ACRL College & Research Libraries News

Association of College & Research Libraries

New Publications

George M. Eberhart is senior editor of American Libraries; e-mail: geberhart@ala.org

Exposing the Wilderness: Early-Twentieth-Century Adirondack Postcard Photographers,by Robert Bogdan (252 pages, October 1999), takes an interesting approach to documenting the history and culture of the people who lived in and visited upstate New York’s Adirondack Mountains in the first decades of the 20th century. By focusing on a neglected image resource, the real-photo postcards produced by six photographers of the region, Bogdan brings to life the storefronts, the logging camps, the spectator sports, the sanatorium patients, the summer camps, the winter carnivals, and the billboards of bygone days. He also provides biographical details on the photographers and their families, and offers insights into their way of doing business. Illustrated with some 250 postcards, advertisements, and other illustrations. $39-95. Syracuse University Press. ISBN 0-8156-0608-7.

Fire in the Sea: The Santorini Volcano, Natural History and the Legend of Atlantis,by Walter L. Friedrich (258 pages, May 2000), thoroughly examines the geology of the Aegean islands of Santorini, in particular the volcanic eruptions that have taken place there since the Late Pliocene Epoch two million years ago. Historians have long suspected that an eruption during the European Bronze Age was responsible for the legend of the destruction of Atlantis. Using several scientific dating techniques (including the analysis of Greenland ice-core samples), Friedrich arrives at 1640 B.C. as the best date for the Minoan-era eruption, which covered many Mediterranean villages with ash and injected a huge volume of dust into the atmosphere. Archeological discoveries are also surveyed. $34.95. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-65290-1.

Guide to the Cinema of Sweden and Finland,by Per Olov Qvist and Peter von Bagh (308 pages, April 2000), offers a representative sampling of film criticism and biographies of actors and directors in the two countries.

Qvist avoids focusing heavily on the classic Swedish directors (Bergman, Sjöström, Sjöberg) and gives equal treatment to films that are not as well known outside Scandinavia. Von Bagh, though bemoaning the inherent provincialism of the Finnish cinema, argues that at certain times it has been as creative as the output of its neighbor. $85.00. Greenwood. ISBN 0-313-30377-0.

Library Automation in Transitional Societies: Lessons from Eastern Europe,edited by Andrew Lass and Richard E. Quandt (451 pages, December 1999), consists of the papers presented at the Conference on Library Automation held in Warsaw, October 16-18, 1997, under the auspices of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and with the participation of the National Library of Poland. Since the collapse of communism, many libraries in the region have attained Western European or American standards, the quality of librarianship has risen enormously, and librarians have valiantly risen to the challenge of automating their collections from scratch. Some of the papers included are: “Library Automation: Fortunes and Miseries in Poland,” by Adam Manikowski; “The Aleph Implementation at the National Library of the Czech Republic,” by Iva Pribramska; “A Retrospective Conversion: The Case of Debrecen,” by Olga Gomba; and “Managing Delays: The Micropolitics of Time in the Czech and Slovak Automation Projects,” by Andrew Lass. $55.00. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-513262-9.

Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower,by Sergei N. Khrushchev (765 pages, March 2000), consists of the firsthand reminiscences of the son of the man who was premier of the Soviet Union from 1958 to 1964.

Sergei—whose 1991 memoir about his father’s last years, Khrushchev on Khrushchev, unraveled the plot that led to his downfall— discusses Nikita’s rise to power and the crises during his regime. Of particular interest is his perspective on the Cuban Missile Crisis, or the Caribbean Crisis as the Russians call it. Sergei writes that it was a major turning point in U.S.-Soviet relations: “If we look at the events of those years through the prism of the past decades, we see that as a result of the Cuban Missile Crisis Father achieved what he was striving for all those years: American de jure recognition that the Soviet Union was its equal in destructive power.”

The premier’s son speaks with unique authority: Not only was he privy to many of the conversations his father had with close advisers and world leaders, but he worked for 10 years designing Soviet cruise missiles that were pointed at the United States at the height of the Cold War. His revelations about the Soviet space program, including the disastrous explosion of the R-l6 rocket at Tyura-Tam that killed 57 soldiers and 25 civilians in 1960, are extremely valuable.

Sergei Khrushchev, who has been working at the Center for Foreign Policy Development at Brown University since 1991, and his wife became American citizens in 1999. This well-written memoir comes across as an honest and timely reminder of how different things might have been. $54.95. Penn State University Press. ISBN 0-271-01927-1.

The 151st Pennsylvania Volunteers at Gettysburg: Like Ripe Apples in a Storm,by Michael A. Dreese (190 pages, May 2000), offers a day-by-day analysis of the 151st’s participation in the Gettysburg campaign. This unit suffered the second highest number of casualties of any Northern regiment in the battle, most of which occurred in about an hour of fierce fighting at two locations during the first day. Dreese makes use of much fresh source material from descendants of the men in the unit and gives us a glimpse of what the participants went through. Little has been written about these soldiers, who had not seen much combat prior to the battle; even their monument is rarely pointed out during tours of the battlefield. $45.00. McFarland & Company. ISBN 0-7864-0804-9.

Another McFarland Civil War title is Confederate Courage on Other Fields, by Mark J. Crawford (177 pages, March 2000), which exemplifies the current fascination with research into the obscurer corners of Civil War history. Crawford has assembled here the accounts of four little-known Confederate dramas: the battle of Dinwiddie Court House, Virginia, March 31, 1865; excerpts from the letters of Col. Charles C. Blacknall of the 23rd North Carolina Infantry from First Manassas to his death from a wound received at the battle of Winchester in 1864; the bitter conflict in southeastern Missouri typified by the battle of Pilot Knob in 1864; and the forgotten history of General Hospital Number 1 at Kittrell’s Springs, North Carolina. $35.00. McFarland & Company. ISBN 0-7864-0720-4.

Twentieth-Century Teen Culture by the Decades: A Reference Guide,by Lucy Rollin (396 pages, January 2000), will help you understand your elders better as well as your work-study student assistants. Rollin examines the leisure activities, slang, fashion, work ethic, attitudes towards school and parents, and reading preferences of teens from the 1900s to the 1990s. Do you think slam dancing is vulgar or idiotic? Try to imagine what the Pope was thinking when the Vatican issued an official disapproval of the Turkey Trot in 1914. Compare the 1950s furor over comic books causing delinquency with the multiple theories for the cause of teen violence in the 1990s. Learn some slang from the 1940s and try to subtly introduce it among your peers. Besides being informative and a fun read, this book holds a mirror up to each generation and asks, “What were you thinking?" $59.95. Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-30223-5.

You Say You Want a Revolution: A Story of Information Age Politics,by Reed E. Hundt (238 pages, March 2000), is an entertaining memoir of Hundt’s tenure as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission from 1993 to 1997. A high-school friend of A1 Gore, Hundt offers a “West Wing”-flavored narrative filled with anecdotes and informal analysis as he recounts the complicated politicking that led to the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The book is most interesting for its insights into the inner workings of a federal commission and the forces that arrayed themselves against the initiative to connect every classroom to the Internet by 2001. $25.00. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-08364-5. ■