New Books, Films, Databases, and other Resources: August 2013

Why evolution is more than just a theory: it is a fact In all the current highly publicized debates about creationism and its descendant "intelligent design," there is an element of the controversy that is rarely mentioned-theevidence, the empirical truth of evolution by natural selection. Even Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould, while extolling the beauty of evolution and examining case studies, have not focused on the evidence itself. Yet the proof is vast, varied, and magnificent, drawn from many different fields of science. Scientists are observing species splitting into two and are finding more and more fossils capturing change in the past-dinosaurs that have sprouted feathers, fish that have grown limbs. Why Evolution Is Trueweaves together the many threads of modern work in genetics, paleontology, geology, molecular biology, and anatomy that demonstrate the "indelible stamp" of the processes first proposed by Darwin. In crisp, lucid prose accessible to a wide audience,Why Evolution Is Truedispels common misunderstandings and fears about evolution and clearly confirms that this amazing process of change has been firmly established as a scientific truth.

Science writer Carl Zimmer and evolutionary biologist Douglas Emlen have teamed up to write a textbook intended for biology majors that will inspire students while delivering a solid foundation in evolutionary biology. Zimmer brings the same story-telling skills he displayed in The Tangled Bank, his 2009 non-majors textbook that the Quarterly Review of Biology called “spectacularly successful.” Emlen, an award-winning evolutionary biologist at the University of Montana, has infused Evolution: Making Sense of Life with the technical rigor and conceptual depth that today’s biology majors require. Students will learn the fundamental concepts of evolutionary theory, such as natural selection, genetic drift, phylogeny, and coevolution. Evolution: Making Sense of Life also drives home the relevance of evolution for disciplines ranging from conservation biology to medicine. With riveting stories about evolutionary biologists at work everywhere from the Arctic to tropical rain forests to hospital wards, the book is a reading adventure designed to grab the imagination of the students, showing them exactly why it is that evolution makes such brilliant sense of life.

The Cambrian Period records one of the most extraordinary transitions in the history of life. Although animals may have first appeared nearly 700 million years ago, with the earliest sponges, their initial diversifications appear to have been modest until a richly diverse fossil fauna appeared abruptly about 170 million years later. In The Cambrian Explosion, Erwin and Valentine synthesize research from many fields to explain why there was such remarkable novelty of animal forms.

Comic Book

Scientists have a reputation for being focused on their work-and maybe even dull. But take another look. Did you know that it’s believed Galileo was scolded by the Roman Inquisition for sassing his mom? That Isaac Newton loved to examine soap bubbles? That Albert Einstein loved to collect joke books, and that geneticist Barbara McClintock wore a Groucho Marx disguise in public? With juicy tidbits about everything from favorite foods to first loves, the subjects of Kathleen Krull and Kathryn Hewitt’s Lives of the Scientists: Experiments, Explosions (and What the Neighbors Thought) are revealed as creative, bold, sometimes eccentric-and anything but dull.

Laura Overdeck wants to start a revolution-in the way we introduce math to children.The mission: To make the nightly math riddle as common as the bedtime story. Why? Multiple generations of Americans are uncomfortable with math. This attitude is contagious and potentially harmful to children, setting them up for fear and failure. Bedtime Math  wants to change all that.

Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom. Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette's intensifying allergy to Seattle--and people in general--has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic. To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondence--creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter's role in an absurd world.

The Last Trainis the harrowing true story about young brothers Paul and Oscar Arato and their mother, Lenke, surviving the Nazi occupation during the final years of World War II.

"In this best-selling novel, Patrick Smith tells the story of three generations of the MacIveys, a Florida family who battle the hardships of the frontier to rise from a dirt-poor Cracker life to the wealth and standing of real estate tycoons.

"The River Is Home, Smith's first novel, revolves around a Mississippi family's struggle to cope with changes in their rural environment. It is the story of Skeeter, a young boy whose family is poor in material goods but rich in their appreciation of their beautiful natural surroundings. The river figures strongly in their lives as a source of life and death."

After a falling out between their mothers, 13-year-old best friends Nell and Lydia are forbidden from seeing each other for the whole summer. Nell struggles with the thought of not only losing her best friend, but also losing the only person in whom Nell finds refuge from the difficulties she faces at home. Hidden Summer is a quietly beautiful coming of age story about self-discovery, family, and friendship. An elegantly written childrens book debut from an award-winning author in the vein of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and for fans of Moon Over Manifest.

For the past fifty years, "The New York Review of Books" has covered virtually every international revolution and movement of consequence by dispatching the world's most brilliant writers to write eyewitness accounts.

From Adonis to Wordsworth, this book is filled with the history of poet, myth, and knowledge . A text book that I might add is a pleasure to read and illustated in a very unique wa . From Greek myth to modern clothes .. a far range with much ado about nothing in between .

In his international blockbusters The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons, and The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown masterfully fused history, art, codes, and symbols. In this riveting new thriller, Brown returns to his element and has crafted his highest-stakes novel to date. In the heart of Italy, Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon is drawn into a harrowing world centered on one of history's most enduring and mysterious literary masterpieces . . . Dante's Inferno. Against this backdrop, Langdon battles a chilling adversary and grapples with an ingenious riddle that pulls him into a landscape of classic art, secret passageways, and futuristic science. Drawing from Dante's dark epic poem, Langdon races to find answers and decide whom to trust . . . before the world is irrevocably altered.

Part epic of Texas, part classic coming-of-age story, part unflinching portrait of the bloody price of power, The Son is an utterly transporting novel that maps the legacy of violence in the American West through the lives of the McCulloughs, an ambitious family as resilient and dangerous as the land they claim Spring, 1849.

Life hasn't worked out the way Ray Lamar planned. A widower who's made some tragic mistakes, he's got one good thing going for him: he's calm and efficient under pressure, usually with a gun in his hand. A useful skill to have when you're paid to hurt people who stand in your boss's way. But Ray isn't sure he wants to be that man anymore. He wants to go home and see the son he hopes will recognize him. He wants to make a new life far from the violence of the last ten years, and he believes that one last job will take him there. A job that should be simple, easy, clean.

For more than a century before gay marriage became a hot-button political issue, same-sex unions flourished in America. Pairs of men and pairs of women joined together in committed unions, standing by each other for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, for periods of thirty or forty sometimes as many as fifty years. In short, they loved and supported each other every bit as much as any husband and wife.

Although much attention has been paid to the adults who led, participated in, or witnessed the civil rights movement, much less attention has been given to those who were children during that era. Especially in the South, these children of the 1950s and afterward came of age in the midst of major societal shifts regarding race, gender, social class, and industry as the South re-branded itself the "Sun Belt." In this collection of memoirs, writers, teachers, scholars and historians recall growing up in the South from the late 1950s to the early 1990s, revealing how the region changed over time, as well as how a Southern childhood varied across time, race, gender, socio-economic status, and geography. By viewing these remembrances through the lens of multiculturalism, this collection offers anuanced understanding of how the pre-civil rights movement South evolved into the South of the 21st century.

Published from the income of the Frederick John Kingsbury memorial fund in conjunction with the North Carolina society of the colonial dames of America.

In this insightful history, William P. Jones restores the march to its full significance. The opening speech of the day was delivered by the leader of the march, the great trade unionist A. Philip Randolph, who first called for a march on Washington in 1941 to press for equal opportunity in employment and the armed forces. To the crowd that stretched more than a mile before him, Randolph called for an end to segregation and a living wage for every American. Equal access to accommodations and services would mean little to people, white and black, who could not afford them. Randolph's egalitarian vision of economic and social citizenship is the strong thread running through the full history of the March on Washington Movement. It was a movement of sustained grassroots organizing, linked locally to women's groups, unions, and churches across the country. Jones's fresh, compelling history delivers a new understanding of this emblematic event and the broader civil rights movement it propelled.

For decades, history ignored the Nazi persecution of gay people. Only with the rise of the gay movement in the 1970s did historians finally recognize that gay people, like Jews and others deemed "undesirable," suffered enormously at the hands of the Nazi regime. Of the few who survived the concentration camps, only one ever came forward to tell his story.

Highly regarded here and abroad for some thirty works of cultural history and criticism, master historian Jacques Barzun has now set down in one continuous narrative the sum of his discoveries and conclusions about the whole of Western culture since 1500.

The King Years delivers riveting tales of everyday heroes who achieved miracles in constructive purpose and yet poignantly fell short. Here is the full sweep of an era that still reverberates in national politics. Its legacy remains unsettled; there are further lessons to be discovered before free citizens can once again move officials to address the most intractable, fearful dilemmas.

Stephen Walsh's magisterial, engagingly written two-volumeStravinskyis the most detailed and extensive work available on the life of the man widely regarded as the greatest composer of the twentieth century. This second volume takes up the composer's story in 1934, in a Europe growing ever more chaotic in the lead-up to World War II. Walsh follows Stravinsky's emigration to the United States, where he courted Hollywood, associated with writers and artists including Aldous Huxley, W.H. Auden, and George Balanchine, began a career as a conductor and recording artist, and composed a string of masterpieces that changed the course of twentieth-century music.Stravinsky: The Second Exiletakes full account of Russian-language sources, including much correspondence, made available since the composer's death and since the fall of the Soviet Union, and is the first work to thoroughly assess the authenticity of many of the writings published under Stravinsky's name.

"In what may be the best analysis of how international relations affected any domestic issue, Mary Dudziak interprets postwar civil rights as a Cold War feature. She argues that the Cold War helped facilitate key social reforms, including desegregation. Civil rights activists gained tremendous advantage as the government sought to polish its international image. But improving the nation's reputation did not always require real change. This focus on image rather than substance - combined with constraints on McCarthy-era political activism and the triumph of law-and-order rhetoric - limited the nature and extent of progress."

A bold rethinking of the most powerful political idea in the world--democracy--as seen through the lens of the most transformative modern, political movements and the story of how radical democracy can transform America.

An instant American icon--the first Hispanic on the U.S. Supreme Court--tells the story of her life before becoming a judge in an inspiring, surprisingly personal memoir told with startling candor and intimacy.

Celebrated historian May describes how activists surmounted long-standing obstacles for the African-American vote, overcoming centuries of bigotry to secure--and preserve--the right of black citizens to full participation in American democracy in a vivid narrative history.

In A Clown at Midnight Andrew Hudgins offers a meditation on humor with a refreshing poignancy and cutting wit. He touches on love and nature, but at its core this collection is about the consolations and terrors, the delights and discomforts, of laughter, taking its title from a quote by Lon Chaney Sr.: “The essence of true horror is a clown at midnight.” Skillfully probing paradoxes, Hudgins conjures the titular clown: “Down these mean streets a bad joke walks alone / bruised head held low, chin tucked in tight, eyes down / defiant. He laughs and it turns to a moan.” Hudgins gives us utter honesty and accessible verse, exploring moments both uncomfortable and satirical while probing the impulse to confront life’s most demanding trials with laughter.

What is the difference between writing a novel about the Holocaust and fabricating a memoir? Do narratives about the Holocaust have a special obligation to be 'truthful'--that is, faithful to the facts of history? Or is it okay to lie in such works? In her provocative study Persistence of Vision, Ruth Franklin investigates these questions as they arise in the most significant works of Holocaust fiction, from Tadeusz Borowski's Auschwitz stories to Jonathan Safran Foer's postmodernist family history.

In Dante in Love, A. N. Wilson presents a glittering study of an artist and his world, arguing that without an understanding of medieval Florence, it is impossible to grasp the meaning of Dante’s great poem. He explains how the Italian states were at that time locked into violent feuds, mirrored in the ferocious competition between the Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy. He shows how Dante’s preoccupations with classical mythology, numerology, and the great Christian philosophers inform every line of the Comedy. Dante in Love also explores the enigma of the man who never wrote about the mother of his children, yet immortalized the mysterious Beatrice whom he barely knew. With a biographer’s eye for detail and a novelist’s comprehension of the creative process, A. N. Wilson paints a masterful portrait of Dante Alighieri and unlocks one of the seminal works of literature for a new generation of readers.

From an award-winning poet and compulsive joke teller comes a memoir about the jokes that educated him about history, religion, and familyNdelighting him, and often horrifying him, as he grew into adulthood.

Strong support among women was key to Obamas reelection. At the start of his second term, it is time for Barack Obama, forty years after "Roe v. Wade," to finally help lead us to demystify abortion. One-third of all American women will have an abortion by the time they are 45, and most of those women are already mothers. Yet, the topic remains taboo. In this provocative book on the heels of the Planned Parenthood controversy, Sarah Erdreich presents the antidote to the usual abortion debates. Inextricably connected to issues of autonomy, privacy, and sexuality, the abortion debate remains home base for the culture wars in America. Yet, there is more common ground than meets the eye in favor of choice. "Generation Roe "delves into phenomena such as "abortion-recovery counseling," "crisis pregnancy centers," and the infamous anti-choice "black children are an endangered species" billboards. It tells the stories of those who risk their lives to pursue careers in this stigmatized field. And it outlines the outrageous legislative battles that are being waged against abortion rights all over the country. With an inspiring spirit and a forward-looking approach, Erdreich holds abortion up, unabashedly, as a moral and fundamental human right.

The young heroine in "Sinners and the Sea "is destined for greatness. Known only as "wife" in the Bible and cursed with a birthmark that many think is the brand of a demon, this unnamed woman--fated to become the mother of all generations after the great flood--lives anew through Rebecca Kanner.

A Feeling for Books is at once a fascinating study of an influential cultural institution and a profoundly personal meditation on the love of books and the experience of reading. Deftly melding cultural history, literary criticism, and autobiographical reflection, Janice Radway traces the history of the Book-of-the-Month Club from its controversial founding in 1926 through its evolution into an organization uniquely its own.

Praise and lament are two major approaches to praying to God. In this book, Claus Westermann investigates these primary categories of the Psalms and shows their meaning for prayer and worship. He contrasts the Old Testament Psalms with those of Babylon and Egypt indicating their distinctive characteristics. Sensitively written and carefully reasoned, Westermann's book will be valued for the clear-cut way it brings light to the character of the ancient Psalms of Israel.

Making a Welcome combines an engaging personal story with an examination of the meaning and possibilities of hospitality, both as a domestic practice much in need of revival, and as a fundamental Christian orientation, with emotional, intellectual and spiritual implications. Maria Poggi Johnson draws on her knowledge of the Christian tradition, and on two decades of personal experience of trying to welcome well, to consider what happens when we open our homes to others, what is involved in offering a genuine welcome, and how the skills we develop in doing so can shape our relationships with our spouses, with the society around us, with our own beliefs and commitments, and with God. Illustrated by stories drawn from Scripture, literature, film, and from the author's own experience, Making a Welcome challenges readers to discover the life-changing practice of true hospitality, not only in their homes, but in all aspects of their lives

The aggressive tone of the psalms that deal with violence is often viewed as in direct opposition to Jesus' command to love one's neighbor. Erich Zenger, a preeminent international scholar, offers to Christians a new understanding of these powerful, albeit disquieting, psalms. To Zenger, these psalms are laments that cry out against violence and injustice in the world and have great relevance to people of faith today. Readers will appreciate Zenger's forthright discussion of how to use these psalms in modern prayer.

Synopsis: In this devilishly entertaining book, Tripp York takes it upon himself to find the Prince of Darkness. Provoked by a wager made in one of his religion classes, York explores whether in proving the existence of Satan, we might in turn prove the existence of God. Admitting the idea is not half-bad (and thus, conversely, only half-good), York enlists the aid of numerous ministers, theologians, spiritual warriors, pagans, shamanists, fortune tellers, and Satanists in his fiendish quest to determine the whereabouts of God's first fallen creature. Part memoir and part theological treatise, The Devil Wears Nada is a compelling and humorous account of the strange, bizarre, and (oftentimes) offensive things we think about God, the Devil, and everything in between.

The Big Questions in Science and Religion explores these ten queries to determine whether religious beliefs can survive in the scientific age. Author Keith Ward, an expert in the field of world religions, devotes a full chapter to each question, wherein he considers concepts from Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, and Christianity, alongside the speculations of cosmologists, physicians, mathematicians, and philosophers.

Atheologian whose life experience includes growing up alongside a brother with Down syndrome, Amos Yong in this book rereads and reinterprets biblical texts about human disability, arguing that the way we read biblical texts, not the Bible itself, is what causes us to marginalize persons with disabilities. Revealing and examining the underlying stigma of disability that exists even in the church, Yong shows how the Bible offers good news to people of all abilities and he challenges churches to become more inclusive communities of faith. Book jacket.

A Spirited, Accessible Introduction to Wisdom Literature in the Bible

Fleming Rutledge is an Episcopal priest engaged in a nationwide ministry of teaching and preaching. Her other books include Not Ashamed of the Gospel, The Undoing of Death, and The Bible and The New York Times.

Spanning thousands of years, this new collection brings together writings and teachings about sex, marriage, and family from the Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, and Confucian traditions. The volume includes traditional texts as well as contemporary materials showing how the religions have responded to the changing conditions and mores of modern life. It reveals the similarities and differences among the various religions and the development of ideas and teachings within each tradition. Selections shed light on each religion's views on a range of subjects, including sexuality and sexual pleasure, the meaning and purpose of marriage, the role of betrothal, the status of women, the place of romance, grounds for divorce, celibacy, and sexual deviance.

How are American identity and America's presence in the world shaped by war, and what does God have to do with it? Esteemed theologian Stanley Hauerwas helps readers reflect theologically on war, church, justice, and nonviolence in this compelling volume, exploring issues such as how America depends on war for its identity, how war affects the soul of a nation, the sacrifices that war entails, and why war is considered "necessary," especially in America. He also examines the views of nonviolence held by Martin Luther King Jr. and C. S. Lewis, how Jesus constitutes the justice of God, and the relationship between congregational ministry and Christian formation in America.

Abraham Heschel (1907-1972) was one of the great religious teachers and moral prophets of our time. Born in Warsaw to a long line of Hasidic rabbis, he chose instead to study philosophy in Germany. Expelled back to Warsaw, he escaped just weeks before the Nazi invasion and settled in the United States. Through a series of books he contributed greatly to the spiritual renewal of Judaism. But he exerted an equal influence on Christians, so much that he was called another "apostle to the gentiles." A passionate champion of interfaith dialogue, he served as an official observer at Vatican II and was influential in challenging the Catholic church to overcome the legacy of anti-Semitism. He raised a prophetic challenge to the social issues of his day, marching with Martin Luther King and protesting the Vietnam war. His writings here on prayer, God, prophecy, the human condition, and the spiritual life vividly communicate his instinct for the "holy dimension of all existence."

Question: Who made us? Answer #1: God made us. Answer #2: Evolution made us. Which is it? What is the true answer to the age-old question of where we came from? Is it even possible to know for sure? In "Finding Darwin's God, " Kenneth R. Miller offers a surprising resolution to the evolutionism vs. creationism debate. Miller argues that the genuine world of science is far more interesting than either the scientific mainstream or its creationist critics have assumed. He begins by systematically demolishing the claims of evolution's most vocal critics, showing that Darwin's great insights continue to be valid, even in the rarefied worlds of biochemistry and molecular biology. As he puts it, evolution "is the real thing, and so are we." D In this lively, fast-paced book, Miller offers a thoughtful, cutting-edge analysis of the key issues that seem to divide science and religion. As his narrative shows, the difficulties that evolution presents for Western religions are more apparent than real.

Highly regarded Old Testament theologian John Goldingay is often asked about the interpretation of the Bible, about the way we are to understand the stories in the Bible, about the relationship between the Old Testament and the New, and so on. In this volume he explores twenty-three questions related to biblical interpretation, articulating creative, provocative explanations for today's church. The book is divided into four parts: concerning Scripture as a whole; concerning narrative; concerning the Old Testament as a whole; and concerning the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings. Students of the Old Testament, pastors, and laypeople will value this work.

An internationally respected expert on the Second Temple period provides a fully up-to-date introduction to this crucial area of Biblical Studies.

Its one thing to clear a piece of land move the rocks, rake the soil, and protect it with a fence. It's another to bring it to life with berry-bearing bushes, exuberant tubers, vigorous vegetables, and many splendored flowers. It's that second thing that Arthur Boers has done, he's taken a theory and made it fruitful." Book jacket.

Religion and Science is a definitive contemporary discussion of the many issues surrounding our understanding of God and religious truth and experience in our understanding of God and religious truth and experience in our scientific age. This is a significantly expanded and feshly revised version of Religion in an Age of Science, winner of the American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence and the Templeton Book Award. Ian G. Barbour--the premier scholar in the field--has added three crucial historical chapters on physics and metaphysics in the seventeenth century, nature and God in the eighteenth century, and biology and theology in the nineteenth century. He has also added new sections on developments in nature-centered spirituality, information theory, and chaos and complexity theories.

A thousand years ago, the most perfect copy of the Hebrew Bible was written. It was kept safe through one upheaval after another in the Middle East, and by the 1940s it was housed in a dark grotto in Aleppo, Syria, and had become known around the world as the Aleppo Codex. Journalist Matti Friedman’s true-life detective story traces how this precious manuscript was smuggled from its hiding place in Syria into the newly founded state of Israel and how and why many of its most sacred and valuable pages went missing. It’s a tale that involves grizzled secret agents, pious clergymen, shrewd antiquities collectors, and highly placed national figures who, as it turns out, would do anything to get their hands on an ancient, decaying book. What it reveals are uncomfortable truths about greed, state cover-ups, and the fascinating role of historical treasures in creating a national identity. 

Consider Facebook - it's human contact, only easier to engage with and easier to avoid. Developing technology promises closeness. Sometimes it delivers, but much of our modern life leaves us less connected with people and more connected to simulations of them. In Alone Together, MIT technology and society professor Sherry Turkle explores the power of our new tools and toys to dramatically alter our social lives. It's a nuanced exploration of what we are looking for - and sacrificing - in a world of electronic companions and social networking tools, and an argument that, despite the hand-waving of today's self-described prophets of the future, it will be the next generation who will chart the path between isolation and connectivity.

John Polkinghorne, an international figure known both for his contributions to the field of theoretical elementary particle physics and for his work as a theologian, has over the years filled a bookshelf with writings devoted to specific topics in science and religion. In this new book, he undertakes for the first time a survey of all the major issues at the intersection of science and religion, concentrating on what he considers the essential insights for each. Clearly and without assuming prior knowledge, he addresses causality, cosmology, evolution, consciousness, natural theology, divine providence, revelation, and scripture.

A landmark in the conversation about race and religion in America.