-- a society, Blessedbowl, that has since elevated him as a hero. Blessedbowl is a cultural convergence of lies, memories, stories, and beliefs. Its people thrive on ideas of persecution, exceptionalism, and enemies, persuaded that war lurks just outside their walls. Lester's gradual emergence from his amnesia signals a crisis for the people of Blessedbowl, as their illusions become less and less sustainable.

"You Are There is set on a small island off the coast of France, where unscrupulous landowners have succeeded in overtaking the land from the last heir of a previously wealthy family. That heir, whose domain, in a Beckettian twist, is now reduced to the walls that border these patches of land he used to own, prowls the walls all day, eking out a living by collecting tolls at each gate. His seemingly hopeless struggle to recover his birthright becomes complicated as the government sees a way of using his plight for the sake of political expediency, and the romantic intervention of the daughter of one of the landowners (who has her own sordid history with the politician) engenders further difficulties, culminating in an apocalyptic, hallucinatory finale"

"The exhibition, organized by The Costume Institute, will celebrate the late Alexander McQueen's extraordinary contributions to fashion. From his postgraduate collection of 1992 to his final runway presentation which took place after his death in February 2010, Mr. McQueen challenged and expanded the understanding of fashion beyond utility to a conceptual expression of culture, politics, and identity. His iconic designs constitute the work of an artist whose medium of expression was fashion. Approximately one hundred examples will be on view, including signature designs such as the bumster trouser, the kimono jacket, and the Origami frock coat, as well as pieces reflecting the exaggerated silhouettes of the 1860s, 1880s, 1890s, and 1950s that he crafted into contemporary silhouettes transmitting romantic narratives. Technical ingenuity imbued his designs with an innovative sensibility that kept him at fashion's vanguard."

Alvin Pendergast, a nineteen-year-old Illinois farm boy and tuberculosis survivor, falls prey to con man and killer Chester Burke, who promises him a job across the Mississippi in the summer of 1928, but instead involves him in a harrowing journey across the Midwest, but Alvin finds the courage to take charge of his own fate after bonding with a curious and clever dwarf Chester picks up along the way.

Inspired by true events, a graphic novel examines life on the streets of war-torn Iraq, raising questions about the meaning of liberation through the experiences of four lions who escaped from the Baghdad Zoo during a raid.

The author tells the story of his long, painful, longshot recovery from a near-fatal car accident at age 18 to eventually complete the Ironman Triathlon.

"What might a school that wholeheartedly values thinking look like? How can we encourage students to be active learners instead of passive recipients of knowledge? In this engaging book, Boostrom invites readers to think about the ways in which the practice of teaching unintentionally promotes nonthinking."

Jorge Luis Borges is generally acknowledged to be one of the 20th century's most significant writers. But, the fact that he is an Argentine writer is rarely discussed.

Arranged into four periods - Classical, Hellenic, Roman and Early Byzantine - this work features works by such ancient masters as Xenophanes, Callimachus, Sappho and Simonides.

Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857) is a pioneering biography of one great Victorian woman novelist by another. Gaskell was a friend of Bronte's and, having been invited to write the official life, determined to both tell the truth

Offering insight into the poet's lesser-known contributions as a teacher and lecturer, a collection of excerpts from forty-six of his presentations includes such topics as "What I think I'm doing when I write a poem" and "The future of the world."

Acclaimed historian Alan Brinkley gives us a sharply realized portrait of Henry Luce, arguably the most important publisher of the twentieth century. As the founder of "Time," "Fortune, "and "Life" magazines, Luce changed the way we consume news and the way we understand our world

A comprehensive collection of the author's nonfiction works ranges from reports on the 1976 Soweto uprising and observations of Zimbabe at the dawn of independence to portraits of such figures as Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu.

The ultimate reader's-guide to the works that fooled publishers, readers, and critics the world over--from Dionysius the Renegade to modern publishing pranks such as the Hitler Diaries.

Explores the lessons that modern readers can draw from Joyce's classic work, revealing how "Ulysses" presents a vision of a more tolerant and decent society in which the seemingly banal hero, Leopold Bloom, represents ordinary wisdom that can offer a model for living.

Newmarket pictorial moviebook.

An extensive volume of Greek poetry includes more than one thousand entries spanning three millennia and many diverse traditions, in an anthology that includes works by such classic and modern writers as Sappho, Pindar, and Seferis.

Prize-winning author and journalist Norberto Fuentes was once a revolutionary: a writer with privileged access to Fidel Castro's inner circle during some the most challenging years of the revolution. But in the late 1990s, as the regime began sending its oldest comrades to the firing squad, he became A Man Who Knew Too Much. Escaping a death sentence and now living in exile, Fuentes has written a brilliant, satirical, and utterly captivating "autobiography" of the Cuban leader-in Fidel's own arrogant and seductive language--discussing everything from Castro's early sexual experiences in Birán to his true feelings about Che Guevara and his philosophy on murder, legacy, and state secrets.-

The Beowulf story retold from the dragon's point of view reveals the darker side of human nature and values