College & Research Libraries News
New Publications
Civil War America: Voices from the Home Front,by James Marten 046 pages, April 2003), presents case studies of how ordinary men, women, and children in both the South and the North experienced the war. Marten delves into personal diaries and papers to piece together civilian expe- riences far from the battle lines, including Con- federate dissenters, war journalists, women dur- ing the siege of Vicksburg, children and children’s war literature, escaped slaves in the contraband camps, and postwar soldiers’ orphans. $85.00. ABC- CLIO. ISBN 1-57607-237-1.
The Gale Encyclopedia of the Unusual and Unexplained,by Brad Steiger and Sherry Hansen Steiger (3 vols., June 2003), is a pretty good at- tempt at compiling information on a wealth of psychic, religious, historical, and. physical myster- ies, from the afterlife to UFOs. As with the Steigers’ many other books, they seem a notch more comfortable and accurate with parapsycho- logical and New Age topics, but for undergradu- ates seeking a general background, these volumes should be adequate. Numerous illustrations, bib- liographies, and handy glossaries add interest. $231.00. Thomson/Gale. ISBN 0-7876-5382-9.
The Gulf War in World Literature, 1990- 2000,by Mohammed M. Aman (1,126 pages, 2 vols., 2002), con- tains abstracts of 571 books and documentaries pub- lished on the 1990- 1991 Gulf War and its aftermath. The summaries are pri- marily quantitative, usually two-to-four pages long, and cover books written in English, Arabic, German, French, and Italian. The first of the book’s 22 sections describes general histories of the conflict, while the others focus on biographies, chemical and biological weapons, conspiracy theories, environmental effects, religious issues, victims, women, and other topics. Color photographs are scattered throughout, many of them taken by the author during a UNESCO-sponsored fact-finding mission to Kuwait. Published by the Center for Research and Studies on Kuwait, POB 65131, Almansoriya, 35652 Kuwait. Libraries may request a copy from the author at aman@sois. uwm.edu. ISBN 99906-32-65-0.
George M. Eberhart is senior editor of American Libraries, e-mail: geberhart@ala.org
Native American Photography at the Smithsonian: The Shindler Catalogue,by Paula Richardson Fleming 071 pages, June 2003), reprints the portraits from the Smithsonian’s first photographic exhibit of 1869, perhaps the first such exhibition by any American museum. The images portray many individuals who participated in the Indian delegations that visited the White House between 1851 and 1869. Created by artist and photographer Antonio Zeno Shindler, who also took some of the 1867 images, the exhibition summarized much of what was known about Native Americans after the Civil War. Fleming, for the first time, provides corrected information on the names of specific individuals, their tribal affiliations, and the photographers. $39.95. Smithsonian Institution. ISBN 1-58834-121-6.
The Quest for the True Cross,by Carsten Peter Thiede and Matthew d’Ancona (205 pages, June 2003), examines the alleged relic of the titulus, or inscription above the cross upon which Jesus was crucified, housed in Rome’s Basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, and concludes that it is the same object that Queen Helena (Constantine’s mother) supposedly brought to Rome from Jerusalem, where she had found it in 326 A.D. on the spot where the Church of the Holy Sepulchre now stands. The inscription itself, though fragmentary, is clearly in three languages—Aramaic, Greek, and Latin—the Latin and Greek reading (oddly enough from right to left) “of Nazareth, King” and the Aramaic limited to six markings, though it appears to form the Tetragram YHWH. The authors, fresh from their 1996 book The Jesus Papyrus, in which they controversially dated certain frag- ments of the Gospel of St. Matthew as early as 60 A.D. ‚ make a good circumstantial case for the artifact’s provenance. The book was published in En- gland in 2000, but has been reprinted here in paperback after a 2001 documentary produced by Mel Gibson’s Icon Films for the Dis- covery Channel. $17.95. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 1-4039-6212-X.
Route 66: Images of America's Main Street,by William Kaszynski (173 pages, May 2003), provides a 21st-century view of what the Mother Road looks like, 77 years after it was commissioned. As with his previous book The American Highway (McFarland, 2000), Kaszynski is generous with facts and photos, including a 32-page color section. Starting at the comer of Michigan and Jackson in Chicago, the author points out the existing landmarks all the way to the Will Rogers Memorial in Palisades Park, Santa Monica. Other books have made the same journey, among them Route 66: The Romance of the West by Thomas Repp (Mock Turtle, 2002), Route 66: The Mother Road by Michael Wallis (St. Martin’s, 1990), and the postcard-sized Traveling Route 66by Nick Freeth (University of Oklahoma, 2001), but Kaszynski offers details the others lack, without getting bogged down in milepost-by- milepost minutiae. $45.00. McFarland. ISBN 0-7864-1553-3.
Singing in the Saddle: The History of the Singing Cowboy,by Douglas B. Green (392 pages, October 2002), relates the history of such great Western favorites as “Pecos Bill,” “Cool Water,” “Blue Shadows on the Trail,” and “Back in the Saddle Again,” but goes far beyond Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and the Sons of the Pioneers. Green, who founded the modern Western swing group Riders in the Sky, covers the genre from its roots in the cowboy culture of the 19th century, through its first recorded hit (Carl T. Sprague’s “When the Work’s All Done This Fall,” 1925), its heyday from 1930 to 1942 as it flourished in the Grand Ole Opry and Western movies, up to the revival sparked in the 1970s by the songs of Michael Martin Murphey and the Riders in the Sky. Well-illustrated and thoroughly researched. $34.95. Vanderbilt University. ISBN 0-8265- 1412-X.
The Sixteen: The Covert Assassination Squad That Went beyond the SAS,by John Urwin (269 pages, November 2003), recounts the author’s exploits as a member of an elite British covert assassination squad that earned out missions in Cyprus, Beirut, Cairo, and Syria in 1958- 1959. Since the UK Ministry of Defence denies knowing about this unit’s existence and no hint of it has surfaced up to the point of this book’s publication in England in 2002, readers have the option of taking this narrative as either fact or fiction. Urwin claims he and his colleagues were schooled in techniques not taught to operatives today, including a fear-suppression method called “one step beyond” and martial-arts moves called “the machine” that guarantee self-control even under unexpected circumstances. The book reads like a novel, and perhaps it is, but Urwin claims that the reason he’s telling it all now is because the international war on terrorism needs to re- cruit, train, and employ such groups again—and he’s willing to help. $24.95. Vision, distributed by the Independent Publishers Group. ISBN 1- 904132-14-6.
Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon,by Michael Adams (308 pages, July 2003), is not merely a glossary of the jargon used on the seven seasons of the popular Buffy the Vampire Slayer television show; the book also offers a linguistic examination of the structure (suffixes, prefixes, functional shifts, and mixed etymologies) of the slang that helped make the series a cult hit. English Professor Adams describes his own first viewing of the show in 1997: “I surfed through the channels until I heard ‘Love makes you do the wacky,’ and I was, by virtue of that functional shift of wacky from its accustomed role as adjective to the novel one of noun, hooked on Buffy from that day forward.” Making a strong case for the study of ephemeral English, Adams defines and contextualizes such words and phrases from the Buffyverse as vague up, slayage, übersuck, wiggy, and kicking the gearshift. It’s also nice to see that American Libraries 'September 1999 article on the series is referenced twice. $19.95. Oxford University. ISBN 0-19-516033-9.