It’s all treats and no tricks at the Cofrin Library this October. The Library will be holding a Book Salespalooza from Friday (Oct. 12) to Wednesday (Oct. 17). They are cleaning out their back room and offering everyone a great selection of new and used books. There will be paperbacks, non-fiction, children’s books, textbooks, and much more… and the best part is everything is only $1 per book. Sale carts will be located on the Plaza Level of the Cofrin Library. “Shop early and often for the best selection! Even if you can’t make it until half-way through, you’re bound to find a gem!” For more information, contact Leah Liebergen at liebergl@uwgb.edu.
Cofrin Library News
Archive for the ‘Books’ Category
Cofrin Library invites you to Book Salespalooza
Monday, October 8th, 2012Reference Books – New 7-Day Checkout!
Thursday, September 6th, 2012New this semester: Items in our reference collection – those are the encyclopedias, dictionaries, and handbooks on the 3rd floor – are now available for a 7-day checkout checkout to UWGB students, faculty, and staff. The books provide introductions to topics, background information, definitions, facts, figures, and statistics.
Popular Reading Suggestion Box
Thursday, June 14th, 2012
What do you like to read? Let us know by stopping by the Cofrin Library’s 4th floor popular reading area. Not only is it stocked with new purchases, we’ve recently installed a suggestion box so you can help us grow the collection.
New Children’s Books
Thursday, May 31st, 2012Our IMC Reading collection is always growing! Check out the new titles below, located on the new books shelves on the library’s 3rd floor, or browse the rest of the collection on the 4th floor.
Tashi and the Tibetan Flower Cure
Tashi loves listening to Popola, her grandfather, sing Tibetan chants to the click, click of his prayer beads. She also loves hearing Popola s stories about the village in Tibet where he grew up. But recently Popola has been sick, and Tashi is worried. One of the stories Tashi remembers tells how people in Popola s village use flowers to help themselves recover from illnesses. Will this healing tradition work in the United States, so far from Popola s village? Determined to help Popola get better, Tashi recruits family, friends, and neighbors in a grand effort to find out. Lyrically told and illustrated with impressionistic paintings, Tashi and the Tibetan Flower Cure shines a tender light on the universal bond between grandchild and grandparent. Readers of all ages are sure to be inspired by the gentle power of this story and its spirit of compassion and community. (description from publisher)
Guacamole
Following on the success of Sopa de frijoles / Bean Soup and Arroz con leche / Rice Pudding is Jorge Argueta’s third book in our bilingual cooking poem series — Guacamole — with very cute, imaginative illustrations by Margarita Sada.
Guacamole originated in Mexico with the Aztecs and has long been popular in North America, especially in recent years due to the many health benefits of avocados. This version of the recipe is easy to make, calling for just avocados, limes, cilantro and salt. A little girl chef dons her apron, singing and dancing around the kitchen as she shows us what to do. Argueta’s gift in seeing beauty, magic and fun in everything around him makes this book a treasure — avocados are like green precious stones, salt falls like rain, cilantro looks like a little tree and the spoon that scoops the avocado from its skin is like an excavating tractor.
As in the previous cooking poems, Guacamole conveys the fun and pleasure of making something delicious and healthy to eat for people you really love. A great book for families to enjoy together. (description from publisher)
Only One Year
Although she sometimes finds him troublesome, fourth-grader Sharon can’t bear the idea that her two-year-old brother, Di Di, will spend a whole school year with relatives in China while she and her first-grade sister, Mary, go to school and her parents work. Time passes faster than she expects, as she and Mary forge a new relationship by building a dollhouse and playing school after homework is done. Di Di returns in the summer, and after a period of readjustment fits back into the family. Soon he’s off to preschool himself. While it is not atypical for immigrant families to send children to relatives, it is an unusual subject for a chapter book. The first-person narrative opens up Sharon’s conflicted feelings, and it is clear that what is best for Di Di is not easy for anyone, including her parents. Realistically, the fitting-back-in period is even more difficult than the absence. Supportive black-and-white illustrations and a glossary/pronunciation guide for the occasional Chinese words and phrases complete the appealing package of this gentle family story. Grades 2-4. –Kathleen Isaacs (description from Booklist: http://www.booklistonline.com)
Con el sol en los ojos (With the Sun in My Eyes)
In this charming book of short poems in Spanish and English, a young boy and girl describe their world and their day-to-day experiences — the boy’s street is like the trunk of an almond tree and the newborn chicks are like tiny walking suns. The girl loves her dog Oliver, the wind hitting her in the face and laughter “that explodes for no reason.” But the children also ponder mysteries such as the loud silence the boy hears inside himself when he goes for a walk alone and the vast beauty of the sky with its clouds and constellations.
Once again Jorge Lujan brings young readers a lyrical and joyful collection of poems. Morteza Zahedi’s powerful illustrations in densely saturated colors perfectly complement the poems’ subtle explorations. (description from publisher)
New Books
Friday, May 11th, 2012Check out our selection of new books- 3rd floor Cofrin Library.
Why Americans Hate the Media and How It Matters
P95.82 .U6 L33 2011
As recently as the early 1970s, the news media was one of the most respected institutions in the United States. Yet by the 1990s, this trust had all but evaporated. Why has confidence in the press declined so dramatically over the past 40 years? And has this change shaped the public’s political behavior? This book examines waning public trust in the institutional news media within the context of the American political system and looks at how this lack of confidence has altered the ways people acquire political information and form electoral preferences.
Drawing on historical evidence, experiments, and public opinion surveys, this book shows that in a world of endless news sources, citizens’ trust in institutional media is more important than ever before. (description from publisher)
Pop Music Pop Culture
ML3470 .R64 2011
What is happening to pop music and pop culture? Synthesizers, samplers and MDI systems have allowed anyone with basic computing skills to make music. Exchange is now automatic and weightless with the result that the High Street record store is dying. MySpace, Twitter and You Tubeare now more important publicity venues for new bands than the concert tour routine. Unauthorized consumption in the form of illegal downloading has created a financial crisis in the industry. The old postwar industrial planning model of pop, which centralized control in the hands of major record corporations, and divided the market into neat segments, is dissolving in front of our eyes.
This book offers readers a comprehensive guide to understanding pop music today. It provides a clear survey of the field and a description of core concepts. The main theoretical approaches to the analysis of pop are described and critically assessed. The book includes a major investigation of the revolutionary changes in the production, exchange and consumption of pop music that are currently underway.
Pop Music, Pop Culture is an accomplished, magnetically interesting guide to understanding pop music today. (description from publisher)
UN Peacekeeping in Africa
JZ4997.5 .A A34 2011
Nearly half of all UN peacekeeping missions in the post Cold War era have been in Africa, and the continent currently hosts the greatest number (and also the largest) of such missions in the world. Uniquely assessing five decades of UN peacekeeping in Africa, Adekeye Adebajo focuses on a series of questions: What accounts for the resurgence of UN peacekeeping efforts in Africa after the Cold War? What are the factors that have determined the success, or contributed to the failure, of the missions? Does the mandating of so many peacekeeping missions signify the failure of Africa s regional security organizations? And, crucially, how can a new division of labor be established between the UN and Africa s security organizations to more effectively manage conflicts on the continent?
Adebajo s historically informed approach provides an in-depth analysis of the key domestic, regional, and external factors that shaped the outcomes of fifteen UN missions, offering critical lessons for future peacekeeping efforts in Africa and beyond. (description from publisher)
Parting Ways: New Rituals & Celebrations of Life’s passing
BF789 .D4 C32 2011
Parting Ways explores the emergence of new end-of-life rituals in America that celebrate the dying and reinvent the roles of family and community at the deathbed. Denise Carson contrasts her father’s passing in the 1980s, governed by the structures of institutionalized death, with her mother’s death some two decades later. Carson’s moving account of her mother’s dying at home vividly portrays a ceremonial farewell known as a living wake, showing how it closed the gap between social and biological death while opening the door for family and friends to reminisce with her mother. Carson also investigates a variety of solutions–living funerals, oral ethical wills, and home funerals–that revise the impending death scenario. Integrating the profoundly personal with the objectively historical, Parting Ways calls for an “end of life revolution” to change the way of death in America. (description from publisher)
Oscar Wilde
PR5824 .R57 2011
‘If literature, as Oscar Wilde once claimed, is not read at all, then either his work is not literature or Ruth Robbins has proved him wrong in this wonderfully original and provocative, deeply insightful critical account and appreciation of the text of Wilde. More than merely introductory—though Robbins’ study is the single most indispensable inauguration to the Wildean oeuvre I’ve had the fortune to read—here is a radically challenging, beautifully written, and intimately perceptive reading of Wilde. Robbins’ Oscar Wilde will, I have no doubt, set the agenda for thinking about Wilde again and, what is more to the point, astutely and intelligently. As Ruth Robbins demonstrates on every page with perceptive insight, wit and aplomb, the truth is rarely pure and never simple, but, in readings such as this, as rare as they are necessary, it is the truth—the truth of Wilde and the truth that only the literary and reading can effect—which appears everywhere. As Henry David Thoreau might have observed had he had the chance to read Oscar Wilde, read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all. Oscar Wilde is one of those books.’ (Julian Wolfreys, Professor of Modern Literature and Culture, Loughborough University, author of Literature, in Theory )
New Books
Thursday, April 12th, 2012Here are just a few of our latest arrivals, see them all on the New Books shelf, Cofrin Library 3rd floor.
History of the birth control movement in America
HQ766.5.U5 E54 2011
A History of the Birth Control Movement in America tells the extraordinary story of a group of reformers dedicated to making contraception legal, accessible, and acceptable. The engrossing tale details how Margaret Sanger’s campaign beginning in 1914 to challenge anti-obscenity laws criminalizing the distribution of contraceptive information grew into one of the most far-reaching social reform movements in American history.
The book opens with a discussion of the history of birth control methods and the criminalization of contraception and abortion in the 19th century. Its core, however, is an exciting narrative of the campaign in the 20th century, vividly recalling the arrests and indictments, banned publications, imprisonments, confiscations, clinic raids, mass meetings, and courtroom dramas that publicized the cause across the nation. Attention is paid to the movement’s thorny alliances with medicine and eugenics and especially to its success in precipitating a profound shift in sexual attitudes that turned the use of contraception into an acceptable social and medical practice. Finally, the birth control movement is linked to court-won privacy protections and the present-day movement for reproductive rights. (description from publisher)
Disrupted childhoods : children of women in prison
HV8886.U5 S54 2011
Millions of children in the United States have a parent who is incarcerated and a growing number of these nurturers are mothers. Disrupted Childhoods explores the issues that arise from a mother’s confinement and provides first-person accounts of the experiences of children with mothers behind bars. Jane A. Siegel offers a perspective that recognizes differences over the long course of a family’s interaction with the criminal justice system. Presenting an unparalleled view into the children’s lives both before and after their mothers are imprisoned, this book reveals the many challenges they face from the moment such a critical caregiver is arrested to the time she returns home from prison. Based on interviews with nearly seventy youngsters and their mothers conducted at different points of their parent’s involvement in the process, the rich qualitative data of Disrupted Childhoods vividly reveals the lived experiences of prisoners’ children, telling their stories in their own words. Siegel places the mother’s incarceration in context with other aspects of the youths’ experiences, including their family life and social worlds, and provides a unique opportunity to hear the voices of a group that has been largely silent until now. Jane A. Siegel is an associate professor of criminology at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey and chair of the department of sociology, anthropology, and criminal justice. She has published numerous articles on the long-term consequences of child sexual abuse, risk factors for victimization, and the effects of parental incarceration. (description from publisher)
Rat island : predators in paradise and the world’s greatest wildlife rescue
QL83.2 .S76 2011
Rat Island rises from the icy gray waters of the Bering Sea, a mass of volcanic rock covered with tundra, midway between Alaska and Siberia. Once a remote sanctuary for enormous flocks of seabirds, the island gained a new name when shipwrecked rats colonized, savaging the nesting birds by the thousands. Now, on this and hundreds of other remote islands around the world, a massive-and massively controversial-wildlife rescue mission is under way.
Islands, making up just 3 percent of Earth’s landmass, harbor more than half of its endangered species. These fragile ecosystems, home to unique species that evolved in peaceful isolation, have been catastrophically disrupted by mainland predators-rats, cats, goats, and pigs ferried by humans to islands around the globe. To save these endangered islanders, academic ecologists have teamed up with professional hunters and semiretired poachers in a radical act of conservation now bent on annihilating the invaders. Sharpshooters are sniping at goat herds from helicopters. Biological SWAT teams are blanketing mountainous isles with rat poison. Rat Island reveals a little-known and much-debated side of today’s conservation movement, founded on a cruel-to-be-kind philosophy. (description from publisher)
Welcome to the suck : narrating the American soldier’s experience in Iraq
DS79.74 .P44 2011
Our collective memories of World War II and Vietnam have been shaped as much by memoirs, novels, and films as they have been by history books. In Welcome to the Suck, Stacey Peebles examines the growing body of contemporary war stories in prose, poetry, and film that speak to the American soldier’s experience in the Persian Gulf War and the Iraq War. Stories about war always encompass ideas about initiation, masculinity, cross-cultural encounters, and trauma. Peebles shows us how these timeless themes find new expression among a generation of soldiers who have grown up in a time when it has been more acceptable than ever before to challenge cultural and societal norms, and who now have unprecedented and immediate access to the world away from the battlefield through new media and technology. (description from publisher)
Give ‘em hell : the tumultuous years of Harry Truman’s presidency, in his own words and voice
E814 .G65 2011
The accidental presidency of Harry S. Truman, in words, photographs, and his ever-candid voice.
He was a startling contrast to Franklin Roosevelt. A farmer’s son from west Missouri, Truman didn’t chat; he talked, without art or inflection. And yet, this man of big dreams and simple phrases led the country out of war, welcomed the United Nations, and ran a cross-country campaign that changed American politics. His plain speech, first seen as a liability, became a symbol of transparency and gave him a platform to challenge his rivals-both at home and abroad-to honor their promises and commit to firm action.
Give ‘Em Hell brings the president and his era to life like no other biography. It combines the insights of noted historian Terry Golway with Truman’s own voice in audio excerpts from his most significant presidential speeches. (description from publisher)
The Library is turning 40!
Monday, February 6th, 2012
Help the Cofrin Library celebrate 40 years of service with our very first Edible Book Festival! On Monday February 27th from 12-2 PM we will host a very unusual book display on the library’s 3rd floor- all of the books will be completely edible. You can participate by entering your own book creation or by stopping by the library to fill out a ballot and taste the books. For more information or to register check out
New Books
Tuesday, November 29th, 2011Check out our selection of new books on the 3rd floor new book shelf in the Cofrin Library. Here are just a few:
Competing in tough times : business lessons from L.L. Bean, Trader Joe’s, Costco, and other world-class retailers / Barry Berman.
call number HF5429 .B449 2011
Specific, ac
tionable lessons from Aldi, Amazon.com, L.L.Bean, Costco, Nordstrom, Publix, Stew Leonard’s, Trader Joe’s, Wegmans, Whole Foods, and more.
Competing in Tough Times brings together powerful new strategies that world-class retailers are using to thrive in today’s brutally unforgiving business environment.
World-renowned retail expert Dr. Barry Berman shows how to plan, build, and implement proven strategies based on both cost and differentiation. You’ll learn how to safely reduce costs and prices without increasing risk, minimize product proliferation, enhance the service experience, strengthen your private label program, and more. To support each approach, Berman presents full-length examples from outstanding retailers in every market sector, from consumer goods and apparel to technology.
Whether you’re a retail executive, owner, supplier, consultant, or student, these are the tools you need to compete, win–and keep on winning. In Competing in Tough Times, leading retail consultant Barry Berman systematically examines ten world-class retailers, identifying shared strategies that every retailer can use to drive dramatic, sustained performance improvement.
Berman highlights what these widely diverse retailers have in common in terms of both operational cost structures and differentiation. He reveals how they’ve developed low-cost strategies without cutting crucial “muscle,” better rationalized product selection, optimized human relations and the service experience, and taken full advantage of private labeling. He presents his recommendations in an easy-to-read decision-making format, supported by current data and detailed implementation guidance. (– description from publisher)
Toilet : public restrooms and the politics of sharing / edited by Harvey Molotch and Laura Noré
call number GT476 .T65 2010
So much happens in the public toilet that we never talk about. Finding the right door, waiting in line, and using the facilities are often undertaken with trepidation. Don’t touch anything. Try not to smell. Avoid eye contact. And for men, don’t look down or let your eyes stray. Even washing one’s hands are tied to anxieties of disgust and humiliation. And yet other things also happen in these spaces: babies are changed, conversations are had, make-up is applied, and notes are scrawled for posterity.
Beyond these private issues, there are also real public concerns: problems of public access, ecological waste, and—in many parts of the world–sanitation crises. At public events, why are women constantly waiting in long lines but not men? Where do the homeless go when cities decide to close public sites? Should bathrooms become standardized to accommodate the disabled? Is it possible to create a unisex bathroom for transgendered people?
In Toilet, noted sociologist Harvey Molotch and Laura Norén bring together twelve essays by urbanists, historians and cultural analysts (among others) to shed light on the public restroom. These noted scholars offer an assessment of our historical and contemporary practices, showing us the intricate mechanisms through which even the physical design of restrooms—the configurations of stalls, the number of urinals, the placement of sinks, and the continuing segregation of women’s and men’s bathrooms—reflect and sustain our cultural attitudes towards gender, class, and disability. Based on a broad range of conceptual, political, and down-to-earth viewpoints, the original essays in this volume show how the bathroom—as a practical matter–reveals competing visions of pollution, danger and distinction. (–description from publisher)
Belief instinct : the psychology of souls, destiny, and the meaning of life / Jesse Bering.
call number BF51 .B47 2011
Why is belief so hard to shake? Despite our best attempts to embrace rational thought and reject superstition, we often find ourselves appealing to unseen forces that guide our destiny, wondering who might be watching us as we go about our lives, and imagining what might come after death.
In this lively and masterfully argued new book, Jesse Bering unveils the psychological underpinnings of why we believe. Combining lucid accounts of surprising new studies with insights into literature, philosophy, and even pop culture, Bering gives us a narrative that is as entertaining as it is thought-provoking. He sheds light on such topics as our search for a predestined life purpose, our desire to read divine messages into natural disasters and other random occurrences, our visions of the afterlife, and our curiosity about how moral and immoral behavior are rewarded or punished in this life.
Bering traces all of these beliefs and desires to a single trait of human psychology, known as the “theory of mind,” which enables us to guess at the intentions and thoughts of others. He then takes this groundbreaking argument one step further, revealing how the instinct to believe in God and other unknowable forces gave early humans an evolutionary advantage. But now that these psychological illusions have outlasted their evolutionary purpose, Bering draws our attention to a whole new challenge: escaping them. (–description from publisher)
Temperate and boreal rainforests of the world : ecology and conservation / edited by Dominick A. DellaSala ; foreword by David Suzuki.
call number QH541.5.R27 T46 2011
While tropical rainforests have received much conservation attention and support for their protection, temperate and boreal rainforests have been largely overlooked. Yet these ecosystems are also unique, supporting rainforest communities rich in plants and wildlife and containing some of the most massive trees on Earth.
Temperate and Boreal Rainforests of the World brings together leading scientists from around the world to describe the ecology and conservation of these lesser-known rainforests in an attempt to place them on par with tropical rainforests in conservation efforts. The book
- summarizes major scientific findings
- presents new computer models that were used to standardize rainforest definitions
- identifies regions previously not widely recognized as rainforest
- provides the latest estimates on rainforest extent and degree of protection
- explores conservation strategies
The book ends with a summary of the key ecological findings and outlines an ambitious vision of how we can conserve and manage the planet’s remaining temperate and boreal rainforests in a truly ecological way that is better for nature, the climate, and ultimately our own welfare. (–description from publisher)
American poetry in performance : from Walt Whitman to hip hop / Tyler Hoffman.
call number PN4151 .H64 2011
American Poetry in Performance: From Walt Whitman to Hip Hop is the first book to trace a comprehensive history of performance poetry in America, covering 150 years of literary history from Walt Whitman through the rap-meets-poetry scene. It reveals how the performance of poetry is bound up with the performance of identity and nationality in the modern period and carries its own shifting cultural politics. This book stands at the crossroads of the humanities and the social sciences; it is a book of literary and cultural criticism that deals squarely with issues of “performance,” a concept that has attained great importance in the disciplines of anthropology and sociology and has generated its own distinct field of performance studies. American Poetry in Performance will be a meaningful contribution both to the field of American poetry studies and to the fields of cultural and performance studies, as it focuses on poetry that refuses the status of fixed aesthetic object and, in its variability, performs versions of race, class, gender, and sexuality both on and off the page.
Relating the performance of poetry to shifting political and cultural ideologies in the United States, Hoffman argues that the vocal aspect of public poetry possesses (or has been imagined to possess) the ability to help construct both national and subaltern communities. American Poetry in Performance explores public poets’ confrontations with emergent sound recording and communications technologies. (–description from publisher)
Give-a-kid-a-book Donations
Tuesday, November 15th, 2011
Give a Kid a Book campaign is back
The Cofrin Library is once again a drop off point for the Brown County Library’s Give-a-Kid-a-Book campaign. You can donate NEW, unwrapped, unmarked books that are fun for babies, children or young adults up to age 18 by December 9th. New, unwrapped books can be brought to the circulation desk on the 3rd floor of the library. Unsure of what to donate? Check out this list for ideas: http://www.co.brown.wi.us/i/f/export/gakablist.pdf Books are distributed to local children during the holidays and used to promote reading year round through various youth reading programs.
New Books
Wednesday, November 9th, 2011Check out our new selection of books on the 3rd floor of the library- here are just a few:
Scientific writing : thinking in words / David Lindsay
Telling people about research is just as important as doing it. But many researchers, who, in all other respects, are competent scientists, are afraid of writing. They are wary of the unwritten rules, the unspoken dogma and the inexplicably complex style, all of which seem to pervade conventional thinking about scientific writing.
This book has been written to expose these phantoms as largely smoke and mirrors, and replace them with principles that make communicating research easier and encourage researchers to write confidently. It presents a way of thinking about writing that emulates the way good scientists think about research.
It concentrates on the structure of articles, rather than simply on grammar and syntax. So, it is an ideal reference for researchers preparing articles for scientific journals, posters, conference presentations, reviews and popular articles; for students preparing theses; and for researchers whose first language is not English. (– description from publisher)
Cooking in other women’s kitchens : domestic workers in the South, 1865-1960 / Rebecca Sharpless.
As African American women left slavery and the plantation economy behind, many entered domestic service in southern cities and towns. Cooking was one of the primary jobs they performed in white employers’ homes, feeding generations of white families and, in the process, profoundly shaping southern foodways and culture.
Rebecca Sharpless argues that, in the face of discrimination, long workdays, and low wages, African American cooks worked to assert measures of control over their own lives and to maintain spaces for their own families despite the demands of employers and the restrictions of segregation. Sharpless also shows how these women’s employment served as a bridge from old labor arrangements to new ones. As opportunities expanded in the twentieth century, most African American women chose to leave cooking for more lucrative and less oppressive manufacturing, clerical, or professional positions.
Through letters, autobiography, and oral history, this book evokes African American women’s voices from slavery to the open economy, examining their lives at work and at home. Sharpless looks beyond stereotypes to introduce the real women who left their own houses and families each morning to cook in other women’s kitchens. (description from publisher)
Jesus and gin : evangelicalism, the Roaring Twenties and today’s culture wars / Barry Hankins.
Jesus and Gin is a rollicking tour of the roaring twenties and the barn- burning preachers who led the temperance movement—the anti-abortion crusade of the Jazz Age. Along the way, we meet a host of colorful characters: a Baptist minister who commits adultery in the White House; media star preachers caught in massive scandals; a presidential election hinging on a religious issue; and fundamentalists and liberals slugging it out in the culture war of the day. The religious roar of that decade was a prologue to the last three decades. With the religious right in disarray today after its long ascendancy, Jesus and Gin is a timely look at a parallel age when preachers held sway and politicians answered to the pulpit. (–description from publisher)
Stayin’ alive : the 1970s and the last days of the working class / Jefferson Cowie.
An epic account of how middle-class America hit the rocks in the political and economic upheavals of the 1970s, this wide-ranging cultural and political history rewrites the 1970s as the crucial, pivotal era of our time. Jefferson Cowie’s edgy and incisive book—part political intrigue, part labor history, with large doses of American musical, film, and TV lore—makes new sense of the 1970s as a crucial and poorly understood transition from New Deal America (with its large, optimistic middle class) to the widening economic inequalities, poverty, and dampened expectations of the 1980s and into the present.
Stayin’ Alive takes us from the factory floors of Ohio, Pittsburgh, and Detroit, to the Washington of Nixon, Ford, and Carter. Cowie also connects politics to culture, showing how the big screen and the jukebox can help us understand how America turned away from the radicalism of the 1960s and toward the patriotic promise of Ronald Reagan. Cowie makes unexpected connections between the secrets of the Nixon White House and the failings of George McGovern campaign; radicalism and the blue-collar backlash; the earthy twang of Merle Haggard’s country music and the falsetto highs of Saturday Night Fever. Like Jeff Perlstein’s acclaimed Nixonland, Stayin’ Alive moves beyond conventional understandings of the period and brilliantly plumbs it for insights into our current way of life. (–description from publisher)
Disneyland and culture : essays on the parks and their influence / edited by Kathy Merlock Jackson and Mark I. West.
The success of Disneyland as the world’s first permanent, commercially viable theme park sparked the creation of a number of other parks throughout the world, from Florida to Japan, France, and Hong Kong. But the impact of Disneyland is not confined to the theme park arena. These essays explore a far-reaching ideology. Among the topics are Disney’s role in the creation of children’s architecture; Frontierland as an allegorical map of the American West; the “cultural invasion of France” in Disneyland Paris; the politics of nostalgia; and “hyperurbanity” in the town of Celebration, Florida.
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