Month: December 2008

End of Year / Holidays / Something to Look Foward To

Congrats to all of our students who survived finals, and a happy holidays wish to everyone.  I hope that this brief time off is treating the JCCC community well (and everyone else, too, of course!)  Next semester, you will see these updates get back to regular, as well as an exciting new feature.

While the feature doesn’t have a name yet, it will be a twice-a-week feature which follows me through a new experience:  I’m taking a class here at JCCC!  It isn’t uncommon for faculty to take classes, but I hope to show students and staff how the library can enhance your classroom experience, provides numerous resources for students, and can better enrich the general learning environment on campus.

Here’s hoping I do OK: It’s been a couple years since I was in school. I’m actually nervous about all of the can’t-find-my-class, hope-I-make-friends, hope-I’m-not-late stuff that everyone goes through.  It’s pretty exciting for me, and I hope I can use the experience to paint the library in an appropriate, positive light.

Michael Phelps and His Book Won’t Help You Swim Fast

I used to give atheletes a lot of flack for seemingly always needing a co-writer for their memoirs.  But hey, if you’re that freakishly good at one thing, you’ve got a good shot at being not that great at a few things.  It might as well be a permission slip, being that freakishly good:  free pass on 2 social skills and 1 basic talent.  I’d say writing a book is probably a heavier weight than any of the given passes, so I’ll let it go.

So what do we know about Michael Phelps?  He swims fast.  He eats a lot of food.  His book, No Limits: The Will to Succeed, co-written with Alan Abrahamson, discusses how he’s set himself up with the desire to push himself that much harder, as well as the relentless training he puts himself through.  This book just made it to our McNaughton Collection, so it is advisable to check it out sooner than later.

A Sobering Book of the Day

The mass killings carried out by the Nazi party and their allies during World War II are horrific.  The impact certainly overshadowed other mass killings carried out by regimes in the 20th Century, but Benjamin A. Valentino is out to make sure these tragedies and their lessons do not go unnoticed.  His book, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century, looks at all of the different places where, by his definition, at least 50,000 people are killed in a 5 year period. A brief list of mass killings:

  • Soviet Union
  • China
  • Cambodia
  • Nazi Germany
  • Armenia
  • Rwanda
  • Soviet occupation of Afghanistan
  • Guatemala

And there are probably more.  This book provides a new look at the brutality of the 20th Century, but contains lessons one should remember.

Book of the Day from Andrea Kempf

Andrea Kempf is a Professor/Librarian at JCCC.  She’s also really smart.  Here’s a book + review she passed along to me a few days ago, which I’m finally posting.

Smile as they Bow by Nu Nu Yi. In the first contemporary novel from Burma, published since a dictatorial regime has virtually closed the country, Nu Nu Yi writes about a festival where spirit mediums (called Natkadaws who are usually transvestites) are paid to pray for solutions to people’s problems for steep payments. The main character is an aging medium whose young lover has become interested in a beggar girl. The novel not only explores gay life in Burma but is also a window on a little known part of the world.

Torture and the Military Profession

I’m reading this article in the Washington Post (if they make you sign up, it is a free account) about foreign perceptions on our torture policies.  It goes on to say that one of the biggest selling points for non-Iraqi opponents who fight US troops in Iraq was that they all believe that we torture prisoners, and that recent policies which may condone torture led them to believe they’d be severely tortured.  From the article:

It’s no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001.

That’s a pretty bold statement, and also where today’s book comes in:  Torture and the Military Profession by Jessica Wolfendale.  Wolfendale presents the point of view that torture done by a military, sanctioned or not, may be a direct result of military training methods.  She also calls for a dramatic change in how military troops are cultivated to have less of a psychological impact that could cause these behaviors. While I’m not sure I agree with all of her points, it is an interesting take on how some recent events may have come about.

Down to the (Under)wire

I’m not going to pretend to understand the world of women’s undergarments.  Pantyhose seems to be the most useless clothing item aside from possibly the necktie or the marching band plume.

So the idea that there’s some outside motivation controlling why women wear what they wear is not a surprise to me.  From the idealization to unrealistic expectations, I’m sure its men’s fault.  But the motivations and intricacies of these things I will never get is the topic of Jiggle: (Re)Shaping American Women by Wendy Burns-Ardolino.  Part gender study, part cultural study, this book takes on multiple reasons, types, and purposes for ladies’ undergarments to be what they are, from the past to the present.

You won’t, however, discover a practical purpose for the necktie.