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

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

You Are Not a Gadget: Jaron Lanier

You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, by Jaron Lanier.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.  209 pages.  Sacred Heart University Library: HM851 .L358 2010

We’ve heard the terminology:   crowdsourcing, the hive mind, the noosphere, the wisdom of crowds.  Jaron Lanier, a technology pioneer and Silicon Valley insider, dares in You Are Not a Gadget  to question the current elevation of the collective intelligence at the expense of individual intelligence.   He sees value in the collective, but as a tool, not as a replacement for the individual.  A case in point is authorship.  As Lanier puts it:

"An impenetrable tone deafness rules Silicon Valley when it comes to the idea of authorship. … The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world’s books into one book… If the books [being scanned into] the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will be only one book.  This is what happens today with a lot of content; often you don’t know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video. … Authorship – the very idea of the individual point of view – is not a priority of the new ideology. … The one collective book will absolutely not be the same thing as the library of books by individuals it is bankrupting."  (p.46-47)

Lanier’s book has been widely reviewed, in The New York Times, for example, and he was recently profiled in The Economist.  He wants us to remain individuals even as we invent and use technology, and not “respect bits too much.” (p.119)  “Any gadget”, he says, “gets boring after a while. But a deepening of meaning is the most intense potential kind of adventure available to us.” (p.192)

--Bonnie Figgatt

Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide

Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide, by Cass R. Sunstein.  Oxford Univ. Press, 2009. 199 pages.  Sacred Heart University Library: HN90 .R3 S848 2009

Talking things over can bring people closer, but not always in positive ways.  So we learn from Cass Sunstein’s recent book, Going to Extremes. 

 Sunstein says his book’s theme “is simple:  When people find themselves in groups of like-minded types, they are especially likely to move to extremes.” (p.2)   So, people who approve  of a particular war effort will be even more supportive of it after talking to each other, or people who are   racially prejudiced will show more prejudice after talking with each other. (p.3-4)    He sees implications for this polarization phenomenon in any number of areas – politics, religious organizations, investments, and consumer behavior among them –and he writes engagingly, with lots of well-documented examples to illustrate his points. 

David Brooks cites Sunstein’s work in a 2010 New York Times column, while considering the tendency to live in “information cocoons,” filtering out information that may challenge our views.

Cass Sunstein was previously the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and is now serving in the Obama administration.  His books include Radicals in Robes,  Infotopia,  Nudge,  Why Societies Need Dissent, and others.

--Bonnie Figgatt

Biography in Context: More Than Just Biographies!

Biography in Context.  Farmington Hills, Mich: Gale Cengage Learning, 1999- (continuously updated). 

 

http://0-rqst-agent.auto-graphics.com.enterprise.sacredheart.edu/LoginModule/Goto.aspx?cuid=rqst&dataid=150

Biography in Context is an online biography resource that offers much more than just biographies of famous people. Some of the added features include:
•    600,000+ biographies
•    Contemporary and historical people
•    Images, videos, and audio clips 
•    Links to magazine and academic journal articles
•    Links to recommended websites
•    NY Times, USA Today and UPI News feeds

Here’s an example of information found in Biography in Context. Many students at SHU read Plato’s Republic so we looked up Plato and found:  13 biographies, images, 2 audio recordings discussing his influence, 6 recommended websites, 26 magazine articles, and 112 academic journal articles. You can access all of this through the SHU Library database listing. Click on the Find Resources tab on the library homepage, select Find Articles Search Databases, and choose Biography in Context.

--Nancy DelVecchio