Friday, May 30, 2008

The Ecology of Oil: Environment, Labor, and the Mexican Revolution, 1900-1938 (Studies in Environment and History)



An exploration of the social and environmental consequences of oil extraction in the tropical rainforest. Using northern Veracruz as a case study, the author argues that oil production generated major historical and environmental transformations in land tenure systems and uses, and social organization. Such changes, furthermore, entailed effects, including the marginalization of indigenes, environmental destruction, and tense labor relations. In the context of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), however, the results of oil development did not go unchallenged. Mexican oil workers responded to their experience by forging a politicized culture and a radical left militancy that turned 'oil country' into one of the most significant sites of class conflict in revolutionary Mexico. Ultimately, the book argues, Mexican oil workers deserve their share of credit for the 1938 decree nationalizing the foreign oil industry - heretofore reserved for President Lazaro Cardenas - and thus changing the course of Mexican history. [Description provided by the publisher] [Image: http://www.nd.gov/hist/images/photoarchives/mining/D0508-Oil-well-near-RObinso.jpg]

HD9574.M615.H837

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

The Real Pepsi Challenge: How One Pioneering Company Broke Color Barriers in 1940s American Business


In America's long march toward racial equality, small acts of courage by men and women whose names we don't recall have contributed mightily to our nation's struggle to achieve its own ideals. This moving book details the story of one such little-noted chapter.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, as Jackie Robinson changed the face of baseball, a group of African-American businessmen -- twelve at its peak -- changed the face of American business by being among the first black Americans to work at professional jobs in Corporate America and to target black consumers as a distinct market.
The corporation was Pepsi-Cola, led by the charismatic and socially progressive Walter Mack, a visionary business leader. Though Mack was a guarded idealist, his consent for a campaign aimed at black consumers was primarily motivated by the pursuit of profits -- and the campaign succeeded, boosting Pepsi's earnings and market share. But America succeeded as well, as longstanding stereotypes were chipped away and African- Americans were recognized as both talented employees and valued customers. It was a significant step in our becoming a more inclusive society.
On one level, The Real Pepsi Challenge, whose author is an editor and writer for The Wall Street Journal, is a straightforward business book about the birth of niche marketing. But, as we quickly learn, it is a truly inspirational story, recalling a time when we as a nation first learned to see the strength of our diversity. It is far more than a history of marketing in America; it is a key chapter in the social history of our nation.
Until these men came along, typical advertisements depicted African-Americans as one-dimensional characters: Aunt Jemimas and Uncle Bens. But thereafter, Pepsi-Cola took a different approach, portraying American blacks for what they were increasingly becoming -- accomplished middle-class citizens. While such portrayals seem commonplace to us today, they were revolutionary in their time, and the men who brought them into existence risked day-to-day professional indignities parallel to those that Jackie Robinson suffered for breaking baseball's color line. As they crossed the country in the course of their jobs, they faced the cruelty of American racial attitudes. Jim Crow laws often limited where they could eat and sleep while on the road, and they faced resistance even within their own company. Yet these men succeeded as businessmen, and all went on to success in other professions as well, including medicine, journalism, education, and international diplomacy.
Happily, six of these pioneers lived to tell their stories to the author. Their voices, full of pride, good humor, and sharp recollection, enrich these pages and give voice to the continuing American saga. [Description provided by the publisher]
HD9349.S634.P462

Pleasure and the Arts: Enjoying Literature, Painting, and Music


How do the arts give us pleasure? Covering a very wide range of artistic works, from Auden to David Lynch, Rembrandt to Edward Weston, and Richard Strauss to Keith Jarrett, Pleasure and the Arts offers us an explanation of our enjoyable emotional engagements with literature, music, andpainting. The arts direct us to intimate and particularized relationships, with the people represented in the works, or with those we imagine produced them. When we listen to music, look at a purely abstract painting, or drink a glass of wine, can we enjoy the experience without verbalizing ourresponse? Do our interpretative assumptions, our awareness of technique, and our attitudes to fantasy, get in the way of our appreciation of art, or enhance it? Examining these questions and more, we discover how curiosity drives us to enjoy narratives, ordinary jokes, metaphors, and modernistepiphanies, and how narrative in all the arts can order and provoke intense enjoyment. Pleasurable in its own right, Pleasure and the Arts presents a sparkling explanation of the enduring interest of artistic expression. [Description provided by the publisher]
BH39.B88

Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition



For millennia, two biblical verses have been understood to condemn sex between men as an act so abhorrent that it is punishable by death. Traditionally Orthodox Jews, believing the scripture to be the word of God, have rejected homosexuality in accordance with this interpretation. In 1999, Rabbi Steven Greenberg challenged this tradition when he became the first Orthodox rabbi ever to openly declare his homosexuality.

Wrestling with God and Men is the product of Rabbi Greenberg’s ten-year struggle to reconcile his two warring identities. In this compelling and groundbreaking work, Greenberg challenges long held assumptions of scriptural interpretation and religious identity as he marks a path that is both responsible to human realities and deeply committed to God and Torah. Employing traditional rabbinic resources, Greenberg presents readers with surprising biblical interpretations of the creation story, the love of David and Jonathan, the destruction of Sodom, and the condemning verses of Leviticus. But Greenberg goes beyond the question of whether homosexuality is biblically acceptable to ask how such relationships can be sacred. In so doing, he draws on a wide array of nonscriptural texts to introduce readers to occasions of same-sex love in Talmudic narratives, medieval Jewish poetry and prose, and traditional Jewish case law literature. Ultimately, Greenberg argues that Orthodox communities must open up debate, dialogue, and discussion—precisely the foundation upon which Jewish law rests—to truly deal with the issue of homosexual love. [Description provided by the publisher]

BM729.H65.G74

Friday, May 23, 2008

No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam



Though it is the fastest growing religion in the world, Islam remains shrouded by ignorance and fear. What is the essence of this ancient faith? Is it a religion of peace or war? How does Allah differ from the God of Jews and Christians? Can an Islamic state be founded on democratic values such as pluralism and human rights? A writer and scholar of comparative religions, Reza Aslan has earned international acclaim for the passion and clarity he has brought to these questions. In No god but God, challenging the “clash of civilizations” mentality that has distorted our view of Islam, Aslan explains this critical faith in all its complexity, beauty, and compassion. [Description provided by the publisher]

BP161.3.A79

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Burning Issues:Understanding and Misunderstanding the Middle East- a 40-Year Chronicle


Nineteen authors, mostly Americans with first-hand experience in Occupied Palestine, examine the ideological genesis of the Israeli state and detail the moral, economic, and political costs - both foreign and domestic - that Americans pay every day for their uncritical support of a problematic ally. Burning Issues is composed of articles from The Link, a periodical published since 1968 by Americans for Middle East Understanding [Description provided by the publisher]


DS126.5.B87

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Benjamin Franklin Unmasked: On the Unity of His Moral, Religious, and Political Thought


Moral paragon, public servant, founding father; scoundrel, opportunist, womanizing phony: There are many Benjamin Franklins. Now, as we celebrate the tercentenary of Franklin's birth, Jerry Weinberger reveals the Franklin behind the many masks and shows that the real Franklin was far more remarkable than anyone has yet discovered. [Description provided by the publisher] [Image: http://www.americaslibrary.gov/assets/aa/franklinb/aa_franklinb_subj_e.jpg]


E302.F8.W545

Monday, May 19, 2008

Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans


In Driven Out, Jean Pfaelzer sheds a harsh light on America’s past. This is a story of hitherto unknown racial pogroms, purges, roundups, and brutal terror, but also a record of valiant resistance and community. This deeply resonant and eye-opening work documents a significant and disturbing episode in American history.
F870.C5.P48

Thursday, May 15, 2008

The World Without Us

In The World Without Us, Alan Weisman offers an utterly original approach to questions of humanity’s impact on the planet: he asks us to envision our Earth, without us.
In this far-reaching narrative, Weisman explains how our massive infrastructure would collapse and finally vanish without human presence; which everyday items may become immortalized as fossils; how copper pipes and wiring would be crushed into mere seams of reddish rock; why some of our earliest buildings might be the last architecture left; and how plastic, bronze sculpture, radio waves, and some man-made molecules may be our most lasting gifts to the universe.
The World Without Us reveals how, just days after humans disappear, floods in New York’s subways would start eroding the city’s foundations, and how, as the world’s cities crumble, asphalt jungles would give way to real ones. It describes the distinct ways that organic and chemically treated farms would revert to wild, how billions more birds would flourish, and how cockroaches in unheated cities would perish without us. Drawing on the expertise of engineers, atmospheric scientists, art conservators, zoologists, oil refiners, marine biologists, astrophysicists, religious leaders from rabbis to the Dali Lama, and paleontologists---who describe a prehuman world inhabited by megafauna like giant sloths that stood taller than mammoths---Weisman illustrates what the planet might be like today, if not for us.
[Description provided by the publisher] [Photo: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/205/451988344_30d291c21f_o.jpg]
GF75.W455

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

American Protest Literature

“I like a little rebellion now and then”—so wrote Thomas Jefferson to Abigail Adams, enlisting in a tradition that throughout American history has led writers to rage and reason, prophesy and provoke. This is the first anthology to collect and examine an American literature that holds the nation to its highest ideals, castigating it when it falls short and pointing the way to a better collective future.

American Protest Literature presents sources from eleven protest movements—political, social, and cultural—from the Revolution to abolition to gay rights to antiwar protest. Each section reprints documents from the original phase of the movement as well as evidence of its legacy in later times. Informative headnotes place the selections in historical context and draw connections with other writings within the anthology and beyond. Sources include a wide variety of genres—pamphlets, letters, speeches, sermons, legal documents, poems, short stories, photographs, posters—and a range of voices from prophetic to outraged to sorrowful, from U.S. Presidents to the disenfranchised. Together they provide an enlightening and inspiring survey of this most American form of literature. [Description provided by the publisher]

HN90.R3.A6754

Monday, May 12, 2008

Shopping Our Way to Safety: How We Changed from Protecting the Environment to Protecting Ourselves

Many Americans today rightly fear that they are constantly exposed to dangerous toxins in their immediate environment: tap water is contaminated with chemicals; foods contain pesticide residues, hormones, and antibiotics; even the air we breathe, outside and indoors, carries invisible poisons. Yet we have responded not by pushing for governmental regulation, but instead by shopping. What accounts for this swift and dramatic response? And what are its unintended consequences?

Andrew Szasz examines this phenomenon in Shopping Our Way to Safety. Within a couple of decades, he reveals, bottled water and water filters, organic food, “green” household cleaners and personal hygiene products, and “natural” bedding and clothing have gone from being marginal, niche commodities to becoming mass consumer items. Szasz sees these fatalistic, individual responses to collective environmental threats as an inverted form of quarantine, aiming to shut the healthy individual in and the threatening world out.

Sharply critiquing these products’ effectiveness as well as the unforeseen political consequences of relying on them to keep us safe from harm, Szasz argues that when consumers believe that they are indeed buying a defense from environmental hazards, they feel less urgency to actually do something to fix them. To achieve real protection, real security, he concludes, we must give up the illusion of individual solutions and together seek substantive reform.

Andrew Szasz is professor and chair of the department of sociology at the University of California at Santa Cruz and author of the award-winning EcoPopulism (Minnesota, 1994). [All descriptive information provided by the publisher]

Friday, May 02, 2008

Prisons (Introducing Issues With Opposing Viewpoints)



Do prisons help society? How should inmates be treated? What role should prisons play in the war on terror?

REF HV9471.P7826

Child Abuse (Introducing Issues With Opposing Viewpoints)


How serious is the problem of child abuse? How can child abuse be prevented? How should the Government deal with child abusers and sex offenders?
REFHV6626.52.C535

The U.S. Government (Introducing Issues With Opposing Viewpoints)


What is the current state of government? Are governmental powers properly balanced? How should government function in the future?
REF JK40.U84

Homosexuality (Introducing Issues With Opposing Viewpoints)

Is homosexuality a moral issue? Should gay people have the same rights as straight people? Should gay people be permitted to marry?

REF HQ76.3.U5.H6444

Christianity (Introducing Issues With Opposing Viewpoints)

What is the role of Christianity in the world? What is the role of gender and sexuality in Christianity? What is the future of Christianity?

REF BR121.3.C47

Religion in Schools (Introducing Issues With Opposing Viewpoints)


Should religion be allowed in public schools? Should public schools teach intelligent design? Should public schools allow school prayer?
REF LC111.R47

Bullying (Introducing Issues With Opposing Viewpoints)

What causes Bullying? How can parents and others combat bullying? How can bullying be reduced?
REF BF637.B85B84

Television (Introducing Issues With Opposing Viewpoints)


Is Television Harmful?; What is Society's Relationship to Television?; Who Should Control Television?
REF PN1992.3.U5T367

Cults (Social Issues Firsthand)

Exploring Cults; Leaving Cults; The Impact on Families: The Dangers of Cults
REF BP603.C845

Depression (Social Issues Firsthand)

Depression strikes; Living with Depression; Getting Help; How Depression Affects Others

REF RC 537.D4262


[Image: http://www.faqs.org/health/images/uchr_05_img0491.jpg]

Racism (Social Issues Firsthand)

Everyday Racism; Racism at School; Racism, Tragedy, and Violence

REF E184.3A1.R3265

Alcoholism (Social Issues Firsthand)

Alcohol and Teens; Coping with a Parent's Addiction; Alcoholism from the Perspective of Family and Friends; Recovery

REF HV5292.A38554

Addiction (Social Issues Firsthand)

Life as an Addict; Relationships and Addiction; Recovery and Beyond
REF HV4998.A34