ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

New Publications

George M. Eberhart

Black Congressmen during Reconstruction,edited by Stephen Middleton (444 pages, December 2002), brings together selected speeches of the 22 black men who served in the U.S. Congress between 1870 and 1901. Among them are Hiram Rhodes Revels (R-Miss.), the first black person elected to the Senate, who was chosen to fill the vacated seat of Confederate president Jefferson Davis; Robert Brown Elliott (R-S.C.), who spoke eloquently on the Civil Rights Bill of 1875; and George Henry White (R-N.G), the only black congressman from 1897 to 1901, who often reminded his colleagues that he was the sole representative for 9 million black Americans. The words spoken by these men in the House and Senate shed muchneeded light on the state of race relations in 19thcentury America. $94.95. Greenwood. ISBN 0-313-32281-3.

Black Firsts,by Jessie Carney Smith (787 pages, 2d ed., December 2002), updates the 1994 edition with 1,000 new and many other revised entries that document the pioneering achievements of black people in the arts and entertainment, business, civil rights, education, government, journalism, the military, organizations, religion, science, sports, and writing. The book is filled with many fascinating facts. For example, the first black astronaut was

Arnaldo Tamayo-Mendez, a Cuban who flew aboard the Soviet Soyuz 38 in 1980, preceding the first black American in space by three years; the first black woman to graduate from college in the United States was Lucy Ann Stanton (Oberlin, 1850); Wynton Marsalis was the first jazz artist to win the Pulitzer Prize for music (1997); and the first public library to provide service exclusively for the black community was the Louisville Western Branch Library in 1905. $58.00. Visible Ink. ISBN 1-57859-153-8.

A Chinese Bestiary,edited by Richard E. Strassberg (314 pages, July 2002), is a translation of and commentary on portions of the Shanhaijing, orthe Guideways through Mountains and Seas, a cosmography originally compiled during the 4th to the 1st centuries B.C. Included are 350 descriptions of gods, demons, monsters, and foreign tribes that demonstrate how the Chinese perceived an intelligible sacred order within the natural world. Unlike European bestiaries that embedded Christian allegory within each animal’s description, the Shanhaijing assumed the literal truth of each strange hybrid creature it described. Strassberg adds considerable interest by accompanying the text with a set of 76 illustrations designed by the 16th-century artisan Jiang Yinghao. Anne Birrell’s The Classic of Mountains and Seas (Penguin, 1999) is a more complete but minimally annotated translation of the Shanhaijing. $75.00. University of California. ISBN 0-520-21844-2.

Dissent in the Heartland,by Mary Ann Wynkoop (214 pages, October 2002), is an excellent portrayal of student activism at Indiana University in the 1960s and 1970s. Based on many interviews with participants, as well as FBI files and university records, Wynkoop shows how the antiwar, civil-rights, studentrights, and feminist movements developed and thrived on this Midwestern campus far away from the traditional centers of counterculture on the coasts and in Chicago. $19.95. Indiana University. ISBN 0-253-34118-3.

Encyclopedia of Terrorism,by Harvey W Kushner (523 pages, December 2002), offers an overview of global terrorism with more than 300 entries on individuals, groups, events, methods, and theoretical perspectives. Kushner, a professor of criminal justice at Long Island University, has served as a consultant on international terrorism to various courts and government George M. Eberhart is senior editor of American Libraries; e-mail: geberhart@ala.org agencies. This is a well-organized reference book, with appendices that provide Web sites, maps, and a chronology of terrorism from 1865 to 2002. $99.95. Sage. ISBN 0-7619-2408-6.

Footsteps in the Attic,by Paul F. Eno (167 pages, October 2002), narrates the author’s investigations into ghostly phenomena in New England and offers some space-time speculations on why such things occur. A former news editor with the Providence Journal, Eno first warns that some seemingly paranormal events have a neuropsychiatric explanation and that eerie manifestations can also be generated by very-low-frequency sound waves. Others are not so readily explainable, and Eno goes on to detail 16 cases of apparitions, hauntings, and poltergeists that he has looked into. A sequel to the author’s Faces at the Window (1998). $14.95. New River Press. ISBN 1-891724-02-9.

Footsteps in the Fog: Alfred Hitchcock's San Francisco,by Jeff Kraft and Aaron Leventhal (286 pages, October 2002), revisits the locations in the Bay area made famous by Hitchcock’s films, especially Santa Rosa (Shadow of a Doubt, 1943); Big Basin State Park, the Avenue of Tall Trees, Mission Dolores, Mission San Juan Bautista, and the streets of San Francisco (Vertigo, 1958); and Bodega Bay (The Birds, 1963). Beginning with a foreword by Hitchcock’s daughter Patricia, this book explores the director’s love of northern California and documents the steps he took in making these and other films in the area, all accompanied by archival and contemporary photos to make this a useful traveler’s guide. Librarians will appreciate the commentary on the appearance in Shadow of a Doubt of the former Carnegie library in Santa Rosa—demolished in 1965 and replaced by the present Sonoma County Public Library. $24.95. Santa Monica Press. ISBN 1-891661-27-2.

A History of the French New Wave Cinema,by Richard Neupert (342 pages, December 2002), examines the dramatic avant-garde films made by young and innovative French directors from 1958 to 1964 that injected new life into worldwide cinema. Neupert focuses not only on the core auteurs Truffaut, Chabrol, and Godard, but their predecessors Roger Vadim and Louis Malle, and their successors Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze. $24.95. University of Wisconsin. ISBN 0-299-18164-2.

The Moonlandings: An Eyewitness Account,by Reginald Turnill (456 pages, December 2002), is the memoir by BBC aerospace correspondent Turnill, who covered manned space missions for the BBC, from Yuri Gagarin’s first flight in 1961 to the joint Soviet-American mission in 1975, and continued on a freelance basis afterwards. At 87, he is still on the lecture circuit. He knew many of the early astronauts and space pioneers, including Wernher von Braun, whose V2 rockets falling on London had caused the premature birth of Turnill’s son and whose 1969 plan for a permanent lunar base by 1985 and a Mars base by 1989 is revealed here. Turnill was the first journalist to break the news in 1970 that Apollo 13 had been crippled by an explosion; he retells that story, as well as other dramas in the U.S. and Soviet space programs. Astronaut Buzz Aldrin contributed the foreword to this engaging and whimsical narrative. $27.00. Cambridge University. ISBN 0-521-81595-9.

The Oxford History of Byzantium,edited by Cyril Mango (334 pages, December 2002), surveys the history, art, and culture of the Byzantine Empire from its Roman origins to its fall to the Ottomans in 1453. Ten contributing writers offer insight into selected aspects of the era, while Cyril and Marlia Mundell Mango tie them together with essays on pilgrimage, icons, and monasticism, as well as a superb array of accompanying photographs, maps, and drawings that bring the empire to life. $45.00. Oxford University. ISBN 0-18-814098-3.

Surviving the Confederacy,by John C. Waugh (447 pages, October 2002), chronicles the life of a prominent Richmond couple, Roger and Sarah Pryor, whose writings are central to understanding life in Virginia during the Civil War. Waugh retells their tale in an engaging narrative fashion, accompanied by abundant documentation. Editor and attorney Pryor was an ardent secessionist before the war, then led a brigade in the Army of Northern Virginia; Sara’s description of hardships on the home front, especially during the siege of Petersburg, are vividly recounted. An excellent, understandable portrayal of the forces that tore the country apart 140 years ago. $28.00.

The Ten Commandments: A Handbook of Religious, Legal and Social Issues,by Joseph P. Hester (285 pages, January 2003), explores the controversy over how and whether Judeo-Christian ethical rules can be applied to legislation and litigation in the United States. Beginning with the origin and meaning of the biblical commandments and the development of ethics and reflective morality, Hester examines the basic American constitutional principle of the separation of church and state and whether an ethical compromise is possible between the religious and the secular. He looks at such specific issues as faith-based initiatives, posting the commandments on public buildings, character education, the pledge of allegiance, creationism, prayer in public schools, blue laws, stem cell research, euthanasia, capital punishment, pacifism, abortion, religious profiling, and covenant marriage. The commentary is balanced and well-researched. $45.00. McFarland. ISBN 0-7864-1419-7. ■