Monday, June 15, 2009

Preview Shelf -- Library Offers Bicentennial Darwin Reading

This year is Charles Darwin's bicentennial, and three new books at the Crawfordsville library explain his importance. "Darwin's Sacred Cause" by Adrian Desmond shows how a hatred of slavery shaped the scientist's views on human evolution and restored the moral core of his motivation. In the huge book, "On the Origin of Species" (the illustrated edition), David Quammen begins by saying it is "a surprising, peculiar work in many ways, but among all its peculiarities my favorite is this: Seldom in the history of English prose has such a dangerous, disruptive, consequential book been so modest and affable in tone...because its author...was himself a modest and affable man". Sketches complete the full picture. "Born to be Good" uses Darwin's work on uncontrollable and fleeting facial expressions as the point of departure as Dacher Keltner weaves together insights from new studies of positive emotions in neuroscience, evolution, and philosophy.
The library also has new American history books. "Crossing the Continent 1527-1540" is Robert Goodwin's story of the first African-American to explore the American South, facts based on groundbreaking research in Spanish archives; Esteban Dorantes and three Spanish noblemen survived shipwreck, famine, disease, and Native American hostility from Florida to the Gulf of California. "A Short History of the United States" by Robert Remini, Historian of the United States House of Representatives, contains the essential facts about our country's development. Ronald Walker's "Massacre at Mountain Meadows" is the account of a one of the darkest events in Mormon history and a key event in American religious history; on September 11, 1857, Mormon militia and Piaute allies killed 120 men, women and children, all unarmed emigrants. Robert Roper writes of Walt Whitman and his brothers in the Civil War in "Now the Drum of War". Two significant biographies are Stefan Kanfer's "Somebody" telling the reckless life and remarkable career of Marlon Brando, and Fidel Castro's own "spoken autobiography" called "My Life" organized for the book by Ignacio Ramonet. New art books include the colorful "The Lion Companion to Christian Art" by Michelle Brown, who embraces much of the history of art in the West and in parts of the Middle East, Africa, Asia, the Americas and Australasia from antiquity to the present day showing Christianity's central role in shaping Western culture. The photography collection "America at Home" is a close-up look at how we live, created by Rick Smolan and Jennifer Erwitt, another in the series of collections made in seven days by photo-journalists fanning out in the United States to produce 250,000 digital photos of "home". Kaffe Fassett offers 25 quilt designs in "Glorious Patchwork". On to the future. Howard Rosenberg & Charles Feldman discuss the menace of media speed and the 24-hour news cycle in "No Time to Think". "Paranoia" the 21st-century fear is the menace analyzed by Daniel and Jason Freeman. "The Universe in a Mirror" is Robert Zimmerman's saga of the Hubble Telescope and the visionaries who built it. "Siesta Lane" describing one cabin, no running water, and a year living green, is Amy Minato's own Walden Pond story in Oregon. "Why We Make Mistakes" how we look without seeing, forget things in seconds, and are all pretty sure that we are way above average, is the work of Joseph Hallinan, who notes our design flaws (we're often in the wrong frame of mind) and suggests ways we can do better the next time.

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