Author: bbaile14

Assistant Professor / Digital Projects Librarian for Johnson County Community College

BotD Goes to Sweet Home Chicago

If you think 9/11 didn’t have a direct impact on the Midwest, you might have an argument.  But if you think post-9/11 Midwest isn’t shaped differently than before, you’re quite wrong.  Taking the setting to my home state, the novel Chicago by Alaa Al Aswany paints the climate of the Windy City by examining several Middle-Eastern descendants at the University of Illinois Chicago and their relationships with each other, those of different backgrounds, and their connection to the ebb and flow of Chi-Town. When ethinicity is brought to the forefront, the characters in this book are displayed, examined, and challenged to illustrate the emphasis on diversity, customs, traditions, and traits that each tries to rid themselves of or hold on to.

BotD Takes a Break From Politics

… sort of.

Are you stressed about the election?  Are you fatigued from American politics and all its laborious processes?  Are your eardrums hurt by Kieth Olbermann, Bill O’Reilly, or anyone else?

Maybe it is time to turn to foreign political families.  Speaking for Myself: My Life from Liverpool to Downing Street is the autobiography of Cherie Blair, barrister and (more famously) wife of former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair.  This is the full biography, not just her life in the British spotlight.  Her childhood was unique and she was established long before Blair’s rise to leadership.  An interesting story worth a read.

BotD with Man’s Best Friend (or Woman’s!)

I will do anything to post pictures of my dog on here.  But there’s a reason:  I was actually terrified of dogs.  My wife and I got Cooper explicitly to help me overcome that fear.

I did most of the raising of Cooper, and through knowing him and his quirks , we have overbonded.  He’s the best, and watching him as a tiny puppy play with full-grown pitbulls without fear of harm, I came to lose that fear.

Powerful Bonds Between People and Pets by P. Elizabeth Anderson explores the psychological relationships people and their companion animals develop and the dependencies within.  Complete with sources for further reading, the science of it all is laid out in a compassionate discussion of what could have easily been drab data.  Even though there are lots of pictures, the information is still captivating enough to exist without them.

I’ve seen grown, grizzled men cry over a cat or dog passing away.  That bond is really there for so many of us, and while no one needs an explanation of why they love, it is most certainly interesting to understand the how and the history.

Book of the Day Relies on Pictures

Something that should probably be noted is that, while we do invest a lot into reference or research-based books, we do have a lot of large, full-color picture books for science related topics.  Mammals, trees, birds, and as with this week’s, bugs. Your Monday Morning book is 500 Insects: A Visual Reference by Stephen A. Marshall.

I’m not one to jump at insects unless they jump first at me.  And they do.  Too much.  But they’re pretty interesting.  There is something so alien about them that is intriguing, a foreign quality that if even perceived as grotesque, has some odd beauty or appeal to it, making this book quite interesting.

Of course, if you don’t buy that, you can just consider this book a hit list and start getting to work.

BotD: Continuing on Our Cheery Path

Julian Barnes is a critically acclaimed author, and a writer of many novels, 10 of which we own.  This latest book, however, is a set of Barnes’s musings on death.  Yes, death.  Because we can’t stop with the uppers around here.  But as the title implies, it is Nothing to Be Frightened Of.  The author’s fascination with the subject goes from awkward to reassuring and back. As interesting as it is, you may want to pick up another item we just added to balance out the mood…

1.21 gigawatts? Great Scott!

BotD Sells Out for a Movie

Japanese film directors: who do you think of?  Akira Kurosawa?  Quite a good guess, but not today. Takashi Miike?  Another good guess, and Audition is one of my favorite films, but…

We’ll need to go back, like 1960s back, to another phenomenal director.  An Autumn Afternoon is the last film directed by Yasujiro Ozu.

Here’s a little backstory on Ozu.  He spent his life making films beginning in the 1930s.  While critics liked them, he was not successful enough to get a pass when the country went to war, and was then drafted into infantry.  It is said that during WWII, he was asked to make propaganda films, and spent most of his time watching confiscated American flicks, holding a particular favoritism for Citizen Kane.

When the wars were resolved, he went back to making the kind of films that would define him: family centered narratives typically involving the relationship between parents and their children, often with the overcoming of an absence.  An Autumn Afternoon is no exception, focusing on a widowed father planning his daughter’s wedding in 1960s Japan.  Ozu died in 1963, only a year after this film’s completion.

An Autumn Afternoon was added to the Criterion Collection this year.

Book of the Day vs. Cows

Fact: I don’t eat meat.  I’m not lauding it, I don’t care, and I’m not part of a radical movement to free the bovine.  However, I’m flipping through today’s BotD: Introduction to Animal Science: Global, Biological, Social, and Industry Perspectives, and it appears that in my brief time perusing the item, I’ve encountered the food industry, and lots of bovine.  For real, I think I’ve opened up to more cows than any book I’ve ever touched.  But look at that cover!  Adorable!

Despite my observations, it does not completely adhere to the food industry (or moo-ing animals).  It has a lot of graphical information which is researched and cited.  It also goes into the history of domesticating animals, service, environmental issues… But if you’re simple like me, there are a lot of color pictures of puppies (puppies!!) and rabbits (bunnies!!).

So pick it up for the education (and bunnies!).

Book of the Day

Pay attention, faculty:  You’ve been given the task to improve and implement your individual and departmental assessment.  Lucky for you, the library’s backed this with a preemptive strike and ordered a load of assessment-related material.  The one featured, Assessment Clear and Simple by Barbara Woolvard, is designed specifically to help educators alter habits, behaviors, and curriculum to better gauge their own performance, their department’s performance as a whole, and can be used to aggregate it all into the overall institution. And there are plenty more, educatation-specific and otherwise.

So get reading, impress a dean, impress your supervisor, and get your department assess..erizing?  Sounds good enough…

Special Book of the Day

Yesterday, the new book compiler went down, so no BotD was unleashed.  Today, however, we’ll do two.  The first is extra special, written up by Andrea Kempf, Librarian at JCCC, and responsible for an enormous chunk of our libGuides (they’ve got my name on them by default, but that’s changing).  Without further ado, here’s her chosen book.

I like to read mysteries and I like locked room puzzles and I like books about how Europe is dealing with a massive influx of immigrants.  The Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio by Amara Lakhous, an Algerian immigrant to Italy satisfies all three desires.  When a bully nicknamed “the Gladiator” is found stabbed to death in the elevator of his apartment building in Rome,  the kindest resident becomes the chief suspect because he disappeared the day of the murder.  An inspector interviews the residents revealing the pressures that build when everyone is from somewhere else and no one understands the other.  It was impossible to guess the outcome until the last chapter.  This is a page-turner that sneakily informs while it entertains.