The new book of the week for 10/23/2007 is:

The Girls Who Went Away by Ann Fessler, call number: 362.8298F417

“Ann Fessler brings out into the open for the first time the astonishing untold history of the million and a half women who surrendered children for adoption due to enormous family and social pressure in the decades before Roe v. Wade.”

The new book of the week for 9/7/2007 is:

After the End: Representations of Post-apocalypse by James Berger, call number: 973.92 B496

“In this study of the cultural pursuit of the end and what follows, Berger contends that every apocalyptic depiction leaves something behind, some mixture of paradise and wasteland. Combining literary, psychoanalytic, and historical methods, Berger mines these depictions for their weight and influence on current culture. He applies wide-ranging evidence — from science fiction to Holocaust literature, from Thomas Pynchon to talk shows, from American politics to the fiction of Toni Morrison — to reveal how representations of apocalyptic endings are indelibly marked by catastrophic histories.”

The new book of the week for 8/13/2007 is: The Theft of History by Jack Goody, call number: 901 G658

The Theft of History “argues that Occidentalist views of our past have continued to dominate, to an unhealthy degree, and that the west has managed to steal credit for the invention of major conceptual categories like democracy, capitalism and individualism, and also to impose its own conceptual categories (especially those of time) onto the rest of the world. Jack Goody builds on his own work to extend his influential critique of what he sees as the pervasive eurocentric or occidentalist biases of western historical writing, and the consequent ‘theft’ by the West of the achievements of other cultures in the invention of (notably) democracy, capitalism, individualism, and love.”