March 2011 Archives

Hip-hop has come a long way from its origins in the Bronx in the 1970s, when rapping and DJing were just part of a lively, decidedly local scene that also venerated break-dancing and graffiti. Now hip-hop is a global phenomenon and, in the United States, a massively successful corporate enterprise predominantly controlled and consumed by whites while the most prominent performers are black. How does this shift in racial dynamics affect our understanding of contemporary hip-hop, especially when the music perpetuates stereotypes of black men? Do black listeners interpret hip-hop differently from white fans?

These questions have dogged hip-hop for decades, but unlike most pundits, Michael P. Jeffries finds answers by interviewing everyday people. Instead of turning to performers or media critics, Thug Life focuses on the music's fans--young men, both black and white--and the resulting account avoids romanticism, offering an unbiased examination of how hip-hop works in people's daily lives. As Jeffries weaves the fans' voices together with his own sophisticated analysis, we are able to understand hip-hop as a tool listeners use to make sense of themselves and society as well as a rich, self-contained world containing politics and pleasure, virtue and vice.

Cabell Library ML3918.R37 J44 2011

Note: Quick Picks are new to the collection. Some may not yet have reached the shelves. If you want to check out an item that is not yet available, click the "Is this item available?" link in the catalog record, then click the "Request" link.

Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

The first strip of Dykes to Watch Out For, Alison Bechdel's famous counterculture comic strip, appeared in 1983. The strips collected in this volume chronicle the massive changes that took place between then and 2008, built into and around the lives of a group of recurring characters. Over the twenty-five years covered, they watch, protest, observe, are part of, and rail against what's going on in the United States and the world, always bringing an LGBT perspective to what's happening. That perspective changes over time, reflecting increased acceptance of the characters by society even as they struggle to define themselves and remain true to ideals that parenthood, marriage, and increased acceptance itself force them to reconsider. This collection is by turns funny, sad, engaging, and eye-opening in its frank and forthright treatment of the lives of LGBT people in the United States over the last quarter century. Bechdel, author of the award-winning autobiography Fun Home, draws in a style reminiscent of her stylistic idols, Hergé and R. Crumb.

Cabell Library PN6728.D94 B475 2008

Internationally acclaimed writer Dennis Cooper continues to study the material he's always explored honestly, but does so now-in stories-with a sense of awareness and a satirical touch that exploits and winks at his mastery of this world. As it has done for decades, Cooper's taut, controlled prose lays bare the compulsions and troubling emptiness of the human soul.

Cabell Library PS3553.O582 U35 2009

Note: Quick Picks are new to the collection. Some may not yet have reached the shelves. If you want to check out an item that is not yet available, click the "Is this item available?" link in the catalog record, then click the "Request" link.

In 1928, the boy who will discover Pluto, Clyde Tombaugh, is on the family farm, grinding a lens for his own telescope under the immense Kansas sky. In Flagstaff, Arizona, the staff of Lowell Observatory is about to resume the late Percival Lowell's interrupted search for Planet X. Meanwhile, the immensely rich heir to a chemical fortune has decided to go west to hunt for dinosaurs and in Cambridge, Massachussetts, the most beautiful girl in America is going slowly insane while her ex-heavyweight champion boyfriend stands by helplessly, desperate to do anything to keep her. Inspired by the true story of Tombaugh and set in the last gin-soaked months of the flapper era, Percival's Planet tells the story of the intertwining lives of half a dozen dreamers, schemers, and madmen. Following Tombaugh's unlikely path from son of a farmer to discoverer of a planet, the novel touches on insanity, mathematics, music, astrophysics, boxing, dinosaur hunting, shipwrecks--and what happens when the greatest romance of your life is also the source of your life's greatest sorrow.

Cabell Library PS3552.Y42 P47 2010

Note: Quick Picks are new to the collection. Some may not yet have reached the shelves. If you want to check out an item that is not yet available, click the "Is this item available?" link in the catalog record, then click the "Request" link.