Books, etc.

Little Princes: One Man's Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal

Little Princes: One Man's Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal, by Conor Grennan.  New York: William Morrow, 2010.  307 pages, illustrated.  SHU Library: copies on order.

Buy this book --you will be contributing to Next Generation Nepal.  Conor Grennan co-founded this organization with Farid Ait-Mansour in 2006 to re-unite the lost children of Nepal with their families.  (--and buy it from independent local booksellers)

Nepal underwent a bloody civil war 1996-2006 that left the country even more desperately poor than it when it started --it is one of the poorest and least economically developed countries in the world.  A very rugged, mountainous terrain (including Mt. Everest or Sagarmāthā) isolates most mountain valleys from the capital Kathmandu.  During the war child traffickers solicited payments from anxious parents to "place" their children in safe situations in Kathmandu, but in reality dumped the children on the street and pocketed the money.  Thousands of children were traumatically separated from their parents in this manner, and war, poverty, and the difficulty of travel prevented parents from finding them.  The children were frequently mistreated, starved, and enslaved, and aid organizations could not begin to keep pace with the need for relief.

Grennan embarked on a round-the-world trip in 2004 after eight years at the East-West Institute in Prague and Brussels, working on post-conflict reconciliation in the Balkans.  He wound up volunteering for three months at Little Princes Orphanage in Godawari, near Kathmandu.  It changed his life, but he didn't realize how much until he continued his travels elsewhere.  In 2005 he returned to the children but was forced to leave in the chaotic last months of the war in April 2006.  Back in the United States, he found himself starting a non-profit organization to reunite seven Nepalese children he had met in 2006 with their families in Humla, perhaps the most remote region high in the far northwest corner of Nepal.

Next Generation Nepal took shape in 2006 when he returned after raising money and rented a house in cooperation with the Umbrella Foundation, a non-profit already working in Nepal.  Farid and Grennan founded Dhaulagiri House (named after one of the highest mountains) with six of the seven children he had encountered in 2006 (the seventh was found later).  When travel became safe Grennan set out for Humla just as winter weather came in December 2006.  Travelling by foot with a guide party and an injured knee, Grennan actually found many of the parents of the children in Godawari and began the slow process of reacquainting parents and children separated by years of war.

Meanwhile Grennan corresponded with Elizabeth Flanagan, a fellow UVA alum who had volunteered at a orphanage in Zambia.  She understood the depth of Grennan's passionate commitment to his work and throughout the book their relationship (via e-mail and in person) deepens until he proposes.  In 2007 Grennan and Flanagan return to the United States to continue their work, and today they live in Connecticut with their children.

Part advocacy and personal travelogue, part social history, part adventure, part love-story, Grennan's book recounts his unexpected journey from being "just a normal guy," fun-loving in college (according to his friend Josh Arbaugh) to tireless advocacy, to an understated Christian faith, and to unstinting devotion to children.  Grennan embraced his work seriously enough to study at the New York University Stern School of Business, graduating with an M.B.A. in 2010 so that he could better manage this organization.

Conor Grennan will be speaking at Sacred Heart University on Wednesday, October 17, 2012, sponsored by the University Library and the Common Core Curriculum.

--Gavin Ferriby

Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil

Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil, by Tom Mueller. New York: Norton, 2012. 238 pages.  SHU Library: Popular Reading M (center shelves of the first floor, Ryan-Matura Library)

Olive oil has a very long and multifaceted history as a religious element, medicine, beauty aid --and food.  For 5000 it has charaterized the life and ancient cuisines of the Mediterranean, as ubiquitous in the age of Homer as the current Euro-crash.  In 2007 Tom Mueller began to investigate the dark side of olive oil corruption in The New Yorker, and he became oil-obsessed, an ancient condition.  This book expands and deepens his previous writing.

So what is olive oil virginity? Virgin olive oils are made by mechanical methods alone: the fruit is washed and crushed; the pulp is malaxed (softened by kneading) and centrifuged; and the resulting oil is filtered.  No chemical, thermal or nonphysical (reesterification) are used.  "Extra Virgin" is an oil grade of excellent color and odor and free fatty acid content of 0.8g per 100g (0.8%).

The olive oil trade is frequently corrupt, however.  Much of the oil that appears as extra-virgin in supermarkets is not, and sometimes not even made from olives.  In many areas small artisan producers practicing ancient and local traditions must compete with globalized multinationals dominated by fraud and deceptive practices.  Olive oil has become a unique prism through which to view the problems and promise of global trade: high-quality olive oil is now available where it was never available before, but in so doing depends upon a trade system and semi- or openly-criminal syndicates which inevitably corrupt it.

Beyond trade, olive oil also has a particular place in religious and medical practices (and sometimes those commingle).  The very teminology of olive oil is redolent of religion: how many products other than oil, wood, wax, and honey can be described as "virgin"?  (--and all of those are also Christian sacramental elements or constituents).

You deserve to know where you olive oil comes from, whether you simply eat pizza or cook gourmet foods.  You should have the assurance that your oil is pure whether you apply it to your skin, receive it in token of blessing, or simply celebrate its special and ancient taste.  Extra Virginity will tell you all this and more in entertaining, memorable, even delicious prose, stories, and poetry.

--Gavin Ferriby

Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson

The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise of the Environmental Movement, by Mark Hamilton Lytle.  Oxford Univ. Press, 2007.  x, 277 pages.  SHU Library: New Books QH31 .C33 L98 2007

This short book tells an intellectual, ecological biography of Rachel Carson (1907-1964), a founding writer of the environmental movement.  Lytle (who teaches history and environmental studies at Bard College) puts Carson into context in her time, and bases his text on wise readings of her books and carefully selected materials from Rachel Carson's papers at Yale University, in other collections, and comments in the literature about her.  Lytle never forgets Carson's patient care for her mother and the financial exigencies she faced, but also portrays the courage and stamina of a female scientist willing to take on major corporations in the time before the femininst movement.

Trained as a biologist and originally employed by the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, Carson began to publish naturalist essays in 1937 in The Atlantic Monthly.  Her first book, Under the Sea Wind (1941) was reviewed well but sold poorly; she continued to write magazine articles while working for the Bureau and writing a biological history of the ocean which became The Sea Around Us (1951).  This popular and well-received book enabled her to move to Maine to write The Edge of the Sea (1955) about ecosystems of the North American north Atlantic coast.  Continuing to care for her relatives in Maryland, she began to investigate synthetic pesticides (especially DDT) and the harm they did to wildlife and the coastal ecosystems.

Carson began especially to study carcinogenesis (origins of cancer) which was beginning to be associated with synthetic pesticides at the National Institutes of Health; she was drafting the "cancer chapters" of Silent Spring when she was found to have cysts in her breasts, and underwent a mastectomy.  The cancer, however, had metastasized and Carson was in a race with cancer to write what she knew before was she realized would be her inevitable death.

Silent Spring found that synthetic pesticides are as crude "as a cavemans club" which simply kill everything they touch and release toxins into the ecosystem.  In fact she was "calling into question the paradigm of scientific progress that defined postwar America." (p. 166)  Corporate producers of synthetic pesticides fought back hard, calling her a subversive. Ezra Taft Benson, Eisenhower's (Mormon) Secretary of Agriculture, wondered "why a spinster with no children was so concerned about genetics" and labelled her "probably a Communist." (p. 175)  By April 1964 she was vindicated in stark terms: a massive fish kill in the Mississippi River was traced to the pesticide endrin that entered the river at the Memphis waste-treatment plant.  It was produced by Velsicol (now Eastman Chemical Company) a corporation which had tried to block publication of Silent Spring.  In that month Carson died.

Lytle provides context and nuance to this sad and heroic story.  She saw humans in the ecological web; her opponents saw (and continue to see) humans as masters of nature.  At the end of Edge of the Sea (1955) she writes,

What is the meaning of so tiny a being as the transparent wisp of protoplasm that is sea lace, existing for some reason that is inscrutable to us--a reason that demands its presence by the trillion amid the rocks and weeds of the shore?  The meaning haunts and ever eludes us, and in its very pursuit we approach the ultimate mystery of life itself. (p. 216)

--Gavin Ferriby

Strapped: Why America's 20- and 30-Somethings Can't Get Ahead

Strapped: Why America's 20- and 30-Somethings Can't Get Ahead, by Tamara Draut.  New York: Anchor Books, 2007.  Located in the library at:   HQ799.7 .D73 2007 or online  via eBrary for SHU users.

By Stephanie Sorbara '15

There are many factors today that are holding people between the ages of 20 and 30 back from reaching their American Dream. To many, the American dream is not to be extremely wealthy or drive four different kinds of luxury cars, but rather to be able to start a family and not be drenched in student loan debt. The vast majority of people aged from 20 to 30 years old are struggling to build a career and a start a family and feel as though it is their fault. In Strapped: Why America’s 20-and 30- Somethings can’t get Ahead, Tamara Draut successfully outlines the struggles that people of today’s generation face as they try to build a career and future for themselves, and how it vastly differs from their parent’s generation.

The main component necessary for obtaining a future stable job that will provide benefits when it comes to starting a family and an income high enough to cover all living expenses stems from a simple college degree. Education is the key to getting ahead in life, yet it is the largest component that holds people back from creating their own future for themselves. College is extremely overpriced and not worth the results. Because college is so overpriced, many students are forced to take out an excessive amount of student loans to help pay for college. In the end they most likely receive their bachelors degree and sometimes even further their education to a masters degree. However, even with those degrees, the income they will be receiving when they finally find a job is not enough to pay off the immense amount of loans that build up from their college education. This debt builds up extremely fast and holds those college graduates back for years from getting a home of their own and starting a family. Not only that, but many students who excel greatly in high school must resort to community colleges because a four-year education is simply unaffordable. With increasing competition, one can be the brightest student out there, but be unable to further their education due to such high college tuition costs. Several bright students must resort to a two-year degree from a community college, when they clearly deserve to go to a highly ranked school. Students with a two year degree generally tend to end up with lower paying jobs and this prevents them from being able to live on their own as quickly as they had dreamed of. However, it is not their fault and is not because they are not a bright student. The aid granted to students who excel in high school is not generous enough to help them obtain a four-year degree. Basically, if a student’s parents are not in the upper class making a very large salary, a college education will not be very easy to obtain now a days.

Another aspect that holds people back from attaining their dreams of one day living comfortably in the middle class are the missing benefits that are not granted through their job. In our parent’s generation, it was common to work for a company that would pay for that person to go to graduate school while he or she worked at their company. Not having that extra debt to pay off greatly aided in that person starting a family and owning a home. Better yet, when it came time to starting a family, the people of our parent’s generation were granted benefits, such as paid maternity leave. Today, most of these benefits are extinct and cause much of our generation’s 20 and 30 year olds to delay starting a family because their jobs would be put at risk. The jobs that one can get from a bachelors and masters degree today do not provide as many benefits for one and do not offer a high enough income to pay for the current living costs. Draut clearly outlines the reasons as to why our parents had an easier start in building their futures, and this is only one of the many.

Tamara Draut explains the reasons why it is so difficult for 20 and 30 year olds to get ahead in life and achieve their dream of simply owning a home and starting a family. Draut does a great job in depicting the obstacles that young adults today are facing and proving that it is not at all their fault. Today’s current economy, job offerings and education system vastly differs from our parent’s generation. This book is extremely informative and pertains to everyone’s life in some way. It provides great information young adults need to be aware of when diving into their future.

My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture

My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture, by Susan D. Blum.  Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 2009.  Located at: First Floor, New Book Display: PN 167 .B48 2009; also available online for SHU users via eBrary.

University undergraduate students and faculty live in two different cultural communities and their understandings of plagiarism and originality differ profoundly.  Blum presents plagiarism as (for faculty) rooted in Enlightenment discussions of ideas, words, expression, individual originality, and sources –summed up in the concept of “authenticity.”  But students live performative lives –surrounded by texts via chat, texting (text is now a verb), and view performative quotation and allusion very differently from adult norms of attribution.

Plagiarism involves, according to Blum, and spectrum of behaviors from outright intentional deception (purchasing a paper to be submitted as one’s own) to casual or uninformed quotation and appropriation of text.  Academic disciplines vary in their approach to quotation: when does a cliché (if the shoe fits …) become a literary allusion (the best of times, the worst of times) become unsourced appropriation and potential plagiarism?  Students are actually very sophisticated in their use of quotation and other textual reference, but their norms differ from those enforcing originality in academe.  The previous sentence is actually quoted from page 27 –academic norms require that I attribute it to Blum; but if I loosely paraphrased the same content without attribution, am I committing plagiarism?

An anthropologist, Blum bases her study on interviews carried out by four trained students; 234 people participated in 154 interviews (“a few involving more than one student” –so there’s quotation marks!) and 32 conversations resulting in more than 5,000 pages of transcripts.  She studied “Saint U” –probably a more “competitive” university than Sacred Heart University although many of Blum’s findings seem directly relevant to this context.  Her chapter “Growing Up in the College Bubble” should be required of all faculty and staff.  This is thought-provoking material about a serious concern which evades simplistic policies and processes.

--Gavin Ferriby

The Evolution of Search (Google)

This six-minute video reviews very recent history: from 1999 -- this video is produced by Google, so it has a predictable point of view.  But it gives a great overview quickly!

 

 

Hat tip to Library Link of the Day.

--Gavin Ferriby

Featured Resource: Credo Reference

 

 

 

Credo Reference --This is information you can believe in.

Don't know where to start with your paper?  Down about a project coming up?  Credo Reference is a great place to start -- current, high-quality information with links to databases and resources available to SHU students.

Credo "topic pages" are a huge help: just type in a really general word, like democracy, photosynthesis, or terrorism --and the topic page at the top of the search results gives a basic definition, some related words, and links to journal articles, books, and images.  Click on the Concept Map link in the main menu and (after a pause for Java) an interactive, "live" concept map will open up with clickable links.

No wonder Smart Research Starts Here --with CredoReference.

The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood

The Information: A History, A Theory, a  Flood, by James Gleick.  New York: Pantheon, 2011.  Sacred Heart University Library Z665 .G547 2011. 

In 426 pages Gleick maps the development of a concept, a property, and flow: information.  Just what information is, is hard to pin down: for this reason the book is properly The Information and that definite article is important: THE information.

Gleick's story really begins with Claude Shannon's work that bridge mathematics and electrical circuits in an obscure, technical article in The Bell System Technical Journal, July and October 1948.  Shannon clarified and quantified information as signal, bits, dots and dashes and electrical pulses, bridged by an abstract theory between knowledge and entropy, chaos, and uncertainty.  Shannon hardly cared what the bits meant, what could be resolved into meaning: he was concerned with quantified pulses, signals, loss, or distortion.  The process he discovered what the world runs on now, the fuel, the vital principle of our world.  By the time the physicist John Archibald Wheeler writes in At Home In the Universe (1994), "All things physical are information-theoretic in origin, and this is a participatory universe." (p. 296)  It is now hard to envision the world before Claude Shannon.

Information's maze-like permutations and unexpected entanglements, however, take the reader to Norbert Wiener's MIT, Kurt Goedel's Vienna Circle, and later the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and Alan Turing's amazing years at Cambridge and Bletchley Park.  From the study of Babylonian cuneiform came a realization of ancient algorithms: instructions in starkly binary clay tablets.  Cryptograph contributed habits such as check-sums and other fail-safes to prevent the loss of signal, and in 1941 Jorge Luis Borges began his story, "The Library of Babel," with the phrase, "The Universe (which others call the Library) …." --the concept of the conceptual, ideational universe entangled with the physical, particle universe was born.

Gleick's book, like Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach (1979), is hard to understand and exhilarating to read all at once.  Like Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (2003), Gleick's book is both readable and at times utterly baffling.  This book requires patience, but rewards the reader with truly unexpected conclusions that are elegant, satisfying, and logically compelling.  This is the kind of book you should read while you're in college.

--Gavin Ferriby

When Asia Was The World

When Asia Was the World, by Stewart Gordon. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2008.  228 pages. Library location: DS 5.95 .G67 2008

This fascinating book traces (according to the cover) the "traveling merchants, scholars, wariors, and monks who created the 'Riches of the East.'"  The author uses some fairly straightforward ideas from social network theory to interpret the traveling records of nine individuals who undertook long journeys for trade, scholarship, diplomacy, and pilgrimage across central and southern Asia from the seventh to the 16th centuries.

Vast scholarship informs this book, but it is all worn very lightly.  Gordon writes in a very accessible manner about individuals you probably have never heard of, and makes them interesting.  Ibn Fadlan in 921-922 undertakes a perilous journey from the heart of Caliphate (Baghadad) to the wilds of the Russian frontier, Almish, King of the Bulgars, on the Volga River.  This obscure journey takes on all the marks of frontier travel in any era: Ibn Fadlan was wiley, clever, lucky, and above all brave.

The Asian empires had many customs in common, such as robing (as a mark of favor and sign of power).  Traders did not represent sovereign powers or kings, and power was often distributed through kinship and tribal systems.  When Gordon finally recounts the Europeans who encountered this innovative, wealthy, and self-reflective Asian world, they seem strange: their armies cohere around command centers and survive the death of generals; traders were responsible to kings; powerful posts went to members of the same ethnicity and the white race.  Europeans held concepts of Christian and heathen which went far beyond sectarian divisions among the followers of the Buddha, or rivals in the Islamic umma (community of the faithful).

The great contribution of such scholarship is finally to glimpse one's own culture or history as though from the outside.   The book succeeds in doing just that --the restless, commercial, innovating Asians are "normal" and the Europeans are the outliers.  And so it was until the 18th century, when Europeans began to re-organize trade patterns millenia old.  I wonder whether Asia will in turn wind up re-organizing European and American trade and cultural patterns to resemble more closely the Asia portrayed in this book.

--Gavin Ferriby

Wicked Plants: The Weed That Kill Lincoln's Mother & Other Botanical Atrocities

Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln's Mother & Other Botanical Atrocities, by Amy Stewart.  Chapel Hill, N.C. : Algonquin Books, 2009.  236 pages.  See also: http://www.amystewart.com/wickedplants.html

Daffodil, tulip, hyacinth, azalea, hydrangea, rhododendron, chrysanthemum, and lily: these are the names of some popular flowers in my garden which could be poisonous to human or animal.
In addition, the world's most important food crops of potatoes, corn, beans, and cashews can all be poisonous if we don’t cook them properly or are consumed too much!

What’s so great about the book Wicked Plants? First, the cover jacket, then its charming etchings and ghastly illustrations will allure you into the magical land of the plant kingdom. You will be alarmed and enlightened by the power of plants.

Abraham Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln died at the age of 34 from Milk sickness caused by the White Snakeroot plant eaten by cows.

How can luxuriant trees, shrubs, flowers, and grass, which look so innocent and beautiful, be so wicked and dangerous?  Some plants conceal deadly and dangerous toxic or could be illegal or painful or destructive or intoxicating such as:

• This houseplant could be your last - The peace lily made people call poison control center more than any other plants poisoning in 2005.
• Deadly dinner - corn had caused pellagra in Europe in 1735. It killed   many people, including100, 000 Americans during the early 20th century until scientist understood the disease in 1930s.
• Devil’s bartender – tonic water, added with the tree extract of quinine, is prohibited to army pilots 72 hours before flying.
• Don’t look now – our beloved Fredrick Law Olmstead could lose his eyesight by the sap of poison sumac.
• Dreadful bouquet – a bouquet of larkspur, delphinium, and lily of the valley could be lethal if someone ate enough of it.
• Forbidden garden – yellow Jessamine took children’s lives as kids mistakenly suck the nectar out of the flowers, thinking it is honeysuckle.
• Psychedelic plants – the morning glory seed may produce a natural high and some kids have been hospitalized with dangerously high heart rates and frightening hallucinations.
• Here comes the sun – farm workers or ones who eat large quantities of celery could end up with severe sunburn when exposed to light.
• Suicide tree – in India, people take advantage of cerbera fruit to end one or another’s life. This region’s suicide rate is 3 times higher than India’s average. Its blossoms resemble plumeria which are so fragrant and beautiful!       

Stewart says the most wicked weed of all is tobacco. Its leaf is so toxic that it has taken the lives of 90 million people worldwide and can kill workers through skin contact. She claims that this plant contributed to the establishment of slavery in America. 

Toxic plants do not only lurk in the tropical jungle or at a faraway place. Do not underestimate the power of the plants and be aware of the dark side of the plants. Think about this, just 3 pedals of a lily could kill your cat!

--Sue Shim