Happy New Year! Posts will resume next week with leisure reading suggestions from the VCU Libraries collections. In the meanwhile, are you looking for something to read? Lists come out all year long, but especially in December, that promote the best or most interesting books of the year. Booksellers Amazon and Barnes & Noble have both released their "Best of 2012" lists. Goodreads, a social media site for readers, has released its Choice Awards, voted on by members. The 2012 winners of the Virginia Literary Festival are another source for good reads, as well as the lists of winners and candidates for such awards as the Man Booker, National Book Award, and Pulitzer. VCU Libraries owns many, but not all, of the titles on these lists, so you may also wish to check your local public library for availability.
Library News: Award Winners 
Founder of a dynasty, builder of the original Grand Central, creator of an impossibly vast fortune, Cornelius "Commodore" Vanderbilt is an American icon. Humbly born on Staten Island during George Washington's presidency, he rose from boatman to builder of the nation's largest fleet of steamships to lord of a railroad empire. Lincoln consulted him on steamship strategy during the Civil War; Jay Gould was first his uneasy ally and then sworn enemy; and Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president of the United States, was his spiritual counselor. We see Vanderbilt help to launch the transportation revolution, propel the Gold Rush, reshape Manhattan, and invent the modern corporation--in fact, as T. J. Stiles elegantly argues, Vanderbilt did more than perhaps any other individual to create the economic world we live in today.
In The First Tycoon, Stiles offers the first complete, authoritative biography of this titan, and the first comprehensive account of the Commodore's personal life. It is a sweeping, fast-moving epic, and a complex portrait of the great man. Vanderbilt, Stiles shows, embraced the philosophy of the Jacksonian Democrats and withstood attacks by his conservative enemies for being too competitive. He was a visionary who pioneered business models. He was an unschooled fistfighter who came to command the respect of New York's social elite. And he was a father who struggled with a gambling-addicted son, a husband who was loving yet abusive, and, finally, an old man who was obsessed with contacting the dead.
The First Tycoon is the exhilarating story of a man and a nation maturing together: the powerful account of a man whose life was as epic and complex as American history itself.
Cabell Library CT275.V23 S85 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.
Reviewed by Renée Bosman, Reference Librarian for Government and Public Affairs and Reference Collection Coordinator
Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories is exquisitely well-crafted and worth a read, even if you tend to shy away from short stories. Several stories do touch upon the theme of cultural identity explored at length in her later novel The Namesake, but this often serves as background to their ordinary human trials; miscarriage, marital tension, and loss are some of the issues faced by both her Indian and Indian-American characters.
There is a thread of unfulfillment that runs through these stories, whether it is Mrs. Das and her marriage in “Interpreter of Maladies” or young Eliot observing his lonely babysitter in “Mrs. Sen’s,” yet Lahiri avoids injecting their lives with pessimism. Instead, many of her characters display a resiliency to life’s everyday challenges that can be uplifting; one observes, “there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.” This sentiment beautifully describes Interpreter of Maladies – perhaps ordinary on the surface, but a work of extraordinary beauty.
Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities
Alfred Hitchcock was one of the best known directors of suspense films in the twentieth century, and this early film shows the skill he had attained years and even decades before his signature works. In this 1940 Oscar-winning film based on the 1938 novel of the same name, a young woman marries the secretive Maxim de Winter after a chance meeting in Monte Carlo, then returns with him to his estate in Cornwall and its house, Manderley. The plot follows the bride, whom we learn early on is the second Mrs. de Winter, as she attempts to escape the overpowering presence of her predecessor. From beautiful cinematography to spot-on acting, this movie has the power to surprise seventy years after its release.
This Criterion Collection edition contains commentary by film scholar Leonard J. Leff; isolated music and effects track; screen, hair, makeup and costume tests including Vivien Leigh, Anne Baxter, Loreeta Young, Margaret Sullavan and Joan Fontaine; Hitchcock on Rebecca, excerpts from his conversations with François Truffaut; phone interviews with Joan Fontaine and Judith Anderson from 1986; behind-the-scenes photo gallery; production correspondence and casting notes; deleted scenes script excerpts; 1939 test screening questionnaire; footage from 1940 Academy Awards ceremony; re-issue trailer; three hours of radio show adaptations.
Cabell Media and Reserves DVDs PR6007.U47 R42 2001
Cabell Library PR6007.U47 R4 1938 (novel)
Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities
A fictionalized account of the murder of Emmett Till, Bebe Moore Campbell’s Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine is an engaging novel about the lives of the people involved. Spanning the many decades that followed the murder, this story personalizes the heartache suffered by everyone involved, from the family of Armstrong Todd (the fictional stand-in for Emmett Till) to the power brokers of the Mississippi Delta to the man who put a bullet in his stomach to the descendants of every person involved. Campbell has a knack for bringing her characters to life in all their beauty and ugliness. No one, murderer or victim, gets away unexamined in this work.
Whether it was Campbell's intention or not (she died in 2006), this book is the very definition of thought-provoking. Abstract ideas of discrimination and oppression have almost no role in this book; instead the reader experiences the thoughts and feelings of people living in difficult circumstances. To say that black Americans have historically been oppressed is one thing, but it is entirely another to watch the destruction of lives in ways large and small. All the novel's black characters struggle to survive the injustice of Jim Crow, to escape it in the North, only to realize that the legacy of oppression is inescapable, and can mean destruction even when victory is in sight. All the characters -- white or black, male or female, rich or poor, young or old -- are forever damaged by the things they do and that are done to them as a result of who they are. In the end, however, most of them find a place of strength to draw from in order to handle life's trials.
Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities
Li-Young Lee is a poet of the core elements of human experience, shunning the transitory. His work encompasses loneliness, fatherhood, love, the inner life of children, and many other experiences familiar to readers of today, yesterday, or tomorrow. The poems of Book of My Nights are not very long as a rule, focusing with spare language on the things one tends to ruminate about in the hours between dusk and dawn.
On the death of his brother, in "Black Petal":
Ask him who his mother is. He'll declare the birds
have eaten the path home, but each of us
joins night's ongoing story
On the concerns of a father, in "Words for Worry":
Worry boils the water
for tea in the middle of the night.
Worry trimmed the child's nails before
singing him to sleep.
On youth and mortality, in "Stations of the Sea":
Once forsaken, I remain
hidden in the dust, a mortal threshold
unearthed by crying.
Crying, my body turns to dark petals.
The poet has been well-laurelled in his life as a poet, winning multiple Pushcart Prizes, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. Perhaps the most prominent of Asian American poets, a collection of interviews entitled Breaking the Alabaster Jar was published in 2006. His poems have been anthologized in major works like the Norton Anthology of American Literature, signaling both provisional inclusion in the oft-debated canon and the regard in which his work is held.
Cabell Library PS3562.E35438 B66 2001
Cabell Library PS3562.E35438 Z46 2006 Breaking the Alabaster Jar
Celebrating Black History Month at the VCU Libraries
Reviewed by Patricia Selinger, Head of Preservation
It was a tense moment. Sojourner Truth was about to speak at the second Women’s Rights Convention in 1851. Truth had been making many Americans uncomfortable as she spoke publicly of the hypocrisy of democracy when racism and sexism were tearing the country apart. Her book, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave, was published the year before and she had joined an abolitionist speakers bureau. Her supporters secured her a place on the program. As soon as she spoke, ongoing discussions halted. The elegant, privileged white feminist women at the meeting, who thought they could speak authentically for slave women, were quiet. Truth’s life stood in stark contrast to theirs, and she spoke much more persuasively than they could. She called on women who did not want her to speak or join the discussions to face their hypocrisy. She denounced men in the audience for withholding rights from their mothers, sisters, and wives. The question, “Ar’n’t I A Woman” perfectly captured the difference between black and white antebellum women.
Deborah White, a distinguished professor of history at Rutgers University, wrote a concise book on the development of stereotypes of slave women as well the horrors they were forced to face in their daily life. She describes well the issues and differences between slave and free women. While all women of the time were powerless and exploited to a degree, black women experienced an extreme form of persecution. Extensive footnotes authenticate her research and work. White proposed that the female slave trade had little to do with the woman’s ability to work; instead, it had everything to do with physical attractiveness and the black woman’s ability to have children -- children to benefit the slave owner alone. In essence, slave women were little more than sexual objects. White persuasively documents how the stigma persists to modern times. Black women have no era in history where they were respected or held privilege as a class in American society.
Nine years later Sojourner Truth was speaking again, this time on the abolition of slavery. Rumors circulated in the audience that Truth was actually a man posing as a woman. Men demanded that she show her breasts to prove she was a woman. She did, saying that it was to their shame that she did so. At that time, “No” seemed to be the answer to the question “Ar’n’t I A Woman”. White argues that the black woman is still waiting for an affirmative answer.
The text of the speech “Ar’n’t [Ain’t] I A Woman?” can be found online at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/sojtruth-woman.html. The book was White’s first publication and won the Letitia Brown Memorial Book Prize.
Reviewed by Renée Bosman, Reference Librarian for Government and Public Affairs and Reference Collection Coordinator
Three Junes is a quiet character study of the McLeod family, told at three points in time over the span of ten years. Each section stands well on its own; indeed, “Collies,” the first part of the book, won the 1999 Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society Medal for Best Novella. Yet when read together, the stories complement each other and serve to provide multi-faceted portraits of the characters; the reader not only views Paul, the McLeod patriarch, through the lens of his own narrative, but from his son Fenno’s perspective as well.
The novel begins with Paul’s trip to Greece as a recent widower, during which he reminisces about his somewhat flawed, yet very loving, marriage to Maureen. Fenno’s story meanders between his life in New York during the time of Maureen’s illness and his homecoming to Scotland several years later, precipitated by Paul’s death. The third section studies the McLeod men from the eyes of an outsider, an acquaintance of Paul’s who also meets Fenno and one of his brothers through rather unusual circumstances. Yet rather than a too-coincidental and tidy ending, Fern’s impressions lend another dimension to the McLeod men and serve to underscore the themes of choice and ambiguity present in the lives of Glass’s very human characters.
Reviewed by Ken Hopson, Manager, Media and Reserve Services
Most Westerners grew up hearing the word Gypsy, understanding it to portray a colorful sort of people who travel in caravans and read palms. In reality, they are an ethnic group of at least 15 million people, properly called "Romani." They have their own language and government, though no home country. Originally from Northern India, the Romani have spent the last millennium migrating to all parts of the world, eventually assimilating into communities where they feel comfortable. Throughout their history, the Romani have faced the xenophobic, which is among the topics approached in this film.
Tony Gatlif , of Romani ethnicity himself, has directed a film that is part personal journey, part love story and part exposé of a misunderstood people. Gatlif won numerous international awards for this film, which employed only two non-Romani actors.
Gadjo Dilo tells the story of Stephane (Romain Duris), a young Parisian, who travels to Romania in search of a female Gypsy singer who is on a cassette tape his father had given him before he died. Taken under the wing of the constantly intoxicated and overly excited Isidor (Izidor Serban), Stephane is eventually accepted by the Romani community and experiences both their jubilation and tribulation first hand. He also finds that the singer he has been seeking may not be the woman on his father's tape, but an altogether different Gypsy, the unconventional Sabina (Rona Hartner) sitting right next to him. This movie will make you happy and sad, offend and enlighten you, and fill your ears with some of the most unique music in the world.
Note: This is a VHS video, available for in-house use only, except for faculty, graduate and honors students. See the VCU Libraries Borrowing Privileges webpage for details.
Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities
Long before the movie version of Wonder Boys catapulted Tobey Maguire into the public eye, way before he published his Pulitzer-winning The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, back when he was only 25, Michael Chabon published his first novel, a slim coming-of-age story called The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. It brought him fame and a good reputation at an age when most writers are still diligently laboring in the vineyards of the literary and little magazines. It is a funny, moving book set during the summer when newly graduated college student Art Bechstein tries to figure out who he is and what to do with his life. In the process he winds up with a boyfriend and a girlfriend, gets involved with the Pittsburgh underworld at levels high and low, and has a series of pleasantly picaresque adventures.
This novel will appeal to readers who enjoyed The Secret History or The Catcher in the Rye, or really any good novel about what it means to be young and in love with the world. Chabon's prose is both exuberant and smooth in this book, telling the story with a minimum of fuss. Pittsburgh is on display in every chapter, a real presence and not just a generic setting, making this the kind of novel that inhabitants might point to if asked "what's it like to live here?" It's also a fun novel to read if you've only read Chabon's later work, partly for the pleasure of the book itself, partly for the pleasure of anticipating how he came to grow in later years.
