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NEW PUBLICATIONSC&RL News, June 2007 by George Eberhart Alien Worlds: Social and Religious Dimensions of Extraterrestrial Contact, edited by Diana G. Tumminia (360 pages, April 2007), explores the seemingly related experiences of abduction experiencers and contactee religious cultists. Included are essays by Mikael Rothstein on religious hagiography in the Aetherius Society; Jerome Clark on Sister Thedra, who started out as Dorothy Martin of Oak Park, Illinois, and received space messages that became the subject of a famous 1956 sociological study titled When Prophecy Fails; Diana Tumminia on the long-lived Unarius cult in southern California; Georg M. Rønnevig on abductions and sleep paralysis; and Pierre Lagrange on contactee beliefs in France. $34.95. Syracuse University. ISBN 978-0-8156-0858-5. Build It Once: A Basic Primer for the Creation of Online Exhibitions, by Sarah Goodwin Thiel (100 pages, March 2007), explains the basics of setting up an online exhibition and suggests a simple four-level structure suitable for most digital collections. Thiel even guides the reader through the intricacies of table creation in a Dreamweaver tutorial. An excellent resource for those who need to find out quickly and practically how to create an exhibition. $35.00. Scarecrow. ISBN 978-0-8108-5225-9.
Care and Conservation of Manuscripts 9, edited by Gillian Fellows-Jensen and Peter Springborg (263 pages, February 2007), contains the proceedings of the 8th international seminar on conservation held at the University of Copenhagen, April 14–15, 2005. Papers include conservation techniques used by Ankara University for an 11th-century Islamic manuscript; a case study on ethical issues involving the digitization of an English 15th-century physician’s handbook by the Wellcome Trust; the story of a fragment of St. Mark’s gospel preserved in the Prague Castle Archives for 1,400 years; the 2003 recovery of books stolen from the Royal Library in Copenhagen; the conservation of leather bindings damaged by mold; and a reinvestigation of climate control in the archives of the National Museum of Denmark. $45.00. Museum Tusculanum Press, distributed by International Specialized Book Services. ISBN 978-87-635-0554-3. Collecting the Imagination: The First Fifty Years of the Ransom Center, edited by Megan Barnard (132 pages, April 2007), marks the semicentennial of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, established in 1957 as a world-class collection of European and American literature, historical documents, photography, and art. This well-illustrated volume describes the center’s founding, its mission and collections, growth, curators, and Harry Huntt Ransom himself, who as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences established his vision for a “research center to be the Bibliothèque Nationale of the only state that started out as an independent nation.” $40.00. University of Texas. ISBN 978-0-292-71489-2. Crocodile: Evolution’s Greatest Survivor, by Lynne Kelly (272 pages, July 2007), provides a brief look at the natural history of crocodiles and their interaction with humans. Much of the book is devoted to crocodiles in Australia, where it now seems likely that modern crocs originated, according to fossils discovered recently near Isisford in Queensland. Kelly reviews crocodile hunting and crocodile attacks, folk legends, croc farms, and zoo specimens. Although she mentions them in passing, alligators are better covered in Vaughn L. Glasgow’s A Social History of the American Alligator (St. Martin’s, 1991). $24.95. Allen & Unwin, distributed by Independent Publishers Group. ISBN 978-1-74114-498-7. Goods for Sale: Products and Advertising in the Massachusetts Industrial Age, by Chaim M. Rosenberg (242 pages, April 2007), examines the many products made in Massachusetts during its golden age of industry from 1860 to 1920. Rosenberg illustrates his narrative with some 130 colorful company trade cards that advertised clothing, sewing machines, footwear, pianos, watches, silverware, sarsaparilla, liver pills, stoves, bicycles, and automobiles—all manufactured in the Bay State from Boston to the Connecticut Valley. A vivid look at what constituted the amenities of life in an earlier time. $24.95. University of Massachusetts. ISBN 978-1-55849-580-7. Libraries and Librarianship: Sixty Years of Challenge and Change, 1945–2005, by George Bobinski (203 pages, May 2007), is an insightful retrospective on the past 60 years of the library profession. Bobinski, whose career from public library page to library school sage spans the same timeframe, enumerates succinctly the high and low points of reference service, library technology, cooperation, funding, library associations, intellectual freedom, women in librarianship, diversity, facilities and preservation, education, and library literature. He also summarizes 15 major developments, highlights 50 prominent library leaders, and provides a chronology of significant events. $40.00. Scarecrow. ISBN 978-0-8108-5899-2.
Roadside History of Louisiana, by Charles M. Robinson III (351 pages, May 2007), follows the highways of the Bayou State, pointing out plantations, historic sites, museums, and points of interest for the curious tourist. $20.00. Mountain Press. ISBN 978-0-87842-531-0.
George M. Eberhart is senior editor of American Libraries, e-mail: geberhart@ala.org |
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| © 2008 American Library Association. Copyright Statement Last Revised: May 21, 2007 |
Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America, by Elliot Jaspin (341 pages, March 2007), documents 12 instances between 1864 and 1923 where whites forcefully drove African Americans out of entire counties in Indiana, Texas, Tennessee, Missouri, Kentucky, Arkansas, Georgia, and North Carolina. The most disturbing thing about this book is not only that this is just the tip of the iceberg—the 1923 Rosewood, Florida, incident is another case that was made into a film—but also that such racial purges were effectively covered up and quickly forgotten. Indeed, Jaspin discovered them only after he noticed abrupt drops in black population in particular counties from one census to another and then poked around in old newspapers and archives in search of a cause. This grim history of race relations in rural America is a sad reminder of how widespread intolerance once was and how its effects persist—especially when read in conjunction with James Loewen’s Sundown Towns (New Press, 2005). $26.95. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-03636-3.
The Origin, Persistence, and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, by Henry H. Bauer (282 pages, May 2007), presents a credible critique of the paradigm that AIDS is caused solely by the HIV retrovirus. Bauer, professor emeritus of chemistry and science studies and dean emeritus of Arts and Sciences at Virginia Polytechnic, presents a solid array of data that suggest (as Peter Duesberg, the Perth Group, and other so-called AIDS dissidents have also done) that testing HIV positive is a nonspecific (and sometimes temporary) response to various levels of physiological stress ranging from minor ailments to heavy drug abuse and such serious diseases as tuberculosis. Bauer contends that the frequency of positive HIV tests is largely inconsistent with the pattern of an infectious agent and points to racial disparities in HIV test results that are difficult to explain by behavior—African Americans, for example, are five or six times as likely to test positive as whites, even in low-risk groups. As for AIDS itself, Bauer says it is a collection of immune diseases, outside Africa most often stemming from drug abuse; in sub-Saharan Africa, where HIV testing is rare and reporting is fallible, other diseases are attributed to AIDS, especially when their effects are exacerbated by malnutrition and poverty. Bauer goes on to show how science and medicine can sometimes go wrong (read John M. Barry’s The Great Influenza to find out how much time was wasted looking for a bacterial cause for the Spanish flu epidemic), and why the HIV/AIDS viral theory has persisted despite significant evidence to the contrary. $35.00. McFarland. ISBN 978-0-7864-3048-2.