Category Archives: Feature Articles

What to Read this Month: September 2019

Happy fall! While it might be too soon to curl up with a blanket, you can always curl up with a good book. For more exciting reads, check out our Overdrive, New and Noteworthy, and Current Literature collections.


Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton.

Eli Bell’s life is complicated. His father is lost, his mother is in jail, and his stepdad is a heroin dealer. The most steadfast adult in Eli’s life is Slim – a notorious felon and national record-holder for successful prison escapes – who watches over Eli and August, his silent genius of an older brother.

Exiled far from the rest of the world in Darra, a neglected suburb populated by Polish and Vietnamese refugees, this twelve-year-old boy with an old soul and an adult mind is just trying to follow his heart, learn what it takes to be a good man, and train for a glamorous career in journalism. Life, however, insists on throwing obstacles in Eli’s path – most notably Tytus Broz, Brisbane’s legendary drug dealer.

But the real trouble lies ahead. Eli is about to fall in love, face off against truly bad guys, and fight to save his mother from a certain doom – all before starting high school.

A story of brotherhood, true love, family, and the most unlikely of friendships, Boy Swallows Universe is the tale of an adolescent boy on the cusp of discovering the man he will be. Powerful and kinetic, Trent Dalton’s debut is sure to be one of the most heartbreaking, joyous and exhilarating novels you will experience.


The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator by Timothy C. Winegard.

A pioneering and groundbreaking work of narrative nonfiction that offers a dramatic new perspective on the history of humankind, showing how through millennia, the mosquito has been the single most powerful force in determining humanity’s fate.

Why was gin and tonic the cocktail of choice for British colonists in India and Africa? What does Starbucks have to thank for its global domination? What has protected the lives of popes for millennia? Why did Scotland surrender its sovereignty to England? What was George Washington’s secret weapon during the American Revolution?

The answer to all these questions, and many more, is the mosquito.

Across our planet since the dawn of humankind, this nefarious pest, roughly the size and weight of a grape seed, has been at the frontlines of history as the grim reaper, the harvester of human populations, and the ultimate agent of historical change. As the mosquito transformed the landscapes of civilization, humans were unwittingly required to respond to its piercing impact and universal projection of power.

The mosquito has determined the fates of empires and nations, razed and crippled economies, and decided the outcome of pivotal wars, killing nearly half of humanity along the way. She (only females bite) has dispatched an estimated 52 billion people from a total of 108 billion throughout our relatively brief existence. As the greatest purveyor of extermination we have ever known, she has played a greater role in shaping our human story than any other living thing with which we share our global village.

Imagine for a moment a world without deadly mosquitoes, or any mosquitoes, for that matter? Our history and the world we know, or think we know, would be completely unrecognizable.

Driven by surprising insights and fast-paced storytelling, The Mosquito is the extraordinary untold story of the mosquito’s reign through human history and her indelible impact on our modern world order.


The Last Equation of Isaac Severy: A Novel in Clues by Nova Jacobs.

The Family Fang meets The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry in this literary mystery about a struggling bookseller whose recently deceased grandfather, a famed mathematician, left behind a dangerous equation for her to track down – and protect – before others can get their hands on it.

Just days after mathematician and family patriarch Isaac Severy dies of an apparent suicide, his adopted granddaughter Hazel, owner of a struggling Seattle bookstore, receives a letter from him by mail. In it, Isaac alludes to a secretive organization that is after his final bombshell equation, and he charges Hazel with safely delivering it to a trusted colleague. But first, she must find where the equation is hidden.

While in Los Angeles for Isaac’s funeral, Hazel realizes she’s not the only one searching for his life’s work, and that the equation’s implications have potentially disastrous consequences for the extended Severy family, a group of dysfunctional geniuses unmoored by the sudden death of their patriarch.

As agents of an enigmatic company shadow Isaac’s favorite son – a theoretical physicist – and a long-lost cousin mysteriously reappears in Los Angeles, the equation slips further from Hazel’s grasp. She must unravel a series of maddening clues hidden by Isaac inside one of her favorite novels, drawing her ever closer to his mathematical treasure. But when her efforts fall short, she is forced to enlist the help of those with questionable motives.


Brave New Arctic: The Untold Story of the Melting North by Mark C. Serreze.

An insider account of how researchers unraveled the mystery of the thawing Arctic.

In the 1990s, researchers in the Arctic noticed that floating summer sea ice had begun receding. This was accompanied by shifts in ocean circulation and unexpected changes in weather patterns throughout the world. The Arctic’s perennially frozen ground, known as permafrost, was warming, and treeless tundra was being overtaken by shrubs. What was going on? Brave New Arctic is Mark Serreze’s riveting firsthand account of how scientists from around the globe came together to find answers.

In a sweeping tale of discovery spanning three decades, Serreze describes how puzzlement turned to concern and astonishment as researchers came to understand that the Arctic of old was quickly disappearing – with potentially devastating implications for the entire planet. Serreze is a world-renowned Arctic geographer and climatologist who has conducted fieldwork on ice caps, glaciers, sea ice, and tundra in the Canadian and Alaskan Arctic. In this must-read book, he blends invaluable insights from his own career with those of other pioneering scientists who, together, ushered in an exciting new age of Arctic exploration. Along the way, he accessibly describes the cutting-edge science that led to the alarming conclusion that the Arctic is rapidly thawing due to climate change, that humans are to blame, and that the global consequences are immense.

A gripping scientific adventure story, Brave New Arctic shows how the Arctic’s extraordinary transformation serves as a harbinger of things to come if we fail to meet the challenge posed by a warming Earth.


The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley.

From the Hugo Award­winning author of The Stars Are Legion comes a brand-new science fiction thriller about a futuristic war during which soldiers are broken down into light in order to get them to the front lines on Mars.

They said the war would turn us into light.
I wanted to be counted among the heroes who gave us this better world.

The Light Brigade: it’s what soldiers fighting the war against Mars call the ones who come back…different. Grunts in the corporate corps get busted down into light to travel to and from interplanetary battlefronts. Everyone is changed by what the corps must do in order to break them down into light. Those who survive learn to stick to the mission brief – no matter what actually happens during combat.

Dietz, a fresh recruit in the infantry, begins to experience combat drops that don’t sync up with the platoon’s. And Dietz’s bad drops tell a story of the war that’s not at all what the corporate brass want the soldiers to think is going on.

Is Dietz really experiencing the war differently, or is it combat madness? Trying to untangle memory from mission brief and survive with sanity intact, Dietz is ready to become a hero – or maybe a villain; in war it’s hard to tell the difference.

A worthy successor to classic stories like Downbelow Station, Starship Troopers, and The Forever War, The Light Brigade is award-winning author Kameron Hurley’s gritty time-bending take on the future of war.

 


2019 Banned Books Week

This week (September 22nd-28th) is Banned Books Week, which is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read. Inspired by an article I read this year (More than half of banned books challenged for LGBTQ content), I want to highlight some LGBTQ related titles that have been challenged or banned to make us more aware of the need to include a variety of voices.  I hope that you will enjoy exploring these titles for yourself.

Angels in America by Tony Kushner.  Angels in America was challenged at Deerfield High School in Deerfield, Massachusetts after protests from a community member who objected to its sexual, religious and racial content, and public attacks made by a local organization that called the play ‘pornography.’ However, after a major outcry from students and other community members, including a student who wrote an op-ed, it was decided that the book would still be taught in the Deerfield AP English class.

Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden.  It was published first in 1982 amidst controversy because of its positive portrayal of the story’s gay protagonists. There have been several attacks on the book because it centers on two 17 year old girls exploring their sexual orientation, though there are no explicit sexual encounters in the novel. The book was also reportedly banned in some Kansas City schools.  The book was at the center of a high-profile 1995 case in which US District Court Justice Thomas Van Bebber ruled that the novel must be returned to high school libraries where it had been removed because it was educationally suitable.

Coming Out in College: The Struggle for a Queer Identity by Robert A. Rhoads.  It was one of 55 books that parents in Fayetteville, Arkansas petitioned to have removed from school libraries. The parents formed Parents Protecting the Minds of Children and objected to the profane language and depictions of sexuality in the book. They also accused librarians and other opponents of their efforts of promoting a homosexual agenda. PPMC objects to this book because it promotes gay pride and a rejection of heterosexism.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel.  Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is a graphic novel memoir of the author’s childhood, particularly focused on her relationship with her closeted gay father Bruce. As Alison grows older and realizes that she is a lesbian, she and Bruce are both forced to confront how his repression may have affected her own self-image and the way that she dealt with her sexuality. Time magazine named it the best book of 2006, describing it as “a masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debts to each other.” The musical adaptation of Fun Home won the 2015 Tony Award for Best Musical. In 2018, two New Jersey parents requested that it be removed from the 12th grade honors curriculum because of its “sexually explicit nature.”

Gays/Justice: A Study of Ethics, Society and Law by Richard D. Mohr.  Gays/Justice was one of 55 books that parents in Fayetteville, Arkansas petitioned to have removed from school libraries. The parents formed Parents Protecting the Minds of Children and objected to the profane language and depictions of sexuality in the book. They also accused librarians and other opponents of their efforts of promoting a homosexual agenda. PPMC objects to this book because it endorses stronger civil rights for gay people and opposes organized religion.

Geography Club by Brent Hartinger.  It has recently become one of the most banned and challenged books in the United States. It was banned in the author’s hometown of Tacoma, Washington. More recently, the book has come under fire in West Bend, Wisconsin, where community members object to its presence in the local library because of its ‘immoral’ gay content. Click here for the Kids’ Right to Read Project interview with Brent Hartinger.

George by Alex Gino tells the story a child who is born male and known to all as George, but identifies as female and prefers the name Melissa. The book details how Melissa comes out to her best friend, and eventually to others, through the help of a school play. Five elementary schools in eastern Oregon withdrew from an annual statewide ‘Battle of the Books’ competition because of the inclusion of George in the reading list. The book carries an age recommendation of grades 3-7 and the schools’ principals argued it was not appropriate for their third-to-fifth grade students who would be participating in the competition.

Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin by John D’Emilio.  In May 2005, the Oklahoma House of Representatives passed a resolution calling on public libraries to remove children’s books with references to gay characters or families. In response, gay and lesbian civil rights groups in Oklahoma donated copies of Lost Prophet: The Life of Bayard Rustin and Stonewall: The Riot that Sparked the Gay Revolution to local high schools. The donation was met with conservative outcry but the Oklahoma City school board voted to permit the donation.

New Joy of Gay Sex by Charles Silverstein.  The New Joy of Gay Sex met various challenges including its being challenged at a Clifton, New Jersey library where the board voted to limit access to the book, keeping it hidden behind the circulation desk and requiring that patrons ask for it specifically by name. Additionally, a York Township woman in Medina County, Ohio quit her job as a librarian in protest over children being able to check out adult-oriented materials like The New Joy of Gay Sex. The library took no action maintaining that its policy was a parental responsibility to monitor which books children checked out.

Stuck Rubber Baby by Howard Cruse is a graphic novel about a young man coming to terms with his homosexuality in the Civil Rights era American south. Themes include homophobia, racism and gay identity. The novel was attacked by the Library Patrons of Texas, who objected to its inclusion in local libraries. They forced the reclassification of the book from Young Adult to Adult, but the book was not removed.

The National Coalition Against Censorship has even more titles on their website.

Collection Spotlight: Migration in a Divided World

In conjunction with the 2019 Provost Forum: Immigration in a Divided World, our current collection spotlight focuses on the complex issue of immigration, including books by many of the participants.  The titles are a mix of points of view and include public policy texts, political books, histories, memoirs, and novels.  Here are some highlights from the display:

The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America by Eric Kaufmann

Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen by Jose Antonio Vargas

The Death of Politics: How to Heal our Frayed Republic after Trump by Peter Wehner

Cast Away: Stories of Survival from Europe’s Refugee Crisis by Charlotte McDonald-Gibson

The Virtue of Nationalism by Yoram Hazony

Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat

Debating Immigration edited by Carol M. Swain

Challenging the Borders of Justice in the Age of Migrations by Juan Carlos Velasco and MariaCaterina La Barbara

The Body Papers: A Memoir by Grace Talusan

Immigration Wars: Forging an American Solution by Jeb Bush and Clint Bolick

Understanding Immigration: Issues and Challenges in an Era of Mass Population Movement by Marilyn Hoskin

The Other Americans by Laila Lalami

Please check out the Collection Spotlight rack near our Perkins Library Service Desk on the first floor of Perkins in preparation for the Forum taking place between October 16th-17th, 2019.

Low Maintenance Book Club Reads Fleabag!

Our next book club will be on Tuesday September 24th at 5:30 in Bostock 121 (Murthy Digital Studio) The Edge.

If you enjoyed the series, check out the play! Duke University Libraries’ Low Maintenance Book Club kicks off the fall semester reading Fleabag, Phoebe Waller-Bridges’ play upon which the hit show was based.

From the play’s synopsis: “With family and friendships under strain and a guinea pig café struggling to keep afloat, Fleabag suddenly finds herself with nothing to lose.” We hope you’ll join us on this wild ride!

Light refreshments will be served, and we’ll have small prizes for attendees.  Copies of this book are available through the Duke Libraries.

Please RSVP if you plan to attend. If you have any questions, you can contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy at aah39@duke.edu.

Announcing the 2019 Archival Expeditions Fellows

The Archival Expeditions introduces Duke graduate students to teaching with digital and physical primary sources. Each student partners with a Duke faculty sponsor to design an undergraduate course module that incorporates primary source material tailored to a specific class.  The Archival Expeditions Fellows spend 70-75 hours during a semester consulting with their faculty sponsor, library staff and other experts and researching, developing and testing the module.  A module can take a variety of shapes and be adjusted to fit different courses, disciplines, and goals of the faculty sponsor.  This year’s cohorts consists of three graduate students.

Kimberley DimitriadisKimberley Dimitriadis

Kimberley is a third year graduate student in the English department.  Her research interests include Victorian literature and culture, the history of science and mathematics, and novel theory.  She will be working with Dr. Charlotte Sussman on the course “Doctors’ Stories,” an undergraduate course that investigates fiction and theory written about doctors and the discipline of medicine from the eighteenth century to the present day. It explores stories doctors tell about themselves, and the stories that have been told about them.  She plans to use historical objects, manuscripts, and advertisements to help students understand how the fictions they’ve encountered in the classroom are supported by the physical instruments and documentation in circulation prior to or at the time of writing.


Jonathan HornrighausenJonathan Hornrighausen

Jonathan is a second year graduate student in Religious Studies.  His research interests include Scripture, art, and interreligious dialogue.  He will be working with Dr. Marc Brettler on the course “The Old Testament/Hebrew Bible,” an introduction to the Hebrew Bible from a non-confessional, historical-critical perspective.  His module aims to help students in the course understand the impact of the Hebrew language’s structure and writing system on how the Hebrew Bible has changed over time as a text and a material artifact.  One major aim will be for students to engage in transcription exercises based on the practices used by the Dead Sea scribes, the Masoretes, and contemporary Jewish scribes.


Joseph MulliganJoseph Mulligan

Joseph is a fourth year graduate student in Romance Studies.  His research engages with late nineteenth- and twentieth-century literatures of Hispanic America and explores the proliferation of allegory in modernist aesthetics. He will be working with Dr. José María Rodríguez García on the course “Introduction to Spanish Literature II,” a survey of major writers and movements of the Spanish literary tradition in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.  He will be drawing materials from digital archives, such as Biblioteca Digital Hispánica (Biblioteca Nacional de España), Biblioteca Digital de Castilla y León, and HathiTrust, as well as holdings from the Rubenstein, Perkins, and Lily Libraries at Duke.  Focusing on pedagogical missions, this module will highlight the challenges of modernization which the government of the Second Spanish Republic addressed in 1931 with the creation of the Board of Pedagogical Missions led by Manuel Bartolomé Cossío,

 

Applications will be available on our website in the spring for the fall 2020 cohort. Funding has been provided by the Provost’s Office and Duke’s Versatile Humanist NEH grant.

What to Read this Month: August 2019

Welcome / welcome back to Duke and the start of another school year! In an effort to encourage reading for pleasure while in college – really, it’s possible – here are some suggestions from our New and Noteworthy collection, located on the first floor of Perkins across from the bathrooms. You can also check out our Current Literature and Devil DVDS at Lilly, CDs at the Music Library on East Campus, and our Overdrive collection. Don’t worry if your computer doesn’t have a disc drive; you can borrow those at Lilly! And if you need help finding a book, you can learn about how we organize our books in this course guide or come to the service desk – we’re happy to help!


Strangers and Cousins by Leah Hager Cohen.

In the seemingly idyllic town of Rundle Junction, Bennie and Walter are preparing to host the wedding of their eldest daughter Clem. A marriage ceremony at their beloved, rambling home should be the happiest of occasions, but Walter and Bennie have a secret. A new community has moved to Rundle Junction, threatening the social order and forcing Bennie and Walter to confront uncomfortable truths about the lengths they would go to to maintain harmony.

Meanwhile, Aunt Glad, the oldest member of the family, arrives for the wedding plagued by long-buried memories of a scarring event that occurred when she was a girl in Rundle Junction. As she uncovers details about her role in this event, the family begins to realize that Clem’s wedding may not be exactly what it seemed. Clever, passionate, artistic Clem has her own agenda. What she doesn’t know is that by the end, everyone will have roles to play in this richly imagined ceremony of familial connection-a brood of quirky relatives, effervescent college friends, ghosts emerging from the past, a determined little mouse, and even the very group of new neighbors whose presence has shaken Rundle Junction to its core.

With Strangers and Cousins, Leah Hager Cohen delivers a story of pageantry and performance, hopefulness and growth, and introduces a winsome, unforgettable cast of characters whose lives are forever changed by events that unfold and reverberate across generations.

Cohen writes both fiction and nonfiction, including her 2013 book, I Don’t Know: In Praise of Admitting Ignorance and Doubt (Except When You Shouldn’t).


Only as the Day is Long: New and Selected Poems by Dorianne Laux.

Only as the Day Is Long represents a brilliant, daring body of work from one of our boldest contemporary poets, known to bear compassionate and ruthless witness to the quotidian. Drawn from Dorianne Laux’s five expansive volumes, including her confident debut Awake, National Book Critics Circle Finalist What We Carry, and Paterson Prize-winning The Book of Men, the poems in this collection have been “brought to the hard edge of meaning” (B. H. Fairchild) and praised for their “enormous precision and beauty” (Philip Levine). Twenty new odes pay homage to Laux’s mother, an ordinary and extraordinary woman of the Depression era.The wealth of her life experience finds expression in Laux’s earthy and lyrical depictions of working-class America, full of the dirt and mess of real life. From the opening poem, “Two Pictures of My Sister,” to the last, “Letter to My Dead Mother,” she writes, in her words, of “living gristle” with a perceptive frankness that is luminous in its specificity and universal in its appeal. Exploring experiences of survival and healing, of sexual love and celebration, Only as the Day Is Long shows Laux at the height of her powers.

You can watch Laux read her poetry.


The End of the Beginning: Cancer, Immunity, and the Future of a Cure by Michael S. Kinch.

For the first time since a 5th century Greek physician gave the name “cancer” (karkinos, in Greek) to a deadly disease first described in Egyptian Papyri, the medical world is near a breakthrough that could allow even the most conservative doctors and pragmatic patients to use the other “c word” – cure – in the same sentence as cancer. A remarkable series of events has brought us to this point, thanks in large part to a new ability to more efficiently harness the extraordinary power of the human immune system.

The End of the Beginning is a remarkable history of cancer treatment and the evolution of our understanding of its dynamic interplay with the immune system. Through Michael Kinch’s personal experience as a cancer researcher at Washington University and the head of the oncology program at a leading biotechnology company, we witness the incredible accumulation of breakthrough science and its rapid translation into life-saving technologies that have begun to dramatically increase the quality and quantity of life for cancer patients.

According to Kinch’s website,

“Michael S. Kinch, Ph.D. is Associate Vice Chancellor at Washington University in St Louis, where he helps lead entrepreneurship activities as well as research on innovation in biopharmaceutical research and development. Michael founded and leads the Centers for Research Innovation in Biotechnology (CRIB) and Drug Development (CDD).

“Dr. Kinch’s scientific background includes the development of new medicines for cancer, immunological and infectious diseases. His current work is primarily focused upon understanding the blend of science, medicine, business and law needed to support the development of new medicines.”


The Business of Changing the World: How Billionaires, Tech Disrupters, and Social Entrepreneurs are Transforming the Global Aid Industry by Raj Kumar.

Today, entrepreneurs, Silicon Valley start-ups, and celebrity activists are the driving force in a radical shift in the way we think about lifting people out of poverty. In this new era of data-driven, results-oriented global aid, it’s no longer enough to be a well-intentioned do-gooder or for the wealthy to donate an infinitesimal part of their assets to people without a home or basic nutrition. What matter now in the world of aid are measurable improvements and demonstrable, long-term change.

Drawing on two decades of research and his own experiences as an expert in global development, Raj Kumar, founder and President of Devex, explores the successes and failures of non-traditional models of philanthropy. According to Kumar, a new billionaire boom is fundamentally changing the landscape of how we give, from well-established charitable organizations like the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to Starbucks and other businesses that see themselves as social enterprises, to entrepreneurial start-ups like Hello Tractor, a farm equipment-sharing app for farmers in Nigeria, and Give Directly, an app that allows individuals to send money straight to the mobile phone of someone in need. The result is a more sustainable philosophy of aid that elevates the voices of people in need as neighbors, partners, and customers.

Refreshing and accessibly written, The Business of Changing the World sets forth a bold vision for how businesses, policymakers, civil society organizations, and individuals can turn well-intentioned charity into effective advocacy to transform our world for good.

For a different perspective, see Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas.


Operatic by Kyo Maclear, illustrated by Byron Eggenschwiler.

Somewhere in the universe, there is the perfect tune for you.

It’s almost the end of middle school, and Charlie has to find her perfect song for a music class assignment. The class learns about a different style of music each day, from hip-hop to metal to disco, but it’s hard for Charlie to concentrate when she can’t stop noticing her classmate Emile, or wondering about Luka, who hasn’t been to school in weeks. On top of everything, she has been talked into participating in an end-of-year performance with her best friends.

Then, the class learns about opera, and Charlie discovers the music of Maria Callas. The more she learns about Maria’s life, the more Charlie admires her passion for singing and her ability to express herself fully through her music. Can Charlie follow the example of the ultimate diva, Maria Callas, when it comes to her own life?

This evocatively illustrated graphic novel brilliantly captures the high drama of middle school by focusing on the desire of its finely drawn characters to sing and be heard.

The Music Library has a variety of CD and Vinyl records featuring Maria Callas.

 


August 2019 Collection Spotlight: Microhistories

microhistory sign

This month’s Collection Spotlight is featuring microhistories.  In order to create what we hope is a far ranging and interesting selection of titles for people to browse, we decided to approach microhistory both from the academic and popular side of things.  We hope you will forgive us if in our enthusiasm we stray into some titles that might not meet the strict definition!

Here is a selection of some of the titles that we are showcasing:

A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

To Free a Family: The journey of Mary Walker by Sydney Nathans

Color: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay

Poverty and Piety in an English Village by Keith Wrightson and David Levine

The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars by Dava Sobel

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester

If some of these titles spark your interest, consider getting involved with Duke’s own MicroWorlds Lab this year!  They even have a section called “What is Microhistory” if you want to explore further what this method of study means.

Please check out the Collection Spotlight rack near our Perkins Library Service Desk on the first floor of Perkins to find your next read!

microhistory book covers

Remembering Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison passed away yesterday at the age of 88. You can find a lot of really wonderful tributes and reflections online explaining just why she is a literary giant. Here are a few that you might find interesting:

Toni Morrison’s Song of America (written by Tracy K. Smith, former poet laureate)

How Toni Morrison Made Us See Black Women

The Generosity Of Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison Taught Me How to Think

Toni Morrison Taught Me How to Really Read

TONI MORRISON REMEMBERED AS A ‘WRITER FOR THIS AGE’: Recalling the Nobel laureate and the times her life touched Duke.

If you want to (re)read her work, we of course have you covered! Here are some highlights (including fiction, non-fiction, and works she edited):

The Bluest Eye

Home

Tar Baby

God Help the Child

Song of Solomon

Beloved

Beloved (ebook version)

The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

The Black Book

Burn this Book: PEN Writers Speak out on the Power of the Word

You might also be interested in reading interviews, such as Toni Morrison: Conversations and Conversations with Toni Morrison.

If you have a chance to go see the new documentary on her, Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, you should definitely do so. I saw it at the Full Frame Documentary Festival this year, and I really enjoyed it. Eventually we’ll have a copy of the dvd in our library, but in the meantime you might enjoy these two films:

Beloved

“Sheer Good Fortune”: Celebrating Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison quote

What to Read this Month: July 2019

For additional summer reads, check out our Overdrive, New and Noteworthy, and Current Literature collections.


Zero Sum Game by S.L. Huang

I devoured this book in half a day. It was amazing, and probably rates with some of my favorite sci-fi books like In Conquest Born by C.S. Friedman. The main character – Cas – is brilliant, compelling, a survivor, and a killer. And then she winds up in situations where she has to view the world beyond the lens of the axioms that fill her brain and literally surround her in daily life. Cas is also placed in a position where her actions affect the fate of millions (which brings to mind Dragon Age: Inquisition). Cas’s character in many ways reminds me of Clariel from Clariel by Garth Nix and Cat in Catharsis by D. Andrew Campbell.

Even better, apparently there’s a second book in the series that just came out!

Description:

A blockbuster, near-future science fiction thriller, S.L. Huang’s Zero Sum Game introduces a math-genius mercenary who finds herself being manipulated by someone possessing unimaginable power …

Cas Russell is good at math. Scary good. The vector calculus blazing through her head lets her smash through armed men twice her size and dodge every bullet in a gunfight, and she’ll take any job for the right price.

As far as Cas knows, she’s the only person around with a superpower…until she discovers someone with a power even more dangerous than her own. Someone who can reach directly into people’s minds and twist their brains into Moebius strips. Someone intent on becoming the world’s puppet master.

Cas should run, like she usually does, but for once she’s involved. There’s only one problem…

She doesn’t know which of her thoughts are her own anymore.


Thick: And Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom

A few pages into this book, I set it down. I knew I would want to read it in one sitting, and also hear the author’s voice before reading more. So I went to listen to the first few minutes of her book presentation at Red Emma’s Bookstore Coffeehouse. Two hours later, I had watched the entire presentation. And then I finally got around to reading the book. There’s so much to reflect on and absorb that I’m getting my own copy so I can underline to my heart’s content. Very approachable, compelling, and a wonderful author; I came to her from reading Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy, which I also recommend.

Corroborating Reviews:

As featured by The Daily Show, NPR, PBS, CBC, Time, VIBE, Entertainment Weekly, Well-Read Black Girl, and Chris Hayes, “incisive, witty, and provocative essays” (Publishers Weekly) by one of the “most bracing thinkers on race, gender, and capitalism of our time” (Rebecca Traister)

“Thick is sure to become a classic.” –The New York Times Book Review

In eight highly praised treatises on beauty, media, money, and more, Tressie McMillan Cottom–award-winning professor and acclaimed author of Lower Ed – is unapologetically “thick”: deemed “thick where I should have been thin, more where I should have been less,” McMillan Cottom refuses to shy away from blending the personal with the political, from bringing her full self and voice to the fore of her analytical work. Thick “transforms narrative moments into analyses of whiteness, black misogyny, and status-signaling as means of survival for black women” (Los Angeles Review of Books) with “writing that is as deft as it is amusing” (Darnell L. Moore).

This “transgressive, provocative, and brilliant” (Roxane Gay) collection cements McMillan Cottom’s position as a public thinker capable of shedding new light on what the “personal essay” can do. She turns her chosen form into a showcase for her critical dexterity, investigating everything from Saturday Night Live, LinkedIn, and BBQ Becky to sexual violence, infant mortality, and Trump rallies.

Collected in an indispensable volume that speaks to the everywoman and the erudite alike, these unforgettable essays never fail to be “painfully honest and gloriously affirming” and hold “a mirror to your soul and to that of America” (Dorothy Roberts).


Filling the Void: Emotion, Capitalism and Social Media by Marcus Gilroy-Ware

This extremely thought-provoking book explores the sociocultural dimensions of technology in general and social media in particular. Gilroy-Ware links the emotional distress that social media feeds and profits from to the culture of capitalism that developed from capitalism as an economic system. He describes it: “The ‘capitalism’ that must be addressed in relation to social media is therefore one that operates at a far broader scale – that of society itself” (99).

Description:

Why is everyone staring at their phones on the train? Why do online videos of kittens get so many views? Why is the internet full of misinformation? Why are depression and anxiety amongst the most treated health conditions?

Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram have come to be an integral part of the lives of billions of people across the world. But are they simply another source of information and entertainment, or a far more ominous symptom of capitalism’s excesses?

Written by Marcus Gilroy-Ware, this book is an essential inquiry into why we really use social media, and what this means for our understanding of culture, politics and capitalism itself.


Anti-Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy by Siva Vaidhyanathan

I picked this book up after reading The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry) and learning a lot from it. Anti-Social Media did not dissapoint. It is timely, thoughtful, and compelling as it queries the unintended effects of a culture intertwined with the Internet.

Description:

One of the signal developments in democratic culture around the world in the past half-decade has been the increasing power of social media to both spread information and shape opinions. More and more of our social, political, and religious activities revolve around the Internet. Within this context, Facebook has emerged as one of the most powerful companies in the world.

If you wanted to build a machine that would distribute propaganda to millions of people, distract them from important issues, energize hatred and bigotry, erode social trust, undermine respectable journalism, foster doubts about science, and engage in massive surveillance all at once, you would make something a lot like Facebook. Of course, none of that was part of the plan. In Antisocial Media, Siva Vaidhyanathan explains how Facebook devolved from an innocent social site hacked together by Harvard students into a force that, while it may make personal life just a little more pleasurable, makes democracy a lot more challenging. It’s an account of the hubris of good intentions, a missionary spirit, and an ideology that sees computer code as the universal solvent for all human problems. And it’s an indictment of how “social media” has fostered the deterioration of democratic culture around the world, from facilitating Russian meddling in support of Trump’s election to the exploitation of the platform by murderous authoritarians in Burma and the Philippines. Both authoritative and trenchant, Antisocial Media shows how Facebook’s mission went so wrong.


The Rise of the Meritocracy by Michael Dunlop Young

Contemporary discourse surrounding meritocracy glorifies it as an American ideal. However, the origins of the term are more akin to Jonathan Swift’s modest proposal of eating babies. Young coined the term in his 1958 dystopian satire The Rise of the Meritocracy. From the year 2034, he tracks the history of British education, projecting the triumph of an IQ-based education system and the perils of a meritocracy come to fruition. The philosophical success of meritocracy is a bitter disappointment to Young, who wrote a Guardian article in 2001 titled “Down with Meritocracy.”

This should be required reading for any serious contemporary discussion of merit and its role in higher education.

Description:

Michael Young has christened the oligarchy of the future “Meritocracy.” Indeed, the word is now part of the English language. It would appear that the formula IQ + Effort = Merit may well constitute the basic belief of the ruling class in the twenty-first century. Projecting himself from 1958 into the year 2034, the author of this sociological satire shows how present decisions and practices may remold our society.

It is widespread knowledge that it is insufficient to be somebody’s nephew to obtain a responsible post in business, government, teaching, or science. Experts in education and selection apply scientific principles to sift out the leaders of tomorrow. You need intelligence rating, qualification, experience, application, and a certain caliber to achieve status. In a word, one must show merit to advance in the new society of tomorrow.

 


Author Agreement for a DH Project — Is That a Thing?

This post by Liz Crisenbery, 2018-2019 Project Manager for Project Vox, is part of a series on graduate students’ “Intern Experience” at Duke University Libraries. 

Author agreements — contractual documents provided by the publisher to the author, explaining the terms of publication — are foundational to many print and digital publications. Yet this stock element of publishing is not frequently discussed in relation to DH projects. Open access is a hallmark of digital humanities — making content available to anyone with an internet connection and thereby challenging the paywall approach to scholarly publishing. While open access also pushes against the overuse of copyright protections, it doesn’t oppose or necessarily undermine the rights of authors. How might digital humanities projects use author agreements to help acknowledge and protect the labor of people who develop content while also ensuring the resulting works can have broad access and use?

Communicate the role of the author agreement as a contract
Why might an established DH project consider creating author agreements?

Enter Project Vox, an open-access digital-humanities project that seeks to amplify the voices of early modern female philosophers, challenge the canon, and provide access to teaching materials and research guides. It is chiefly a collaborative effort, dependent upon a team of individuals who research, write, edit, and stage biographical and bibliographical entries on women philosophers.

Project Vox itself is an open educational resource, yet not all the content that appears on the site is created by the team. As the range of content types published by Project Vox has expanded, we have realized the need to better communicate protections and access for works published on our site.

For instance, Project Vox recently published the first English translation of Émilie Du Châtelet’s essay on optics (the complete version of which was itself only recently discovered and transcribed). As project manager I worked with Liz Milewicz (co-director of Project Vox and Head of Duke Libraries’ Digital Scholarship Services) to create an author agreement that could be used for this translation and also future Project Vox publications. We wanted the translation to be easily accessible to a wide audience and to be available for use in research and instruction; we also wanted to protect the translator, Bryce Gessell, from having his work published in other forms without his consent.

Fortunately, we were able to consult with Duke Libraries’ Office of Copyright and Scholarly Communications, specifically Arnetta Girardeau (Duke Libraries’ Copyright & Information Policy Consultant) and Dave Hansen (Associate University Librarian for Research, Collections, and Scholarly Communication), to create a template author agreement for Project Vox publications. Suffice it to say, we would not have created such a document without their expertise and guidance. This is the resulting template for Project Vox author agreements: Project Vox Author Agreement – Master Template.

The process of creating this agreement highlighted for us how author agreements can be challenging for DH publications and yet necessary if we truly hope to protect and honor the work of content creators while also making that content freely available. While some of the information included in the author agreement is relatively mundane (e.g., the name of the author, the name of the work, information used to create a citation, etc.), much of the document establishes legal relationships between different parties. In the process of creating our author agreement, we realized our long-held assumption that Project Vox was the “publisher” of content needed to be reevaluated. Rather, because Project Vox is hosted by Duke University Libraries, and because the Libraries provide a more stable partner for entering into agreements, the Libraries are named as the publisher. Increasingly, academic libraries are acting as publishers, challenging the nature of publishing and creating new models. (Maria Bonn and Mike Furlough edited an essay collection on this very subject, which is itself available via open access.)

illustrate what a Creative Commons license looks like
Creative Commons licenses provide digital projects and publications legal protections while promoting open access.

Additionally, the author in our agreement is tasked with choosing the type of Creative Commons license for their work and then to apply for that license. As stated on the Creative Commons organization’s website, “The Creative Commons copyright licenses and tools forge a balance inside the traditional ‘all rights reserved’ setting that copyright law creates. Our tools give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work. The combination of our tools and our users is a vast and growing digital commons, a pool of content that can be copied, distributed, edited, remixed, and built upon, all within the boundaries of copyright law.”[1] These licenses allow copyright holders the ability to qualify how their work can be re-used while prioritizing greater access to the work.

Through creating this template and publishing the first work on Project Vox with a signed author agreement, I’ve gained insight into parts of DH publishing that I never previously considered, particularly related to process and documentation from the standpoint of a publisher. As DH projects continue to partner with libraries to facilitate hosting and digital publication, I hope to have more conversations about how different projects handle publication, if they have author agreements, and what processes they follow to make content accessible.

[1] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/

Liz Crisenbery is a PhD Candidate in musicology who studies early twentieth-century Italian opera, exploring the intersection of gender, politics, and music. Her dissertation examines masculine identities of fascist composers and reception of their operas during the height of Italian fascism. Other research interests include digital humanities, opera and media, and riot grrrl. During the 2018-19 academic year, Liz worked as project manager for Project Vox with the support of Bass Connections.

What to Read this Month: June 2019

Happy Pride Month! In addition to these books, check out our Overdrive, New and Noteworthy, and Current Literature collections. If you’re looking for something good to watch or listen to, explore Lilly’s Devil DVDs and the Music Library’s CD collection.


Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl: A Novel by Andrea Lawlor (they/them).

It’s 1993 and Paul Polydoris tends bar at the only gay club in a university town thrumming with politics and partying. He studies queer theory, has a dyke best friend, makes zines, and is a flâneur with a rich dating life. But Paul’s also got a secret: he’s a shapeshifter. Oscillating wildly from Riot Grrrl to leather cub, Women’s Studies major to trade, Paul transforms his body at will in a series of adventures that take him from Iowa City to Boystown to Provincetown and finally to San Francisco – a journey through the deep queer archives of struggle and pleasure.

Andrea Lawlor’s debut novel offers a speculative history of early ’90s identity politics during the heyday of ACT UP and Queer Nation. Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is a riotous, razor-sharp bildungsroman whose hero/ine wends his way through a world gutted by loss, pulsing with music, and opening into an array of intimacy and connections.

Andrea Lawlor recently appeared on the podcast Against Everyone with Connor Habib, in an episode titled Andrea Lawlor or Queer Non-Binary Sex Revolution Now!


Born Both: An Intersex Life by Hida Viloria (s/he, he/r).

From one of the world’s foremost intersex activists, a candid, provocative, and eye-opening memoir of gender identity, self-acceptance, and love.

My name is Hida Viloria. I was raised as a girl but discovered at a young age that my body looked different. Having endured an often turbulent home life as a kid, there were many times when I felt scared and alone, especially given my attraction to girls. But unlike most people in the first world who are born intersex – meaning they have genitals, reproductive organs, hormones, and/or chromosomal patterns that do not fit standard definitions of male or female – I grew up in the body I was born with because my parents did not have my sex characteristics surgically altered at birth.

It wasn’t until I was twenty-six and encountered the term intersex in a San Francisco newspaper that I finally had a name for my difference. That’s when I began to explore what it means to live in the space between genders – to be both and neither. I tried living as a feminine woman, an androgynous person, and even for a brief period of time as a man. Good friends would not recognize me, and gay men would hit on me. My gender fluidity was exciting, and in many ways freeing – but it could also be isolating.

I had to know if there were other intersex people like me, but when I finally found an intersex community to connect with I was shocked, and then deeply upset, to learn that most of the people I met had been scarred, both physically and psychologically, by infant surgeries and hormone treatments meant to “correct” their bodies. Realizing that the invisibility of intersex people in society facilitated these practices, I made it my mission to bring an end to it – and became one of the first people to voluntarily come out as intersex at a national and then international level.

Born Both is the story of my lifelong journey toward finding love and embracing my authentic identity in a world that insists on categorizing people into either/or, and of my decades-long fight for human rights and equality for intersex people everywhere.

Hida Viloria is a writer, author, and vanguard intersex and non-binary activist. S/he has spoken about intersex human rights at the United Nations and as a frequent television and radio guest (Oprah, Aljazeera, 20/20, NPR, BBC…), consultant (Lambda Legal, UN, Williams Institute…) and op-ed contributor (NewNowNext, The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post, The Advocate, Ms., CNN.com…).


¡Cuéntamelo! : Oral Histories by LGBT Latino immigrants by Juliana Delgado Lopera (she/her), illustrated by Laura Cerón Melo, edited by Shadia Savo and Santiago Acosta.

¡Cuéntamelo! began as a cover story for SF Weekly. It is “[a] stunning collection of bilingual oral histories and illustrations by LGBT Latinx immigrants who arrived in the U.S. during the 80s and 90s. Stories of repression in underground Havana in the 60s; coming out trans in Catholic Puerto Rico in the 80s; Scarface, female impersonators, Miami and the ‘boat people’; San Francisco’s underground Latinx scene during the 90s and more.”

Juliana Delgado Lopera is an award-winning Colombian writer, historian, speaker and storyteller based in San Francisco. She’s the creative director of RADAR Productions, a queer literary non-profit in San Francisco. Her debut novel Fiebre Tropical, which won the 2014 Jackson Literary Award, will be out Spring 2020 from The Feminist Press.


Lives of Great Men: Living and Loving as an African Gay Man: A Memoir by Chiké Frankie Edozien (he/him).

From Victoria Island, Lagos to Brooklyn, U.S.A. to Accra, Ghana to Paris, France; from across the Diaspora to the heart of the African continent, in this memoir Nigerian journalist Chiké Frankie Edozien offers a highly personal series of contemporary snapshots of same gender loving Africans, unsung Great Men living their lives, triumphing and finding joy in the face of great adversity. On his travels and sojourns Edozien explores the worsening legal climate for gay men and women on the continent; the impact homophobic evangelical American pastors are having in many countries, and its toxic intersection with political populism; and experiences the pressures placed on those living under harshly oppressive laws that are themselves the legacy of colonial rule – pressures that sometimes lead to seeking asylum in the West. Yet he remains hopeful, and this memoir, which is pacy, romantic, and funny by turns, is also a love-letter to Africa, above all to Nigeria and the megalopolis that is Lagos.

Chiké Frankie Edozien is an award-winning reporter whose work has appeared in the New York Times, The Times (UK), Quartz, Vibe magazine, Time Magazine, and more.

He was a New York Post political reporter for over a decade. His work has been featured on numerous new broadcasts. He co-founded The AFRican magazine in 2001 to tell often overlooked, African stories.


Trans Figured: My Journey from Boy to Girl to Woman to Man by Brian Belovitch (he/him).

Imagine experiencing life not as the gender dictated by birth but as one of your own design. In Trans Figured, Brian Belovitch shares his true story of life as a gender outlier and his dramatic journey through the jungle of gender identity.

Brian has the rare distinction of coming out three times: first as a queer teenager; second as a glamorous transgender woman named Tish, and later, Natalia Gervais; and finally as an HIV-positive gay man surviving the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. From growing up in a barely-working-class first-generation immigrant family in Fall River, Massachusetts, to spinning across the disco dance floor of Studio 54 in New York City; from falling into military lock-step as the Army wife of a domineering GI in Germany to having a brush with fame as Natalia, high-flying downtown darling of the boozy and druggy pre-Giuliani New York nightclub scene, Brian escaped many near-death experiences.

Trans Figured chronicles a life lived on the edge with an unforgettable cast of characters during a dangerous and chaotic era. Rich with drama and excitement, this no-holds-barred memoir tells it all. Most importantly, Brian’s candid and poignant story of recovery shines a light on the perseverance of the human spirit.

In 2016, Brian created Queer Stages an LGBTQ playreading group whose mission is to preserve and present LGBTQ themed plays and playwrights for current and future generations. Recently he was Alice, First Lady of Earth in Charles Ludlam’s Conquest of the Universe or When Queens Collide at LaMama to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Ridiculous Theatre. In film and television, Brian has appeared in The Irishman, Nor’easter, Silent Prey, Q&A, The Deuce, Homeland, and The Americans.

 


The Art of Writing Letters: A Q&A with Joanna Murdoch

“Working with the Library” is an occasional series of stories highlighting collaborations between librarians and the people around campus whose teaching and research we support.

Joanna Murdoch is a Ph.D. Candidate in the English Department. She taught a Thompson Writing Program first-year writing seminar called “The Art of Writing Letters” in the spring of 2018. Arianne Hartsell-Gundy, Head of the Humanities Section and Librarian for Literature and Theater Studies, served as the course librarian for this class. She had the pleasure of asking Joanna a couple of questions about how the library has supported her teaching and research.


What were your primary goals for your students in working with letter writing in this course?

Teaching for the Thompson Writing Program’s first-year writing seminar, I wanted to foreground the tangible longevity of academic writing. The claims we make and the words we use in essays, exhibits, or online forums can last a long time. Against the odds, a lot of written material survives! The assignments in my course ask students to think about their writing and research as taking part in conversations with long histories and long futures, too.

Letter writing, it turns out, is a good tool for cultivating the blend of voice, personhood, and responsibility that is crucial for compelling academic work but isn’t always explicitly handled in writing instruction. In almost any century, letters open with an address to a named person and close with the writer’s signoff. Between those extremities, letters and their composers do everything they can to try to reach their readers. For their part, the letter’s recipients face literal response-ability: they have to decide whether and how they are able to respond. Writing and reading in this view are intimate, implicating activities: words can’t convey ideas unless two human beings have already agreed to connect.

It’s easy to forget this interpersonal grounding when composing a college essay. But even the strictest cautions surrounding intellectual property and the respect and defense of human rights require us to acknowledge the voices of others. That’s why my students have been practicing discerning and responding to the historically situated human voice in other people’s writing over three major assignments—a close-reading analysis of a single letter, a research project on a letter exchange held at the Rubenstein or in Perkins’ collections or databases, and a letter to a public figure, exhibited on the Campus Club Wall for three weeks in April of 2018. 

How has the library supported your teaching?

In so many ways! Duke’s subscription to databases like North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories provided rich exploratory ground for my students in all stages of their writing projects. The library’s collections of World War I letters available in book form in the stacks gave students who stumbled across them the foundation they needed for their research on soldiers’ letters in the Rubenstein’s holdings. Then, in April, the Campus Club Wall in Perkins became a live part of our writing and learning space when students received permission to exhibit some visually enhanced selections from their letters to public figures.

But it was the library’s gifted specialists who really brought Perkins and Rubenstein to life for my class. Our designated Perkins librarian Arianne Hartsell-Gundy very graciously showed us how to use the library guide she had designed especially for our course, and she supported students with exercises for crafting a focused research question and building an annotated bibliography with reputable sources. I’ll always remember Perkins 118 as the place where Arianne showed us the lines from Alexander Hamilton’s letter-esque The Farmer Refuted (1775) that live on in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton (2015).

A major highlight of the semester was when Rubenstein’s Elizabeth Dunn and Mandy Cooper introduced us to the historical letters and letter-writing guides they had hand-picked to match the students’ research interests. The hours these librarians spent selecting, transcribing, arranging, and expertly talking us through the materials were a huge gift to the class. Thank you, Perkins and Rubenstein!

How about your research?

For my research on medieval religious lyric poems, I lean heavily on Duke Libraries and their Borrow Direct and Interlibrary Loan relationships. My carrel is overflowing with Perkins, Divinity, and Lilly titles, plus others shipped in from Yale, the University of Chicago, or even our basketball competitor down the road. Thanks to the bases covered by Duke and these other library collections, this spring I was free to buy only the works I knew I would return to, rather than every single title on my comprehensive exams’ reading lists. The best part was when Perkins bought a collection of essays on Chaucer’s poetics at my request! I’d better go check it out, now that it’s on the shelves . . .

Another enormously helpful tool has been the library’s subscription to Oxford Bibliographies Online. Since I’m still in an early stage of dissertation research, I need all the overviews I can get of major contours in scholarly publishing. OBO is a great place to start.

What are three things you think that undergraduates should know about using information and the library?

I) You’re responsible for sniffing out the stories and scholarly drama behind the materials you see. If you do a lot of reading around for a project, you’ll start to see the same names and references to the same group of 10–30 major academic works. Then it’s like you’re pulling a necklace up out of the sand, revealing the links of a single, if complicated, structure. It’s one of the best feelings early on in graduate school, being not-at-the-mercy of the infinite-seeming database search results.

II) I said above that written material lasts longer than we think it will. But that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to actually use it once you’ve consigned it to your files. You may have terabytes of notes and essays on your computer or in the cloud, but you’ll never find any of it again unless you’ve tagged it all thoroughly or you like to spend your free time randomly clicking through old files. Some people love reference management software like RefWorks or Zotero. I can’t stand the way those services look, so I build massive searchable folders in an awesome writing program called Scrivener. Whatever you decide, leave yourself a lot of breadcrumbs. Don’t be like me and spend years searching for a half-remembered, haunting line that turned out to be from Leonard Cohen’s song “Anthem“: “There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in”—I spent so long searching for the note I had made about it back before I learned to cite cite cite even passing references in journal-type notes. The best breadcrumb of all is a full bibliographic citation, including the date you found and read/listened to the material, plus a quick personal note on what you thought about it. The “find” function on your computer will do the rest.

III) If you need part-time work during a heavy course-load year, reshelving books for the library is a fantastic way to find a meditative groove while filling your muscle memory with clues about the way information is structured and accessed in a major university library—which boils down to the shape of academic discourse itself. That’s how it went for me, at least, in the basement stacks of the Yale music library. Maybe Duke will even let you listen to Hamilton or Leonard Cohen while you set some Perkins shelves to rights!

Data Lost, but not Forgotten

Intern Experience: Kaylee Alexander (Data & Visualization Services)

This post by Kaylee Alexander, 2019 Humanities Unbounded Graduate Assistant, is part of a series on graduate students’ “Intern Experience” at Duke University Libraries. 

With the growing popularity of digital humanities projects, the question of how humanists should manage data, and specifically missing data and data limitations, is of increasing importance. Often the glittering possibilities of integrating technology and data-driven research methods into historical analysis makes us forget that we are still dealing with imperfect information, albeit processed in new and meaningful ways. In my own research on 19th-century funerary monuments in Paris, the issue of survival bias has been pervasive, as very few tombs—only the most expensive—have survived into the present day.

Survival bias occurs when we focus on people or things that have passed through a selection process and overlooking those that haven’t. In 1943, for example, damaged bomber planes returning from combat were being studied to identify areas that needed additional reinforcements. However, these planes had survived. What about those that didn’t? Where had they sustained damage? This was the question posed by statistician Abraham Wald, who argued that damage to returned planes represented not where improvements were needed, but rather where planes could sustain damage and could still return safely. It was the undamaged areas that were more telling.

Diagram showing areas of damage to returned WWII bomber planes (red) and recommended areas for reinforcement based on Wald’s analysis.

Historical studies are, not surprisingly, prone to such survival biases. Objects and documents get lost or damaged; others are not deemed worthy of being kept. Some information is just never recorded. But, just like Wald’s returned bomber planes, what does survive can be used to consider what we’ve lost. This is a concept that I work with all of the time, and a bias that my work specifically tries to overcome through data-driven practices. However, it is not something that I had yet considered in the context of inherited datasets.

As a Humanities Unbounded Graduate Assistant with Duke Libraries’ Data and Visualization Services, I began working with members of the Representing Migration Humanities Lab in preparation for their Data+ project, “Remembering the Middle Passage.” Led by English professor Charlotte Sussman, one of the original goals of the project was to use data representing nearly 36,000 transatlantic slave voyages to see if it would be possible to map a reasonable location for a deep-sea memorial to the transatlantic slave trade. Data on these voyages had been compiled and made openly accessible online by a team of researchers working with the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (among others). The promises of these data were great; we just had to figure out how to use them.

My primary task was getting to know the data and providing support in preparation for the upcoming Data+ session. So, I began with the Slave Voyages website.

Home page for the Slave Voyages website: https://www.slavevoyages.org/

The landing page for the database boasts that “this digital memorial raises questions about the largest slave trades in history and offers access to the documentation available to answer them.” Here, you can view and download data on these voyages as well as access summary tables and interactive data visualizations, timelines, and maps, allowing users to easily interact with a wealth of information. Clearly labeled columns, filled with rows of data, project an image of endless research possibilities with all the data you could ever need.

Web-based interface to voyages data in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.

However, the online interactive database only represents about half of the variables included in the full version of the database, which can be downloaded, but certainly isn’t as user-friendly as the front-facing version. One of the most glaring things I noticed when I first opened this file was all of the empty cells.

Excel sheet showing the full version of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database downloaded from https://slavevoyages.org/voyage/downloads.

It soon became clear that the online version only included a selection of the most complete variables (many of which were estimates based on original sources).

One of the first things I do when working with a new dataset in my own work is to create an overview of all of my variables and the percentage of records that have each variable. This provides me with useful insights into how complete my data are, and also how reliable certain variables will be for the types of questions I want to ask. I find this to be particularly useful when working with data that I have not compiled myself, even when a codebook already exists, as it helps you to get really quickly familiar with exactly what you have and what might be possible. More often than not, I end up revising my research questions as a result of this process. So, I wondered how this might help the Data+ team set their goals.

While the original questions of the project had been formed around mortality and how to map the experiences of enslaved people on board these voyages, a reconsideration of the data showed how the answers to these questions would only be attainable for a fraction of the voyages in the database—and nothing of any voyages that hadn’t been accounted for.

The question of all this missing data then became an essential part of the research project. How could all these gaps inform us about what isn’t there? Why were data missing, and how could we use this to think more broadly about erasure in the context of the slave trade? If our goal was to memorialize lives lost, how could we best and most appropriately accomplish this given the data we didn’t have?

There is still much work to be done before we can even begin answering these questions, and I leave that in the capable hands of the Data+ team and the Representing Migration Lab. But until then, my take away is this: missing data should not become forgotten data. Knowing what we’re working with, whether it be inherited data or data we’ve constructed, and being aware of the data we’re missing, allows us to reformulate our research objectives in new and more meaningful ways.

Kaylee P. Alexander is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies, where she is also a research assistant with the Duke Art, Law & Markets Initiative (DALMI). Her dissertation research focuses on the visual culture of the cemetery and the market for funerary monuments in nineteenth-century Paris. In the spring of 2019, she served as a Humanities Unbounded graduate assistant with Data and Visualization Services at Duke University Libraries. Follow her on Twitter @kpalex91

Happy Birthday, Walt Whitman!

Today is the 200th anniversary of Walt Whitman’s birthday!  We recently celebrated Whitman’s birthday with our Whitman Sampler event at the end of April, which featured President Emeritus Richard Brodhead reading from Whitman’s poetry and discussing his impact.

If you want to explore the life and work of Whitman, we have one of the best collections in the country in our Rubenstein Rare Books & Manuscript Library.  You can see original editions, the many drafts of his works that he created, correspondence, clippings, portraits, and scrapbooks in this collection.  We even have a lock of his hair!

If you want to read some of his work, of course we have many of his books that you can check out and read at home.  You might also enjoy reading a selection from the Academy of American Poets.  The New York Public Library has a great page outlining some good places to start reading.

If you’re looking for something different, check out the Manly Health and Training, written by Walt Whitman under the pseudonym Mose Velsor.  You can read about the discovery of this work here.

Finally I wrote a series of blog posts to highlight the “I Sing the Body Electric: Walt Whitman and the Body” exhibit that I had the great privilege of curating in 2017.  You can find blog posts about Whitman and Popular CultureWhitman and the Body, Whitman and the Civil War, and Reading Walt Whitman.

 

 

Low Maintenance Book Club Reads There There

For the summer meeting of the Low Maintenance Book Club, we’ll be discussing the 2019 Duke Summer Reads selection There There. It tells a powerful story of urban Native Americans confronting alcoholism, depression and unemployment amidst the historical backdrop of U.S. subjugation.

Copies of this book are available through the Duke Libraries (printonline and  e-audiobook) and from the Durham County Library (printlarge format printebook e-audiobook and audiobook on CD).

We’ll have light snacks (savory and sweet), and you’re welcome to bring your lunch. Please RSVP if you plan to attend.

**Please note a change in meeting location: Bostock 121, the Murthy Digital Studio

Date: Thursday June 27th, 2019

Time: noon-1:00 pm

Location: Bostock 121 (Murthy Digital Studio)

If you have any questions, you can contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy at aah39@duke.edu.

Database Tips and Tricks

 

It’s a familiar feeling: you only need one more scholarly source for your paper due at 8:30 the next morning. It may also just so happen to be 2:30 am, and at a certain point, there’s only so much caffeine in the world. However, by knowing how to utilize the number of databases available at Duke, one can seek relief. Even better, utilizing databases will grant you access to full-text scholarly articles, popular sources, and a multitude of additional resources (all without having to leave your dorm room and trek across campus). In this blog series, procrastinators and planners alike will find recommendations, tips, and tricks on how to navigate the amazing range of databases Duke Libraries have to offer- without wanting to tear your hair out.

There are two primary categories of databases you will find in academic libraries: general databases and specialized databases. If you are just beginning to explore your research topic, a general database, such as Academic Search Complete or JSTOR, can help guide your initial research. These databases are multidisciplinary and draw from a wide range of journals. However, once you have started the research process, you may find that general databases no longer offer the content you need. For example, April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month; if you had a research assignment related to the history of sexual assault in the United States, you may want to first use a general database such as Academic Search Complete to help guide your research before delving into specialized databases. However, after you have discovered some possibly relevant sources that could help guide your keyword search, you may then want to pursue sources in specialized databases- for this example, specialized databases in History or Women’s & Sexuality Studies.

On Duke Libraries Research Database guide, the most popular general databases are directly linked at the top of the guide. One of those, and indeed one of the most popular general databases in academic libraries, is Academic Search Complete. Academic Search Complete is hosted by EBSCO. Note that EBSCO itself is not a database; rather, EBSCO hosts a multitude of databases, including both general and specialized varieties, and across a variety of disciplines. As discussed above, Academic Search Complete would be an ideal database with which to begin the research process for many of your classes. Through Duke Libraries’ subscription to Academic Search Complete, you can access full-text scholarly articles, popular sources, as well as The New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

There are a variety of factors you may consider when choosing a database- among them should be exactly what type of source you are looking for. If a database only offers abstracts, but you require a full-text journal article as a source, it would not be an appropriate database option. Finding the right database for your research is not necessarily always a seamless process; however, Duke Libraries have many resources available in order to help you conduct your research and access the best articles and journals.

Quick tip: Know what citation style your professor wants/requires before beginning your research. Many databases will provide formatted citations based on the style needed (MLA, APA, etc), While you should double-check the citation provided in order to ensure it is formatted correctly, using that citation as a foundation should save you some time.

Additional resources:

  • Be sure to check out Duke Libraries’ Research Guides. These guides, created by Duke University librarians, offer specialized tips centered around your area of research.
  • As always, if you are ever stumped by navigating databases or wondering where to go next in your research, Duke’s librarians are here to help. Here is a quick link to get help via chat, email, or phone: https://library.duke.edu/research/ask

What to Read this Month: April 2019

April is Arab American Heritage Month and National Poetry Month, so this month’s books are all Arab-American fiction, bilingual poetry, or poetry influenced by the Middle East. For more exciting reads, check out our Overdrive, New and Noteworthy, and Current Literature collections.


Dinarzad’s Children: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Fiction edited by Pauline Kaldas and Khaled Mattawa.

The first edition of Dinarzad’s Children was a groundbreaking and popular anthology that brought to light the growing body of short fiction being written by Arab Americans. This expanded edition includes sixteen new stories – thirty in all – and new voices and is now organized into sections that invite readers to enter the stories from a variety of directions. Here are stories that reveal the initial adjustments of immigrants, the challenges of forming relationships, the political nuances of being Arab American, the vision directed towards homeland, and the ongoing search for balance and identity.

The contributors are D. H. Melhem, Mohja Khaf, Rabih Alameddine, Rawi Hage, Laila Halaby, Patricia Sarrafian Ward, Alia Yunis, Diana Abu Jaber, Susan Muaddi Darraj, Samia Serageldin, Alia Yunis, Joseph Geha, May Monsoor Munn, Frances Khirallah Nobel, Nabeel Abraham, Yussef El Guindi, Hedy Habra, Randa Jarrar, Zahie El Kouri, Amal Masri, Sahar Mustafah, Evelyn Shakir, David Williams, Pauline Kaldas, and Khaled Mattawa.


The Situe Stories by Frances Khirallah Noble.

The situe, or Arabic grandmother, moves in and out of this collection of stories as they seek to capture the integration of Christian Arab women into American culture. The tales contain elements of magic and stoicism, presenting characters rich in independence and creativity.

Frances Khirallah Noble also wrote The New Belly Dancer of the Galaxy: A Novel about a middle-aged Syrian American optician who experiences a series of misadventures involving myth, magical realism, and the realities of Arab American life in a post-9/11 world.


Talking Through the Door: An Anthology of Contemporary Middle Eastern American Writing edited by Susan Atefat-Peckham with a foreword by Lisa Suhair Majaj.

The writers included here are descendants of multiple cultural heritages and reflect the perspectives of various ethnic and cultural backgrounds: Egyptian, Iranian, Iraqi, Jordanian, Lebanese, Libyan, Palestinian, Syrian. They are from diverse socioeconomic classes and spiritual sensibilities: Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and atheist, among others. Yet they coexist in this volume as simply American voices.

Atefat-Peckham gathered poetry and prose from sixteen accomplished writers whose works concern a variety of themes: from the familial cross-cultural misunderstandings and conflicts in the works of Iranian American writers Nahid Rachlin and Roger Sedarat to the mysticism of Khaled Mattawa’s poems; from the superstitions that govern characters in Diana Abu-Jaber’s prose to the devastating homesickness in Pauline Kaldas’ characters. Filled with emotion and keen observations, this collection showcases these writers’ vital contributions to contemporary American literature.


The World is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East edited by Diane Glancy and Linda Rodriguez.

This anthology explores how the Middle East has captured the imaginations of a significant group of Native American poets, most of whom have traveled to the Middle East (broadly defined to include the Arab world, Israel, Turkey, Afghanistan). What qualities of the region drew them there? What did they see? How did their cultural perspectives as Native Americans inform their reactions and insights? Three thematic sections – Place, People, Spirit – feature poems and notes inspired by the poets’ experiences of Middle Eastern cultures.

Contributors include Jim Barnes, Kimberly Blaeser, Trevino L. Brings Plenty, Natalie Diaz, Diane Glancy, Joy Harjo, Allison Hedge Coke, Travis Hedge Coke, Linda Hogan, LeAnne Howe, Bojan Louis, Craig Santos Perez, Linda Rodriguez, Kim Shuck, and James Thomas Stevens.


Armenian-American Poets: A Bilingual Anthology compiled and translated by Garig Basmadjian.

A beautiful anthology of poetry written in English by Armenian-American poets, along with their translations into Armenian by author Garig Basmadjian.

This book was published by the Armenian General Benevolent Union, which was founded in 1906 and is dedicated to upholding Armenian heritage worldwide.


Beautiful Words: Kasuundze’ Kenaege’ by John Elvis Smelcer.

A literary landmark, this bilingual collection of poems represents the only literature of the Ahtna culture in existence. Ahtna is one of twenty indigenous languages of Alaska and had no written form until the last thirty years. Here John Smelcer renders these poems in his native tongue with English translations.

To learn more about the Ahtna culture, visit the Ahtna Heritage Foundation’s website.


Arabic Poems: A Bilingual Edition edited by Marlé Hammond.

Arabic poetry is as vast as it is deep, encompassing all manner of poetic expression from Morocco to Iraq and spanning more than fifteen centuries. In its early stages it formed part of an oral tradition, and there were systematic and collective efforts to transmit it to later generations. Poetry not only entertained and delighted, it also served to memorialize individuals, communities, and events. Even today, it has pride of place in the public domain, engaging the elites and the masses in equal measure, albeit in different registers. This anthology attempts to capture the breadth and depth of the Arabic poetic legacy through its inclusion of pieces composed from pre-Islamic times through to the twenty-first century.

Check out our catalog for other translated collections of Arabic poetry.

 


Celebrate National Poetry Month (and Walt Whitman)

April is National Poetry Month!   There are many ways to celebrate, including signing up for a poem-a-day or participating in Poem in Your Pocket Day on April 18th.

If you want to read poetry, we have  a lot of titles in our collection to choose from.  You can explore here.  You might also enjoy exploring Columbia Granger’s World of Poetry.  You can find some full text of poems and citations to collections of poetry to help track down a particular poem.  It’s especially helpful when you know the first or last line of a poem.

Another way to observe National Poetry Month is to help us celebrate the 200th anniversary of Walt Whitman.  We’ll be celebrating tomorrow (April 5th) with a pop up outside of Vondy from 11:00-1.  Join us to make a button and do a mad lib!

We’ll also have an event on April 25th at 4:00 pm in the Korman Assembly Room (Perkins 217) called “A Whitman Sampler: A Bicentennial Celebration.”  Here are the details:

with Richard H. Brodhead
President Emeritus of Duke University and
William Preston Few Professor Emeritus of English

Join us as we celebrate Walt Whitman’s 200th birthday with readings and remarks by Duke’s ninth president on why he loves the “Good Gray Poet” and you should, too. Also featuring original Whitman manuscripts and materials from one of the most significant Whitman collections in the world, right here in Duke’s Rubenstein Library.

What to Read this Month: March 2019

This month’s selections are books by and about some amazing women in honor of Women’s History Month. For more exciting reads, check out our Overdrive, New and Noteworthy, and Current Literature collections.

Bonus recommendation: Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved by Kate Bowler, also available as an audiobook on Overdrive.


The Wind In My Hair: My Fight for Freedom in Modern Iran by Masih Alinejad with Kambiz Foroohar.

An extraordinary memoir from an Iranian journalist in exile about leaving her country, challenging tradition, and sparking an online movement against compulsory hijab.

A photo on Masih’s Facebook page: a woman standing proudly, face bare, hair blowing in the wind. Her crime: removing her veil, or hijab, which is compulsory for women in Iran. This is the self-portrait that sparked ‘My Stealthy Freedom,’ a social media campaign that went viral.

But Masih is so much more than the arresting face that sparked a campaign inspiring women to find their voices. She’s also a world-class journalist whose personal story, told in her unforgettably bold and spirited voice, is emotional and inspiring. She grew up in a traditional village where her mother, a tailor and respected figure in the community, was the exception to the rule in a culture where women reside in their husbands’ shadows. As a teenager, Masih was arrested for political activism and was surprised to discover she was pregnant while in police custody. When she was released, she married quickly and followed her young husband to Tehran where she was later served divorce papers to the shame and embarrassment of her religiously conservative family. Masih spent nine years struggling to regain custody of her beloved only son and was forced into exile, leaving her homeland and her heritage. Following Donald Trump’s notorious immigration ban, Masih found herself separated from her child, who lives abroad, once again.

A testament to a spirit that remains unbroken, and an enlightening, intimate invitation into a world we don’t know nearly enough about, The Wind In My Hair is the extraordinary memoir of a woman who overcame enormous adversity to fight for what she believes in, and to encourage others to do the same.

You can watch Masih Alinejad explain My Stealthy Freedom at the 2016 Women in the World Summit in New York City. To follow My Stealthy Freedom in action, see their Facebook and Twitter.


Jefferson’s Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America by Catherine Kerrison.

The remarkable untold story of Thomas Jefferson’s three daughters – two white and free, one black and enslaved – and the divergent paths they forged in a newly independent America.

Thomas Jefferson had three daughters: Martha and Maria by his wife, Martha Wayles Jefferson, and Harriet by his slave Sally Hemings. In Jefferson’s Daughters, Catherine Kerrison, a scholar of early American and women’s history, recounts the remarkable journey of these three women – and how their struggle to define themselves reflects both the possibilities and the limitations that resulted from the American Revolution.

Although the three women shared a father, the similarities end there. Martha and Maria received a fine convent school education while they lived with their father during his diplomatic posting in Paris – a hothouse of intellectual ferment whose celebrated salonnières are vividly brought to life in Kerrison’s narrative. Once they returned home, however, the sisters found their options limited by the laws and customs of early America.

Harriet Hemings followed a different path. She escaped slavery – apparently with the assistance of Jefferson himself. Leaving Monticello behind, she boarded a coach and set off for a decidedly uncertain future.

For this groundbreaking triple biography, Kerrison has uncovered never-before-published documents written by the Jefferson sisters when they were in their teens, as well as letters written by members of the Jefferson and Hemings families. She has interviewed Hemings family descendants (and, with their cooperation, initiated DNA testing) and searched for descendants of Harriet Hemings.

The eventful lives of Thomas Jefferson’s daughters provide a unique vantage point from which to examine the complicated patrimony of the American Revolution itself. The richly interwoven story of these three strong women and their fight to shape their own destinies sheds new light on the ongoing movement toward human rights in America – and on the personal and political legacy of one of our most controversial Founding Fathers.

Catherine Kerrison discussed Jefferson’s Daughters in a Conversations at the Washington Library podcast. also wrote Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South.


Song In a Weary Throat: Memoir of an American Pilgrimage by Pauli Murray, with a new introduction by Patricia Bell-Scott.

First published posthumously in 1987, Pauli Murray’s Song in a Weary Throat was critically lauded, winning the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and the Lillian Smith Book Award among other distinctions. Yet Murray’s name and extraordinary influence receded from view in the intervening years; now they are once again entering the public discourse. At last, with the republication of this “beautifully crafted” memoir, Song in a Weary Throat takes its rightful place among the great civil rights autobiographies of the twentieth century.

In a voice that is energetic, wry, and direct, Murray tells of a childhood dramatically altered by the sudden loss of her spirited, hard-working parents. Orphaned at age four, she was sent from Baltimore to segregated Durham, North Carolina, to live with her unflappable Aunt Pauline, who, while strict, was liberal-minded in accepting the tomboy Pauli as “my little boy-girl.” In fact, throughout her life, Murray would struggle with feelings of sexual “in-betweenness” – she tried unsuccessfully to get her doctors to give her testosterone – that today we would recognize as a transgendered identity.

We then follow Murray north at the age of seventeen to New York City’s Hunter College, to her embrace of Gandhi’s Satyagraha – nonviolent resistance – and south again, where she experienced Jim Crow firsthand. An early Freedom Rider, she was arrested in 1940, fifteen years before Rosa Parks’ disobedience, for sitting in the whites-only section of a Virginia bus. Murray’s activism led to relationships with Thurgood Marshall and Eleanor Roosevelt – who respectfully referred to Murray as a “firebrand” – and propelled her to a Howard University law degree and a lifelong fight against “Jane Crow” sexism. We also read Betty Friedan’s enthusiastic response to Murray’s call for an NAACP for Women – the origins of NOW. Murray sets these thrilling high-water marks against the backdrop of uncertain finances, chronic fatigue, and tragic losses both private and public, as Patricia Bell-Scott’s engaging introduction brings to life.

Now, more than thirty years after her death in 1985, Murray – poet, memoirist, lawyer, activist, and Episcopal priest – gains long-deserved recognition through a rediscovered memoir that serves as a “powerful witness” (Brittney Cooper) to a pivotal era in the American twentieth century.

Pauli Murray is featured in multiple murals in Durham. To learn more about Pauli Murray and community projects commemorating her, check out the Pauli Murray Project.


Gertrude Weil: Jewish Progressive in the New South by Leonard Rogoff.

It is so obvious that to treat people equally is the right thing to do,” wrote Gertrude Weil (1879-1971). In the first-ever biography of Weil, Leonard Rogoff tells the story of a modest southern Jewish woman who, while famously private, fought publicly and passionately for the progressive causes of her age. Born to a prominent family in Goldsboro, North Carolina, Weil never married and there remained ensconced – in many ways a proper southern lady – for nearly a century. From her hometown, she fought for women’s suffrage, founded her state’s League of Women Voters, pushed for labor reform and social welfare, and advocated for world peace.

Weil made national headlines during an election in 1922 when, casting her vote, she spotted and ripped up a stack of illegally marked ballots. She campaigned against lynching, convened a biracial council in her home, and in her eighties desegregated a swimming pool by diving in headfirst. Rogoff also highlights Weil’s place in the broader Jewish American experience. Whether attempting to promote the causes of southern Jewry, save her European family members from the Holocaust, or support the creation of a Jewish state, Weil fought for systemic change, all the while insisting that she had not done much beyond the ordinary duty of any citizen.

A decade before Rogoff’s book, Anne Firor Scott wrote an article about Gertrude Weil. She relates a conversation about international problems where Gertrude exclaimed, “I grow more radical every year. Who knows? I may live long enough to become a communist!”

Gertrude Weil is featured in the Women of Valor exhibit in the Jewish Women’s Archive. She also has a highway marker in Goldsboro.


Always Another Country: A Memoir of Exile and Home by Sisonke Msimang.

Born in exile, in Zambia, to a guerrilla father and a working mother, Sisonke Msimang is constantly on the move. Her parents, talented and highly educated, travel from Zambia to Kenya and Canada and beyond with their young family. Always the outsider, and against a backdrop of racism and xenophobia, Sisonke develops her keenly perceptive view of the world. In this sparkling account of a young girl’s path to womanhood, Sisonke interweaves her personal story with her political awakening in America and Africa, her euphoria at returning to the new South Africa, and her disillusionment with the new elites. Confidential and reflective, Always Another Country is a search for belonging and identity: a warm and intimate story that will move many readers.

Sisonke Msimang gave a TEDTalk in 2017 titled If a Story Moves You, Act on It. She recently published The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela, which she discusses here.

 


Remembering W.S. Merwin

“There are few great poets alive at any one time, and W.S. Merwin is one of them. Read him.” — The Guardian

W.S. Merwin, former United States poet laureate, Academy of American Poets Chancellor, environmental activist, literary translator and two-time Pulitzer prize-winning author, died on March 15th, 2019 at the age of 91.  His work was often featured in the New Yorker.

If you’ve never read any of his works, we have many of his books in our collection, including these:

Garden Time

The Shadow of Sirius

Flower & Hand: Poems, 1977-1983

The Vixen: Poems

The Rain in the Trees: Poems

He was also known for his translations:

Purgatorio

From the Spanish Morning

Satires

Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

Four French Plays

Let me leave you with one of his poems:

Separation

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

from The Second Four Books of Poems (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 1993).

March 2019 Collection Spotlight: International Year of The Periodic Table of Chemical Elements

Professor Molenium from the American Chemical Society

This month’s Collection Spotlight celebrates The United Nations International Year of The Periodic Table of Chemical Elements.  It’s the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the publication of Mendeleev’s Periodic Table of Chemical Elements in 1869.  To learn more, check out this collection of articles.  You might also enjoy reading through the posts marked with #IYPT2019.   Here’s some examples of the titles that we are featuring:

The Periodic Table: Its Story and Its Significance by Eric R. Scerri

Reactions: An Illustrated Exploration of Elements, Molecules, and Change in the Universe by Theodore Gray

Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore

Vanity, Vitality, and Virility: The Science behind the Products You Love to Buy by John Emsley

Gold: A Novel by Chris Cleave

The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements by Sam Kean

The Last Sorcerers: The Path from Alchemy to the Periodic Table by Richard Morris

Check out the Collection Spotlight rack near our Perkins Library Service Desk on the first floor of Perkins to see if any of the books there can spark a chemical reaction in you!

What to Read this Month: February 2019

February is Black History Month, so before I get to the books, here are some exhibits, resources, and events:

Duke People’s State of the University is a campus activist group that has successfully pressured Duke to “ban the box” – not require job applicants to disclose criminal history – and rename the Carr building. The Chronicle named PSOTU one of its Chron15 Pioneers.

Duke is home to the personal and professional papers of John Hope Franklin, historian, activist, and public scholar. The John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture, housed at the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library collects and preserves primary sources. The John Hope Franklin Center of International and Interdisciplinary Studies produces a weekly webcast called Left of Black, hosted by Duke Professor Mark Anthony Neal. The Franklin Humanities Institute hosts the lab From Slavery to Freedom: Representations of Race and Freedom in the African Diaspora.

February 13 marked the 50th anniversary of the Allen Building Takeover at Duke. The Takeover is commemorated by an online exhibit and a physical exhibit on display through July 14 in the Jerry and Bruce Chappell Family Gallery in Perkins. Duke Digital Collections include Silent Vigil (1968) and Allen Building Takeover (1969) Audio Recordings. In addition to the  Allen Building Takeover recordings, Duke has digitized the oral history collection Behind the Veil: Documenting African-American Life in the Jim Crow South. Members of the Duke community now also have access to a database of oral history interviews of African Americans: The HistoryMakers Digital Archive.

NC Central University has two remaining events in their Black History Month Activities: a lecture from The Universal Ethiopian Students’ Association, 1927-1948: Mobilizing Diaspora by Dr. Takeia Anthony and the musical drama A Need Fulfilled, profiling the lives of black nurses in World War II.

For more exciting reads, check out our New and Noteworthy and Current Literature collections.


Unseen: Unpublished Black History From The New York Times Photo Archives by Darcy Eveleigh, Dana Canedy, Damien Cave, and Rachel L. Swarns.

Hundreds of stunning images from black history have long been buried in the New York Times archives. Unseen dives deep into the Times photo archives – known as the Morgue – to showcase this extraordinary collection of photographs and the stories behind them.

It all started with Times photo editor Darcy Eveleigh discovering dozens of these photographs. She and three colleagues – Dana Canedy, Damien Cave and Rachel L. Swarns – began exploring the history behind them, subsequently chronicling them in a series entitled “Unpublished Black History” that ran in print and online editions of the Times in February 2016. It garnered 1.7 million views on the Times website and thousands of comments from readers. This book includes those photographs and many more, among them: a 27-year-old Jesse Jackson leading an anti-discrimination rally in Chicago, Rosa Parks arriving at a Montgomery Courthouse in Alabama, a candid behind-the-scenes shot of Aretha Franklin backstage at the Apollo Theater, Ralph Ellison on the streets of his Manhattan neighborhood, the firebombed home of Malcolm X, Myrlie Evans and her children at the funeral of her slain husband , Medgar, and a wheelchair-bound Roy Campanella at the razing of Ebbets Field.

Were the photos – or the people in them – not deemed newsworthy enough? Did the images not arrive in time for publication? Were they pushed aside by words at an institution long known as the Gray Lady? Eveleigh, Canedy, Cave, and Swarns explore all these questions and more in this one-of-a-kind book.

My favorite photograph from this book is at the beginning of the section “Arthur Mitchell, Dancing Through Barriers” on page 96. Unfortunately, this image does not appear in the online photograph series.


Talking Back: Voices of Color edited and with an introduction by Nellie Wong.

Talking Back: Voices of Color is a dynamic anthology featuring voices of youth, political prisoners, immigrants, and history-makers. Essays by a multi-racial, intergenerational mix of 25 Black, Latinx, Native American, and LGBTQ community organizers. Topics include quality education and environmental justice, indigenous land rights and international solidarity, film and book reviews, hidden histories of women of color, and tales of endurance and survival.

The introduction by Nellie Wong, a celebrated and widely published poet, explores the meaning of talking back as a step in gaining self-esteem and as a collective act. She writes: “To whom do we talk back? To those who will silence us. Those who incarcerate us in prison or in the home. Those who deny us our rights to cross borders to seek refuge from violence and safety for our children. Those who brutalize us because of our race, gender or sexuality… These voices of color matter. They need to be heard. Everywhere.”

This vibrant anthology astonished me at every turn. Many of the events referenced are history that I was never taught, stories that never penetrated the mainstream media, and news that never struck me as important on a visceral level amid the flood of a 24/7 news cycle and the filter effect of social media. Talking Back: Voices of Color opened my eyes to lived realities. I highly recommend this book, but reading it requires open-mindedness and a willingness to listen rather than reflexively judge based on the organizers’ politics.


Showtime at the Apollo: The Epic Tale of Harlem’s Legendary Theater by Ted Fox, illustrated by James Otis Smith.

Writer Ted Fox and artist James Otis Smith bring to life Harlem’s legendary theater in this graphic novel adaptation of Fox’s definitive, critically acclaimed history of the Apollo.

Since its inception as an African-American theater in 1934, the Apollo, and the thousands of entertainers who performed there, have led the way in the presentation of swing, bebop, rhythm and blues, jazz, gospel, soul, funk and hip-hop – along with the latest in dance and comedy. The Apollo has nurtured and featured thousands of artists, many of whom have become legends. The beauty they have given the world – their art – transcends the hatred, ignorance, and intolerance that often made their lives difficult. Today, the Apollo enjoys an almost mythical status. With its breathtaking art, this graphic novel adaptation of Showtime at the Apollo brings to life the theater’s legendary significance in music history, African American history, and the culture of New York City.

Multiversity Comics interviewed Ted Fox and James Otis Smith at New York Comic Con 2018. In addition to the new graphic novel, we have the 1983 book it was adapted from.


Afro-Descendants, Identity, and the Struggle for Development in the Americas edited by Bernd Reiter and Kimberly Eison Simmons.

Indigenous people and African descendants in Latin America and the Caribbean have long been affected by a social hierarchy established by elites, through which some groups were racialized and others were normalized. Far from being “racial paradises” populated by an amalgamated “cosmic race” of mulattos and mestizos, Latin America and the Caribbean have long been sites of shifting exploitative strategies and ideologies, ranging from scientific racism and eugenics to the more sophisticated official denial of racism and ethnic difference. This book, among the first to focus on African descendants in the region, brings together diverse reflections from scholars, activists, and funding agency representatives working to end racism and promote human rights in the Americas. By focusing on the ways racism inhibits agency among African descendants and the ways African-descendant groups position themselves in order to overcome obstacles, this interdisciplinary book provides a multi-faceted analysis of one of the gravest contemporary problems in the Americas.

Bernd Reiter has also written The Dialectics of Citizenship: Exploring Privilege, Exclusion, and Racialization and The Crisis of Liberal Democracy and the Path Ahead. Kimberly Eison Simmons contributed to Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis, and Poetics and wrote Reconstructing Racial Identity and the African Past in the Dominican Republic.


Hello Universe by Erin Entrada Kelly.

Newbery Medalist Erin Entrada Kelly’s Hello, Universe is a funny and poignant neighborhood story about unexpected friendships.

In one day, four lives weave together in unexpected ways. Virgil Salinas is shy and kindhearted and feels out of place in his crazy-about-sports family. Valencia Somerset, who is deaf, is smart, brave, and secretly lonely, and she loves everything about nature. Kaori Tanaka is a self-proclaimed psychic, whose little sister, Gen, is always following her around. And Chet Bullens wishes the weird kids would just stop being so different so he can concentrate on basketball.

They aren’t friends, at least not until Chet pulls a prank that traps Virgil and his pet guinea pig at the bottom of a well. This disaster leads Kaori, Gen, and Valencia on an epic quest to find missing Virgil. Through luck, smarts, bravery, and a little help from the universe, a rescue is performed, a bully is put in his place, and friendship blooms.

The acclaimed and award-winning author of Blackbird Fly and The Land of Forgotten Girls writes with an authentic, humorous, and irresistible tween voice that will appeal to fans of Thanhha Lai and Rita Williams-Garcia.

I saw this book while browsing the New and Noteworthy collection. It looked adorable and positive, and did not disappoint. Hello Universe is so cute and wholesome that I was tearing up at the end because everything turns out well and friendship is amazing.

 


What to Read this Month: January 2019

Welcome back! The best way to celebrate the start of 2019 is with some new books. Check out our New and Noteworthy and Current Literature collections for some good titles.


“All the Real Indians Died Off”: and 20 Other Myths About Native Americans by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker unpacks the twenty-one most common myths and misconceptions about Native Americans. In this enlightening book, scholars and activists Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker tackle a wide range of myths about Native American culture and history that have misinformed generations. Tracing how these ideas evolved, and drawing from history, the authors disrupt long-held and enduring myths such as-“Columbus Discovered America,” “Thanksgiving Proves the Indians Welcomed Pilgrims,” “Indians Were Savage and Warlike,” “Europeans Brought Civilization to Backward Indians,” “The United States Did Not Have a Policy of Genocide,” “Sports Mascots Honor Native Americans,” “Most Indians Are on Government Welfare,” “Indian Casinos Make Them All Rich,” and “Indians Are Naturally Predisposed to Alcohol.” Each chapter deftly shows how these myths are rooted in the fears and prejudice of European settlers and in the larger political agendas of a settler state aimed at acquiring Indigenous land and tied to narratives of erasure and disappearance. Accessibly written and revelatory, All the Real Indians Died Off challenges readers to rethink what they have been taught about Native Americans and history.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz also wrote An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Dina Gilio-Whitaker is a policy director and senior researcher at the Center for World Indigenous Studies.

According to Shandiin Herrera, who wrote a moving piece on the Native American experience at Duke in the Chronicle, “I think that this book selection is very important because there are too many stereotypes that continue to be perpetuated, especially in academia. These myths continue to harm Indigenous students, tribal policies, and Native Nations across the country. There is also a substantial amount of power in gaining a new understanding of history and the construction of our society.”


A Safe Girl to Love by Casey Plett contains eleven unique short stories that stretch from a rural Canadian Mennonite town to a hipster gay bar in Brooklyn, featuring young trans women stumbling through loss, sex, harassment, and love. These stories, shiny with whiskey and prairie sunsets, rattling subways and neglected cats, show growing up as a trans girl can be charming, funny, frustrating, or sad, but never will it be predictable.

In addition to Perkins, you can find A Safe Girl to Love as a free PDF on the author’s website Progress Never Stops For Nostalgic Transsexuals.


The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel by Ludmila Ulitskaya, translated from the Russian by Diane Nemec Ignashev. The central character in Ludmila Ulitskaya’s celebrated novel The Kukotsky Enigma is a gynecologist contending with Stalin’s prohibition of abortions in 1936. But, in the tradition of Russia’s great family novels, the story encompasses the history of two families and unfolds in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and the ruins of ancient civilizations on the Black Sea. Their lives raise profound questions about family heritage and genetics, nurture and nature, and life and death. In his struggle to maintain his professional integrity and to keep his work from dividing his family, Kukotsky confronts the moral complexity of reproductive science. Winner of the 2001 Russian Booker Prize and the basis for a blockbuster television miniseries, The Kukotsky Enigma is an engrossing, searching novel by one of contemporary literature’s most brilliant writers.

If you’re interested, we also have the original Russian novel.


You Have the Right to Remain Fat by Virgie Tovar. Growing up as a fat girl, Virgie Tovar believed that her body was something to be fixed. But after two decades of dieting and constant guilt, she was over it–and gave herself the freedom to trust her own body again. Ever since, she’s been helping others to do the same. Tovar is hungry for a world where bodies are valued equally, food is free from moral judgment, and you can jiggle through life with respect. In concise and candid language, she delves into unlearning fatphobia, dismantling sexist notions of fashion, and how to reject diet culture’s greatest lie: that fat people need to wait before beginning their best lives.

Check out her TEDx Talk and website.


Odd Girl Out: My Extraordinary Autistic Life by Laura James. From childhood, Laura James knew she was different. She struggled to cope in a world that often made no sense to her, as though her brain had its own operating system. It wasn’t until she reached her forties that she found out why: suddenly and surprisingly, she was diagnosed with autism.

With a touching and searing honesty, Laura challenges everything we think we know about what it means to be autistic. Married with four children and a successful journalist, Laura examines the ways in which autism has shaped her career, her approach to motherhood, and her closest relationships. Laura’s upbeat, witty writing offers new insight into the day-to-day struggles of living with autism, as her extreme attention to sensory detail–a common aspect of her autism–is fascinating to observe through her eyes.

As Laura grapples with defining her own identity, she also looks at the unique benefits neurodiversity can bring. Lyrical and lush, Odd Girl Out shows how being different doesn’t mean being less, and proves that it is never too late for any of us to find our rightful place in the world.

Amelia Hill of the Guardian interviewed Laura James about being a mother with autism.

Low Maintenance Book Club: Love Between the Covers

Have you ever fallen for a book? Want to shout your love from the rooftops, or *ahem* just share about it at a meeting? If so, join us for the February 12th Low Maintenance Book Club meeting to talk about your favorite reads from the past year and to get recommendations from others. If you tell us (aah39@duke) which books you’d like to talk about beforehand, we’ll try to have a library copy available for checkout at the meeting.  We’ll also have snacks and book-themed games to kick off the first meeting of the semester. We hope you’ll join us!

Date: Tuesday, February 12th, 2019

Time: 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm

Location: Bostock 127 (The Edge Workshop Room)

Register for this discussion.  Light refreshments will be served.

If you have any questions, you can contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy at aah39@duke.edu.

January 2019 Collection Spotlight: KIE Staff Book Clubs

This month our Collection Spotlight is celebrating the Kenan Institute for Ethics Book Clubs for Staff program by featuring some of the books that have been read by the various book clubs across campus.  More than 50 books have been read across 15 departments.  Some of the titles that have been read by these book clubs include:

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

Proud Shoes: The story of an American Family by Pauli Murray

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

The Adventure Gap: Changing the Face of the Outdoors by  James Edward Mills

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

Redefining Realness by Janet Mock

Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

Check out the Collection Spotlight rack near our Perkins Library Service Desk on the first floor of Perkins to find some more thought provoking titles to read.  If you are a staff member interested in starting your own Ethics Book Club in your department or office, you can find details here about how to get seed money to set it up.

What to Read this Month: December 2018

As we head into the end of the semester and the holidays, you may be looking for something new to read!  Check out our New and Noteworthy and Current Literature collections for some good titles.  And if you are traveling, don’t forget about our Overdrive collection for e-books you can easily download to your devices.


84K by Claire North.  The penalty for Dani Cumali’s murder: £84,000.  Theo works in the Criminal Audit Office.  He assesses each crime that crosses his desk and makes sure the correct debt to society is paid in full.  These days, there’s no need to go to prison – provided that you can afford to pay the penalty for the crime you’ve committed.  If you’re rich enough, you can get away with murder.  But Dani’s murder is different.  When Theo finds her lifeless body, and a hired killer standing over her and calmly calling the police to confess, he can’t let her death become just an entry on a balance sheet.  Someone is responsible.  And Theo is going to find them and make them pay.  You can read reviews here and here.


The Paris Seamstress by Natasha Lester is an internationally bestselling World War II novel that spans generations, crosses oceans, and proves just how much two young women are willing to sacrifice for love and family.  1940: As the Germans advance upon Paris, young seamstress Estella Bissette is forced to flee everything she’s ever known.  She’s bound for New York City with her signature gold dress, a few francs, and a dream: to make her mark on the world of fashion.  Present day: Fabienne Bissette journeys to the Met’s annual gala for an exhibit featuring the work of her ailing grandmother – a legend of women’s fashion design.  But as Fabienne begins to learn more about her beloved grandmother’s past, she uncovers a story of tragedy, heartbreak and family secrets that will dramatically change her own life.  You can read an interview with the author here.


The Emperor of Shoes: A Novel by Spencer Wise. Alex Cohen, a twenty-six-year-old Jewish Bostonian, is living in southern China, where his father runs their family-owned shoe factory.  Alex reluctantly assumes the helm of the company, but as he explores the plant’s vast floors and assembly lines, he comes to a grim realization: employees are exploited, regulatory systems are corrupt and Alex’s own father is engaging in bribes to protect the bottom line.  When Alex meets a seamstress named Ivy, his sympathies begin to shift.  She is an embedded organizer of a pro-democratic Chinese party, secretly sowing dissonance among her fellow laborers.  Will Alex remain loyal to his father and his heritage? Or will the sparks of revolution ignite?  Deftly plotted and vibrantly drawn, The Emperor of Shoes is a timely meditation on idealism, ambition, father-son rivalry and cultural revolution, set against a vivid backdrop of social and technological change.  You can read a review here, and read an interview here.


The Clockmaker’s Daughter: A Novel by Kate Morton.  In the summer of 1862, a group of young artists led by the passionate and talented Edward Radcliffe descends upon Birchwood Manor on the banks of the Upper Thames.  Their plan: to spend a secluded summer month in a haze of inspiration and creativity.  But by the time their stay is over, one woman has been shot dead while another has disappeared; a priceless heirloom is missing; and Edward Radcliffe’s life is in ruins.  Over one hundred and fifty years later, Elodie Winslow, a young archivist in London, uncovers a leather satchel containing two seemingly unrelated items: a sepia photograph of an arresting-looking woman in Victorian clothing, and an artist’s sketchbook containing the drawing of a twin-gabled house on the bend of a river.  Why does Birchwood Manor feel so familiar to Elodie?  And who is the beautiful woman in the photograph? Will she ever give up her secrets?  You can read reviews here, here, and here.


The invention of Ana by Mikkel Rosengaard (translated by Caroline Waight).  On a rooftop in Brooklyn on a spring night, a young intern and would-be writer, newly arrived from Copenhagen, meets the intriguing Ana Ivan. Clever and funny, with an air of mystery and melancholia, Ana is a performance artist, a mathematician, and a self-proclaimed time traveler.   Before long, the intern finds himself seduced by Ana’s enthralling stories, and Ana also introduces him to her latest artistic endeavor.  Following the astronomical rather than the Gregorian calendar, she is trying to alter her sense of time–an experiment that will lead her to live in complete darkness for one month.  The Invention of Ana blurs the lines between narrative and memory, perception and reality, identity and authenticity.  You can read reviews here and here.

November 2018 Collection Spotlight: Hidden Service

 

Today Duke commemorates Veteran’s Day.  You can see a list of events going on here.  Here at DUL we’re focusing on “Hidden Service” in our collection spotlight by showcasing fiction and non-fiction books that explore the contributions and experiences of soldiers from a variety of backgrounds, including women, LGBT, African-American, Native American, Asian-American, and Latino/a soldiers.  You can check out this display at the Collection Spotlight rack near our Perkins Library Service Desk on the first floor of Perkins.  Here’s a brief selection of the titles you will find there:

Code Talker by Chester Nez

Be Safe I Love You by  Cara Hoffman

Going for Broke: Japanese American Soldiers in the War against Nazi Germany by James M. McCaffrey

I’m Still Standing: From Captive U.S. Soldier to Free Citizen– My Journey Home by Shoshana Johnson

A Legacy Greater than Words: Stories of U.S. Latinos & Latinas of the WWII Generation by Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez

Dien Cai Dau by Yusef Komunyakaa

The Hello Girls: America’s First Women Soldiers by  Elizabeth Cobbs

Our Time: Breaking the Silence of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” by Josh Seefried.

This collection spotlight was partially inspired by the current World War One exhibit in Rubenstein Library and a recent talk in early November called ” ‘If We Must Die’: African Americans and the War for Democracy.”  Professor Adriane Lentz-Smith, author of Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I, gave the talk.

You might also be interested in this recent blog post about Trinity College during the Great War.

Remembering Ntozake Shange

Ntozake Shange, Reid Lecture, Women Issues Luncheon, Women’s Center, November 1978

Ntozake Shange passed away last week at the age of 70.  If you would like to read more about her legacy, please read here and here.

She is most well known for For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is EnufYou may be familiar with the 2011 film featuring an all star cast (Janet Jackson, Loretta Devine, Hill Harper, Thandie Newton, Whoopi Goldberg, Kerry Washington, and Macy Gray).  Still if you haven’t seen it, the 1982 production starring Ntozake Shange, Patti LaBelle, and Alfre Woodard (among others) is worth a watch!  We have access through Theatre in Video.

Many of her plays can be found in Black Drama.  She is also known for her poetry and wrote several novels.  Here’s a sample of some of her work:

Some Sing, Some Cry

A Daughter’s Geography

Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo: A Novel

Nappy Edges

I Live in Music

Betsey Brown: A Novel

You might also enjoy this New York Public Library interview in 2015.

This post has been written by Arianne Hartsell-Gundy and Heather Martin.

Frankenstein Lives On!

It probably won’t surprise you to hear that there have been a lot of adaptations and works inspired by Frankenstein.  In today’s blog post I’m going to share some film and novel adaptations that you might be interested in taking a look at.

Let’s start with some of the film titles!  The titles that I am sharing with you can be found at our Lilly Library.  In fact most of them are currently on display in their collection spotlight!

Young Frankenstein:  A finely tuned parody of the old Frankenstein movies, in which Gene Wilder returns to the old country to clear his family name.  This classic comedy was directed by Mel Brooks and has a screenplay by Gene Wilder and Mel Brooks.

Frankenstein: Still regarded as the definitive film version of Mary Shelley’s classic tale of tragedy and horror, Frankenstein made unknown character actor Boris Karloff a star and created a new icon of terror.  Along with the highly successful Dracula, released earlier the same year, it launched Universal Studio’s golden age of 1930s horror movies.  The film’s greatness stems less from its script than from the stark but moody atmosphere created by director James Whale.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: This 1994 version is a more faithful adaptation than some of the older versions, though it still takes some liberties with the plot.  It was directed by and starred Kenneth Branagh.  It also features Robert De Niro and Helena Bonham Carter.

I, Frankenstein: Set in a dystopic present where vigilant gargoyles and ferocious demons rage in a battle for ultimate power, Victor Frankenstein’s creation Adam finds himself caught in the middle as both sides race to discover the secret to his immortality.

In addition to films, Frankenstein’s monster has inspired directly and indirectly many authors.

A Monster’s Notes by Laurie Sheck. What if Mary Shelley had not invented Frankenstein’s monster but had met him when she was a girl of eight, sitting by her mother’s grave, and he came to her unbidden?  What if their secret bond left her forever changed, obsessed with the strange being whom she had discovered at a time of need?  What if he were still alive in the twenty-first century?  This bold, genre-defying book brings us the “monster” in his own words.

Frankenstein Unbound by  Brian W. Aldiss.  Joe Bodenland, a 21st century American, passes through a timeslip and finds himself with Byron and Shelley in the famous villa on the shore of Lake Geneva. More fantastically, he finds himself face to face with a real Frankenstein, a doppelganger inhabiting a complex world.

Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi.  From the rubble-strewn streets of U.S.-occupied Baghdad, Hadi–a scavenger and an oddball fixture at a local café–collects human body parts and stitches them together to create a corpse.  His goal, he claims, is for the government to recognize the parts as people and to give them proper burial.  But when the corpse goes missing, a wave of eerie murders sweeps the city, and reports stream in of a horrendous-looking criminal who, though shot, cannot be killed.  This book was a Man Booker International Prize finalist!

Destroyer by Victor LaValle.  The legacy of Frankenstein’s monster collides with the sociopolitical tensions of the present-day United States.  Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein beseeched his creator for love and companionship, but in 2017, the monster has long discarded any notions of peace or inclusion.  He has become the Destroyer, his only goal to eliminate the scourge of humanity from the planet.  In this goal, he initially finds a willing partner in Dr. Baker, a descendant of the Frankenstein family who has lost her teenage son after an encounter with the police.  While two scientists, Percy and Byron, initially believe they’re brought to protect Dr. Baker from the monster, they soon realize they may have to protect the world from the monster and Dr. Baker’s wrath.

The dark descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein by Kiersten White.  Elizabeth Lavenza hasn’t had a proper meal in weeks.  Her thin arms are covered with bruises from her “caregiver,” and she is on the verge of being thrown into the streets . . . until she is brought to the home of Victor Frankenstein, an unsmiling, solitary boy who has everything–except a friend.  Victor is her escape from misery. Elizabeth does everything she can to make herself indispensable–and it works.  But her new life comes at a price.  As the years pass, Elizabeth’s survival depends on managing Victor’s dangerous temper and entertaining his every whim, no matter how depraved.  Behind her blue eyes and sweet smile lies the calculating heart of a girl determined to stay alive no matter the cost . . . as the world she knows is consumed by darkness.

If you want to find out more about adaptations of Frankenstein, try the website The Frankenstein MEME.

This post is part of a series.  You can find older posts here, here, and here.  Don’t forget to sign up for Frankenreads on Halloween!

 

Life of Mary Shelley

I’m continuing my series of blog posts about Frankenstein with some suggestions about how to learn more about Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the author of Frankenstein.  She was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and Wiliam Godwin, the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and she wrote Frankenstein when she was 19 years old!  I think this recent article gives a good sense of why she is such an important literary figure.

If you are looking for a short bio of her, this page on the Romantic Circles Edition is a good place to start.  You might also be interested in this entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.  You can also find several useful entries in the Dictionary of Literary Biography.

You might also be interested in these longer biographies:

Mary Shelley by Miranda Seymour

In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl who Wrote Frankenstein by Fiona Sampson

Mary Shelley by Muriel Spark

Moon in Eclipse: A Life of Mary Shelley by Jane Dunn

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is also going to be the subject of National Geographic’s Genius Season Three!  Here’s an interesting recent article from their website.

You might also be interested in viewing a recent film about her starring Elle Fanning.

P.S. Don’t forget to sign up for Frankenreads!

Finding Frankenstein Online

Since Frankenstein is 200 years old, it’s firmly in the public domain, which means you can find many editions and versions online.  Today I’m continuing my series of blog posts with a list of several resources that I think will be of interest!

First you can read the text at Project Gutenberg!

You can also trace the evolution of the novel with images and transcriptions of the notebooks at the Shelley-Godwin Archive.  This archive  provides the digitized manuscripts of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft.

There’s the Stuart Curran’s digital edition in the Romantic Circles Editions.  It provides both the 1818 and 1831 publications of Frankenstein.  It also has a link to a comparative text tool through Juxta Commons for both these years.

The Pittsburgh Frankenstein Project is working on a new digital edition that builds on and expands the work done by Curran and others.

The Frankenstein Bicentennial Project has several fun projects worth looking at, including Frankenbook (a collective reading and collaborative annotation experience of the original 1818).

I also discovered what looks like the beginning of a mapping project involving the novel.  It looks incomplete, but an interesting experiment (pun intended) nonetheless. You can see both the Creature’s journey and Victor Frankenstein’s journey.

Let’s end on a fun note with the web series Frankenstein, MD, a collaboration between Pemberley Digital and PBS Digital Studios.  You can find links to all the videos here.

P.S. Don’t forget to sign up for Frankenreads!

What to Read this Month: October 2018

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report is on my mind this week, so we’re highlighting books about climate change.  Check out our New and Noteworthy and Current Literature collections for more titles!


Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming edited by Paul Hawken.  A team of over 200 scholars, scientists, policymakers, business leaders and activists share the hundred most substantive solutions to combat climate change that together will not only slow down the growth of carbon emissions, but reverse them altogether.  Put into action together, these solutions will mobilize society into taking the climate change conversation from problem definition to problem solving, from fear and apathy to collaboration and regeneration.  You can find out more about Project Drawdown at their website.  Also, see this interview.


We’re Doomed. Now What?: Essays on War and Climate Change by Roy Scranton.  The time we’ve been thrown into is one of alarming and bewildering change – the breakup of the post-1945 global order, a multispecies mass extinction, and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it.  Not one of us is innocent, not one of us is safe.  This book addresses the crisis that is our time through a series of brilliant, moving, and original essays on climate change, war, literature, and loss, from one of the most provocative and iconoclastic minds of his generation.  You can watch a forum with the author here.


South Pole Station: A Novel by Ashley Shelby.  South Pole Station is a place with an average temperature of -54°F and no sunlight for six months a year.  Unmoored by a recent family tragedy, Cooper Gosling is adrift at thirty and–despite her early promise as a painter–on the verge of sinking her career.  So she accepts her place in the National Science Foundation’s Artists & Writers Program and flees to Antarctica–where she encounters a group of misfits motivated by desires as ambiguous as her own.  The novel also centers on clashes between scientists and conservative politicians who rely on campaign contributions from oil companies over the causes of climate change.  You can see reviews here and here.


Coasts in Crisis: A Global Challenge by Gary Griggs.  Coastal regions around the world have become increasingly crowded, intensively developed, and severely exploited. Hundreds of millions of people living in these low-lying areas are subject to short-term coastal hazards such as cyclones, hurricanes, and destruction due to El Niño, and are also exposed to the long-term threat of global sea-level rise.  These massive concentrations of people expose often-fragile coastal environments to the runoff and pollution from municipal, industrial, and agricultural sources as well as the impacts of resource exploitation and a wide range of other human impacts.  Can environmental impacts be reduced or mitigated and can coastal regions adapt to natural hazards?  You can read a review in the journal Coastal Management: https://doi.org/10.1080/08920753.2018.1426378 (access available through our library).


Climate Justice: Hope, Resilience, and the Fight for a Sustainable Future by Mary Robinson is an urgent call to arms by one of the most important voices in the international fight against climate change, sharing inspiring stories and offering vital lessons for the path forward.  Holding her first grandchild in her arms in 2003, Mary Robinson was struck by the uncertainty of the world he had been born into.  Before his fiftieth birthday, he would share the planet with more than nine billion people–people battling for food, water, and shelter in an increasingly volatile climate.  The faceless, shadowy menace of climate change had become, in an instant, deeply personal.  Mary Robinson’s mission would lead her all over the world, from Malawi to Mongolia, and to a heartening revelation: that an irrepressible driving force in the battle for climate justice could be found at the grassroots level, mainly among women, many of them mothers and grandmothers like herself.  From Sharon Hanshaw, the Mississippi matriarch whose campaign began in her East Biloxi hair salon and culminated in her speaking at the United Nations, to Constance Okollet, a small farmer who transformed the fortunes of her ailing community in rural Uganda, Robinson met with ordinary people whose resilience and ingenuity had already unlocked extraordinary change.


New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel.  As the sea levels rose, every street became a canal. Every skyscraper an island.  For the residents of one apartment building in Madison Square, however, New York in the year 2140 is far from a drowned city. There is the market trader, who finds opportunities where others find trouble. There is the detective, whose work will never disappear – along with the lawyers, of course.   There is the internet star, beloved by millions for her airship adventures, and the building’s manager, quietly respected for his attention to detail.  Then there are two boys who don’t live there, but have no other home – and who are more important to its future than anyone might imagine.  Lastly there are the coders, temporary residents on the roof, whose disappearance triggers a sequence of events that threatens the existence of all – and even the long-hidden foundations on which the city rests.  You can read reviews here and here.

Low Maintenance Book Club Gets Spooky!

Get in the Halloween spirit with the Duke University Libraries Low-Maintenance Book Club! On Tuesday, October 30th, 5:30-7pm, we’ll meet to discuss three scary short stories by Shirley Jackson: “The Lottery,” “The Possibility of Evil,” and “The Summer People.”  Netflix’s new The Haunting of Hill House is based on one of her books!

The stories can be found in Novels and stories : The lottery, The haunting of Hill House, We have always lived in the castle, other stories and sketches, available in Perkins Library. One copy of this book will be placed on reserve for overnight loan.

Low-Maintenance Book Club: Halloween Edition
Tuesday, October 30th, 5:30-7pm
Bostock 127 (The Edge Workshop Room)

Please RSVP if you plan to attend . We’ll be serving light snacks!

If you have any questions, you can contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy at aah39@duke.edu.

 

2018 Banned Books Week

Happy Banned Books Week! Banned Books Week is a celebration of the freedom to read books that are frequently challenged and targeted for removal from libraries, and runs this year from September 23-29. This year’s theme, “Banning Books Silences Stories,” is a reminder that censorship not only infringes on our intellectual freedom–it harms our ability to create, tell, and share stories. Banned Books Week celebrates free and open access to information; though the books reported by the ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom are frequently challenged, they remain accessible to readers in libraries throughout the country.

Duke Libraries owns many of these challenged books. If you’re interested in reading a title that has been challenged historically or in recent years, here are some selected titles:

You can check out a list of the most frequently challenged books of 2017 here.

What to Read this Month: September 2018

Looking for something new to read? Check out our New and Noteworthy and Current Literature collections!


Burger by Carol J Adams. The burger, long the All-American meal, is undergoing an identity crisis. From its shifting place in popular culture to efforts by investors such as Bill Gates to create the non-animal burger that can feed the world, the burger’s identity has become as malleable as that patty of protein itself, before it is thrown on a grill. Carol Adams’s Burger is a fast-paced and eclectic exploration of the history, business, cultural dynamics, and gender politics of the ordinary hamburger. You can read an excerpt of Burger here, and the author’s defense of the veggie burger here.

 


Buttermilk Graffiti : a Chef’s Journey to Discover America’s New melting-pot cuisine by Edward Lee. American food is the story of mash-ups. Immigrants arrive, cultures collide, and out of the push-pull come exciting new dishes and flavours. But for Edward Lee, who, like Anthony Bourdain or Gabrielle Hamilton, is as much a writer as he is a chef, that first surprising bite is just the beginning. What about the people behind the food? What about the traditions, the innovations, the memories? A natural-born storyteller, Lee decided to hit the road and spent two years uncovering fascinating narratives from every corner of the country. Listen to chef Edward Lee talk about his journey across America here.


Eating Animals by Jonathan Safron Foer. Part memoir and part investigative report, Eating Animals is the groundbreaking moral examination of vegetarianism, farming, and the food we eat every day that inspired the documentary of the same name. Faced with the prospect of being unable to explain why we eat some animals and not others, Foer set out to explore the origins of many eating traditions and the fictions involved with creating them. Traveling to the darkest corners of our dining habits, Foer raises the unspoken question behind every fish we eat, every chicken we fry, and every burger we grill. You can read more about the book here.


Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating by Charles Spence. Why do we consume 35 percent more food when eating with one other person, and 75 percent more when dining with three? How do we explain the fact that people who like strong coffee drink more of it under bright lighting? And why does green ketchup just not work? The answer is gastrophysics, the new area of sensory science pioneered by Oxford professor Charles Spence. Now he’s stepping out of his lab to lift the lid on the entire eating experience — how the taste, the aroma, and our overall enjoyment of food are influenced by all of our senses, as well as by our mood and expectations. You can read a review of the book here.


The Potlikker Papers : a Food History of the Modern South by John T. Edge. Like great provincial dishes around the world, potlikker is a salvage food. During the antebellum era, slave owners ate the greens from the pot and set aside the leftover potlikker broth for the enslaved, unaware that the broth, not the greens, was nutrient rich. After slavery, potlikker sustained the working poor, both black and white. In the South of today, potlikker has taken on new meanings as chefs have reclaimed it. Potlikker is a quintessential Southern dish, and The Potlikker Papers is a people’s history of the modern South, told through its food. Beginning with the pivotal role cooks and waiters played in the civil rights movement, noted authority John T. Edge narrates the South’s fitful journey from a hive of racism to a hotbed of American immigration. He shows why working-class Southern food has become a vital driver of contemporary American cuisine. You can read more about the book–and the complexities to telling history through food– here.


 A Revolution in Taste: The Rise of French Cuisine 1650-1800 by Susan Pinkard. Modern French habits of cooking, eating, and drinking were born in the ancien regime, radically breaking with culinary traditions that originated in antiquity and creating a new aesthetic. This new culinary culture saw food and wine as important links between human beings and nature. Authentic foodstuffs and simple preparations became the hallmarks of the modern style. Susan Pinkard traces the roots and development of this culinary revolution to many different historical trends, including changes in material culture, social transformations, medical theory and practice, and the Enlightenment. You can read more about Pinkard’s exploration of french culinary history here.

The Low Maintenance Book Club Reads Roxane Gay!

Kick off the new school year with us at the Low Maintenance Book Club‘s upcoming meeting on Wednesday, September 26th, from 5:30-7pm. We’ll be reading selections from award-winning novelist and essayist Roxane Gay’s Difficult Women, her debut collection of short fiction.

Although we’ll plan to discuss “I Will Follow You,” “Difficult Women” and “North Country,” you should feel free to read as much or as little (we are low-maintenance, after all) of the work as you’d like.  We are featuring a giveaway–the first ten people to RSVP will receive a free copy of the book! You can also check out copies from Duke Libraries and the Durham County Library.  Light refreshments will be served.

Date: Wednesday, September 26th, 2018

Time: 5:30 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.

Location: Bostock 127 (The Edge Workshop Room)

If you have any questions, you can contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy at aah39@duke.edu.

What to Read this Month: August 2018

Welcome back to campus!  If you are looking for something to read, you have several options!  First we have our New and Noteworthy collection at Perkins Library and the Current Literature collection at Lilly Library.  You might also be interested in using Overdrive!  And now check out some of these suggestions on what to read this month!


Ambiguity Machines & Other Stories by Vandana Singh, who Ursula K. Le Guin described as “A most promising and original young writer.”  In her first North American collection, Singh’s deep humanism interplays with her scientific background in stories that explore and celebrate this world and others and characters who are trying to make sense of the people they meet, what they see, and the challenges they face.  An eleventh century poet wakes to find he is as an artificially intelligent companion on a starship.  A woman of no account has the ability to look into the past. In “Requiem,” a major new novella, a woman goes to Alaska to try and make sense of her aunt’s disappearance.


Daphne: A Novel by Will Boast.  Elegantly written and profoundly moving, this spellbinding debut affirms Boast’s reputation as a “new young American voice for the ages” (Tom Franklin).  Born with a rare (and real) condition in which she suffers degrees of paralysis when faced with intense emotion, Daphne has few close friends and even fewer lovers.  Like her mythic namesake, even one touch can freeze her.  But when Daphne meets shy, charming Ollie, her well-honed defenses falter, and she’s faced with an impossible choice: cling to her pristine, manicured isolation or risk the recklessness of real intimacy.  Set against the vivid backdrop of a San Francisco flush with money and pulsing with protest, Daphne is a gripping and tender modern fable that explores both self-determination and the perpetual fight between love and safety.  Read reviews here and here.


The Last Equation of Isaac Severy: A Novel in Clues by Nova Jacobs.  A literary mystery about a struggling bookseller whose recently deceased grandfather, a famed mathematician, left behind a dangerous equation for her to track down–and protect–before others can get their hands on it.  Just days after mathematician and family patriarch Isaac Severy dies of an apparent suicide, his adopted granddaughter Hazel, owner of a struggling Seattle bookstore, receives a letter from him by mail.  In it, Isaac alludes to a secretive organization that is after his final bombshell equation, and he charges Hazel with safely delivering it to a trusted colleague.  But first, she must find where the equation is hidden.  You can read a review here, and an interview here.


Gun Love: A Novel by Jennifer Clement.  Pearl’s mother took her away from her family just weeks after she was born, and drove off to central Florida determined to begin a new life for herself and her daughter–in the parking lot next to a trailer park. Pearl grew up in the front seat of their ’94 Mercury, while her mother lived in the back.  Despite their hardships, mother and daughter both adjusted to life, making friends with the residents of the trailers and creating a deep connection to each other.  All around them, Florida is populated with gun owners–those hunting alligators for sport, those who want to protect their families, and those who create a sense of danger.  Written in a gorgeous lyric all its own, Gun Love is the story of a tough but optimistic young woman growing up in contemporary America, in the midst of its harrowing love affair with firearms.  You can read reviews here and here.


Song of a Captive Bird: A Novel by Jasmin Darznik.  All through her childhood in Tehran, Forugh Farrokhzad is told that Persian daughters should be quiet and modest.  She is taught only to obey, but she always finds ways to rebel–gossiping with her sister among the fragrant roses of her mother’s walled garden, venturing to the forbidden rooftop to roughhouse with her three brothers, writing poems to impress her strict, disapproving father, and sneaking out to flirt with a teenage paramour over café glacé.  During the summer of 1950, Forugh’s passion for poetry takes flight–and tradition seeks to clip her wings.  Inspired by Forugh Farrokhzad’s verse, letters, films, and interviews–and including original translations of her poems–this haunting novel uses the lens of fiction to capture the tenacity, spirit, and conflicting desires of a brave woman who represents the birth of feminism in Iran–and who continues to inspire generations of women around the world.  You can read about the author’s inspiration for this novel here.

What to Read this Month: July 2018

Looking for something new to read?   Check out our New and Noteworthy and Current Literature collections for some good reads to enjoy!


Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging by Afua Hirsch.   You’re British.   Your parents are British.  You were raised in Britain.  Your partner, your children and most of your friends are British.  So why do people keep asking you where you are from?  Brit(ish),  which is part memoir, part reportage, and part commentary, is about a search for identity. It is about the everyday racism that plagues British society. It is about our awkward, troubled relationship with our history.  You can read reviews here and here.


The Parking Lot Attendant: A Novel by Nafkote Tamirat is a haunting story of fatherhood, national identity, and what it means to be an immigrant in America today.  It explores how who we love, the choices we make, and the places we’re from combine to make us who we are.  The story begins on an undisclosed island where the unnamed narrator and her father are the two newest and least liked members of a commune that has taken up residence there.  Though the commune was built on utopian principles, it quickly becomes clear that life here is not as harmonious as the founders intended.  After immersing us in life on the island, our young heroine takes us back to Boston to recount the events that brought her here.  You can read reviews here and here.  You might also be interested in this interview with the author.


Creative Quest by Questlove.  A unique new guide to creativity from Questlove–inspirations, stories, and lessons on how to live your best creative life.  Questlove–musician, bandleader, designer, producer, culinary entrepreneur, professor, and all-around cultural omnivore–shares his wisdom on the topics of inspiration and originality in a one-of-a-kind guide to living your best creative life.  In Creative Quest, Questlove synthesizes all the creative philosophies, lessons, and stories he’s heard from the many creators and collaborators in his life, and reflects on his own experience, to advise readers and fans on how to consider creativity and where to find it.  He addresses many topics–what it means to be creative, how to find a mentor and serve as an apprentice, the wisdom of maintaining a creative network, coping with critics and the foibles of success, and the specific pitfalls of contemporary culture–all in the service of guiding admirers who have followed his career and newcomers not yet acquainted with his story.


The Long Hangover: Putin’s New Russia and the Ghosts of the Past by Shaun Walker provides a deeply reported, bottom-up explanation of Russia’s resurgence under Putin.  By cleverly exploiting the memory of the Soviet victory over fascism in World War II, Putin’s regime has made ordinary Russians feel that their country is great again.  Walker provides new insight into contemporary Russia and its search for a new identity, telling the story through the country’s troubled relationship with its Soviet past.  He not only explains Vladimir Putin’s goals and the government’s official manipulations of history, but also focuses on ordinary Russians and their motivations.  He charts how Putin raised victory in World War II to the status of a national founding myth in the search for a unifying force to heal a divided country, and shows how dangerous the ramifications of this have been.  If you want to learn more, you might find this video of a talk he gave at the NYU’s Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia.


Odd Girl Out: My Extraordinary Autistic Life by Laura James is a sensory portrait of an autistic mind.  From childhood, Laura James knew she was different.  She struggled to cope in a world that often made no sense to her, as though her brain had its own operating system.  It wasn’t until she reached her forties that she found out why: suddenly and surprisingly, she was diagnosed with autism.  With a touching and searing honesty, Laura challenges everything we think we know about what it means to be autistic. Married with four children and a successful journalist, Laura examines the ways in which autism has shaped her career, her approach to motherhood, and her closest relationships. Laura’s upbeat, witty writing offers new insight into the day-to-day struggles of living with autism, as her extreme attention to sensory detail–a common aspect of her autism–is fascinating to observe through her eyes.  You can read a review here, and learn more about the author’s experience here.

Earning While They’re Learning: Archiving Valuable Experiences

“Earning While They’re Learning” is an occasional series of stories celebrating our library student workers. The Duke University Libraries employ more than 250 undergraduates and graduate students every year, making us one of the largest student employers on campus.


What goes on behind those mysterious Rubenstein doors? For junior Ines, it’s a learning that goes beyond the classroom.

Hired in her freshman year, Ines works several days a week in the David M. Rubinstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. On a typical day, you can find her shelving and retrieving books, manning the service desk, and helping patrons from all over the world find materials for various research projects. Amazed at the ideas behind the research, Ines remarks that her favorite part of the job is interacting with researchers and getting a glimpse into their worlds of discovery.

For Ines, every rare material in Rubenstein Library is like a hidden treasure with a story that is just waiting to be brought back to life. As a current double major in Art History and Political Science, she has come to appreciate the value of tangible sources both through her travel and her experiences working at Rubenstein.

“You can’t underestimate what it’s like to hold a resource in your hands, really see it, and personally engage with it on your own time,” she said.

And these aren’t just any sources; they are some of the best in the country.

“Duke has an amazing rare books collection,” she said. “That’s something undergrads sometimes forget or don’t even realize is available.”

Working in the Rubenstein has given Ines a better understanding of the infrastructure behind Duke’s research, and has made her a better researcher. Though sometimes having a job can fall low on Duke students’ list of priorities, she finds it incredibly valuable.

“What my peers don’t realize is that being a student-worker doesn’t detract from my Duke experience—it amplifies it. I’m able to work with adults and be responsible. It’s character development as much as anything.”

Ines believes in enriching her education beyond the classroom and strives to constantly expose herself to new things. The Rubenstein Library has provided her with a space to explore these pursuits, and that wouldn’t be possible without funding from programs like the Grody Challenge and the Libraries’ Annual Fund. Last year, she was informed there might not be enough funding to renew her position, but she stuck it out.

For Ines, Duke’s special collections are more than just musty old repositories. While there is some dust (of course), she views the Rubenstein as a dynamic place. The staff have become inspiring mentors and friends, and even the oldest of documents have captured her imagination.

“There’s some stuff people never take out,” she pointed out. “Those are stories just waiting to be told.”


About this Series: Students like Ines are an indispensable part of our library workforce. Their employment provides Duke students with valuable financial aid to support their education, and they learn useful skills that enhance their academic studies and careers after college. This year, to encourage senior giving to the Libraries, George Grody (Associate Professor of Markets and Management Studies) has set up the Grody Senior Challenge. Every gift made by the Class of 2018 to the Libraries Annual Fund will be matched by Professor Grody. All funds will directly support library student workers who provide research and instructional help.

What to Read this Month: June 2018

Looking for something new to read?   Check out our New and Noteworthy and Current Literature collections for some good reads to enjoy!


The Elizas by Sara Shepard (the author of Pretty Little Liars) is the her first adult novel.  It’s an Hitchcockian double narrative composed of lies, false memories, and a protagonist who must uncover the truth for survival.  When debut novelist Eliza Fontaine is found at the bottom of a hotel pool, her family at first assumes that it’s just another failed suicide attempt.  But Eliza swears she was pushed, and her rescuer is the only witness. Desperate to find out who attacked her, Eliza takes it upon herself to investigate. But as the publication date for her novel draws closer, Eliza finds more questions than answers. Like why are her editor, agent, and family mixing up events from her novel with events from her life? Her novel is completely fictional, isn’t it?  You can read an excerpt here.


Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds by Lauren Slater.  Although one in five Americans now takes at least one psychotropic drug, the fact remains that nearly seventy years after doctors first began prescribing them, not even their creators understand exactly how or why these drugs work–or don’t work–on what ails our brains.  Blue Dreams offers the explosive story of the discovery and development of psychiatric medications, as well as the science and the people behind their invention, told by a riveting writer and psychologist who shares her own experience with the highs and lows of psychiatric drugs.  Lauren Slater’s revelatory account charts psychiatry’s journey from its earliest drugs, Thorazine and lithium, up through Prozac and other major antidepressants of the present. In her thorough analysis of each treatment,  Slater asks three fundamental questions: how was the drug born, how does it work (or fail to work), and what does it reveal about the ailments it is meant to treat?  You can read reviews here and here.  You might also find this NPR interview interesting.


The House of Broken Angels: A Novel by Luis Alberto Urrea.  In his final days, beloved and ailing patriarch Miguel Angel de La Cruz, affectionately called Big Angel, has summoned his entire clan for one last legendary birthday party.  But as the party approaches, his mother, nearly one hundred, dies herself, leading to a farewell doubleheader in a single weekend.  Among the guests is Big Angel’s half brother, known as Little Angel, who must reckon with the truth that although he shares a father with his siblings, he has not, as a half gringo, shared a life.  The story of the de La Cruzes is the quintessential American story.  This indelible portrait of a complex family reminds us of what it means to be the first generation and to live two lives across one border.  You can read reviews here and here.  You might also like to read about the inspiration for the novel.


The Pursuit of Endurance: Harnessing the Record-breaking Power of Strength and Resilience by Jennifer Pharr Davis, National Geographic’s Adventurer of the Year in 2012 and a a record holder of the FKT (fastest known time) on the Appalachian Trail.  She reveals the secrets and habits behind endurance as she chronicles her incredible accomplishments in the world of endurance hiking, backpacking, and trail running.  With a storyteller’s ear for fascinating detail and description, Davis takes readers along as she trains and sets her record, analyzing and trail-testing the theories and methodologies espoused by her star-studded roster of mentors. She distills complex rituals and histories into easy-to-understand tips and action items that will help you take perseverance to the next level.  You can read an excerpt here.


Caddyshack: The Making of a Hollywood Cinderella Story by Chris Nashawaty.  Caddyshack is one of the most beloved comedies of all time, a classic snobs vs. slobs story of working class kids and the white collar buffoons that make them haul their golf bags in the hot summer sun. It has sex, drugs and one very memorable candy bar, but the movie we all know and love didn’t start out that way, and everyone who made it certainly didn’t have the word “classic” in mind as the cameras were rolling.  Chris Nashawaty, film critic for Entertainment Weekly,  goes behind the scenes of the iconic film, chronicling the rise of comedy’s greatest deranged minds as they form The National Lampoon, turn the entertainment industry on its head, and ultimately blow up both a golf course and popular culture as we know it.  It is at once an eye-opening narrative about one of the most interesting, surreal, and dramatic film productions there’s ever been, and a rich portrait of the biggest, and most revolutionary names in Hollywood. So, it’s got that going for it…which is nice.

The Great American Read on PBS

The Great American Read premiers on PBS tonight at 8:00 pm.  It’s going to be an 8 part series hosted by Meredith Vieira.  They have a list of the 100 titles selected (along with a checklist you can download) on their website, and voting opens after the first episode.  You can see how they selected the titles on their about page.

As you can imagine, we have many of the titles here in our library.  I’ve randomly selected a couple of titles from each of the nine categories to highlight some of what we own (these are no indication of how I will be voting).

Mystery/Horror

Romance

Classic

Science Fiction/Fantasy

Adventure

Coming of Age

Young Adult

Contemporary

Literary

You might also check if Durham Public Library and Chapel Hill Public Library have copies!

Join the conversation by using their hashtag #GreatReadPBS. I’m thinking about starting a campaign to include Mrs. Dalloway and Kindred!

What to Read this Month: May 2018

Looking for something new to read?   Check out our New and Noteworthy and Current Literature collections for some good reads to enjoy!


Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans, VICE futures editor and lead singer of the band YACHT.  She presents the first social history of women and the internet. These innovators, concentrating where computers have made our lives better, richer, and more connected, are the unsung heroes of network culture.  The book features women who have pioneered technology, like Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, Stacy Horn, as well as database poets, desktop thespians, cyber-ingenues, glass ceiling-shattering entrepreneurs, and the self-proclaimed “biggest bitch in Silicon Alley.”  You can read an interview with the author here, and a book recommendation from the editors of Scientific American.


Circe by Madeline Miller.  In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe is a strange child–not powerful, like her father, nor viciously alluring like her mother. Turning to the world of mortals for companionship, she discovers that she does possess power–the power of witchcraft, which can transform rivals into monsters and menace the gods themselves.  With unforgettably vivid characters, mesmerizing language and page-turning suspense, Circe is a triumph of storytelling, an intoxicating epic of family rivalry, palace intrigue, love and loss, as well as a celebration of indomitable female strength in a man’s world.  Read reviews here, here, and here.  You may also like this interview with the author.


 How To Break Up with Your Phone by Catherine Price.  Packed with tested strategies and practical tips, this book is the essential, life-changing guide for everyone who owns a smartphone.  Is your phone the first thing you reach for in the morning and the last thing you touch before bed? Do you frequently pick it up “just to check,” only to look up forty-five minutes later wondering where the time has gone? Do you say you want to spend less time on your phone–but have no idea how to do so without giving it up completely? If so, this book is your solution.  You can read some of her advice in this NYT article.


I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death by Maggie O’Farrell.  Ann Patchett had this to say about this book: “I Am I Am I Am is a gripping and glorious investigation of death that leaves the reader feeling breathless, grateful, and fully alive.  Maggie O’Farrell is a miracle in every sense.  I will never forget this book.”  This astonishing memoir recounts the near-death experiences that have punctuated and defined her life.   Seventeen discrete encounters with Maggie at different ages, in different locations, reveal a whole life in a series of tense, visceral snapshots. In taut prose that vibrates with electricity and restrained emotion, O’Farrell captures the perils running just beneath the surface, and illuminates the preciousness, beauty, and mysteries of life itself.  In taut prose that vibrates with electricity and restrained emotion, O’Farrell captures the perils running just beneath the surface, and illuminates the preciousness, beauty, and mysteries of life itself.


Speak No Evil by Uzodinma Iweala.  In the long-anticipated novel from the author of the critically acclaimed Beasts of No Nation, a revelation shared between two privileged teenagers from very different backgrounds sets off a chain of events with devastating consequences.  It explores what it means to be different in a fundamentally conformist society and how that difference plays out in our inner and outer struggles.  It is a novel about the power of words and self-identification, about who gets to speak and who has the power to speak for other people.  You can read reviews here, here, and here.

Earning While They’re Learning: Getting in Tune with the Music Library

“Earning While They’re Learning” is an occasional series of stories celebrating our library student workers. The Duke University Libraries employ more than 250 undergraduates and graduate students every year, making us one of the largest student employers on campus.


Tucked inside the Mary Duke Biddle Building on East Campus, the Music Library is not like most other libraries at Duke. It’s small, quiet, and out of the way. Many students might not even know it exists. But for senior Rachel Thompson, the library has become something of a second home over the past three years.

Rachel is one of the first people you typically see at the front desk when you walk into the Music Library. As a student employee, she does a bit of everything—working with patrons, stacking and reshelving, sorting through books, scores, microfiche, and CDs. In all her time at Duke, she’s never considered applying for any other job.

“A lot of times people complain like, ‘Ugh, I’ve got to go to work,’ ” she says. “But I’m like, ‘I can’t relate!’ ”

As you descend the steps from the library’s main floor into the stacks and study rooms below, it’s not hard to see why. Perfectly peaceful and still, it’s a little oasis of sanity, tucked away from the chaos of academic life.

“I really like the aura of this place,” she says when asked about why she enjoys working here so much. “I typically only study in this library.”

For Rachel, a pre-dental philosophy major with a minor in chemistry, working in the library gives her a chance to get in touch with some parts of herself that can be hard to find other places. She played trombone in high school and has played piano for most of her life, and she’s currently part of Duke’s gospel choir. Working in the Music Library lets Rachel immerse herself in music—not just scores, she’s quick to point out, but also books on music theory, music history, and music’s evolution across different genres and cultures.

When asked about her future plans, in fact, Rachel says her work in music libraries may not necessarily end with graduation.

“I actually wouldn’t mind working in a library later in life,” she says. “I like books, I like music … and music libraries are fun because you get to see the scores, which is a little bit different than just your run-of-the-mill book.”

When asked about an especially good day on her job, Rachel has a hard time picking out just one.

“Well, towards the end of the semester, the person who’s over us typically will have an end-of-semester party, which is always nice—free food, you know… but, let’s see…” her voice trails off. “Most days are pretty good!”


About this Series: Students like Rachel are an indispensable part of our library workforce. Their employment provides Duke students with valuable financial aid to support their education, and they learn useful skills that enhance their academic studies and careers after college. This year, to encourage senior giving to the Libraries, George Grody (Associate Professor of Markets and Management Studies) has set up the Grody Senior Challenge. Every gift made by the Class of 2018 to the Libraries Annual Fund will be matched by Professor Grody. All funds will directly support library student workers who provide research and instructional help.

Engaging Students in Neurodiversity Activism: Q&A with Marion Quirici

“Working with the Library” is an occasional series of stories highlighting collaborations between librarians and the people around campus whose teaching and research we support.

Dr. Marion Quirici is a Lecturing Fellow in the Thompson Writing Program and a faculty advisor for the Duke Disability Alliance. This semester she is teaching Writing 101: Neurodiversity, Narrative, Activism. Her students are working on projects that fight stigma by educating the public about the social contexts of mental and psychiatric disabilities. Kim Duckett, Head of Research and Instructional Services, has been Marion’s course librarian for three semesters.. She recently asked Marion a few questions about how the library has supported her teaching and research in the area of disability studies.


What are your primary goals for your students working on their neurodiversity activism projects?

Student Sydny Long with her graphic novel, “The Lonely Brain.”

The goal is to train students to communicate an impactful message to a broad audience beyond the classroom. Their message should challenge mainstream assumptions and stereotypes about mental disabilities, and generate deeper understanding of the social contexts that make mental differences meaningful. The assignment is flexible in terms of format and medium. Students have a lot of freedom in figuring out what they want to say, how they want to say it, and whom they want to address. Some of their projects may involve more traditional forms of academic writing (articles, blogs, or op-eds), but students can also communicate their message through visual art, film, creative writing, posters, websites, social media campaigns, and dialogic forms of activism such as canvassing and teach-ins. What every project has to do is take the knowledge and skills cultivated in my course and transfer them into real-world situations. Through this assignment, I want students to come to terms with their own power and learn to use their research and writing skills to enact change.

What unique challenges does this assignment present?

Because my courses are situated in the field of disability studies, there are two main challenges that we reckon with as a group when designing these projects. The first is upholding the mantra of the disability rights movement: “nothing about us without us.” In the “disability rights are human rights” conversation, we must center disabled perspectives. While some of my students identify as disabled and incorporate their own experiences into their activism,

Student Laura Benzing with her visual art piece, “Language of Autism.”

the majority identify as nondisabled and neurotypical. It is therefore essential that students rigorously consider the lived experiences of psychiatric consumers, survivors, and ex-patients in order to challenge their own assumptions. In advocacy work and activism, it is important not to place an onus of recovery on the individual. Instead, I ask students to research the social structures and cultural conditions that contribute to the challenges individuals face. To be good allies, students have to resist thinking of “us” and “them” — it’s just “us.”

The second challenge is accessibility. The activism project must be accessible not only to a general audience that is unfamiliar with the neurodiversity paradigm, but also to people with all kinds of disabilities. Students learned to use accessibility software to caption their videos, and create audio descriptions of the visual components of their projects. Some thought about ways to incorporate tactile elements into their artwork, while others created accessible maps and navigational aids to help guide participants to their events. I organized the projects into a website here: tinyurl.com/disabilityart.

How has the library supported your teaching?

The Thompson Writing Program follows a “writing in the disciplines” model, which means that every faculty member designs writing courses within a specific discipline in which they have advanced training and expertise. We each have an assigned course librarian with specialized knowledge of our discipline–you, in my case–who visit our classes once or twice a semester to train students in their research methods. This semester you visited twice: once to discuss non-traditional forms of research for the activism projects, for which students were expected to find first-person perspectives on topics relating to mental health, and a second time to train students to use the library databases to compile and analyze a variety of critical sources for their research papers.

Student work from Dr. Quirici’s class last year featured on the Campus Club wall in Perkins Library.

Duke’s librarians have collaborated on a number of resources that are useful for the teaching of writing, which they organized into a “Library 101 Toolkit.” The toolkit contains worksheets that help students choose a topic, consider their audience by identifying stakeholders, and evaluate their sources. My favorite handout is called “Classifying Sources: The BAAM Method.” It outlines four different ways a student might engage with a source in their writing: Background, Artifact, Argument, and Method. I find that having students organize their sources into these categories during the research process helps them structure their papers, and situate their own ideas alongside the work of others.

A really unique way that the library has supported my teaching has been their willingness to provide opportunities for my students to exhibit their work. Last year, the students who created visual art for their activism projects had their work featured on the Campus Club Wall in Perkins Library for a month, thanks to the help of Meg Brown. This year, librarians in Lilly helped one of my students organize a shelf display of recommended reading for Disability Pride Week and contribute a post to the Libraries’ blog.

How about your research?

The Duke Libraries have an online database called “Disability and the Modern World” that I have found useful for browsing for the kinds of resources I would not have known to search for, including periodicals, film and television sources, and archival materials. Resources are organized by subject, discipline, geographical

Students Jay Patel and Nick Saba with their children’s book, “New Friends.”

location, and people, which always makes for a really generative browsing experience. I was so excited to discover an Australian chat show called “No Limits,” which covers a range of topics on disability representation in the media, and features one of my favorite disability activists, Stella Young.

The Rubenstein Library also has an extensive History of Medicine Collection that has been useful to my research. When I was writing a lecture on Psychiatric Degeneration Theory for the Neurohumanities Research Group this past February, I was able to consult a first edition of Bénédict Morel’s 1857 treatise on the so-called “physical, intellectual, and moral degeneration of the human race,” and study the development of a harmful theory that would later be used to justify eugenics and racial cleansing.

What are three things you think that undergraduates should know about using information and the library?

First, to generate as many questions as possible about your topic before you start searching. It’s important at the beginning of the research process to consider your topic from all angles, and to keep an open mind about what you might argue until you’ve learned what other scholars have already written. The more questions students ask about their topic at the beginning of the process, the more options they will have for taking a unique approach on the subject.

Second, not to be overwhelmed by the amount of information out there. Disability is a topic people initially perceive as marginal, but this is a misconception, and there is scholarship connecting disability to almost anything you can think of. Students can feel daunted by this. But once they take the time to comb through what’s out there by engaging in distant reading, they find more sophisticated ways to articulate what exactly interests them. It can be really exciting to watch them discover the originality of their own ideas.

Third, to be comfortable asking for help. Research should never be done in total isolation. Having a conversation with a librarian, classmate, or professor can help you not only articulate your project to yourself, but also to get feedback on how well others are understanding your ideas. They might raise questions, introduce perspectives you had not considered, and help you define your topic. Think of the librarians as extra professors outside the classroom. They have many years of experience organizing research and gaining access to information, and students should take advantage of all that expertise!

Happy National Poetry Month!

April is National Poetry Month! Celebrate by reading some great poetry.  Of course we have a lot of poetry books in our circulating collection, including:

Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith, the current Poet Laureate

The Magic My Body Becomes by Jess Rizkallah

Poem She Didn’t Write and Other Poems by Olena Kalytiak Davis

Bestiary by Donika Kelly

Lessons on Expulsion by Erika Sanchez

When My Brother Was An Aztec by Natalie Diaz

Whereas by Layli Long Soldier

Divinity School by Alicia Jo Rabins

The Academy of Hay by Julia Shipley

The January Children by Safia Elhillo

Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur

Beast Meridian by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal

Breaking Poems by Suheir Hammad

Made in Detroit by Marge Piercy

Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals by Patrica Lockwood

Finally please enjoy “The Universe is a House Party”!

What to Read this Month: April 2018

Looking for something new to read?   Check out our New and Noteworthy and Current Literature collections for some good reads to enjoy!


Black Panther: World of Wakanda by Roxane Gay and Ta-Nehisi Coates.  The world building of Wakanda continues in a love story where tenderness is matched only by brutality! You know them now as the Midnight Angels, but in this story they are just Ayo and Aneka, young women recruited to become Dora Milaje, an elite task force trained to protect the crown of Wakanda at all costs. Their first assignment will be to protect Queen Shuri… but what happens when your nation needs your hearts and minds, but you already gave them to each other? Meanwhile, former king T’Challa lies with bedfellows so dark, disgrace is inevitable. Plus, explore the true origins of the People’s mysterious leader, Zenzi. Black Panther thinks he knows who Zenzi is and how she got her powers – but he only knows part of the story! COLLECTING: BLACK PANTHER: WORLD OF WAKANDA 1-6.


Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble.  A revealing look at how negative biases against women of color are embedded in search engine results and algorithms Run a Google search for “black girls”–what will you find? “Big Booty” and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms. But, if you type in “white girls,” the results are radically different.  Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities.  Through an analysis of textual and media searches as well as extensive research on paid online advertising, Noble exposes a culture of racism and sexism in the way discoverability is created online.  If you are interested in more information,  here’s a review.  You might also be interested in the author’s presentation at the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society at Berkeley.


The House of Impossible Beauties by Joseph Cassara.  A gritty and gorgeous debut that follows a cast of gay and transgender club kids navigating the Harlem ball scene of the 1980s and ’90s, inspired by the real House of Xtravaganza made famous by the seminal documentary Paris Is Burning.  Told in a voice that brims with wit, rage, tenderness, and fierce yearning, The House of Impossible Beauties is a tragic story of love, family, and the dynamism of the human spirit.  You can read reviews here and here.  You might also like to read this interview with the author.

 


Peach by Emma Glass.  Something has happened to Peach. Staggering around the town streets in the aftermath of an assault, Peach feels a trickle of blood down her legs, a lingering smell of her anonymous attacker on her skin. It hurts to walk, but she manages to make her way to her home, where she stumbles into another oddly nightmarish reality: Her parents can’t seem to comprehend that anything has happened to their daughter. The next morning, Peach tries to return to the routines of her ordinary life, going to classes, spending time with her boyfriend, Green, trying to find comfort in the thought of her upcoming departure for college. And yet, as Peach struggles through the next few days, she is stalked by the memories of her unacknowledged trauma.  In this astonishing debut, Emma Glass articulates the unspeakable with breathtaking verve. Intensely physical, with rhythmic, visceral prose, Peach marks the arrival of a visionary new voice.  You can read reviews here and here.


The Real Life of the Parthenon by Patricia Vigderman.  Ownership battles over the marbles removed from the Parthenon by Lord Elgin have been rumbling into invective, pleading, and counterclaims for two centuries. The emotional temperature around them is high, and steering across the vast past to safe anchor in a brilliant heritage is tricky. The stories around antiquities become distorted by the pull of ownership, and it is these stories that urge Patricia Vigderman into her own exploration of their inspiring legacy in this compelling extended essay.  You can read reviews here and here.

Disability In The Modern World Database

Disability in the Modern World

Duke is celebrating Disability Pride Week.  If you would like to do research on disability studies, we have a database called Disability in the Modern World.  This database features both primary and secondary sources, including videos, diaries, brochures, advertisements, and more.  It also has the archive of the publication The Disability Rag and its successor The Ragged Edge.  You can browse by title, discipline, general subject, archival collection, place, people, organization, and publisher.  Key areas include:

  • Independence, education, and accessibility
  • Advocacy and rights
  • Legislation and politics
  • The media
  • Arts, sports, and culture
  • Theory
  • Race, class, sexuality, and gender
  • War, industry, and technology

For more readings about disability, check out this recent blog post: Disability Pride Week at Duke: A Reading List.

 

What to Read this Month: March 2018

Looking for something new to read?   Check out our New and Noteworthy and Current Literature collections for some good reads to enjoy!


Brass: A Novel by Xhenet Aliu.  Celeste Ng described this novel as “”a fierce, big-hearted, unflinching debut.”  A waitress at the Betsy Ross Diner, Elsie hopes her nickel-and-dime tips will add up to a new life.  Then she meets Bashkim, who is at once both worldly and naive, a married man who left Albania to chase his dreams–and wound up working as a line cook in Waterbury, Connecticut.  Elsie, herself the granddaughter of Lithuanian immigrants, falls in love quickly, but when she learns that she’s pregnant, Elsie can’t help wondering where Bashkim’s heart really lies, and what he’ll do about the wife he left behind. Seventeen years later, headstrong and independent Luljeta receives a rejection letter from NYU and her first-ever suspension from school on the same day.  Instead of striking out on her own in Manhattan, she’s stuck in Connecticut with her mother, Elsie–a fate she refuses to accept.


Capitalism without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake is the first comprehensive account of the growing dominance of the intangible economy.  For the first time, the major developed economies began to invest more in intangible assets, like design, branding, R&D, and software, than in tangible assets, like machinery, buildings, and computers.  Haskel and Westlake bring together a decade of research on how to measure intangible investment and its impact on national accounts, showing the amount different countries invest in intangibles, how this has changed over time, and the latest thinking on how to assess this.


Gnomon: A Novel by Nick Harkaway is a virtuosic new novel set in a near-future, high-tech surveillance state, that is equal parts dark comedy, gripping detective story, and mind-bending philosophical puzzle.  In the world of Gnomon, citizens are constantly observed and democracy has reached a pinnacle of ‘transparency.’  Every action is seen, every word is recorded, and the System has access to its citizens’ thoughts and memories–all in the name of providing the safest society in history.  You can read reviews herehere, and here.


The Meaning of Birds by Simon Barnes offers a passionate and informative celebration of birds and their ability to help us understand the world we live in. As well as exploring how birds achieve the miracle of flight; why birds sing; what they tell us about the seasons of the year and what their presence tells us about the places they inhabit, The Meaning of Birds muses on the uses of feathers, the drama of raptors, the slaughter of pheasants, the infidelities of geese, and the strangeness of feeling sentimental about blue tits while enjoying a chicken sandwich.  From the mocking-birds of the Galapagos who guided Charles Darwin toward his evolutionary theory, to the changing patterns of migration that alert us to the reality of contemporary climate change, Simon Barnes explores both the intrinsic wonder of what it is to be a bird–and the myriad ways in which birds can help us understand the meaning of life.


The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures by Antonio Damasio.  The Strange Order of Things is a pathbreaking investigation into homeostasis, the condition of that regulates human physiology within the range that makes possible not only the survival but also the flourishing of life. Antonio Damasio makes clear that we descend biologically, psychologically, and even socially from a long lineage that begins with single living cells; that our minds and cultures are linked by an invisible thread to the ways and means of ancient unicellular life and other primitive life-forms; and that inherent in our very chemistry is a powerful force, a striving toward life maintenance that governs life in all its guises, including the development of genes that help regulate and transmit life.  Read reviews here and here.

Lilly Collection Spotlight: They Came to Play | Women in Sport

To celebrate Women’s History Month 2018, Lilly Library is shining a spotlight on Women in Sport. Books and movies that feature women athletes are “teeming” in our collections. Come to East Campus and check out this month’s Lilly Collection Spotlight.  Click here for the complete line-up.

While you’re at Lilly, visit the exhibit in the foyer, On the Field, the Courts and Beyond: Women in Sports – TITLE IX, that complements our Lilly Collection Spotlight.

BOOKS

Book Cover, Game Changers: the Unsung Heroines of Sports History
2018 | Molly Schiott

Based on the Instagram account @TheUnsungHeroines, a celebration of the pioneering, forgotten female athletes of the twentieth century that features rarely seen photos and new interviews with past and present game changers including Abby Wambach and Cari Champion.

Book Cover, Kicking Off: How Women in Sport are Changing the Game
2016 | Sarah Shephard

There’s a battle being fought. It’s raging on the sports fields, in the newsrooms and behind the scenes at every major broadcaster. Women in sport are fighting for equality with more vigour than ever, but are they breaking down the barriers that stand in their way? Sarah Shephard looks behind the headlines to see whether progress is really being made and tells the stories that can no longer be ignored. It’s time for women to switch their focus from the battlefield to the sports field, once and for all.

book cover: Charging the Net, a History of Blacks in Tennis from Althea Gibson... to the Williams Sisters
2007 | Cecil Harris and Larryette Kyle-DeBose

Beginning with the Williams sisters, the authors examine the foundation of their development as tennis phenoms during the 1990s and the prophetic yet unabashed approach of their coach, father, and sports psychologist, Richard Williams, in crafting a world within which they would be groomed to be successful. a compelling examination of the impact of African Americans on the world of professional tennis and the various challenges and outcomes of that involvement.

book cover, Sportswomen in Cinema, Film and the Frailty Myth
2015 | Nicholas ChareFILMS

An overview of films about women in sport and a timely critical analysis of their role in shaping perceptions of female athletic ability. It examines themes of aggression, beauty, class, ethnicity, physical feminism, sexuality, synaesthesia and technology in relation to mainstream and arthouse cinematic depictions of sportswomen from Pumping Iron 2 to Bend it Like Beckham. 

 

book cover The Match: Althea Gibson Angela Buxton
2004 | Bruce Schoenfeld

50 years ago when Gibson and Buxton were two of the top women’s tennis players in the world. Coming from widely divergent backgrounds (Gibson from a poor black family in Harlem, Buxton from a well-to-do Jewish family in London), the two hooked up in the mid-1950s and became tennis partners and lifelong friends.

Book cover, Global Perspectives on Women in Combat Sports
2015 | ed. Alex Channon

Offers a wide-reaching overview of current academic research on women’s participation in combat sports within a wide range of different national and trans-national contexts, detailing many of the struggles and opportunities experienced by women at various levels of engagement within sports such as boxing, wrestling and mixed martial arts.

FILMS

DVD case Offside
DVD 14381

During the 2006 Iran-Bahrain match, the Tehran soccer stadium roars with 100,000 cheering men and, officially, no women. According to Islamic custom, women are not permitted to watch or participate in men’s sports. Many of the ambitious young female fans who manage to sneak into the arena are caught and sent to a holding pen, guarded by male soldiers their own age. Duty makes these young men and women adversaries, but duty can’t overcome their shared dreams, their mutual attraction, and ultimately their overriding sense of national pride and humanity.

DVD cover Playing Unfair: the media image of the female athlete
DVD 21482 and Streaming Video

Examines the post Title IX media environment in terms of the representation of female athletes. It demonstrates that while men’s identities in sports are equated with deeply held values of courage, strength and endurance, the accomplishments of female athletes are framed very differently and in much more stereotypical ways.

DVD cover Personal Best
DVD 11362

A promising hurdler, played by Mariel Hemingway, finds needed emotional and athletic seasoning with a caring mentor. After the two fall in love, their relationship is threatened as both vie for a spot on the U.S. Olympic team.

 

DVD cover Grandes Ligas
DVD 25223 and streaming video

Members of the Cuban National Women’s Baseball Team discuss their passion for the sport and hardships they faced in Cuba’s society filled with machismo, prejudice and daily hardships.

DVD cover Watermarks
DVD 6270

The story of the surviving members of the  Viennese Hakoah sports club women’s swim team, a world-dominating competitor in the 1930s. The club was eventually shut down during Hitler’s reign, though all the women managed to escape capture. Combines historical footage and contemporary interviews to reconnect the women’s lives and memories.

DVD cover Edge of America
DVD 5579

The new man in town has just accepted a position as an English professor on a reservation in Utah. Finding it hard to fit in with the Native American community, he decides to take on the challenge of coaching the girls’ basketball team.

DVD cover Whip It
DVD 18946

Bliss Cavender is a small-town teenager looking for her own path. Tired of following in her family’s footsteps, she discovers a way to put her life on the fast track–literally. She lands a spot on a roller derby team and becomes “Babe Ruthless.” Co-starring Drew Barrymore in her feature film directorial debut.

 

Read Longmire with Low Maintenance Book Club

At the next meeting of the Duke University Libraries’ Low Maintenance Book Club we will be heading west to Absaroka County, Wyoming with the reading of “Messenger,” a short story from Craig Johnson’s popular Longmire series (which has been adapted into a TV series on Netflix).  The story can be found in Wait for Signs: Twelves Longmire Stories, which is available at the Durham County Library and UNC Chapel Hill.  We also have a copy that will soon be arriving here at Duke.

Please register for this event.  Light refreshments will be served.

Date: Wednesday, March 28th, 2018

Time: 5:30 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.

Location: Bostock 127 (The Edge Workshop Room)

If you have any questions, you can contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy at aah39@duke.edu.

Happy International Women’s Day!

Celebrate International Women’s Day with a good book!  I really enjoyed the New York Time‘s recent article “The New Vanguard,” which selected 15 important books by women.  We have most of the books in our collection:

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel

Outline by Rachel Cusk

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

American Innovations by Rivka Galchen

Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday

How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti

The Vegetarian by  Han Kang

The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh

NW by Zadie Smith

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward

Mislaid by Nell Zink

Also, today the Women’s Prize for Fiction announced their Longlist!

Here are some other reading list suggestions:

100 Recommended Books by Arab Women

All Around the World: Women Writers from Every Continent

25 Women to Read Before You Die

14 Debut Books By Women Coming Out In 2018

Search our book catalog to see if we have these titles.  Happy reading!

Earning While They’re Learning: Getting an Edge on Work

“Earning While They’re Learning” is an occasional series of stories celebrating our library student workers. The Duke University Libraries employ more than 250 undergraduates and graduate students every year, making us one of the largest student employers on campus.


Duke students live busy lives. That’s the name of the game at a university like this. Whether they’re studying, socializing, reading or working, it can sometimes seem like students around here never get a second off their feet.

When it comes to juggling time commitments, though, senior Gabriella Rivera is something of a pro. She’s been working various jobs around campus for the past four years—putting in around 20 hours each week on top of her coursework and other commitments. And at both The Edge and the Perkins Library Service Desk, we’ve been lucky enough to have her since this past spring.

“I like it here,” Bella said when asked about her work. “It’s a relaxed atmosphere… it’s helped me figure out exactly what you can do with the library.”

Before starting work here, Bella explained, she’d never had any experience working in a library. There was definitely something of a learning curve when she was first starting out—though nothing she couldn’t handle.

“I had no idea how it worked when I came in; I was basically starting from scratch,” she said. “When you first start there’s training, but you kind of just learn a lot on the job, too.”

Troubleshooting technology; answering questions; helping people find books, shelve books, look books up online—there’s a lot that goes into Bella’s work. She’s learned a lot about how the Libraries are run and organized, and she says she’s definitely appreciated the expertise it’s given her.

Asked what she likes most about her job, Bella says it’s all about the people. A big part of her job involves helping students iron out problems, and she loves being able to answer people’s questions.

“I like just talking to the people over at the service desk in Perkins and helping them figure out how to use everything here,” she said. “Especially talking to non-Duke students sometimes—it’s nice to break up from just students that you see on campus.”

And even when she’s off of work, Bella enjoys using her skills to help people around her.

“I’ll help my friends if they don’t know what they’re doing in the library,” she said. “I like being able to answer people’s questions both on the desk and off the desk.”


About this Series: Students like Bella are an indispensable part of our library workforce. Their employment provides Duke students with valuable financial aid to support their education, and they learn useful skills that enhance their academic studies and careers after college. This year, to encourage senior giving to the Libraries, George Grody (Associate Professor of Markets and Management Studies) has set up the Grody Senior Challenge. Every gift made by the Class of 2018 to the Libraries Annual Fund will be matched by Professor Grody. All funds will directly support library student workers who provide research and instructional help.

What to Read this Month: February 2018

Looking for something new to read?   Check out our New and Noteworthy and Current Literature collections for some good reads to enjoy!

If you’re looking for even more things to read, I have two other suggestions for you!  First the Low Maintenance Book Club this month is doing a special discussion called “Love between the Covers.”  It’s a chance for people to recommend a book they’ve recently read and loved and for other people to connect with new titles.  We’ll have snacks and some games.  Please join us!

Also, we now have access to NoveList Plus, which is a resource that can help you find lists of recommendations for fiction and non-fiction books based on genres, award winners, etc.  My favorite feature is the “appeal mixer,” which allows you to select several categories and then get recommendations based on it.  For example, if you select fast-paced brooding character with a mystical tone, you get suggestions like Alice Hoffman’s The Story Sisters.

In the meantime here are several selections from our collections!


In Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia, Michael Shermer sets out to discover what drives humans’ belief in life after death, focusing on recent scientific attempts to achieve immortality along with utopian attempts to create heaven on earth. For millennia, religions have concocted numerous manifestations of heaven and the afterlife, and though no one has ever returned from such a place to report what it is really like–or that it even exists–today science and technology are being used to try to make it happen in our lifetime. From radical life extension to cryonic suspension to mind uploading, Shermer considers how realistic these attempts are from a proper skeptical perspective. Heavens on Earth concludes with an uplifting paean to purpose and progress and how we can live well in the here-and-now, whether or not there is a hereafter.  You can read an NYT review here and the Washington Post review here.


Heartland by Ana Simo. In a word-drunk romp through an alternate, pre-apocalyptic United States, Ana Simo’s fiction debut is the uproarious story of a thwarted writer’s elaborate revenge on the woman who stole her lover, blending elements of telenovela, pulp noir, and dystopian satire. It’s a hilarious, genre-defying debut that confronts taboos of race, assimilation, and sex through a high-voltage tale of love, language, and revenge. You can read a review here. You might also enjoy this podcast.

 


Autumn by Karl Ove Knausgaard ( with illustrations by Vanessa Baird and translated from the Norwegian by Ingvild Burkey).   Autumn, first in a new autobiographical quartet based on the four seasons, begins with a letter Karl Ove Knausgaard writes to his unborn daughter, showing her what to expect of the world. He writes one short piece per day, describing the material and natural world with the precision and mesmerising intensity that have become his trademark. He describes with acute sensitivity daily life with his wife and children in rural Sweden, drawing upon memories of his own childhood to give an inimitably tender perspective on the precious and unique bond between parent and child. The sun, wasps, jellyfish, eyes, lice–the stuff of everyday life is the fodder for his art. Nothing is too small or too vast to escape his attention. This beautifully illustrated book is a personal encyclopaedia on everything from chewing gum to the stars.


Elements of Taste: Understanding What We Like and Why by Benjamin Errett. Celine Dion. Kanye West. Hamilton. Stranger Things. Wes Anderson. The Bachelor. Doctor Who. House Hunters. The Girl on the Train. We all have our most and least favorite things. But why? This smart, funny and well-researched book brings together the latest findings from the worlds of psychology, neuroscience, market research, and more to examine what taste really means–and what it can teach us about ourselves. Covering kitsch, nostalgia, “comfort food,” snobbery, bad taste, and what it means to be “basic,” this is the ultimate read for anyone who devours popular and not-so-popular culture.


The Newcomers: Finding Refuge, Friendship, and Hope in an American Classroom by Helen Thorpe is a powerful and moving account of how refugee teenagers at a public high school learn English and become Americans, in the care of a compassionate teacher. It follows the lives of twenty-two immigrant teenagers throughout the course of the 2015-2016 school year as they land at South High School in Denver, Colorado. These newcomers, from fourteen to nineteen years old, come from nations convulsed by drought or famine or war. You can read reviews here, here, and here.

 

Remembering Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin passed away last week, which is a great loss for both the science fiction and fantasy genres.  There have been some great retrospectives and reflections written about her in the last week.  I especially like The Subversive Imagination of Ursula K. Le Guin and Ten Things I Learned from Ursula K. Le Guin.  You might also want to see what Neil Gaiman had to say in his essay Ursula K. Le Guin: The Rabble-Rouser with a Gentle Smile.

Here is Le Guin’s response when asked what she wanted to see happen to her books after she died:

“I want them to be available, I want cheap paper editions of them, I want them to be continuously downloaded in forty different languages, I want them to be read, I want them to be argued about, I want people to cry over them, I want unreadable dissertations written about them, I want people to get angry with them, I want people to love them.”

In that spirit, here are several titles we have in our collection:

The Unreal and The Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin

The Left Hand of Darkness

The Lathe of Heaven: A Novel

The Telling

A Wizard of Earthsea

The Complete Orsinia: Malafrena Stories and Songs

The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

The Birthday of the World and Other Stories

She also wrote several collections of essays and frequently wrote about the craft of writing:

Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination

No Time to Spare: Thinking about What Matters

Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places

Let me end with this awesome letter she wrote in 1987:

 

Earning While They’re Learning: Lessons Learned at the Rubenstein

Sophomore Gretchen Wright in the Rubenstein Library stacks.

“Earning While They’re Learning” is an occasional series of stories celebrating our library student workers. The Duke University Libraries employ more than 250 undergraduates and graduate students every year, making us one of the largest student employers on campus.


An undeclared sophomore with an interest in English and Classical Studies, student worker Gretchen Wright has found a whole new outlet for her passion for research and the humanities through the Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Two hours a day, five days a week, this is where you’ll find Gretchen hard at work among the books she loves—shelving, sorting, and checking out the centuries-old manuscripts that have transformed her journey through Duke over the past two years.

“There are always things that are interesting to me,” Gretchen gushed when asked about her experience in the Rubenstein. “I like books, I like libraries, I like organizing things… I love it. It’s a great place to work!”

With an obvious excitement for history and literature, Gretchen never seems at a loss to find something to marvel at when she gets started talking about her work. Small wonder, too—Gretchen has interacted with some of the rarest, most engaging works in the world in her time at the Rubenstein. First edition Walt Whitman poems, complete with handwritten notes and edits; 16th-century prints of the Malleus Maleficarum, the first-ever witch-hunting manual; written exchanges between Alexander Hamilton and any number of people mentioned in the modern showstopper musical—Gretchen is working with documents that have changed the course of history, and her work at the Rubenstein remains a major source of inspiration for the research her classes often require of her.

“Duke has such a great collection of libraries, and the resources available are incredible,” Gretchen said. “Even though I work at the Rubenstein, we’re constantly interacting and touching and feeling books that I didn’t even know we had.”

Knowing about the documents available to her through the Rubenstein had a major influence on Gretchen. In her poetry class’s final project last fall, for instance, she incorporated a collection of late 19th-century photographs of Durham into a piece on the parallels between history and poetry. The semester after that, she enrolled in a course on the history of the book—held in the Rubenstein itself!

And although she’s not entirely certain where she wants to go in the future, Gretchen’s work in the Libraries has had a clear impact on the path she sees herself pursuing.

“I’ve definitely thought about going into library sciences as a career,” she said. “That’s definitely a possibility I could see myself going into.”

Overall, Gretchen seemed amazed at how much her perspective on research has changed since she began work in the Rubenstein. Before coming here, she had no idea how real and how powerful research in the humanities could be. Her work in the Libraries continues to thrill, challenge, and intrigue her, and the lessons she has learned here have changed her perspective on research forever.

“There’s so much, so many different directions you can take research of any particular topic,” Gretchen said. “Even if you spend hours and hours every day in the library, there will always be something else that you can look at—and I think that’s really great.”


About this Series: Students are an indispensable part of our library workforce. Their employment provides Duke students with valuable financial aid to support their education, and they learn useful skills that enhance their academic studies and careers after college. This year, to encourage senior giving to the Libraries, George Grody (Associate Professor of Markets and Management Studies) has set up the Grody Senior Challenge. Every gift made by the Class of 2018 to the Libraries Annual Fund will be matched by Professor Grody. All funds will directly support library student workers who provide research and instructional help.

What to Read this Month: January 2018

When it’s cold and snowy out, there’s nothing better than a good book (well maybe a hot beverage and some warm blankets).  Check out our New and Noteworthy and Current Literature collections for some good reads to enjoy!  Oh and if you’re not planning on leaving the house anytime soon, make sure to see what we have on Overdrive!


All the Beloved Ghosts by Alison MacLeod (a Booker-longlisted author) is a collection of short stories that blend fiction, biography, and memoir.  MacLeod’s characters hover on the border of life and death, where memory is most vivid and the present most elusive.  Moving from the London riots of 2011 to 1920s Nova Scotia, from Oscar Wilde’s grave to the Brighton Pier, these exquisitely formed stories capture the small tragedies and profound truths of existence.  You can find a review here, and you can find an excerpt here.


Before the War by Fay Weldon.  London, 1922. It’s a cold November morning, the station is windswept and rural, the sky is threatening snow, and the train is late. Vivien Ripple, 20 years old and an ungainly five foot eleven, waits on the platform at Dilberne Halt. She is wealthy and well-bred–only daughter to the founder of Ripple & Co, the nation’s top publisher–but plain, painfully awkward, and, perhaps worst of all, intelligent.  But she has a plan. That very morning, Vivvie will ride to the city with the express purpose of changing her life forever.  With one eye on the present and one on the past, Fay Weldon offers Vivien’s fate, along with that of London between World Wars I and II: a city fizzing with change, full of flat-chested flappers, shell-shocked soldiers, and aristocrats clinging to history.


Murder in the Manuscript Room is the second in Con Lehane’s 42nd Street Library mystery series.  It is a smart, compelling mystery in which the characters themselves are at least as interesting as the striking sleuthing. When a murder desecrates the somber, book-lined halls of New York City’s iconic 42nd Street Library, Raymond Ambler, the library’s curator of crime fiction, has a personal interest in solving the crime. His quest to solve the murder is complicated by personal entanglements involving his friend–or perhaps more-than-friend–Adele Morgan. No one else sees the connections Ambler is sure are there–not an unusual state of affairs for Ambler.


Careers for Women: A Novel by Joanna Scott.  New York in the late 1950s. A city, and a world, on the cusp of change…Careers for Women is a masterful novel about the difficulties of building a career, a dream, or a life–and about the powerful small mercies of friendship and compassion.  There are reviews from the New York Times and the Boston Globe Kate Atkinson described it as a “[…] spectacular novel about the dreams women chase, the choices we make and the power of those decisions to undo us at every turn. I loved it.”


The Prey of Gods by Nicky Drayden. From a new voice in the tradition of Lauren Beukes, Ian McDonald, and Nnedi Okorafor comes The Prey of Gods, a fantastic, boundary-challenging tale, set in a South African locale both familiar and yet utterly new, which braids elements of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and dark humor.   Fun and fantastic, Nicky Drayden takes her brilliance as a short story writer and weaves together an elaborate tale that will capture your heart . . . even as one particular demigoddess threatens to rip it out.  Listed as a Book Riot Best Books of 2017 Pick and a Vulture “The 10 Best Fantasy Books of 2017” Pick!

Happy Birthday, Jane!

December 16th was Jane Austen’s birthday!  This year was the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death!  Check out the #JaneAusten200 hashtag for some of the conversations around this event.   Even an airline is getting in on the celebration! Also, did you know that Jane is now on British money?

In celebration of her birthday and the anniversary of her death, here are several new titles published this year about her:

The Making of Jane Austen

Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen

The Genius of Jane Austen: Her Love of Theatre and Why She Works in Hollywood

Jane Austen: Writer in the World

Jane Austen and Her World

Since Persuasion turns 200 this year too, here are some titles related to this novel:

Persuasion: Authoritative Texts, Background and Contexts, Criticism

Persuasion: An Annotated Edition

Persuasion

Liberty in Jane Austen’s Persuasion

A Revolution Almost Beyond Expression: Jane Austen’s Persuasion

Persuasion and Persuasion (film versions)

Some people (okay, me) contend that Persuasion is her greatest novel, so you might want to give it a try!

Finally, check out this Vogue slideshow inspired by Jane Austen!

 

 

What to Read this Month: December 2017

Looking for a great read for the last month of 2017? Drop by the New & Noteworthy Collection on the 1st floor of Perkins Library!  Also, don’t forget our Current Literature collection at Lilly Library. There you’ll find, among others*:

Where the Animals Go: Tracking Wildlife with Technology in 50 Maps and Graphics by James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti. Using new technology, Cheshire and Uberti peer into age-old patterns of animal migration and behavior. The perfect read for the cartography nut, the science geek, or anyone curious about the natural world! You can find excerpts here and read the NPR review of it here.

 


Eat the Beetles! An Exploration of Our Conflicted Relationship with Insects by David Waltner-Toews. If you’ve ever been to Cafe Insecta at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences’ BugFest, you might have sampled a dish made with bugs! Eat the Beetles focuses on entomophagy (people eating insects) throughout history, weaving cultural, ecological, and evolutionary narratives in a humorous tone.

 

 


After Anatevka by Alexandra Silber. Fiddler on the Roof, the story of Tevye, his wife, and five daughters living in turn of the century Russia, ends with most of the family leaving Anatevka for good…but what about Hodel, the second daughter, who departs the story early to join her fiance in Siberia? Alexandra Silber imagines Hodel and Perchik’s lives after they leave their village, making a life together away from other family and among political turmoil. You can read the NY Times article about the book and its author here.

 


Impossible Views of the World by Lucy Ives. A thirty-something museum curator investigates – hilariously – when one of her colleagues goes mysteriously missing. Check out the NY Times review of it here.

 

 

 


The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories, edited by Mahvesh Murad and Jared Shurin. An anthology focused on the djiin/genie as characters in stories and folklore, Murad and Shurin collect tales from eminent writers such as Neil Gaiman, Amal El-Mohtar, Nnedi Okorafor, and more. Tor has a neat review of it here and Publisher’s Weekly’s shorter take on it can be found here.

 

 


*Selections and descriptions by UNC Field Experience Student Ellen Cline.

What to Read this Month: November 2017

Happy November, readers! Do you find yourself looking at the calendar and wondering where the time has gone this semester? Don’t worry – our New & Noteworthy collection on the 1st floor of Perkins Library is here for your reading pleasure year-round. This month we’ve* picked out five (well, six) new books we hope you’ll enjoy.


Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum by James Delbourgo. Though the scope of its collection has drawn fire over the years,  the British Museum has formidable holdings of artifacts from around the world. Curious about how it came to be? James Delbourgo’s biography of Hans Sloane recounts the story behind its creation, told through the life of a figure with an insatiable ambition to pit universal knowledge against superstition and the means to realize his dream. You can read a review here.

 


The Black Tides of Heaven & The Red Threads of Fortune by JY Yang. An introductory pair of novellas from JY Yang’s new Tensorate Series, each follows one of twin main characters. Akeha (the protagonist of The Black Tides of Heaven) struggles with his belief in a rebel cause and his desire to remain close to his sister, Mokoya (a prophetess and the protagonist of The Red Threads of Fortune) who spends her days hunting monstrous beasts in the sky. You can read Tor’s introduction to/review of the series here.

 


Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony: The Story of a Gamble, Two Black Holes, and a New Age of Astronomy by Marcia Bartusiak. Einstein predicted gravitational waves years ago, but only recently were scientists able to prove their existence! Bartusiak traces the quest of astronomers to build the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors, the most accurate measuring devices humans have created, and the discovery of gravitational waves, revealing the brilliance, personalities, and luck required to start a new age of astronomy. Still curious about LIGO and recent cosmic events? You can read all about news from the observatory here.


The Card Catalog: Books, Cards, and Literary Treasures by Peter Devereaux. From the Library of Congress comes an ode to all things written and to the fading world of card catalogs. Packed with bookish information and full-color photographs, this is a work that can delight the new library initiate as well as the library aficionado.

 

 


Cold Pastoral by Rebecca Dunham. A lyrical look at our world and our place in it…and our effect on it. Dunham covers natural and man-made disasters, everything from Deepwater Horizon to Hurricane Katrina. This collection finds the intersection between moral witness and shattering art in poetry. You can find a review here.

 

 


*Selections and descriptions by UNC Field Experience Student Ellen Cline.

November 2017 Pop-up Collections Spotlight: International Literary Prize Winners

This month’s pop-up collections spotlight falls on international literary prize winners.  The following books were selected by the staff of Duke University Libraries’ International and Area Studies Department.  These selections represent diverse genres (novel, drama, short story, poetry, memoir, oral history) and regions of the globe (Latin America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Middle East).  Taken together, the list below not only provides suggestions for entertaining reads, but also sheds light on one of the many ways that the Libraries’ collections and services align with the University priorities of “internationalization” and “interdisciplinarity.”

(click on book photos for links to books in our collection)

Winners of the Noble Prize in Literature

Gabriela Mistral (Chile, 1945)
“for her lyric poetry which, inspired by powerful emotions, has made her name a symbol of the idealistic aspirations of the entire Latin American world.”

 

 

 


Miguel Angel Asturias (Guatemala, 1967)
“for his vivid literary achievement, deep-rooted in the national traits and traditions of Indian peoples of Latin America.”

 

 

 


Wisława Szymborska (Poland, 1996)
“for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality.”

 

 

 


Svetlana Alexievich (Belarus, 2015)
“for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.”

 

 

 

 


Gao Xingjian (China, 2000)

“for an æuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity, which has opened new paths for the Chinese novel and drama.”

 

 

 


Mo Yan (China, 2012)
“who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary.”

 

 

 

 


Wole Soyinka (Nigeria, 1986)
“who in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashions the drama of existence.”

 

 

 


Dario Fo (Italy, 1997)
“who emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden.”

 

 

 


Patrick Modiano (France, 2014)
“for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation.”

 

 

 


Herta Müller (Germany, 2009)
“who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed.”

 

 

 


Shmuel Yosef Agnon (Israel, 1966)

for his profoundly characteristic narrative art with motifs from the life of the Jewish people.”

 

 

 


Ōe Kenzaburō (Japan, 1994)
who with poetic force creates an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today.”

 

 

 


Kawabata Yasunari (Japan, 1968)
for his narrative mastery, which with great sensibility expresses the essence of the Japanese mind.”

 

 

 


Orhan Pamuk (Turkey, 2006)
who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.”

 

 

 


Najīb Maḥfūẓ (Egypt, 1988)

who, through works rich in nuance – now clear-sightedly realistic, now evocatively ambiguous – has formed an Arabian narrative art that applies to all mankind.

 

 


Winners of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction

David Grossman (Israel, 2017)

whose “ambitious high-wire act of a novel…shines a spotlight on the effects of grief, without any hint of sentimentality.”

 

 

 


Salman Rushdie (UK, 1981)
whose novel about India’s political independence offers a “fascinating family saga and an astonishing evocation of a vast land and its people – a brilliant incarnation of the universal human comedy.”

 

 


Arundhati Roy (India, 1997)

whose novel not only “paints a vivid picture about life in a small rural Indian town…in magical and poetic language,” but also offers “a poignant lesson in the destructive power of the caste system and moral and political bigotry in general.”

 


Han Kang (South Korea, 2016)
whose “fraught, disturbing, and beautiful” novel is not only about “modern day South Korea, but also…shame, desire, and our faltering attempts to understand others, from one imprisoned body to another.”

 

 


Winner of the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction

UK prize awarded for best full-length novel written in English by a woman of any nationality

Lisa McInerney (Ireland, 2016)

whose “searing debut novel about life on the fringes of Ireland’s post-crash society…presents an unforgettable vision of a city plagued by poverty and exploitation, where salvation still awaits in the most unexpected places.”

 

 


Winner of the Dinaane Debut Fiction Award


South African literary prize awarded to writers who have never been published before. The word “dinaane” means “telling our stories together” in Setswana.

Kopano Matlwa (South Africa, 2006)

whose “audacious, lyrical and compassionate tale explores the grey, in-between, intimate experiences and dilemmas of a young girl who, like the society around her, is undergoing changes that call old boundaries, comforts and certitudes into question.”

 

 


Winner of the Commonwealth Book Prize for Asia

Literary prize awarded to writers who were Commonwealth citizens aged 18 or over and who have had their first novel published in the year of entry.

Nayomi Munaweera (Sri Lanka, 2013)

whose “sweeping saga” of the Sri Lankan civil war “offers an unparalleled portrait of a beautiful land during its most difficult moments.”

 

 


Blog post provided by Erik Zitser, Librarian for Slavic, Eurasian, and Eastern European Studies

Happy Birthday, Dylan Thomas!

Today we remember Dylan Thomas for his beautiful poetic gift to the English language.  “Poem in October” was written in memory of his 30th  birthday in 1944; it is  a hymn to autumn and to nature and a meditation on mortality:

Celebrate his birthday with his reading of “Poem in October”

Take a look at some of the books in the library:

Ugly, lovely : Dylan Thomas’s Swansea and Carmarthenshire of the 1950s in pictures

Discovering Dylan Thomas : a companion to the collected poems and notebook poems

A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas

Whitman and Popular Culture

In honor of the “I Sing the Body Electric: Walt Whitman and the Body” exhibit (drawn from our extensive Whitman collection) on display until October 28th in the Biddle Rare Book Room, I have been writing several blog posts about Walt Whitman and his life.  This last one will focus on how Whitman continues to appear in popular culture.  You can find mentions of him in movies, television, fiction, and music.  See this article for more examples.

 

Here are several fun examples of advertisements:

And here’s the poem “O Me! O Life!”

And here’s the poem “Pioneers! O Pioneers!”

You can also find recordings of poets and actors reading Whitman’s work.

I really love this recent project called “Whitman, Alabama“:

You might enjoy some documentaries about Whitman, including Walt Whitman: An American Original and American Experience: Walt Whitman.

You can also find books about Whitman’s influence on culture:

Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity

A Companion to Walt Whitman (part two “The Cultural Context” has a chapter called “Twentieth-century Mass Media Appearances”

A Race of Singers: Whitman’s Working-Class Hero from Guthrie to Springsteen

In Walt We Trust: How a Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America From Itself

Hip, the History (as the summary of the book says, “Hip: The History draws the connections between Walt Whitman and Richard Hell, or Raymond Chandler and Snoop Dogg.”)

To find out more about Whitman, check out the previous blog posts in this series: Reading Walt Whitman, Whitman and the Body, and Whitman and the Civil War.

Lilly Collection Spotlight on Photography

Post contributed by Ira King, Danette Pachtner and Carol Terry. October has been declared Photography Month in North Carolina—come to Lilly Library and borrow a book or movie from our collection spotlight on photography!   In addition to the books available on our Spotlight shelf , Lilly’s focus on photography can be seen with our exhibits The f-Stops Here: Photography in North Carolina in the foyer, Duke: a Perspective – photographs by William Hanley III, and Mario Sorrenti: Draw Blood for Proof,  the “medium” rare book selected by Visual Studies Librarian Lee Sorensen.

With the advent of the smartphone and social media platforms like Instagram, photography has suffused our daily lives. You may shoot a pic of the Duke Chapel on the way to an early morning class, take a photo of your lunch at West Union, and get a snapchat vista from your friend on vacation in the mountains. If you’re obsessed with images, we’ve got you covered with this month’s Collection Spotlight at Lilly Library! Check out the wide range of photography books and films on display.

Ansel Adams: 400 Photographs
Adams, whose work was recently featured in an exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Art, was one of the most celebrated landscape photographers of the Twentieth Century, renowned for his black and white depictions of the stunning scenery of the American West. This book collects photographs from across his multi-decade career. Recommended if you’re craving a reminder of the sublime beauty of the outdoors.

Toy Stories by Gabriele Galimberti
In this unique collection, photographer Gabriele Galimberti traveled around the world photographing children and their toys, spending thirty months on the road and visiting fifty-eight different countries. These striking photographs are fun, but also illuminate the social, economic, and gender issues that surround what toys children grow up with. Recommended if you’re missing your childhood room.

The Beautiful Smile by Nan Goldin
This collection, released on the occasion of Goldin’s 2007 Hasselblad Award, features intimate, diaristic photographs and portraits. Rising to fame as a member and chronicler of the LGBTQ subculture in 1980s and 1990s New York City, Goldin includes both photos from that era and newer works in this book. Recommended if you’re looking for photography that captures both the beauty and fragility of life.

Chromes: 1969-1974 by William Eggleston
One of our personal favorite photographers, Eggleston photographed “ordinary” objects and people around the South and his hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. Eggleston’s work in color helped legitimize the form in a field that was previously dominated by black and white photography. Recommended if you’re a Big Star fan and/or enjoy photos of old gas stations.

And don’t forget that Lilly has a great collection of films you can borrow.

Here are a few titles from our Video Spotlight: Photography on Film

Lilly DVD 8892

La Jetee (1962)
Since its release in 1962, Chris Marker’s La Jetée has emerged as one of the foundational texts of postwar European cinema. With its rhythmic editing, nostalgic voiceover and parade of black-and-white images, La Jetée exercises a hypnotic effect on its viewers. This short, experimental ‘photo-roman’ stays with you long after its 29 minutes are over.

Lilly DVD 6054

Pecker (1999)
John Waters’ film about a budding Baltimore photographer. Pecker (he got the nickname for pecking at his food as a child) photographs the mundane sights of his Baltimore neighborhood: the hamburger joint where he works, rats making love in the alley behind the diner, the oddball characters in his family, and the dancers in the local lesbian strip club.

 

Lilly DVD 29861

City of God (2002)
This movie takes place in the favelas or slums of Rio de Janeiro created to isolate the poor people from the city center. They have grown into places teeming with life, color, music and excitement–and with danger. One of the characters, Rocket, obtains a stolen camera that he treasures and takes pictures from his privileged position as a kid on the streets.

Lilly DVD 20755

Our feelings took the pictures: Open Shutters Iraq (2008)
Iraq-born Maysoon Pachachi’s film documents a project in which a group of women refugees from five cities in Iraq living in Syria learn to take photographs and present their lives to each other. Accompanying book is in Perkins Library.

Lilly DVD 26643

Through a lens darkly: black photographers and the emergence of a people (2014)
Filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris offers what he calls a “family memoir” via historical images of African Americans initially through popular and disturbing stereotypes such as those portrayed in D.W. Griffith’s classic 1915 film Birth of a Nation to more realistic and poignant photographs. Using a series of narrative images by African American photographic artists including Anthony Barboza, Hank Willis Thomas, Lorna Simpson, and Gordon Parks, among others, Harris sheds light on a seldom-told aspect of our culture.

As you can see,  Lilly Library offers a wide range of books and film about the art, science and history of photography which we hope you will enjoy.

Hats Off to Our 2017 Writing and Research Award Winners!

This past Friday, October 20, Duke University Libraries was excited to host the reception of our 2017 writing and research award winners. With topics covering everything from the slums of Bangalore to medieval publishers to personal poetry and creative nonfiction, these student superstars ran the gamut of passions, questions, and creative impulses.

No matter how much their interests varied, though, all of the contestants were judged to have made major contributions to their fields. The response was warm, the students’ and advisors’ speeches were phenomenal, and we’re truly thankful to everyone who was in the audience for the pride and support you showed these winners.

Whitman and the Civil War

In honor of the “I Sing the Body Electric: Walt Whitman and the Body” exhibit (drawn from our extensive Whitman collection) on display until October 28th in the Biddle Rare Book Room, I will be writing several blog posts about Walt Whitman and his life.

One of the cases in the exhibit is about Whitman’s experiences during the Civil War because it greatly influenced how he thought about and wrote about the body.  You can see this in his writing, particularly in Drum TapsSpecimen Days, and Memoranda during the War (selections from his journal entries)

Here are several resources related to Whitman and the Civil War, if you want to learn more:

“Daybreak Gray and Dim”: How the Civil War Changed Walt Whitman’s Poetry

Traveling with the Wounded: Walt Whitman and Washington’s Civil War Hospitals

Walt Whitman In Washington, D.C. : The Civil War And America’s Great Poet by Garrett Peck

Walt Whitman and the Civil War: America’s Poet during the Lost Years of 1860-1862 by Ted Genoways

Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and his Brothers in the Civil War by Robert Roper

The Better Angel : Walt Whitman in the Civil War by Roy Morris, Jr.

Walt Whitman’s Civil War,  Compiled & edited from published & unpublished sources by Walter Lowenfels, with the assistance of Nan Braymer

Walt Whitman and the Civil War; a Collection of Original Articles and Manuscripts edited by Charles I. Glicksberg

To find out more about Whitman, check out the previous blog posts in this series: Reading Walt Whitman and Whitman and the Body.

What to Read this Month: October 2017

what to read this month

Check out our New and Noteworthy and Current Literature collections for some good reads* this month!


Universal HarvesterUniversal Harvester by John Darnielle. Just in time for Halloween, Universal Harvester tells the story of a video store clerk who discovers bizarre videos recorded over the store’s VHS tapes. Darnielle is also known for his work as a musician. You can read more about his local band The Mountain Goats here and find a review of this, his second novel, here.

 

 


Family LexiconFamily Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg. Newly translated from the original Italian by Jenny McPhee, Family Lexicon is an epic saga of family, language, storytelling, and war. First published in 1963, it is set against the backdrop of Mussolini’s rise to power and the tumultuous years of WWII. Ginzburg passed away in 1991, but her autobiographical masterpiece lives on. Check out the review in the New Yorker here.

 


MoonshineMoonshine: A Global History by Kevin R. Kosar is a part of the Edible series. From ancient times to the modern day, Kosar takes the reader on a voyage around the world of DIY distilleries. Stories ranging from amusing to dangerous complete this history of a unique beverage. Spanning the centuries and the globe, this entertaining book will appeal to any food and drink lover who enjoys a little mischief.

 


The ChangelingThe Changeling by Victor LaValle. A new take on a classic tale, this thriller/horror/fantasy novel follows a young father searching for his family. That simple-seeming quest takes him to a forgotten island, a graveyard full of secrets, a forest where immigrant legends still live, and dozens of other places in a wonderful and haunting vision of New York. You can read multiple reviews of The Changeling, from the New York Times, from NPR, or from Tor Books.

 


Affluence without AbundanceAffluence without Abundance by James Suzman. Ever been curious about southern Africa’s San people, also known as the Bushmen? Anthropologist James Suzman documents a proud and private people, introduces unforgettable members of their tribe, and tells the story of the collision between the modern global economy and the oldest hunting and gathering society on Earth. Read an interview with the author and review of the book here.

 


*Selections and descriptions by UNC Field Experience Student Ellen Cline.

 

October Collection Spotlight: Learning Innovation and the Future of Higher Education

October marks the start of Duke NextEd Festival, a series of 30+ events celebrating learning innovation at Duke organized by Duke Learning Innovation (comprised of the Center for Instructional Technology and Online Duke). To coincide with the festival, we put together a Collection Spotlight that features some of our top reads on innovation and change in higher education.

Through these picks you can learn how the university as we know it came to be, investigate the many forces affecting higher ed today, delve into the latest research on effective teaching and learning, get great ideas for making education more effective and relevant, and explore some radical rethinking of what education should do and be.

A top pick from the October Collection Spotlight is The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World In Flux by Cathy Davidson, Duke’s former Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies. In this book, Davidson argues that the American university is stuck in the past and shows how we can revolutionize it to prepare students for our age of constant change. Davidson will give a talk on the book on campus on October 11 as part of NextEd. She will be joined in conversation with Edward Balleisen, Professor of History and Public Policy and Duke’s Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies.

If you like some of the ideas you’re reading about in our selections (or hate them), we encourage you to tweet about it using the NextEd hashtag, #DukeNextEd. Students, faculty, staff, and alumni can also join the conversation about the future of education at Duke by attending one of the many NextEd events happening in the coming weeks.

If you have questions, contact Courtney Lockemer, Communications Manager, Online Duke/Center for Instructional Technology, at courtney.lockemer@duke.edu.

 

Whitman and the Body

In honor of the “I Sing the Body Electric: Walt Whitman and the Body” exhibit (drawn from our extensive Whitman collection) on display until October 28th in the Biddle Rare Book Room, I will be writing several blog posts about Walt Whitman and his life.

Since the theme of the exhibit is the body, it might be useful to examine how scholars have discussed how Whitman wrote about the concept of the body.  Here are several scholarly works that are related to this theme:

Walt Whitman and the Body Beautiful by Harold Aspiz.

Whitman’s Presence: Body, Voice, and Writing in Leaves of Grass by Tenney Nathanson.

Whitman’s Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics, and the Text by M. Jimmie Killingsworth.

So Long! Walt Whitman’s Poetry of Death by Harold Aspiz.

Whitman between Impressionism and Expressionism: Language of the Body, Language of the Soul by Erik Ingvar Thurin.

If you’re looking for something more general, both Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia (has a chapter called “Human Body”) and The Cambridge Introduction to Walt Whitman (has a section called “The body” in chapter two: Historical and cultural contexts) are great resources.

To find out more about Whitman, check out the previous blog post in this series: Reading Walt Whitman.

 

2017 Banned Books Week

This week (September 24th-30th) is Banned Books Week.  To help you learn more about what kinds of books have been challenged or banned over the years (and why), we have a Collection Spotlight on the first floor of Perkins near the Circulation Desk devoted to these books.  Here is a just a selection of what you will find there:

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.  Reasons: language and sexual content

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. Reasons: religious viewpoint, violence

Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. Reason: Sexual content

Habibi by Craig Thompson. Reasons: nudity, sexually explicit, and unsuited for age group

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.  Reasons: degrading, profane and racist work. conflict with community values

For more information check out these websites here, here, and here.

If you use Twitter, you might also enjoy participating in the Rebel Reader Twitter Tournament!

The Hobbit Turns 80!

 

“May the wind under your wings bear you where the sun sails and the moon walks.”

Happy birthday to The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien!  Here are several articles commemorating the day:

The Hobbit at 80: Much More than a Childish Prequel to The Lord of the Rings

Picturing the Hobbit

The Hobbit at 80: What were JRR Tolkien’s Inspirations behind His First Fantasy Tale of Middle Earth?

The Hobbit Is Turning 80.  Here’s What Reviewers Said About It in 1937.

I’m also really fond of this article from the Oxford Dictionaries blog about the origins of the word “hobbit.

If you are interested in (re)reading The Hobbit, we have several copies in our circulating collection.

Here are some images from a lovely book called Art of the Hobbit.

Reading Walt Whitman

Young Walt WhitmanIn honor of the “I Sing the Body Electric: Walt Whitman and the Body” exhibit (drawn from our extensive Whitman collection) on display until October 28th in the Biddle Rare Book Room, I will be writing several blog posts about Walt Whitman and his life.  For this post I want to share where to look to find the works he has written. Reading Whitman for yourself will help you to see why he’s still such a large figure in American Literature.

First you can find a lot of Whitman’s poetry online, if you just want to get a taste of his poetry.   Here are two of of my favorite places to look: Poets.org and Poetry Foundation

Walt Whitman Archive

The Walt Whitman Archive, a project spearheaded by several important Whitman scholars, has a wealth of resources about and by Whitman.  It is well worth investigating all the resources in that archive, but of special interest is the Published Works Section.  It provides access to the six American editions of Leaves of Grass published in Whitman’s lifetime and the so-called deathbed edition of 1891–92.  If you want to really investigate the major changes and expansions that Whitman added to Leaves of Grass, this is the perfect place to look.

Books by Whitman

You can find many different editions for Whitman’s works.  Here are a couple of especially good versions in our general collection.

Leaves of Grass: The Complete 1855 and 1891-92 Editions

Complete Poetry and Collected Prose

Leaves of Grass and Other Writings: Authoritative Texts, Other Poetry and Prose, Criticism

Song of Myself: With a Complete Commentary

Whitman Illuminated: Song of Myself

Drum-taps: The Complete 1865 Edition

Specimen Days, Democratic Vistas, and Other Prose

If that’s just not enough Whitman for you, you should also know that there will be talk and exhibit tour on September 21st from 11:45-1:30 in Rubenstein Library 153.  A light lunch will be served.

What to Read this Month: September 2017

whattoreadthismonth

It’s September and fall weather is settling in – why not settle in with a good read from our New & Noteworthy or Current Literature collections? We’ve* picked out a variety of titles for this month, from Ugandan novels to books about data visualization, and these few are reflective of a greater diversity within both New & Noteworthy and Current Literature.


The Book of CirclesThe Book of Circles: Visualizing Spheres of Knowledge by Manuel Lima. Curious about information visualization? Love spending hours pouring over intricately detailed infographics? Manuel Lima explores historic and present-day uses of the circle as sign, symbol, graph, and more in his Book of Circles. It features nearly 300 accompanying illustrations covering a large array of topics: architecture, urban planning, fine art, design, fashion, technology, religion, cartography, biology, astronomy, physics, and more, all of which are based on the circle. You can also read a little bit about the author’s account of writing the book here.


EverythingBelongsToUsEverything Belongs to Us by Yoojin Grace Wuertz. Yoojin Grace Wuertz spins a lively tale of two friends – one from a privileged background, the other from a lifetime of difficulties – as they enter South Korea’s top university in the 1970s. Mixing personal aspirations (to join the ranks of the rich or the ranks of an underground movement) with charming university students and a secret society, this novel is set against the backdrop of South Korea’s struggle for prosperity in the 70s. Everything Belongs to Us is well lauded in the NY Times and featured in Kirkus.


Alana MasseyAll the Lives I Want by Alana Massey. This collection examines the intersection of the personal with pop culture by looking at different female figures (Sylvia Plath, Britney Spears, Lana Del Ray, and others) in a series of essays that range in tone from humor to academic, but always remain honest. Massey is known for her columns and criticism, and you can read a review of this, her first book, here and check out an interview with the author here.

 


Eye of the SandpiperThe Eye of the Sandpiper by Brandon Keim. Curious about the natural world? Brandon Keim’s Eye of the Sandpiper looks at nature in four parts: the evolutionary and ecological quirks of our world, animals and their emotions, man’s interactions with nature, and finally ethics and ecology in an age of human ingenuity. Infused with a love of the wild, Keim’s work is scientific but written in delightful prose. You can read more about him here.

 


KintuKintu by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi. Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s doctoral novel Kintu won the Kwani Manuscript Prize and was longlisted for the Etisalat Prize for Literature. It follows the descendants of a man named Kintu in multilayered narrative that reimagines the history of Uganda through the Kintu clan’s cursed bloodline. Find an interview with the author here and here, and read more about Kintu, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, and Uganda here.

 


*Selections and descriptions by UNC Field Experience Student Ellen Cline.

Remembering John Ashbery

John Ashbery

John Ashbery, an award-winning poet, died over the weekend.  In 1976 he became the only writer to win the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in the same year for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.  You can see the opening of an early draft of this important work here.

If you’ve never read any of his poetry, now would be a great time.  We own many of his collections. 

To understand his place in American poetry, you might also want to look at some of the biographies and literary criticism that we have about him.

We also have several interesting items in the Rubenstein Library that you might want to explore.

For a nice biography and overview of Ashbery, check out this Poetry Foundation page.  You might also appreciate this recent write-up in the New Yorker.

Come Read ‘March: Book One’ with the Low Maintenance Book Club

The next meetings of the Duke University Libraries’ Low Maintenance Book Club will feature March: Book One by Congressman John Lewis (GA-5), an American icon and key figure of the civil rights movement.

We will be reading the entire graphic novel. Since it’s a bit longer than some past selections (and in the spirit of low maintenance), if you don’t have a chance to finish the entire book, we still welcome you to join us!

You can find a copy at our libraries.  Durham County Library also has copies available.

Please register for this event.  The first ten people to register will receive a free copy of the book.

Date: Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Time: 6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.

Location: Bostock 127 (The Edge Workshop Room)

Light refreshments will be served.

If you have any questions, you can contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy at aah39@duke.edu.

What to Read this Month: August 2017

whattoread

Welcome back to a new semester!  While you’re exploring all that Duke has to offer, why not explore our New and Noteworthy or Current Literature collections?  One of the great things about the books in these collections is the variety of subject areas and genres represented—everything  from popular novels, political histories, and books about animals (and many things in between).


monkeytalkMonkeytalk: Inside the Worlds and Minds of Primates by Julia Fischer. Monkey see, monkey do–or does she? Can the behavior of non-human primates–their sociality, their intelligence, their communication–really be chalked up to simple mimicry? Emphatically, absolutely: no. And as famed primatologist Julia Fischer reveals, the human bias inherent in this oft-uttered adage is our loss, for it is only through the study of our primate brethren that we may begin to understand ourselves.  An eye-opening blend of storytelling, memoir, and science, Monkeytalk takes us into the field and the world’s primate labs to investigate the intricacies of primate social mores through the lens of communication.


mothstorytellingThe Moth Presents All these Wonders: True Stories about Facing the Unknown, edited by Catherine Burns. Celebrating the 20th anniversary of storytelling phenomenon The Moth, 45 unforgettable true stories about risk, courage, and facing the unknown, drawn from the best ever told on their stages. Alongside Louis C.K., Tig Notaro, John Turturro, and Meg Wolitzer, readers will encounter: an astronomer gazing at the surface of Pluto for the first time, an Afghan refugee learning how much her father sacrificed to save their family, a hip-hop star coming to terms with being a “one-hit wonder,” a young female spy risking everything as part of Churchill’s “secret army” during World War II, and more.


walkawayWalkaway: A Novel by Cory Doctorow.  From New York Times bestselling author Cory Doctorow, an epic tale of revolution, love, post-scarcity, and the end of death.  Fascinating, moving, and darkly humorous, Walkaway is a multi-generation SF thriller about the wrenching changes of the next hundred years…and the very human people who will live their consequences.  You can read reviews here and here.

 

 


TheEvangelicalsThe Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America by Frances FitzGerald.  This groundbreaking book from a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian is the first to tell the powerful, dramatic story of the Evangelical movement in America–from the Puritan era to the 2016 presidential election.  Evangelicals have in many ways defined the nation. They have shaped our culture and our politics. Frances FitGerald’s narrative of this distinctively American movement is a major work of history, piecing together the centuries-long story for the first time.  You can read reviews here and here.  You may also appreciate this interview with the author.


fortunateonesThe Fortunate Ones: A Novel by Ellen Umansky. One very special work of art–a Chaim Soutine painting–will connect the lives and fates of two different women, generations apart, in this enthralling and transporting debut novel that moves from World War II Vienna to contemporary Los Angeles.  This painting will bring Lizzie and Rose together and ignite an unexpected friendship, eventually revealing long-held secrets that hold painful truths. Spanning decades and unfolding in crystalline, atmospheric prose, this book is a haunting story of longing, devastation, and forgiveness, and a deep examination of the bonds and desires that map our private histories.

Collection Spotlight: North Carolina

NorthCarolinabooks

Since we know many of our Duke University community are either returning from summer breaks or joining us for the first time, we thought we’d welcome you with books about the state you live in.  You’ll find books about some aspect of North Carolina, novels set in North Carolina, and books written by people from North Carolina.   Check out our Collection Spotlight rack near our Perkins Library Service Desk on the first floor of Perkins.   Here’s a selection of some of the titles you’ll find:

Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen, who is from Asheville.  In a garden surrounded by a tall fence, tucked away behind a small, quiet house in an even smaller town, is an apple tree that is rumored to bear a very special sort of fruit. In this luminous debut novel, Sarah Addison Allen tells the story of that enchanted tree, and the extraordinary people who tend it. This novel is set in the fictional North Carolina town of Bascom.

To Hate Like This is to be Happy Forever: A Thoroughly Obsessive, Intermittently Uplifting and Occasionally Unbiased Account of the Duke-North Carolina Basketball Rivalry by Will Blythe.  As one of our staff member explained when she picked this book, “When I first moved to North Carolina, I kept thinking, why is everyone so crazy about basketball? And then I read this book, and I started to understand.”

Weird Carolinas: Your Travel Guide to the Carolinas’, Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets by Roger Manley.  You think Duke is weird! Haunted places, oddities, North Karolina Kultur! This book also includes South Carolina, and fun facts on legends and pseudo history of the upper South.

These Same Long Bones by Gwendolyn Parker.  It’s set in Durham, more specifically in the “Hayti” black section, on the eve of integration and is told from the point of view of a leader in the black community. It’s a powerful family story and a great glimpse into Durham history.

Talkin’ Tarheel: How Our Voices Tell the Story of NC by Walt Wolfram.  Introduces the reader to the unique regional, social, and ethnic dialects of North Carolina.

What to Read this Month: July 2017

What to Read this Month

Check out our New and Noteworthy and Current Literature collections for some good reads this month!


4 3 2 1 4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster.  Nearly two weeks early, on March 3, 1947, in the maternity ward of Beth Israel Hospital in Newark, New Jersey, Archibald Isaac Ferguson, the one and only child of Rose and Stanley Ferguson, is born.  From that single beginning, Ferguson’s life will take four simultaneous and independent fictional paths. Four identical Fergusons made of the same DNA, four boys who are the same boy, go on to lead four parallel and entirely different lives. Family fortunes diverge. Athletic skills and sex lives and friendships and intellectual passions contrast.  Read reviews here and here.


American Sickness An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back by Elisabeth Rosenthal.  At a moment of drastic political upheaval, this book is an investigation into the dangerous, expensive, and dysfunctional American healthcare system, as well as solutions to its myriad of problems.  Breaking down this monolithic business into the individual industries–the hospitals, doctors, insurance companies, and drug manufacturers–that together constitute our healthcare system, Rosenthal exposes the recent evolution of American medicine as never before.  You can read a review here.


Comfort FoodComfort Food: Meanings and Memories, edited by Michael Owen Jones and Lucy M. Long, explores this concept with examples taken from Atlantic Canadians, Indonesians, the English in Britain, and various ethnic, regional, and religious populations as well as rural and urban residents in the United States. This volume includes studies of particular edibles and the ways in which they comfort or in some instances cause discomfort. The contributors focus on items ranging from bologna to chocolate, including sweet and savory puddings, fried bread with an egg in the center, dairy products, fried rice, cafeteria fare, sugary fried dough, soul food, and others.


Samantha IrbyWe Are Never Meeting in Real Life is a collection of essays by Samantha Irby, who runs the blog bitches gotta eat.  Whether talking about how her difficult childhood has led to a problem in making “adult” budgets, explaining why she should be the new Bachelorette—she’s “35-ish, but could easily pass for 60-something”—detailing a disastrous pilgrimage-slash-romantic-vacation to Nashville to scatter her estranged father’s ashes, sharing awkward sexual encounters, or dispensing advice on how to navigate friendships with former drinking buddies who are now suburban moms—hang in there for the Costco loot—she’s as deft at poking fun at the ghosts of her past self as she is at capturing powerful emotional truths.


Fever of the BloodA Fever of the Blood by Oscar de Muriel.  New Year’s Day, 1889.In Edinburgh’s lunatic asylum, a patient escapes as a nurse lays dying. Leading the manhunt are legendary local Detective ‘Nine-Nails’ McGray and Londoner-in-exile Inspector Ian Frey.Before the murder, the suspect was heard in whispered conversation with a fellow patient–a girl who had been mute for years. What made her suddenly break her silence? And why won’t she talk again? Could the rumours about black magic be more than superstition?McGray and Frey track a devious psychopath far beyond their jurisdiction, through the worst blizzard in living memory, into the shadow of Pendle Hill–home of the Lancashire witches–where unimaginable danger awaits.

New U.S. Poet Laureate: Tracy K. Smith

Tracy K. Smith

Tracy K. Smith, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2017- 
Photo credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Tracy K. Smith, the 22nd Poet Laureate, was appointed on June 14th.  If you are interested in reading her work, fortunately we have several collections of her poetry that you can read.

You might also want to explore some articles about her.  This great NPR profile discusses her appointment, her process as a poet, and a recording of her reading ‘When Your Small Form Tumbled Into Me.’  Here’s another profile from the NYT.  This PBS article lists four poets that Tracy K. Smith recommends you read: Solmaz Sharif, Erika L. Sanchez (coming soon to our collection) James Richardson, and Claudia Rankine.

Finally here’s a video where she reads from Life on Mars:

What to Read this Month: June 2017

Check out our New and Noteworthy and Current Literature collections for some good reads this month!


 The Afterlife of Stars by Joseph Kertes was named a “10 New Books we Recommend this Week” by the New York Times Book Review.  Tim O’Brien said that “The Afterlife of Stars moved me more than any other novel I’ve read in recent memory.” With dazzling storytelling and a firm belief in the power of humor in the face of turmoil, Kertes has crafted a fierce saga of identity and love that resonates through its final page. The Afterlife of Stars is not only a stirring account of one displaced family’s possibilities for salvation, but also an extraordinary tale of the singular and enduring ties of brotherhood.


 The Aisles Have Eyes: How Retailers Track Your Shopping, Strip Your Privacy, and Define Your Power by Joseph Turow is a revealing and surprising look at the ways that aggressive consumer advertising and tracking, already pervasive online, are coming to a retail store near you.  Drawing on his interviews with retail executives, analysis of trade publications, and experiences at insider industry meetings, advertising and digital studies expert Joseph Turow pulls back the curtain on these trends, showing how a new hyper-competitive generation of merchants–including Macy’s, Target, and Walmart–is already using data mining, in-store tracking, and predictive analytics to change the way we buy, undermine our privacy, and define our reputations.


Eveningland by Michael Knight is a collection of stories.  Grappling with dramas both epic and personal, from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill to the “unspeakable misgivings of contentment,” Eveningland captures with crystalline poeticism and perfect authenticity of place the ways in which ordinary life astounds us with its complexity.   These stories, told with economy and precision, infused with humor and pathos, excavate brilliantly the latent desires and motivations that drive life forward.  You can read reviews here and here.

 


 I’d Die for You: And Other Lost Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a collection of the last remaining unpublished and uncollected short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Anne Margaret Daniel. Fitzgerald did not design the stories in I’d Die For You as a collection. Most were submitted individually to major magazines during the 1930s and accepted for publication during Fitzgerald’s lifetime, but were never printed. Some were written as movie scenarios and sent to studios or producers, but not filmed. Others are stories that could not be sold because their subject matter or style departed from what editors expected of Fitzgerald. They date from the earliest days of Fitzgerald’s career to the last. They come from various sources, from libraries to private collections, including those of Fitzgerald’s family.


 The Possessions by Sara Flannery Murphy.  In this electrifying literary debut, a young woman who channels the dead for a living crosses a dangerous line when she falls in love with one of her clients, whose wife died under mysterious circumstances. A tale of desire and obsession, deceit and dark secrets that defies easy categorization, The Possessions is a seductive, absorbing page-turner that builds to a shattering, unforgettable conclusion.  You can read reviews here and here.

Collection Spotlight: Library Staff Picks!

Do you ever wonder what people who work in a library like to read?  Well, it turns out our reading tastes here at Duke University Libraries are extremely varied!  For the months of June and July our Collection Spotlight is going to feature picks from our library staff.  You should come by the display near the Perkins Service Desk on the first floor of the library to see what they picked.  Here is just a sampling:

Valerie Gillispie from University Archives recommended Kitchens of the Great Midwest.  She said: “This is a story of Eva Thorvald, a girl raised in the upper Midwest, who loves food. As a child, she grows hot peppers in her bedroom closet, and grows up to become an extraordinary chef. This novel made me hungry, and nostalgic for Minnesota.”

Janil Miller from our Marine Lab Library picked Whale by Joe Roman, describing it as a “delightfully informative read on Earth’s largest mammal. Through historical illustrations & text, the reader travels from the beast of Biblical fame to today’s wondrous creatures and the many challenges experienced at the human/sea interface.”

Kris Troost from International and Area Studies suggested The Translation of Love, saying that it was a “fascinating depiction of immediate postwar Japan and the struggles faced by repatriated Japanese Canadians who were given few choices after being interned and Japanese Americans serving in the Occupation. Written by a Japanese-Canadian librarian.”

Benov Tzvetan from Access and Delivery Services recommended the classic One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.  Here is why he thinks you should read this book: “Ever felt that life is too hard & unfair? Been upset that store X has run out of your favorite brand of Y? Complained that there aren’t enough Z locally? This page-turner might offer you a different perspective on life…but you have to read it first.”

Kim Duckett from Research and Instructional Services submitted the graphic memoir Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast.  Here’s Kim’s description: “Chast’s parents are REALLY old. In this engaging book she explores what it’s like to help your parents as they age, but also tells the story of a long marriage and the intricacies of family dynamics. It’s touching, sad, and darkly humorous.”

Bridgette Chandhoke from the Communications office in the library offered a perhaps less well-known work from the famous John Steinbeck.  She recommends Travels with Charley: In Search of America, saying: “In this genuine and intimate reflection, John Steinbeck details his cross-country road trip with his dog, Charley, to rediscover the beauty and truths of 1960s America. Through autumn soaked trees and dusty deserts, you’ll be right there with them!”

Our staff picked so many great books that it was hard to choose just a couple to highlight, so I do hope you’ll come see the rest soon.  Thanks to everyone recommended a title!

 

What to Read this Month: May 2017

In the summer I like to read the Duke Common Experience Summer Reading selection.  I am really excited to check out Prince of Los Cocuyos by Richard Blanco this year.  I noticed something interesting though when I looked at the list of the finalists this year.  Lots of great titles, but all the authors are men.  So I thought I’d suggest some books written by women for your summer reading, just to balance your reading list!


Homegoing: A Novel by Yaa Gyasi traces traces three hundred years in Ghana and along the way also becomes a truly great American novel.  Two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle’s dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast’s booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery.  You can read reviews here and here.


Lab Girl by Hope Jahren was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography and a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Geobiologist Hope Jahren has spent her life studying trees, flowers, seeds, and soil. Lab Girl is her revelatory treatise on plant life–but it is also a celebration of the lifelong curiosity, humility, and passion that drive every scientist. In these pages, Hope takes us back to her Minnesota childhood, where she spent hours in unfettered play in her father’s college laboratory. She tells us how she found a sanctuary in science, learning to perform lab work “with both the heart and the hands.” She introduces us to Bill, her brilliant, eccentric lab manager. And she extends the mantle of scientist to each one of her readers, inviting us to join her in observing and protecting our environment.


Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien has been on both the Man Booker Prize and the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlists.  In Canada in 1991, ten-year-old Marie and her mother invite a guest into their home: a young woman called Ai-Ming, who has fled China in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square protests.  Ai-Ming tells Marie the story of her family in Revolutionary China – from the crowded teahouses in the first days of Chairman Mao’s ascent to the Shanghai Conservatory in the 1960s and the events leading to the Beijing demonstrations of 1989. It is a story of revolutionary idealism, music, and silence, in which three musicians – the shy and brilliant composer Sparrow, the violin prodigy Zhuli, and the enigmatic pianist Kai – struggle during China’s relentless Cultural Revolution to remain loyal to one another and to the music they have devoted their lives to.


Difficult Women by Roxane Gay is a collection of stories of rare force and beauty, of hardscrabble lives, passionate loves, and quirky and vexed human connection.  The women in these stories live lives of privilege and of poverty, are in marriages both loving and haunted by past crimes or emotional blackmail.  From a girls’ fight club to a wealthy subdivision in Florida where neighbors conform, compete, and spy on each other, Gay delivers a wry, beautiful, haunting vision of modern America reminiscent of Merritt Tierce, Jamie Quatro, and Miranda July.  If you have never read anything by Roxane Gay, her website has a great list of the short stories, essays, and interviews that have appeared in a variety of online and print publications.   You might also want to check out this NPR interview.


Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age was written by Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, the founder of muslimgirl.com.  It was a  New York Times Editor’s Pick, where the book was described as a “blunt observation, reflective of the potent message she delivers to her readers, a skillful unraveling of the myth of the submissive Muslim woman and a timely introduction to those other, very American and largely unheard 9/11 kids who bear the destructive burden of that one day, every day.”   It is a harrowing and candid memoir about coming of age as a Muslim American in the wake of 9/11, during the never-ending war on terror, and through the Trump era.  You can read an excerpt here.


As always if you’re looking for even more interesting things to read this summer, we’ve got you covered in our our New and Noteworthy and Current Literature collections.

What to Read this Month: April 2017

readthismonthlogo

As always if you’re looking for something interesting to read, we’ve got you covered in our our New and Noteworthy and Current Literature collections.  In honor of National Poetry Month I’m highlighting poetry books this month. Also, check out our Collection Spotlight this month featuring poetry.  It’s on the first floor of Perkins near the Perkins Service Desk!


sythbookcoverSo Much Synth by Brenda Shaughnessy.  Subversions of idiom and cliche punctuate Shaughnessy’s fourth collection as she approaches middle age and revisits the memories, romances, and music of adolescence. So Much Synth is a brave and ferocious collection composed of equal parts femininity, pain, pleasure, and synthesizer. While Shaughnessy tenderly winces at her youthful excesses, we humbly catch glimpses of our own.  Check out this recent interview with Shaughnessy.


minotaurbookcoverWhosoever Has Let a Minotaur Enter Them, Or a Sonnet- by Emily Carr is part of the McSweeney’s poetry series.  How does a love poet fall out of her marriage and back in love with the world? What happens when you grow up to be the “kind of person who…”? These fairytales are for the heartbreakers as much as the heartbroken, for those smitten with wanderlust, for those who believe in loving this world through art.


poetryandprotestbookcoverOf Poetry & Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin edited by Philip Cushway and Michael Warr.
Included in this extraordinary volume are the poems of 43 of America’s most talented African American wordsmiths, including Pulitzer Prize-winning poets Rita Dove, Natasha Tretheway, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Tracy K. Smith, as well as the work of other luminaries such as Elizabeth Alexander, Ishmael Reed, and Sonia Sanchez. Included are poems such as “No Wound of Exit” by Patricia Smith, “We Are Not Responsible” by Harryette Mullen, and “Poem for My Father” by Quincy Troupe. Each is accompanied by a photograph of the poet along with a first-person biography.


quarterlifebookcoverQuarter Life Poetry: Poems for the Young, Broke and Hangry by Samantha Jayne, who is the creator of the popular Quarter Life Poetry Tumblr and Instagram.  She captures real-life truths of work, money, sex, and many other 20-something challenges in this laugh-out-loud collection of poetry. Samantha knows that life post-college isn’t as glamorous as all undergrads think it’s going to be… because she’s currently living it. At 25, Samantha began creating doodles and funny poems about her #struggle to share with friends on Instagram. To her surprise, these poems were picked up by 20-somethings all around the world who agreed, “This is literally us.”


dotheadbookcoverDothead: Poems by Amit Majmudar is a captivating, no-holds-barred collection of new poems from an acclaimed poet and novelist with a fierce and original voice.  Dothead is an exploration of selfhood both intense and exhilarating.  From poems about the treatment at the airport of people who look like Majmudar (“my dark unshaven brothers / whose names overlap with the crazies and God fiends”) to a long, freewheeling abecedarian poem about Adam and Eve and the discovery of oral sex, Dothead is a profoundly satisfying cultural critique and a thrilling experiment in language. You can listen to an interview with Majmudar here.

Collection Spotlight: Poetry

2017 National Poetry Month Poster

We’re celebrating National Poetry Month by highlighting some of the poetry books in our collection.  You can see them on our Collection Spotlight rack near the New and Noteworthy collection. Our previous  Collection Spotlight was for  Trans Day of Visibility!

Also be on the look out for our “Poet-tree” where you can add lines from some of your favorite poems.  For inspiration check out some of these Poems in Your Pocket.

Here is a selection of some of the titles that we are highlighting:

Beating the Graves by Tsitsi Jaji, a Duke professor!

Shallcross by C.D. Wright (review here)

The Prodigal by Derek Walcott (side note: there will be a Derek Walcott Memorial Poetry Reading on April 18th from 4:00-6:00)

Descent: Poems by Kathryn Stripling Byer, a former North Carolina Poet Laureate.

187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border: Undocuments, 1971-2007 by National Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, who did a wonderful reading at Duke on November 17th, 2016.

rack with poetry books

 

Comics and Graphic Novels at the Library

Underground & Independent Comics collection

Did you know that Duke University Libraries can provide you with access to a variety of comics and graphic novels?  Keep reading to find out more!

Rare and Original Issues at the Rubenstein Library

The Rubenstein’s comic collection spans many decades, publishers, and styles: from Golden Age Batman to modern graphic novels, and everything in between.

Edwin and Terry Murray Comic Book Collection

With more than 67,000 comic books from the 1930s to the 2000s, this is our largest collection.  All of the comic book titles are in the process of being added to the library catalog, so you will be able to search the catalog for your favorite superhero!   The titles currently available can also be found in the catalog by searching for “Edwin and Terry Murray Collection (David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library).”   You can try searching by genres, such as “Detective and mystery comics” and  “Underground comics,” as well.

Comic Book and Graphic Novel Collection

Contains thousands of additional comics and graphic novels with rich materials in international comics, especially Argentina and France, and comics created by women.  Find them in the Guide to the Comic Book and Graphic Novel Collection, 1938-2012.

The Underground and Independent Comics Database

The Underground and Independent Comics database is the first-ever scholarly online collection for researchers and students of adult comic books and graphic novels. It features the comics themselves along with interviews, commentary, and criticism. Includes artists such as Jessica Abel, Jaime Hernandez, Jason, Harvey Pekar, Dave Sim, and many more. There are comics from around the world, including Canada, France, Italy, Spain, England, Sweden, Norway, Australia, Korea, Japan.

Comics and Graphic Novels in the Stacks

You can check out comics and graphic novels from our circulating collections.  We also have comics and graphic novels scattered throughout our libraries, with most of them housed at Lilly Library on East campus.  You’ll find everything from The Walking Dead to Persepolis.

There are several ways to identify titles.  If you want to browse, relevant call number sections include PN6700-6790 and NC1300-1766. You can do a title search in our library catalog for specific titles.   You can also use the subject headings Comic books, strips, etc. and graphic novels to discover more titles.

Manga

We have manga in the East Asian collection on the second floor of Bostock.  We hold about 600 titles in Japanese and 150 titles translated into English just in PN6790.J3 – PN6790.J34.  You can also find Korean manhwa in PN6790 K6 – PN6790.K64.  Popular titles held at Duke include One Piece, Dragon ball, Naruto, Astro Boy, as well as the complete works of Tezuka Osamu.

Come Visit Us This Week!

We’ll have a table outside of the Perk on Tuesday March 28th from 1-2 and on Wednesday March 29th from 11-12.  We’ll be showing off some of the works in our collections, demonstrating The Underground and Independent Comics database, and answering questions!

Celebrate National Poetry Month with the Low Maintenance Book Club

In honor of National Poetry Month the Low Maintenance Book Club will be reading Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine.  We will be reading the following selections:

“I” (pages 5-18)

“V” (pages 69-79)

“VII” (pages 139-161))

You can find several copies of this collection at our libraries.  Durham County Library also has copies.

When: April 11th at 6:00pm

Where: The Edge Workshop Room  on the first floor of Bostock

How: Registering in advance helps us know how many to expect

Light refreshments will be served.

If you have any questions, you can contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy at aah39@duke.edu.

What to Read this Month: March 2017

Check out our New and Noteworthy and Current Literature collections for some good reads this month!


A profound and dazzlingly entertaining novel from the writer Louis Menand calls “Jane Austen with a Russian soul.”  In her warm, absorbing and keenly observed new novel, Still Here, Lara Vapnyar follows the intertwined lives of four immigrants in New York City as they grapple with love and tumult, the challenges of a new home, and the absurdities of the digital age.  It was featured in The Millions’ The Great Second-Half 2016 Book Preview.

 


My Life, My Love, My Legacy is the life story of Coretta Scott King–wife of Martin Luther King Jr., founder of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change (The King Center), and singular twentieth-century American civil and human rights activist–as told fully for the first time, toward the end of her life, to Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds.  Coretta’s is a love story, a family saga, and the memoir of an extraordinary black woman in twentieth-century America, a brave leader who, in the face of terrorism and violent hatred, stood committed, proud, forgiving, nonviolent, and hopeful every day of her life.


The Signal Flame by Andrew Krivak is the second novel from National Book Award finalist Andrew Krivak–a heartbreaking, captivating story about a family awaiting the return of their youngest son from the Vietnam War.  Beginning shortly after Easter in 1972 and ending on Christmas Eve this ambitious novel beautifully evokes ordinary time, a period of living and working while waiting and watching and expecting.   You can read reviews here and here.

 


A Life in Parts is a memoir by Bryan Cranston, star of Breaking Bad and Malcolm in the Middle.  He maps his zigzag journey from abandoned son to beloved star by recalling the many odd parts he’s played in real life–paperboy, farmhand, security guard, dating consultant, murder suspect, dock loader, lover, husband, father. Cranston also chronicles his evolution on camera, from soap opera player trying to master the rules of show business to legendary character actor turning in classic performances as Seinfeld dentist Tim Whatley, “a sadist with newer magazines,” and Malcolm in the Middle dad Hal Wilkerson, a lovable bumbler in tighty-whities.  He has much to say about creativity, devotion, and craft, as well as innate talent and its challenges and benefits and proper maintenance.


Storm in a Teacup: The Physics of Everyday Life is by Helen Czerski, a a physicist and oceanographer at University College London. She provides the tools to alter the way we see everything around us by linking ordinary objects and occurrences, like popcorn popping, coffee stains, and fridge magnets, to big ideas like climate change, the energy crisis, or innovative medical testing. She guides us through the principles of gases, gravity, size, and time.  You can read reviews here and here.

 

Marathon Reading of Toni Morrison’s BELOVED

On Thursday, March 30, the Department of English is hosting BELOVED, a marathon reading of Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel.   BELOVED will run 8 hours (9AM-5PM) in the Carpenter Conference Room (Rubenstein Library 249), where there will be a podium, microphone, audience seating, and T-shirts for all participants.  Sign up to read via THIS LINK by March 23rd.

The library of course has several copies of this novel available.  If this marathon inspires you to read more by this amazing author, we can help you there too!

 

What to Read this Month: February 2017

Check out our New and Noteworthy and Current Literature collections for some good reads this month!


Hannah Hart, a YouTube star, has written an at times very funny and very heartbreaking memoir called Buffering: Unshared Tales of a Life Fully Loaded.  She writes about her internet fame, her family, mental illness, love, friendship, sexuality, and more.  John Green describes the memoir like this: “By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Hannah Hart’s new book is a roaring, beautiful, and profoundly human account of an extraordinary life.”  To find out more about Hannah and her memoir, check out this NPR interview.

 


Citizen Scientist: Searching for Heroes and Hope in an Age of Extinction by Mary Ellen Hannibal is a wide-ranging adventure in becoming a citizen scientist by an award-winning writer and environmental thought leader. As Mary Ellen Hannibal wades into tide pools, follows hawks, and scours mountains to collect data on threatened species, she discovers the power of a heroic cast of volunteers–and the makings of what may be our last, best hope in slowing an unprecedented mass extinction. Digging deeply, Hannibal traces today’s tech-enabled citizen science movement to its roots: the centuries-long tradition of amateur observation by writers and naturalists.  Read an excerpt here.


In Neither Snow nor Rain: A History of the United States Postal Service, journalist Devin Leonard tackles the fascinating, centuries-long history of the USPS, from the first letter carriers through Franklin’s days, when postmasters worked out of their homes and post roads cut new paths through the wilderness.  It is a rich, multifaceted history, full of remarkable characters, from the stamp-collecting FDR, to the revolutionaries who challenged USPS’s monopoly on mail, to the renegade union members who brought the system–and the country–to a halt in the 1970s.  This book is the first major history of the USPS in over fifty years.  Read a review here and here.


Refugee Tales, edited by David Herd & Anna Pincus, collects tales from poets and novelists who retell the stories of individuals who have direct experience of Britain’s policy of indefinite immigration detention. Presenting their accounts anonymously, as modern day counterparts to the pilgrims’ stories in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales , this book offers rare, intimate glimpses into otherwise untold suffering.  You can learn more about this project here.   Also check out this review in the Guardian.

 


 Just in time for Valentine’s Day, check out Love is Love: A Comic Book Anthology to Benefit the Survivors of the Orlando Pulse Shooting from IDW Publishing and DC Entertainment.  This oversize comic contains moving and heartfelt material from some of the greatest talent in comics, mourning the victims, supporting the survivors, celebrating the LGBTQ community, and examining love in today’s world.  Some of the talents include Cecil Castellucci, Damon Lindelof, Patton Oswalt, G. Willow Wilson, Steve Orlando, James Tynion IV, Gail Simone, and Dan Parent.


Speaking of Valentine’s Day, if you’re looking for more things to read, check out our Blind Date with a Book.  You may need to hurry before all the matches are made!

Come Read the Novella that Arrival is Based on!

The Low Maintenance Book Club is going to be reading the novella Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang, which won the Nebula Awards’ Best Novella in 1999.  More famously this is the story that the recent movie Arrival is based on!

You can find several copies of the short story collection that contains this story at our libraries, including an e-book version.  Durham County Library also has a copy.

When: February 21st at 6:00pm

Where: The Edge Workshop Room  on the first floor of Bostock

How: Registering in advance helps us know how many to expect.

Light refreshments will be served.

If you have any questions, you can contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy at aah39@duke.edu

What to Read this Month: January 2017

I hope you’re settling in to the new semester.   Why not pick up something new to read? Check out our New and Noteworthy and Current Literature collections.


The Sobbing School by Joshua Bennett is a “sharp and scintillating” (Publishers Weekly) debut collection of poetry, selected by Eugene Gloria as a winner of the National Poetry Series, Joshua Bennett’s mesmerizing debut collection of poetry, presents songs for the living and the dead that destabilize and de-familiarize representations of black history and contemporary black experience.  What animates these poems is a desire to assert life, and interiority , where there is said to be none.  Figures as widely divergent as Bobby Brown, Martin Heidegger, and the 19th-century performance artist Henry Box Brown, as well as Bennett’s own family and childhood best friends, appear and are placed in conversation.


I think many of us are still feeling the pain of losing Carrie Fisher.  One way to cope may be to check out her new The Princess Diarist.  When Carrie Fisher recently discovered the journals she kept during the filming of the first Star Wars movie, she was astonished to see what they had preserved–plaintive love poems, unbridled musings with youthful naivete, and a vulnerability that she barely recognized.  With these excerpts from her handwritten notebooks, this is Fisher’s intimate and revealing recollection of what happened on one of the most famous film sets of all time–and what developed behind the scenes. Fisher also ponders the joys and insanity of celebrity, and the absurdity of a life spawned by Hollywood royalty, only to be surpassed by her own outer-space royalty.  If you enjoy this read, I’d highly recommend reading the rest of her writings.


In Entanglement: The Secret Lives of Hair, Emma Tarlo travels the globe, tracking the movement of hair across India, Myanmar, China, Africa, the United States, Britain and Europe, where she meets people whose livelihoods depend on it. Viewed from inside Chinese wig factories, Hindu temples and the villages of Myanmar, or from Afro hair fairs, Jewish wig parlours, fashion salons and hair loss clinics in Britain and the United States, hair is oddly revealing of the lives of all it touches.  You can read reviews here and here.

 


 In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer?: The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence by George Zarkadakis explores one of humankind’s oldest love-hate relationships–our ties with artificial intelligence, or AI.  It traces AI’s origins in ancient myth, through literary classics like Frankenstein, to today’s sci-fi blockbusters, arguing that a fascination with AI is hardwired into the human psyche. Zarkadakis explains AI’s history, technology, and potential; its manifestations in intelligent machines; its connections to neurology and consciousness, as well as–perhaps most tellingly–what AI reveals about us as human beings.


Unspeakable Things by Kathleen Spivack is a strange, haunting novel about survival and love in all its forms; about sexual awakenings and dark secrets; about European refugee intellectuals who have fled Hitler’s armies with their dreams intact and who have come to an elusive new (American) “can do, will do” world they cannot seem to find. A novel steeped in surreal storytelling and beautiful music that transports its half-broken souls–and us–to another realm of the senses.  To find out more read a Washington Times review, a Paste Magazine review, and a Jewish Book Council review.

“Shaping Your Professional Identity Online” RCR Graduate Student Workshop

Shaping Your Professional Identity Online

The digital world allows us to connect in ever increasing ways.  As an early career scholar these connections can provide you with both opportunities and challenges.  This workshop is designed to help you consider the best ways to navigate how you want to present yourself online.  We will discuss topics such as what to share and how to share, the ethical issues involved, and how to maintain the right balance of privacy.  We will also examine some steps you can take, such as creating a profile on Google Scholar, creating a Google alert for your name, creating an ORCID ID, interacting professionally on Twitter, and creating an online portfolio. If you have a laptop, you may want to bring it.  You will receive RCR credit for attending.

Date: Thursday, February 2, 2017

Time: 2:00pm – 4:00pm

Location: Bostock 127 (The Edge Workshop Room)

Campus: West Campus

Registration link: https://duke.libcal.com/event/3110663

If you have questions, please contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy (aah39@duke.edu)

 

Happy Birthday, Jane!

jane_austen_sketch_1050x700 Jane Austen, as sketched by her sister, Cassandra

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today is Jane Austen’s 241st birthday!  Since the film Love and Friendship came out this year (do yourself a favor and watch it ASAP), I think it would be appropriate to celebrate this year by reading some of her juvenilia and less known works.

Lady Susan (the story that the film Love and Friendship is based on)

Love & friendship: in which Jane Austen’s Lady Susan Vernon is entirely vindicated : concerning the beautiful Lady Susan Vernon, her cunning daughter & the strange antagonism of the DeCourcy family by Whit Stillman (includes Jane Austen’s novella)

Love and Freindship [sic], and Other Early Works (much of her juvenilia can be found here)

The Watsons

Fragment of a novel written by Jane Austen, January-March 1817; now first printed from the manuscript.

Northanger Abbey ; Lady Susan ; The Watsons ; Sanditon

Jane Austen’s “Sir Charles Grandison”

Catharine and Other Writings

The History of England: From the Reign of Henry the 4th to the Death of Charles the 1st (a very amusing early work)

Oh and if the image at the beginning of this post made you curious about Jane’s relationship with Cassandra, you might want to check out some of the letters.

 

What to Read this Month: December 2016

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It’s one of my favorite times of the year!  Yes, that’s right it’s “year’s best books” season.  Many places, including the NYT, Washington Post, NPR, Vulture, and many more.

I’m happy to say that we have many of these books in our New and Noteworthy and Current Literature collections, though I’ll warn you now that you may have to get on the waiting list for some titles!  Here are a selection.


undergroundThe Underground Railroad: A Novel by Colson Whitehead (appears on almost every list).  A magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave’s adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey–hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre-Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day.

 


privatecitizensPrivate Citizens by Tony Tulathimutte.  This book is number three on Vulture’s list: “It’s a rare and bracing thing to see a debut novelist confident enough to pour acid on an entire system (in this case, the one we call meritocracy). The millennials have teeth.” The novel’s four whip-smart narrators–idealistic Cory, Internet-lurking Will, awkward Henrik, and vicious Linda–are torn between fixing the world and cannibalizing it. In boisterous prose that ricochets between humor and pain, the four estranged friends stagger through the Bay Area’s maze of tech startups, protestors, gentrifiers, karaoke bars, house parties, and cultish self-help seminars, washing up in each other’s lives once again.


thewonderAs described on the NPR list, “The Wonder: A Novel by Emma Donoghue is just that: ‘a wonder’ of a story about religious delusion and self-denial set in 19th-century Ireland.” Written with all the propulsive tension that made Room a huge bestseller, THE WONDER works beautifully on many levels–a tale of two strangers who transform each other’s lives, a powerful psychological thriller, and a story of love pitted against evil.

 


darkroomIn the Darkroom by Susan Faludi is featured on NYT’s list: “When Faludi learned that her estranged and elderly father had undergone gender reassignment surgery, in 2004, it marked the resumption of a difficult relationship. Her father was violent and full of contradictions: a Hungarian Holocaust survivor and Leni Riefenstahl fanatic, he stabbed a man her mother was seeing and used the incident to avoid paying alimony. In this rich, arresting and ultimately generous memoir, Faludi — long known for her feminist journalism — tries to reconcile Steven, the overbearing patriarch her father once was, with Stefánie, the old woman she became.”


secondhandThe Washington Post includes Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets: by  Svetlana Alexievich: “Alexievich turns on a tape recorder and listens to average Russians describing their lives amid the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Alexievich, who was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in literature, has produced one of the most vivid and incandescent accounts yet attempted of this society caught in the throes of change.  It is the story of what one character aptly describes as ‘our lost generation — a communist upbringing and capitalist life.'”

 


smallbombsThe Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan appears on both the lists of Vulture and NYT.   It is an expansive and deeply humane novel that is at once groundbreaking in its empathy, dazzling in its acuity, and ambitious in scope.  When brothers Tushar and Nakul Khurana, two Delhi schoolboys, pick up their family’s television set at a repair shop with their friend Mansoor Ahmed one day in 1996, disaster strikes without warning. A bomb–one of the many “small” bombs that go off seemingly unheralded across the world–detonates in the Delhi marketplace, instantly claiming the lives of the Khurana boys, to the devastation of their parents. Mansoor survives, bearing the physical and psychological effects of the bomb.


Since it’s the season of giving, here are two other things you might find useful when selecting a good read.  The Guardian does a slightly different kind of end of year roundup.  They have various writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Julian Barnes select their favorite reads of the year.  Also, NPR has a really fun Book Concierge that lets you use filters to explore titles recommended by their staff and critics.

Did Someone Say Puppies? Puppies in Perkins 2016!

cute_puppy-1920x1200-e1459371734960If your growing to-do list has you overwhelmed..

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Just wake me up when it’s over!

Or finals have you feeling a little down…

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I shouldn’t have online-shopped during lecture.

Good News! It’s time for a study bark! I mean, break.

Wednesday, December 14, Puppies in Perkins will be back! Puppies, wagging tails, and snuggles for all. From 12 pm-3 pm in Perkins 217 therapy dogs will be in the library to soothe all your finals woes and give you the cuddles you so richly deserve. There will also be fun, finals-themed button-making!  Come take a study break and meet and greet the cutest pups on campus!

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Watch out finals week, here I come!

Conquer Finals with the Long Night Against Procrastination

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“Procrastination is something best put off until tomorrow.” –Gerald Vaughan

What: Writing and research help, finals prep, de-stressing, & snacks!
Where: The Edge
When: Tuesday, December 6, 7:00-11:00 pm

T-minus two weeks until finals are upon us! Don’t let final papers, presentations, and exams sneak up on you. Duke University’s Long Night Against Procrastination is a night set apart for maximum productivity–an evening you can devote to studying, snacks, and staying on stop of everything on your to-do list.

Staff from the Libraries, the TWP Writing Studio, and the Academic Resource Center will all be on hand to help with research and writing assistance. Whether it’s finding that last source for your research paper or polishing up your final essay, the LNAP staff can help you tackle those assignments that have you feeling stuck. You can even track your study progress and pick up free study materials throughout the evening. Also, tutors for Organic Chemistry 1 and 2 will be on hand from 8:00-11:-00 pm!

There will also be stress-relieving activities including coloring, button-making, and relaxation stations  for when you need a short brain break. And, of course, there will be plenty of snacks and coffee to feed your productivity. Please help us make the event green by bringing your own coffee mugs and water bottles. Come out for a Long Night Against Procrastination to tackle your problem sets, papers, and study sessions and conquer your finals week!

Sponsored by Duke University Libraries, the TWP Writing Studio, the Academic Resource Center, and the Duke Student Wellness Center

Refreshments provided by Saladelia, Pepsi, Duke University Campus Club, and Friends of the Duke University Libraries

What to Read this Month: November 2016

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Want to find a good read for the Thanksgiving holiday? Check out our New and Noteworthy and Current Literature collections. Here are a couple of suggestions that might be of interest.


seaAll at Sea: A Memoir by Decca Aitkenhead tells the story of love and loss, of how one couple changed each other’s life, and of what a sudden death can do to the people who survive.  On a hot, still morning on a beautiful beach in Jamaica, Decca Aitkenhead’s life changed forever. Her four-year-old son was paddling peacefully at the water’s edge when a wave pulled him out to sea. Her partner, Tony, swam out and saved their son’s life–then drowned before her eyes. Here is a great review of the book and a little discussion of her writing process.

 


refugeesCity of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World’s Largest Refugee Camp by Ben Rawlence. Rawlence interweaves the stories of nine individuals to show what life is like in the camp and to sketch the wider political forces that keep the refugees trapped there. Rawlence combines intimate storytelling with broad socio-political investigative journalism, doing for Dadaab what Katherinee Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers did for the Mumbai slums. Lucid, vivid and illuminating, City of Thorns is an urgent human story with deep international repercussions, brought to life through the people who call Dadaab home.


microbesI Contain Multitudes: The Microbes within Us and a Grander View of Life by Ed Yong examines one of the most significant revolution in biology since Darwin–a “microbe’s-eye view” of the world that reveals a marvelous, radically reconceived picture of life on earth.  Ed Yong takes us on a grand tour through our microbial partners, and introduces us to the scientists on the front lines of discovery. Look here and here for good reviews.

 


citiesCities I’ve Never Lived In: Stories by Sara Majka. Fearlessly riding the line between imagination and experience, fact and fiction, the stories in this debut collection give intimate glimpses of a young New England woman whose life must begin afresh after divorce. A book that upends our ideas of love and belonging, and which asks how much of ourselves we leave behind with each departure we make, these fourteen stories orbit the dreams of a narrator who turns to narrative as a means of working through the world and of understanding herself.  To learn more about this collection check out these two reviews.


gaslightBy Gaslight by Steven Price.  As described by Jean Zimmerman from NPR.org, “By Gaslight can be seen as Arthur Conan Doyle by way of Dickens by way of Faulkner . . . Intense, London-centric, threaded through with a melancholy brilliance, it is an extravagant novel that takes inspiration from the classics and yet remains wholly itself.”

What to Read this Month: October 2016

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As always we’re highlighting our New and Noteworthy and Current Literature collections.  Since we’re getting closer to the November 8th election, this month’s theme is elections and politics!


vote2 Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America by Ari Berman.  Berman brings the struggle over voting rights to life through meticulous archival research, in-depth interviews with major figures in the debate, and incisive on-the-ground reporting. In vivid prose, he takes the reader from the demonstrations of the civil rights era to the halls of Congress to the chambers of the Supreme Court.

 

 


uninformed Uninformed: Why People Know So Little about Politics and What We Can Do about It by Arthur Lupia. Citizens sometimes lack the knowledge that they need to make competent political choices, and it is undeniable that greater knowledge can improve decision making. But we need to understand that voters either don’t care about or pay attention to much of the information that experts think is important. Uninformed provides the keys to improving political knowledge and civic competence: understanding what information is important to others and knowing how to best convey it to them.

 


clinton Who is Hillary Clinton?: Two Decades of Answers from the Left, edited by Richard Kreitner.  Contributors to this anthology include David Corn, Erica Jong, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Tomasky, William Greider, Ari Berman, Barbara Ehrenreich, Chris Hayes, Jessica Valenti, Richard Kim, Joan Walsh, Jamelle Bouie, Doug Henwood, Heather Digby Parton, Michelle Goldberg, and many more.

 

 


trumpTrump and Me by Mark Singer.   Recounts the Singer’s experience writing a profile about Trump for the New Yorker in 1996.

 

 

 

 


obama The Obama Doctrine: American Grand Strategy Today by Colin Dueck.  The Obama Doctrine not only provides a sharp appraisal of foreign policy in the Obama era; it lays out an alternative approach to marshaling American power that will help shape the foreign policy debate in the run-up to the 2016 elections.

 

 


womenvoteYour Voice Your Vote: The Savvy Woman’s Guide to Power, Politics, and the Change We Need by Martha Burk.  This book is a manifesto for this year’s woman voter and for male voters who care about the women in their lives. Martha Burk empowers the reader to cut through the double talk, irrelevancies, and false promises, and focuses directly on what’s at stake for women not only in the 2016 election, but also in the years beyond. Where women stand, what women think, and what we need — with tough questions for candidates to hold their feet to the fire.

 


If you’re not registered to vote, check out Duke’s Student Affairs voter registration page.

Finally, the Libraries will be hosting an informal watch party in the Lilly Training Room (Room 103) for each televised debate. We will also plan to host an interesting discussion by two faculty experts on Wednesday October 19th. Watch out for further information!

Low Maintenance Book Club October meeting

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The Low Maintenance Book Club is meeting again in October!  This book club aims to provide space for members of the Duke community to connect over reading. Realizing how busy people are (and how much reading you probably have to do for classwork and research), we will focus on quick reads. We will read texts like short stories, graphic novels, interesting short essays, poetry, etc.

This month we will be reading several stories from James Tiptree Jr.’s Her Smoke Rose Up Forever.  We will have one copy on reserve at the Perkins Library Service desk.  It can be checked out for 72 hours.  Tiptree’s fiction reflects the darkly complex world its author inhabited: exploring the alien among us; the unreliability of perception; love, sex, and death; and humanity’s place in a vast, cold universe.

Light refreshments will be served!

When: October 24th at 6:00 pm

Where: The Lounge @ The Edge

Stories we will discuss:

  • The Screwfly Solution
  • The Girl who was Plugged in
  • And so on and so on

Please RSVP here for planning purposes.

If you have any questions, you can contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy at aah39@duke.edu

 

2016 Banned Books Week

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Banned Books Week runs this year from September 25th through October 1st.  This year’s theme is about celebrating diversity!  If you’re interested in reading why diversity was picked this year, you might appreciate reading “Why Diverse Books are Commonly Banned,” which mentions that ” ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, has determined that 52% of the books challenged, or banned, over the past decade are from titles that are considered diverse content.”  I also appreciated this point of view from an article in Time.

If you’re interested in reading challenged books with diverse content, here is a list of titles. We of course own many of these books, including these selected titles:

You might also want to check out the 2015 list of the “most challenged” books.

 

Drama Online

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We now have access to the Core Collection of Drama Online, a resource for finding full texts of plays.  It Includes full texts of plays from across the history of the theatre, ranging from Aeschylus to the present day.  It also includes non-English-language works in translation, scholarly and critical editions, first night program texts, and critical analysis and contextual information. Critical interpretations, theatre history surveys and major reference works on authors, movements, practitioners, periods and genres are included alongside performance and practitioner texts, acting and backstage guides.

You can browse by plays, playwrights, genres, periods, context and criticism, and by theatre craft.  Advanced search options also allow you to search by type, playwrights, genre, period, theme, and setting.

Each play in the collection includes a production enquiry, which gives helpful information on who to contact to get performance rights for the play.  Many plays also include useful tools, like a Character Grid that can be used to see only the lines of a given character.

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Another great tool is the Words and Speeches tool that shows how many words and speeches are spoken in different acts of the play.

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Currently we don’t have access to all the Nick Hern plays or the videos, but it’s quite likely that our access will expand in the next year!