The library has purchased many new books so far this year. You can view a handful here along with partial descriptions or go here to see the full listing. These books are on display in the library’s lobby.

Title: Mad Skills:  MIDI and Music Technology in the Twentieth Century

Author: Ryan Alexander Diduck

A cultural history of MIDI (the Musical Instrument Digital Interface), one of the most revolutionary and transformative technologies in the history of music.  A history of electronic music that goes way beyond the Moog.   Part rigorous history, part insightful commentary, and part memoir, Mad Skills tells the story behind MIDI, aka the Musical Instrument Digital Interface, through the twentieth century’s kaleidoscopic lens.

Guiding us across one hundred years of musical instruments, and the music made with them, Mad Skills recounts the technical and creative innovations that led to the making of the most vital, long-standing, ubiquitous, and yet invisible music technology of our time.

Title: the Opposite of Hate: a field guide to repairing our humanity

Author: Sally Kohn

What is the opposite of hate?
 
As a progressive commentator on Fox News and now CNN, Sally Kohn has made a career out of bridging intractable political differences and learning how to talk respectfully with people whose views she disagrees with passionately. Her viral TED Talk on the need to practice emotional—rather than political—correctness sparked a new way of considering how often we amplify our differences and diminish our connections.

Title: Speak Freely

Author: Keith E. Whittington

Free speech is under attack at colleges and universities today, with critics on and off campus challenging the value of open inquiry and freewheeling intellectual debate. Too often speakers are shouted down, professors are threatened, and classes are disrupted. In Speak Freely, Keith Whittington argues that universities must protect and encourage free speech because vigorous free speech is the lifeblood of the university. Without free speech, a university cannot fulfill its most basic, fundamental, and essential purposes, including fostering freedom of thought, ideological diversity, and tolerance.

Title: The Lives of the Constitution

Author: Joseph Tartakovsky 

In a fascinating blend of biography and history, Joseph Tartakovsky tells the epic and unexpected story of our Constitution through the eyes of ten extraordinary individuals―some renowned, like Alexander Hamilton and Woodrow Wilson, and some forgotten, like James Wilson and Ida B. Wells-Barnett.

 

 

Title: Insane: America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness

Author: Alisa Roth

America has made mental illness a crime. Jails in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago each house more people with mental illnesses than any hospital. As many as half of all people in America’s jails and prisons have a psychiatric disorder. One in four fatal police shootings involves a person with such disorders. In this revelatory book, journalist Alisa Roth goes deep inside the criminal justice system to show how and why it has become a warehouse where inmates are denied proper treatment, abused and punished in ways that make them sicker. 

 

Title: St. Petersburg, Madness, Murder, and Art on the Banks of Neva

Author: Jonathan Miles

St. Petersburg has always felt like an impossible metropolis, risen from the freezing mists and flooded marshland of the River Neva on the western edge of Russia. It was a new capital in an old country. Established in 1703 by the sheer will of its charismatic founder, the homicidal megalomaniac Peter the Great, its dazzling yet unhinged reputation was quickly cemented by the sadistic dominion of its early rulers. This city, in its successive incarnations—St. Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad and, once again, St. Petersburg—has always been a place of perpetual contradiction.

Title: Unbound:  Transgender Men and the remaking of Identity

Author: Arlene Stein

Award-winning sociologist Arlene Stein takes us into the lives of four strangers who find themselves together in a sun-drenched surgeon’s office, having traveled to Florida from across the United States in order to masculinize their chests. Ben, Lucas, Parker, and Nadia wish to feel more comfortable in their bodies; three of them are also taking testosterone so that others recognize them as male. Following them over the course of a year, Stein shows how members of this young transgender generation, along with other gender dissidents, are refashioning their identities and challenging others’ conceptions of who they are. During a time of conservative resurgence, they do so despite great personal costs. 

Title: Thinking about Technology

Author: Gill Germain

The world we make reflects the way reality is perceived, and today the world is perceived primarily in technological terms. So argues Gil Germain in Thinking About Technology: How the Technological Mind Misreads Reality. Given the connection between perception and action, or thinking and doing, Germain first highlights the central features of technological worldview to better understand the contemporary drive to master the conditions of human existence. He then boldly proposes that the technological worldview seriously misreads the nature of the world it seeks mastery over, and shows how this misinterpretation invariably leads to the technologically-related challenges currently vexing the contemporary social order, from the drift toward a posthuman future to the anti-globalization backlash. Germain closes Thinking About Technology by articulating an alternative worldview to the technological perspective and illustrating how this re-reading of reality might help us inhabit the technological landscape in ways better attuned to the human condition.

Title: Dark Tales

Author: Shirley Jackson

After the publication of her short story “The Lottery” in the New Yorker in 1948 received an unprecedented amount of attention, Shirley Jackson was quickly established as a master horror storyteller. This collection of classic and newly reprinted stories provides readers with more of her unsettling, dark tales, including the “The Possibility of Evil” and “The Summer People.” In these deliciously dark stories, the daily commute turns into a nightmarish game of hide and seek, the loving wife hides homicidal thoughts and the concerned citizen might just be an infamous serial killer. In the haunting world of Shirley Jackson, nothing is as it seems and nowhere is safe, from the city streets to the crumbling country pile, and from the small-town apartment to the dark, dark woods. There’s something sinister in suburbia.

 

 

Title: Syllabus

Author: Lynda Barry

An award-winning author provides the creative lesson plans and innovative writing exercises she uses in her popular writing workshop aimed at non-writers, which focuses on the connection between the hand, the brain and spontaneous images. Original.

 

Title: Small Teaching

Author: James M. Lang

Employ cognitive theory in the classroom every day

Research into how we learn has opened the door for utilizing cognitive theory to facilitate better student learning. But that’s easier said than done. Many books about cognitive theory introduce radical but impractical theories, failing to make the connection to the classroom. In Small Teaching, James Lang presents a strategy for improving student learning with a series of modest but powerful changes that make a big difference—many of which can be put into practice in a single class period. These strategies are designed to bridge the chasm between primary research and the classroom environment in a way that can be implemented by any faculty in any discipline, and even integrated into pre-existing teaching techniques. Learn, for example:

  • How does one become good at retrieving knowledge from memory?
  • How does making predictions now help us learn in the future?
  • How do instructors instill fixed or growth mindsets in their students?