Previews, Reviews, and Collection Development
by Scott Vieira Bering, Jesse. Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?: And Other Reflections on Being Human. Scientific American, dist. by W.H. Freeman. Jul. 2012. c.320p. index.ISBN 9780374532925. pap. $16. PSYCH Drawn from his Scientific American blog, Bering in Mind, and Slate, this collection of essays by columnist and psychologist Bering (director, Inst. of [...]
By Kristi Chadwick, Director, Emily Williston Memorial Library, Easthampton, MA In this Article Mystery Matchup Clues to the Mysteries Judging from current trends in mysteries and suspense, no place in the world is safe from crime. The best-selling appeal of Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” series remains strong with American readers, and as those fans search for [...]
By Jeanne Bogino, New Lebanon Lib., NY Our culture is filled with tales of the walking dead. They’re in our mythology. They’re in our religions. They’re in our comic books. We fear them, we love them, we’re just plain obsessed with them. But we know the zombie apocalypse is just a fairy tale. We know [...]
Technical difficulties involving the loss of an appendix—of the anatomic, not bibliographic kind—preoccupied your reviewer for much of the past few weeks. Once the meds wore off, the common theme in all this month’s memoirs became clear: growing up. Some of this month’s memoirists accomplished that task much earlier in life than others, but they [...]
It should have come as no surprise that Time magazine’s choice for its 2011 Person of the Year was “The Protestor.” From Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt during the Arab Spring and cold Wisconsin in February and March to autumn’s Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement in New York City and beyond, citizens took to the streets worldwide in 2011 to make their voices heard.
For decades, LJ has listed forthcoming first novels for the spring/summer and fall/winter seasons. Now, we’re doing something different. With so many books available, we want to give readers some direction with this annotated list of 80 especially promising debuts appearing February 1–August 31, 2012. We’ve drawn on publisher excitement, the author’s previous nonfiction or [...]
Every day around 3:04 p.m., my Whitmanesque barbaric yawp degrades into a barbaric yawn—I’m freaking tired! And when fetching a joltin’ cuppa joe, I try to take along a book for an added shot of adrenaline. That way I’m better equipped to figure out life’s mysteries, such as: What’s the difference between an aardvark and [...]
When Uncle Scrooge McDuck finds Duckburg too smoggy and noisy, thanks to industries he established himself, he purchases a huge chunk of unspoiled countryside and decamps with his nephews for his new lake-bedecked property. Then, being the wealthy ol’ moneybags Scrooge that he is, he considers exploiting the resources of this paradise for even more [...]
PLA has been my favorite library conference since I attended my first in 2010. I relished the show’s focus—the granularity and prescriptiveness of its sessions; the moxie and optimism of its presenters. I bonded with a group of Connecticut librarians I now call friends, and I met a future Multnomah County mover who would become my surrogate mother, all while soaking up the weirdy beardy energizing Zen of Portland, our host city.
Aigner, Geoff. Leadership Beyond Good Intentions: What It Takes To Really Make a Difference. Allen & Unwin, dist. by Trafalgar Square. Apr. 2012. c.216p. bibliog. ISBN 9781742373942. pap. $19.95. BUS Leadership trainer Aigner gears this book primarily toward the skilled, willing, and dedicated workers who want to change the world (or at least part of [...]
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