Leddy Library News

Have a good holidays! See you next year!

The holidays are a great time to curl up with a good book and The Leddy Library has the following reads from this year’s New York Times Notable Non-Fiction List while others are on order…

ARGUABLY: Essays. By Christopher Hitchens.
“Hitchens’s esophageal cancer inevitably throws a shadow over this spirited, provocative, prodigiously witty collection.”

THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE: Why Violence Has Declined. By Steven Pinker.
“Are humans essentially good or bad? Has the past century seen moral progress or moral collapse? Pinker addresses these questions and more.”

BLUE NIGHTS. By Joan Didion.
“Mourning the 2005 death of her daughter, Didion presents herself as defenseless against the pain of loss in this elegantly written memoir.”

THE BOY IN THE MOON: A Father’s Journey to Understand His Extraordinary Son. By Ian Brown
“The truth Brown learns from his severely disabled child is a rare one: the life that seems to destroy you is the one you long to embrace.”

CATHERINE THE GREAT: Portrait of a Woman. By Robert K. Massie.
“Massie provides a sweeping narrative about the impressive minor German princess who became empress of Russia.”

THE INFORMATION: A History. A Theory. A Flood. By James Gleick.
“Gleick argues that information is more than just the contents of our libraries and Web servers: human consciousness, life on earth, the cosmos — it’s bits all the way down.”

IS THAT A FISH IN YOUR EAR? Translation and the Meaning of Everything. By David Bellos.
“Against the orthodox view that a translation can’t substitute for the original, a scholar argues that the two need not be the same, but only similar.”

KNOCKING ON HEAVEN’S DOOR: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World. By Lisa Randall.
“A Harvard professor meditates on the nature of science and where physics is headed.”

THE NET DELUSION: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. By Evgeny Morozov.
“In this challenging and often contrarian book, Morozov explores how the Internet is used to constrict or even abolish political freedom.”

THE QUEST: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World. By Daniel Yergin.
“This comprehensive study makes clear that energy policy is not on the right course anywhere.”

THE SWERVE: How the World Became Modern. By Stephen Greenblatt.
“The legacy of the Roman poet Lucretius, and the Renaissance book hunter who saved his great poem from oblivion.”

THINKING, FAST AND SLOW. By Daniel Kahneman.
“Kahneman, a psychologist who won the Nobel in economic science in 2002, presents a lucid and profound vision of flawed human reason in a book full of intellectual surprises and self-help value.”

WHY THE WEST RULES — FOR NOW: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future. By Ian Morris.
“A Stanford historian argues that we face an immediate choice — East-West cooperation or catastrophe.”

Recently the University of Windsor held a reception to celebrate the contribution of staff who have contributed so much to this campus over their years of service.

The Leddy Library was represented by six employees with 40 years of service, one with 30, and two with 20: Maureen Souchuk, Fay Kennedy, Alida DeMarco, Patricia Belanger, Beverly Dalley, John Minos, Johanna Foster and Marjorie Stephens.

Ora has been named one of the top Canadian short films of 2011 by TIFF. Ora – A Thermographic Adventure is 5 min 59 s of behind the scenes on the set. This is one of the two short films on the filming of ORA to be found on the National Film Board website.

Trial access to Slavery and Anti-Slavery, part I: Debates over Slavery and Abolition and part II: Slave Trade in the Atlantic World. Consists of collections on the transatlantic slave trade and the global movement for the abolition of slavery from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century.

Contains:

Trial is NOT available from off-campus. Expires January 2, 2012.

The Leddy Library is now open 24 hours on most days for your studying needs:

EXAM HOURS
Saturday Dec 3rd ~ to ~ Monday Dec 19th

Leddy Library will remain open 24hrs/5days

Sunday 10am through Saturday morning at 2 am
Saturday 10am through till Sunday morning at 2 am

exception: Monday, December 19th, Leddy is closed at 12 midnight

Good luck students! You can do it!

Help support the University of Windsor Student Food Bank and reduce your library fines by donating non-perishable, unexpired food items at Leddy Library’s Circulation Desk. For each item that you donate, you’ll receive $2 off your fines, up to $50 per person!

Everyone knows that you are what you read. So to learn more about the protesters who have been occupying Wall Street for the past three weeks, it makes sense to find out what they’re reading.

The quote is from Bill Morris, who was curious what were in the libraries of the various Occupy movements.  And in this spirit  and in time for today’s panel discussion on the Occupy Movement, here are some of the books that occupies some of the time of some of the people involved in the Occupy Movement.

The People’s History of the United States

“Steve Syrek, an English Ph.D. student at Rutgers University, responded when he heard that librarians were needed and protesters were hungry for copies of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Syrek bought nine copies and donated them to the People’s Library…”

from: The Eclectic Reading List at Occupy Wall Street

The Verso book of dissent : from Spartacus to the Shoe-Thrower of Baghdad

“This suggestion comes from one of the Occupy Wall Street Librarians. “What are you guys telling everyone to read?” I asked. He immediately picked up this book, which he said was one of his favorites. “Verso is a great publisher generally,” another guy who was stacking books added. “We like everything they publish.”

Empire

“If you’re looking for one of the orienting works around contemporary politics of resistance, I’d say you should pick up Antonio Negri’s and Michael Hardt’s Empire.”

from:  Hydra’s Occupy Wall Street Reading List

Direct action : an ethnography

“Nevertheless, some figures are credibly cited as influential, notably David Graeber, an American anthropology don at Goldsmiths in London, who helped organise what became the Wall Street occupation in its early weeks; his books include Direct Action: An Ethnography, Debt: The First Five Thousand Years and Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology.”

Time for outrage!

“Another elderly agitator – grandfathers can sometimes be recruited against fathers – played a comparable role in the southern European sit-ins that followed the Arab spring. Published a year ago when he was 93, the former French resistance fighter Stéphane Hessel’s call for a youth uprising against the powerful, Time for Outrage!, became a pan-European bestseller and was read by the first occupiers in Madrid – the name they adopted, Los Indignados (later copied by the Greek protesters), was taken from its Spanish title, ¡Indignaos!”

from : The Guardian: Occupy: the intellectual high ground

Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street

“Bartleby’s positive refusal continues to resonate with the OWS movement”

from: Occupy Wall Street Library: Marathon reading of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” @ 60 Wall St, 11/10

Civil Disobedience

“In his seminal 1849 essay Civil Disobedience, Thoreau made a compelling case for individual resistance to civil government that would inspire generations of revolutionaries and ordinary nonconformists alike to engage in moral protest against being made unwitting accomplices in the injustices perpetrated by the state. ”

The art of moral protest  : culture, biography, and creativity in social movements

“One thing this year’s unrest and its treatment in the popular media have exposed is the tendency of today’s scholars to reduce protest to “objective” factors like resources, evolutionary biology, and political structures. More than a decade ago, prominent NYU, Columbia and Princeton sociology professor James M. Jasper channeled his frustration with this conflation in The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social Movements — a thoughtful and provocative treatise on the creative, subjective side of social and political protest.”

from:  Occupy Omnibus: From Philosophy to Art, 10 Essential Books on Protest

And for information about the Occupy Movement, I’d recommend checking out the Occupy Movement Research Guide from Patti Ryan and Lisa Sloniowski of York University. This Changes Everything Occupy Wall Street and the 99% Movement is currently on order.

And, as an addendum: two more lists

The first list is “Occupy Primer Reading List: The Essentials” from the Occupy Wall Street’s Practical Change Working Group.

If you are curious about why Occupy Wall Street has turned into Occupy Everywhere, if you want a basic understanding of the problems in the system that make this stand necessary, we believe these are the books to start with, in no particular order.*

Shock Doctrine – Naomi Klein

Debt: The First 5000 Years – David Graeber
End of Growth – Richard Heinberg

In Defense of Food - Michael Pollan

Griftopia – Matt Taibbi

These #ows primer books have been selected because they

1. give a basic yet rarely-discussed understanding of the structural problems that need to change
2. are often-requested books at the Occupy Wall Street Library
3. are relatively objective, even though trolls and false media may profess otherwise

Another list recently published is from Barbara Ehrenreich, author of such works as Nickel and dimed : on (not) getting by in America.

In addition to “A People’s History of the United States”, her 3 books on protest include:

“Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward’s classic Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (1978) because to a large extent, Occupy is a poor people’s movement — a movement of the unemployed, of debtors, of low-wage workers and the homeless.”

“Adam Hochschild’s Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (2005) because it so perfectly illustrates Margaret Mead’s iconic statement: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.”

PsycTESTS™ is a research database that provides access to psychological tests, measures, scales, surveys, and other assessments as well as descriptive information about the test and its development and administration.

PsycTHERAPY™ is a database containing more than 300 videos featuring therapy demonstrations showing clinicians working with individuals, couples, and families.

These databases may be accessed through APA PsycNet.

This trial ends December 10, 2011.

Women, War & Society, 1914-1918 makes accessible documents from the Women at Work Collection at the Imperial War Museum, London.

The First World War had a revolutionary and permanent impact on the personal, social and professional lives of all women. Their essential contribution to the war in Europe is fully documented in this definitive collection of primary source materials brought together in the Imperial War Museum, London.

These unique documents – charity and international relief reports, pamphlets, photographs, and press cuttings – are published here for the first time in fully searchable form, along with interpretative essays from leading scholars. Together these documents form an indispensable resource for the study of 20 th Century social, political, military and gender history.

You can explore this resource by clicking here.