The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Fantastical Journey Around Your Head

Tallis, Raymond. The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Fantastical Journey Around Your Head. London: Atlantic Books, 2008

Submitted by R. Stuhr

Tallis writes that the human face is "the most sign-packed surface in the universe." National Post reviewer Robert Fulford wrote, "So far as Tallis knows, there's nothing that's uninteresting about the head. After all, a head can sneeze, kiss, laugh, yawn, vomit and cry, sometimes with the owner's permission and sometimes not." The advent of Botox is doing away with the nuances and messages that can be present in a face. The human species craves for these messages as a sign of recognition. To read more about this fascinating book, see Fulford's review.

(soon to be) On order for Grinnell College Libraries

Recommendations from Prairie Light's book buyer Paul Ingram

Just today I stumbled across the fact that Book Sense, the independent book sellers' collaborative front, had become Indie Bound. Indie Bound's Web site is annoying, catering to something . . . not necessarily books or the bookish--but I'm sure books are there. There are also author interviews hidden in there somewhere. I stumbled across one with Lois Lowry, but I couldn't find a link to the interviews, nor could I find a place to search the Web site--it is probably there, but I was just too bothered by the hype to keep looking. BUT The good thing was that in trying to figure out if this site was legitimate, I went to the Prairie Lights Web page to see if the Indie Bound logo was there (and it was) and I found this link to Paul Ingram's "corner." There is a nice varied list of recommendations there with compact but enlightening descriptions. The books range from "country noir" to Iowania to politics and history. Browse and enjoy!

Paul's Corner at Praire Lights Book Store in Iowa City.
http://www.prairielightsbooks.com/NASApp/store/IndexJsp?s=regionalcatalog&page=282416

What is the What

Dave Eggers. What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng: A Novel. San Francisco: McSweeney's, 2006. (In paperback by Vintage Books, 2007).

Submitted by R. Stuhr

This much talked about book is the result of a collaboration between Eggers and Deng. Deng is one of the Lost Boys of Sudan. At the age of seven, he ran from his village after being separated from his mother as it was being attacked by a Sudanese government sanctioned group called the Murahaleen. Deng eventually merged with a small group of boys who were led by a teacher from his village. This group grew in size and they made their way to Ethiopia. On their way the boys passed through other burnt out villages, were attacked by government helicopters, government and rebel soldiers and eaten by lions. They watched their friends and fellow travelers die by the side of the road, and traveled themselves with very little hope, and without clothes or food. Once Deng and his group made it to Ethiopia they became part of a large refugee group numbering in the thousands. They lived in relative peace here until the Ethiopian government fell and the new government forced them out of the country. Thousands were killed as they escaped back into Sudan and the survivors made their way to new refugee camps. Deng spent ten years in a UN run camp in Kenya before being one of the last Lost Boys to be sent to the United States. By that time, he was aware that his parents were still alive.

The novel starts as Deng is being robbed in his Atlanta apartment. He is tied up and beaten and as he lies there he begins to narrate his story from the time of his peaceful and happy childhood through the destruction of his village and his years of wandering and life as a refugee. His life in the Kenyan refugee camp is relatively stable compared to his entry into the United States. He describes the hundreds of young men, dropped into different cities in the country without any idea about how to live in an urban industrialized environment and no idea of how to relate to or interact with Americans. They arrived with high expectations to attend college and thrive. Some do and many others continue to struggle. They remain closely connected to each other through email and cell phones--a now scattered by tightly knit extended family.

Eggers' and Deng's collaboration is a beautifully written, heart breaking, and enlightening story. Eggers is founder and editor of McSweeney's, an innovative and fascinating publishing enterprise. See the Blog entry on the The Believer Magazine. Deng has founded the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation and all proceeds from the sales of What is the What go to this foundation. The foundation's goal is to provide educational opportunities for those affected by the conflicts in Sudan. www.valentinoachakdeng.org

Burling First Floor Smith Memorial PS3605.G48 W43 2006

For other books by Dave Eggers

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

Deresiewicz, William. "The Disadvantages of an Elite Education." American Scholar 2008.
available online: http://www.theamericanscholar.org/su08/elite-deresiewicz.html
(The libraries subscribe in print).

"Our Best Universities Have Forgotten That the Reason They Exist is to Make Minds, Not Careers."

Submitted by R. Stuhr

Deresiewicz writes harshly about the direction he sees education moving, especially with respect to the elite (ivy league) universities. He takes to task admissions procedures, grading practices (and expectations), social elitism, the move away from humanities and sciences to more practical, career oritented areas, and, related to career orientation, the institutional desire to develop rich alumni with the ability to donate large sums of money over the goals and missions of a liberal arts education. Deresiewicz also sites the disappearance of solitude and reflection, the need for students to conform to what they see as the desires of their professors (Yale students, he writes, think for themselves but only because their professors want them to) to get that A. He points out evidence of grade inflation along with the loss of the expectation that students (faculty, alumni) not take consequences of their actions or behavior.

I feel that anything I write reduces what Mr. Deresiewicz is expressing. His writing is heartfelt and he in fact labels his essay an exhortation. This is an important article for anyone in liberal arts institutions to read and to ponder. Is his take extremist? Does it take someone pointing out the extreme situation to make others more alert to what is happening? He is writing specifically about Yale in the following quotation: "The college career office has little to say to students not interested in law, medicine, or business, and elite universities are not going to do anything to discourage the large percentage of their graduates who take their degrees to Wall Street. In fact, they’re showing them the way. The liberal arts university is becoming the corporate university, its center of gravity shifting to technical fields where scholarly expertise can be parlayed into lucrative business opportunities."

And: "Being an intellectual begins with thinking your way outside of your assumptions and the system that enforces them. But students who get into elite schools are precisely the ones who have best learned to work within the system, so it’s almost impossible for them to see outside it, to see that it’s even there. Long before they got to college, they turned themselves into world-class hoop-jumpers and teacher-pleasers, getting A’s in every class no matter how boring they found the teacher or how pointless the subject, racking up eight or 10 extracurricular activities no matter what else they wanted to do with their time. Paradoxically, the situation may be better at second-tier schools and, in particular, again, at liberal arts colleges than at the most prestigious universities. Some students end up at second-tier schools because they’re exactly like students at Harvard or Yale, only less gifted or driven. But others end up there because they have a more independent spirit. They didn’t get straight A’s because they couldn’t be bothered to give everything in every class. They concentrated on the ones that meant the most to them or on a single strong extracurricular passion or on projects that had nothing to do with school or even with looking good on a college application. Maybe they just sat in their room, reading a lot and writing in their journal. These are the kinds of kids who are likely, once they get to college, to be more interested in the human spirit than in school spirit, and to think about leaving college bearing questions, not resumés."

Deresiewicz is a regular contributor to The Nation and writes frequently for American Scholar, and The New Republic. He taught at Yale from 1998-2008.

Books on libraries

Libraries as Agencies of Culture. Edited by Thomas Augst and Wayne Wiegand. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. (Appeared originally as a special issue of American Studies The Library as an Agency of Culture, Fall 2001, volume 42, no. 3).

Submitted by R. Stuhr

The essays in this collection each look at some aspect of the role of libraries in supporting cultural and civic life. In his introduction, Augst considers the social interaction of the reader with the book and notes that books acquire social life through exchange and use, thus claiming the innate social nature of libraries. He describes the library as a social enterprise, a physical space, and a symbolic site of collective memory. Augst provides food for thought and some very nicely expressed ideas, including, "To read a book is to borrow from established forms of cultural authority and to refashion that authority within personal and communal contexts of meaning and practice (p. 15).

In "The Sound of the Civic: Reading Noise at the New York Public Library," Ari Kelman, writes about the rule of silence in the New York Public Library reading room, and the code of behavior patrons were expected to follow. He describes the NYPL as a "public institution that attempts to foster private interactions between people and texts.... The library provides information but it cannot facilitate congregation or conversation" (p. 28). He compares this state with Habermas's description of the public sphere which requires conversations among readers (although based on shared texts) to prosper. However dreary this idea of imposed silence and stifled conversation may seem, Kelman contrasts this kind of spiritually nourishing space with the nonstop noise of the city and stresses the goal of the library to "ensure the safe and clear transmission of information from text to individual," p. 40.

Contrast these ideas with "Exploring the American Idea at the New York Public Library," by Jean L. Peer. This essay provides a history of Cold War era discussion forums which the NYPL devised to provide an opportunity for library patrons to read and discuss important documents and texts looking at US democratic principles from a variety of angles. These book forums were provided along with Great Books discussion groups, and eventually, film series. Nothing quiet about these programs!

The Library as Place: History, Community, and Culture. Edited by John E. Buschman and Gloria J. Leckie. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2007.

This is another collection of essays. It is divided into three parts, with part one focusing on public libraries, part two on the research library, and part three on the myths created around libraries. The essays on public libraries are all about creating community, making spaces where disparate people from all walks of life come to feel comfortable, to learn, to read, to be with others, to relax and find refuge. Public libraries have had the role of creating social spaces, furthering the goals of democracy, and building a sense of civic responsibility. Julia A. Hersberger's article on the Greensboro Carnegie Negro Library drives home the idea of taking the library beyond the building as this library moved well past its initial community to serve the entire county through book mobile services. Ronald Tetreault's essay on the rise of military libraries during the time of the British Empire shows the library, in this context, moving from an officers' club to an institution that served enlisted men accompanied by an overall change in the militaries' view of these men which led to respect and improved conditions and opportunities.

Other essays in this collection look at the use of libraries by scholars and undergraduates. Antell and Engel show that scholars value the library as a place to work and where serendipitous discovery can take place. Lisa M. Given finds that undergraduates are still relying heavily on materials within the library as well as finding the library a welcoming place to work. She finds that students like to be able to arrange furniture to suit their needs--moving chairs and tables around to accommodate groups or individual study. Heavy, nailed down furniture is (may be) a thing of the past and she recommends that libraries should consult carefully with their students before renovating spaces. [By the way, this theory was carried out successfully by Georgia Tech and presented in a recent ALA session].

Both of these books provide thoughtful and interesting discussion on the role and purposes of libraries within existing communities and as micro-communities in and of themselves. They promote the idea of the library as a social space where conversations can take place inspired by texts. This can happen between the text and an individual reader or through group discussion. Learning and discovery can take place in solitude or as a shared and collaborative activity.

Library As Place
Burling 1st floor Z716.4 .L485 2007

Libraries as Agencies of Culture
on order for the Grinnell College Libraries

The Struggle For Power: The American Revolution

Theodore Draper. The Struggle For Power: The American Revolution (New York:
Random House, 1996)

Reviewed by T. Hatch

If one supposes that ideology is a litany of highfalutin excuses justifying the nakedly brazen acquisition of power; not a streetlight (that while providing a drunk with a place to steady himself) nonetheless affords at least some illumination, then, this book belongs on the nightstand.

Draper's history of the American Revolution concentrates on the period following the British victory in the Seven Years' War until the beginning of armed hostilities in 1775. With the French now vanquished and no longer a threat to the English colonists, stoked by success, the British sought to make the colonial bureaucracy a bit more rational. Unhappily for the sake of the emerging Empire the colonists were only too thoroughly English. And like all real Englishmen they were adroit at smuggling, loathed paying taxes, and were among the world's finest at rioting. Because it was ambition (not oppression) that drove the colonist to revolt, it was only natural that a group of proper Englishmen should avail themselves of the opportunity to seize political power. So they did.

Because of the debt incurred in the Seven Years' War Parliament stepped up to claim its long dormant power of administration of the colonies. The colonists were used to the economic expansion that marked the first half of the eighteenth century. They were also accustomed to the lax enforcement effort of the custom authorities and quite naturally resented the crackdown. In addition to the unpopular Royal Proclamation of 1763 that enraged colonists who were already purchasing land beyond the Alleghenies, and for whom the Crown's imposition of a land monopoly was disagreeable, found themselves in opposition to a short list of slightly less egregious measures taken by the British government. The Sugar, Currency, and Stamp Acts of 1764 as well as the establishment of the vice-admiralty courts were all resented by the colonists with a propensity to rebellion.

Because the enterprising part of the colonial elite that we know as our founding fathers were able to exploit the “mob” in resisting taxes and duties there is no loose talk among American historians about social revolution. Because colonists held slaves in nearly all of the American colonies there can be no real discussion of a colonial war of liberation either. Like the Glorious Revolution of 1688 the American Revolution took place during a time of relative economic prosperity. In the tradition of their English revolutionary brethren the followers of the American Revolution see the event as a historical sui generis, entirely superior to revolutions in other countries.

Burling 2nd floor E210 .D73 1996

The Winning of the West

Theodore Roosevelt. The Winning of the West. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1904
[1889] 4 vols.

[v. 1. From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 -- v. 2. From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 -- v. 3. The founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 -- v. 4. Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807.]

Reviewed by T. Hatch

Aside from the renown that the twenty-sixth president receives for expropriating the Progressive agenda and his charmingly contrived cowboy persona he also had a career as an historian. The Winning of the West is the story of American expansion beyond the Allegheny mountains. The intrepid frontiersman armed with little more than his rifle and axe, heroically weathering ubiquitous Indian attacks of untold ferocity, settled the “sparsely peopled temperate zone” that is today the central part of the United States. Teddy Roosevelt is then to U.S. historiography what Leon Uris is to the history of Zionism. As Ronald Reagan opined after the invasion of Grenada, “it was lucky we got there when we did.”

Spreading out over the North American continent in Roosevelt's view was only right and natural for the English speaking peoples as it was inevitable anyway. Notions of progress, the march of civilization, and Anglo-Saxon supremacy were self-evident to the right thinking Americans of T.R.'s day (and beyond). To have avoided this clash would have meant caving into “sentimental humanitarians” who though they meant well were nevertheless “the large class of amiable but maudlin fanatics.” Consistent with the Rooseveltian zeitgeist sentimentalism was to deny the settler and pioneer the basic justice of their cause and sentencing the better part of the North American continent to being “kept as nothing but a game preserve for squalid savages.” It was bleeding-heart humanitarianism to grant the barbarians title to the land for which they held no valid deed. Clearly natural right was on the side of the frontier Irish Calvinists- those backwoods “Roundheads” - who understood that “the man who puts the soil to use must of right dispossess the man who does not, or the world will come to a stand still.”

Speaking of barbarians and savages.... If one were a member of an Indian tribe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries here in America social mobility was limited to a promotion from mere barbarian to the more exalted rank of savage. For Roosevelt it was largely a distinction without a difference. To aspire to the social station of savagery meant little more than growing crops and not torturing your captives in a way that offended Anglo-Saxon sensibilities. Either way your days were numbered and the inexorable march of progress demanded that you wither away.

Professor Chomsky has aptly described Theodore Roosevelt as a “lunatic racist.” Not that there is any honor amongst racists – lunatic or otherwise – but contrasted to the misplaced paternalism of a Lord Lugard there is something pathologically grimy about Roosevelt's brand of racism. Lugard as a representative of the British Empire in Northern Africa divided humanity into “advanced” and “backward” races. It was the duty of advanced races to provide the “three C's” of Christianity, civilization, and commerce so that one day they might be self-sufficient and provide the world market with goods and raw materials (see Lord Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa). Not so with T.R. There was not any place in Roosevelt's world for the “backward” races. The future for the American Indian resembled the prospects facing the Picts in England centuries ago.

An excellent companion piece to The Winning of the West is Gore Vidal's Empire. Vidal portrays T.R. as a shallow manic who revels in the banality of phrases such as “dee lighted.” Perhaps there is some justice to Roosevelt's visage on the side of that crime against nature, taste, and historical accuracy that we call Mount Rushmore.

Burling 2nd floor F351 .R79