With over 340 new titles added to the catalogue this week it was a challenge to select a small sample, but here are some items of interest, including some award-winning fiction for great summer reading. Click on a title for more information. Use your library barcode to place a hold on items and your TWU log in to view eBooks.
THE ARTS
King diligently assembles a swath of anecdotes and evidence, coaxing lively color and fascinating detail from even the most stolid of historical facts and documents. The book serves as an entertaining if broad account of a revolutionary transformation in vision-not least of all through art.
A history of Vancouver’s Commodore Ballroom, from when it was built in 1930 through to it becoming one of the best-known music venues in Canada.
BUSINESS
If you think today’s economy is scary, check out the Jazz Age horrors chronicled in this financial history of the interwar years and the central bankers who blighted them. Ahamed, an investment manager, surveys the economic upheavals of the 1920s and 1930s, when crushing war debts and reparations from WWI sparked hyperinflation in Germany and a host of lesser eruptions, all of it climaxing in the American stock market crash and the Great Depression.
ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES
A book that, “anyone interested in natural history, botany, protecting nature, or Native American culture will love,” (Library Journal) ,Braiding Sweetgrass is poised to be a classic of nature writing.
The ultimate must-have guide for identifying migrant raptors, Hawks at a Distance is the first volume to focus on distant raptors as they are truly seen in the field.
From beetles to bald eagles, ravens to wolves, Heinrich reveals the fascinating and mostly hidden post-death world that occurs around us constantly, while examining the ancient and important role we humans, too, play as scavengers, connecting death to life.
The Road is How re-enchants our modern map of desire, spirit and nature by taking us on a three-day walk down an ordinary prairie road. Detouring along rail beds, over hills and into fields, sitting next to sloughs, waiting for a sparrow to sing to the dusk a second time, we enter a territory where imagination and experience carry us beyond the history of our transgressions to the soul’s contact with a broken land.
The shorebird guide /Michael O’Brien, Richard Crossley, Kevin Karlson ; photographs by Richard Crossley … [et al.] ; silhouettes by Michael O’Brien ; maps by Kenn Kaufman.
Join the experts in birding by impression, a revolutionary approach to bird identification. Now birders at all levels can learn how to identify shorebirds quickly and simply.
Enlisting the help of a Metis Elder, Trevor Herriot revisits the history of one corner of the Great Plains. This book’s lyrical blend of personal narrative, prairie history, imagery, and argument begins with the cause of protecting native grassland on community pastures. With Indigenous and settler people alienated from one another and from the grassland itself, hope and courage are in short supply. This book offers both by proposing an atonement that could again bring people and prairie together.
Renowned biologist Daniel Chamovitz presents an intriguing and scrupulous look at how plants themselves experience the world–from the colors they see to the schedules they keep. Highlighting the latest research in genetics and more, he takes us into the inner lives of plants and draws parallels with the human senses to reveal that we have much more in common with sunflowers and oak trees than we may realize.
HISTORY
A major work of history that for the first time reveals the violence and terror at the heart of Britain’s civilizing mission in Kenya
LITERATURE
The American epic of two boy geniuses named Joe Kavalier and Sammy Clay. is a triumph of originality, imagination, and storytelling, an exuberant, irresistible novel that begins in New York City in 1939. A young escape artist and budding magician named Joe Kavalier arrives on the doorstep of his cousin, Sammy Clay. From the shared fears, dreams, and desires of two teenage boys, they spin comic book tales of the heroic, fascist-fighting Escapist and the beautiful, mysterious Luna Moth, otherworldly mistress of the night. Climbing from the streets of Brooklyn to the top of the Empire State Building, Joe and Sammy carve out lives, and careers, as vivid as cyan and magenta ink.
On the 50th anniversary of his death, C.S. Lewis was memorialized in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey. In addition, Oxford and Cambridge Universities, where he taught, also held commemorations. This volumes gathers together addresses from those events. Contributors include: Rowan Williams, Alister McGrath, Malcolm Guite, William Lane Craig, Helen Cooper, and Walter Hooper.
Master storyteller Madeleine Thien takes us inside an extended family in China, showing us the lives of two successive generations–those who lived through Mao’s Cultural Revolution and their children, who became the students protesting in Tiananmen Square.
In Empire Falls Richard Russo delves deep into the blue-collar heart of America in a work that overflows with hilarity, heartache, and grace.
Norman Mailer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning and unforgettable classic about convicted killer Gary Gilmore. Mailer tells not only Gilmore’s story, but those of the men and women caught in the web of his life and drawn into his procession toward the firing squad. All with implacable authority, steely compassion, and a restraint that evokes the parched landscape and stern theology of Gilmore’s Utah. THE EXECUTIONER’S SONG is a trip down the wrong side of the tracks to the deepest source of American loneliness and violence. It is a towering achievement-impossible to put down, impossible to forget.
Andre Alexis’s contemporary take on the apologue offers an utterly compelling and affecting look at the beauty and perils of human consciousness. By turns meditative and devastating, charming and strange, Fifteen Dogs shows you can teach an old genre new tricks.
“If you manage to read only a few good novels a year, make this one of them.”
Robert Olen Butler’s lyrical and poignant collection of stories about the aftermath of the Vietnam War and its impact on the Vietnamese was acclaimed by critics across the nation and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993.
Berlin, 1939. The Hot-Time Swingers, a popular German American jazz band, have been forbidden to play live because the Nazis have banned their ‘degenerate music.’ After escaping to Paris, where they meet Louis Armstrong, the band’s brilliant young trumpet-player, Hieronymus Falk, is arrested in a café by the Gestapo. It is June 1940. He is never heard from again. Berlin, 1992. Falk, now a jazz legend, is the subject of a celebratory documentary. Two of the original Hot-Time Swingers American band members, Sid Griffiths and Chip Jones, are invited to attend the film’s premier in Berlin. As they return to the landscape of their past friendships, rivalries, loves and betrayals, Sid, the only witness to Falk’s disappearance who has always refused to speak about what happened, is forced to break his silence.
Lynn Coady gives us eight unforgettable new stories, each one of them grabbing our attention from the first line and resonating long after the last. She is quite possibly the writer who best captures what it is to be human at this particular moment in our history
A collection of short stories looking at the bizarre, the tragi-comic and the unbelievable elements that run through our lives. Each story examines, from a different angle, the difficult business of love, loyalty and memory. With elegance and restraint, in spare language, these narratives run the gamut from realistic to uncanny, from ordinary epiphanies to extremities of experience.
America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished even his most virulent accuser.
Frank Bascombe, in the aftermath of his divorce and the ruin of his career, has entered an “Existence Period,” selling real estate in Haddam, New Jersey, and mastering the high-wire act of normalcy. But over one Fourth of July weekend, Frank is called into sudden, bewildering engagement with life.Independence Day is a moving, peerlessly funny odyssey through America and through the layered consciousness of one of its most compelling literary incarnations, conducted by a novelist of astonishing empathy and perception.
The lake /Perrine Leblanc ; translated by Lazer Lederhendler.
A mesmerizing story about the disappearance of three young women and a deeply disturbing portrait of a small town gone bad.
An astonishing meditation on America today and filled with brilliant insights, The Lay of the Land is a magnificent achievement from one of the most celebrated chroniclers of our time.
A love story, an adventure, and an epic of the frontier, Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize— winning classic, is the grandest novel ever written about the last defiant wilderness of America. Richly authentic, beautifully written, always dramatic, Lonesome Dove is a book to make us laugh, weep, dream, and remember.
From Louisa May Alcott’s beloved classic Little Women, Geraldine Brooks has animated the character of the absent father, March, and crafted a story “filled with the ache of love and marriage and with the power of war upon the mind and heart of one unforgettable man” Brooks follows March as he leaves behind his family to aid the Union cause in the Civil War. His experiences will utterly change his marriage and challenge his most ardently held beliefs.
Often the novel reads like an anthropological report filtered through a literary lens; the details of Martin’s life and crimes are stacked as if documenting a human card tower barely capable of remaining upright. This is an important and brilliantly unconventional work, offering a glimpse into a mind few can ever, or would ever want to, fully understand. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic. Middlesex is the winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Winner of the pulitzer prize for fiction. An epic novel and a thrilling literary discovery, The Orphan Master’s Son follows a young man’s journey through the icy waters, dark tunnels, and eerie spy chambers of the world’s most mysterious dictatorship, North Korea.
Set in the West Indies in the period following World War II, The Polished Hoe unravels over the course of twenty-four hours but spans the collective experience of a society characterized by slavery.
The searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece.
Beautifully written and startlingly original, Through Black Spruce takes the considerable talents of Canadian novelist Joseph Boyden to new and exciting heights. This is the story of two immensely compelling characters: Will Bird, a legendary Cree bush pilot who lies comatose in a remote Ontario hospital; and Annie Bird, Will’s niece, a beautiful loner and trapper who has come to sit beside her uncle’s bed. From the rugged Canadian wilderness to the drug-fueled glamour of the Manhattan club scene, this is thrilling, atmospheric storytelling at its finest.
On his deathbed, surrounded by his family, George Washington Crosby’s thoughts drift back to his childhood and the father who abandoned him when he was twelve.
A series of challenging and provocative critical insights into a wide range of travel narratives written in English after the Second World War.
With twenty-one kids, the Cardinal family is a force of nature. And now, after not being in the same room for decades, they’re congregating to celebrate their father, a prospector who discovered the zinc mine their now-deserted hometown in northern Quebec was built around. But as the siblings tell the tales of their feral childhood, we discover that Angele, the only Cardinal with a penchant for happiness, has gone missing – although everyone has pretended not to notice for years.
In a finely woven series of flashbacks and correspondence, Lev Termen, the Russian scientist, inventor, and spy, tells the story of his life to his “one true love,” Clara Rockmore, the finest theremin player in the world. Us Conductors is steeped in beauty, wonder, and looping heartbreak, a sublime debut that inhabits the idea of invention on every level.
Bennie is an aging former punk rocker and record executive ; Sasha – the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Here Jennifer Egan brilliantly reveals their pasts, along with the inner lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs. With music pulsing on every page, A Visit from the Goon Squad is a startling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption.
POLITICAL STUDIESThis book focuses on the preparations made by President Bush’s transition team as well as those by Senators Obama and McCain as one administration exited and the other entered the White House. Using this recent transition as a lens through which to examine the presidential transition process, Kumar simultaneously outlines the congressional legislation that paved the way for this distinctive transition and interweaves comparative examples from previous administrative transitions going back to Truman-to-Eisenhower.
PSYCHOLOGYPart memoir, part history, and beautifully written, Inside The Mental offers an episodic journey into the stigma, horror, and redemption that she found within the institution’s walls. Now in her nineties, Parley looks back at the emerging use of group therapy, the advent of patients’ rights, evolving ethics in psychiatry, and the amazing cast of characters she met there. She also reveals her role in groundbreaking experiments with LSD, pioneered by the world’s leading researchers at “The Mental” to treat addiction and mental illness.
RELIGIOUS STUDIES
Presents Hebrew and Aramaic transcriptions of approximately 450 non-biblical texts from Qumran, arranged according to the sequential number of the composition and the Qumran Cave. The Handbook s texts, derived from the works of competent and accomplished Qumran scholars, represent significant contributions to Qumran studies.Timothy Keller shows how God calls on each of us to express meaning and purpose through our work and careers.
twenty-two of Aune’s essays focusing on a variety of issues in the interpretation of the Gospels, Gospel traditions, Paul and the Pauline letters.
Ruth Meyers argues that a dynamic relationship exists between worship and mission — that gathering as God’s people includes at its heart our being sent out into the world in God’s name.
SCIENCES
Part philosophical whodunit, part bold scientific conjecture, this landmark work enlarges themes that have sustained Dennett’s legendary career at the forefront of philosophical thought. Dennett explains that a crucial shift occurred when humans developed the ability to share memes, or ways of doing things not based in genetic instinct. Language, itself composed of memes, turbocharged this interplay. The result, a mind that not only perceives and controls but can create and comprehend, was thus largely shaped by the process of cultural evolution .
Drawing on a treasure trove of new scientific knowledge, Nick Lane expertly reconstructs evolution’s history by describing its ten greatest inventions–from sex and warmth to death–resulting in a stunning account of nature’s ingenuity.
Refashioning the story of human evolution, Wilson draws on his remarkable knowledge of biology and social behavior to demonstrate that group selection, not kin selection, is the premier driving force of human evolution.
This story about the workings of the human mind is explored through the personalities of two fascinating individuals so fundamentally different from each other that they seem unlikely friends or colleagues. In the process they may well have changed, for good, mankind’s view of its own mind.
SOCIAL SCIENCESTheNew York Times bestselling memoir of a woman whose curiosity led her to the world’s most remote places and then into fifteen months of captivity: “Exquisitely told…A young woman’s harrowing coming-of-age story and an extraordinary narrative of forgiveness and spiritual triumph”
THEATREA timeless analysis of theatre from the most influential stage director of the twentieth century.As relevant as when it was first published in 1968, groundbreaking director and cofounder of the Royal Shakespeare Company Peter Brook draws on a life in love with the stage to explore the issues facing a theatrical performance—of any scale.
Florence James revolutionized American theatre before being struck down by a McCarthyist witch hunt and emigrating to Canada. Fists upon a Star is James’s answer to that question that destroyed so many lives in the United States of America: “Are you now, or have you ever been…?”
The call from the East [electronic resource]: sketches from the history of the Irish mission to Machuria, 1869-1919 /by F.W.S. O’Neill.
In this landmark work, Paul Kurtz examines the reasons why people accept supernatural and paranormal belief systems in spite of substantial evidence to the contrary. According to Kurtz, it is because there is within the human species a deeply rooted tendency toward magical thinking—the “transcendental temptation”—which undermines critical judgment and paves the way for willful beliefs. Kurtz explores in detail the three major monotheistic religions
