February 2014 Acquisitions

Books:
Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain, 1903.
Adam Glass et al, Suicide Squad, Vol. 1: Kicked in the Teeth, 2012.
Nella Larsen, Passing, 2003.
Grant Morrison et al, Batman Incorporated, Vol. 1: Demon Star, 2013.
Duane Swierczynski et al. Birds of Prey, Vol. 1: Trouble in Mind, 2012.
Daniel Wallace, Superman: The Ultimate Guide to the Man of Steel, 2013.
E. B. White, Stuart Little, 2005.
Judd Winick et al, Batwing, Vol. 3: Enemy of the State, 2013.


DVDs:
Barbie and Her Sisters in a Pony Tale, 2013.
Bronco Bullfrog, 1969.
Capote, 2005.
Fiddler on the Roof, 1971.
Stuart Little, 1999.

The Browning of California

"'If you had asked me 40 years ago--when I first ran for governor--what I would be doing in 2014, I could never have guessed. Nor could anyone else,' Brown said in a statement posted on his campaign website. 'Yet, by the grace of God and habits of perseverance instilled in me by my family, the Dominican nuns and the Jesuits, I am here and ready to go.'"


Christopher Cadelago at The Sacramento Bee reports that Gov. Jerry Brown will run for another term.

Read more here: http://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/2014/02/california-gov-jerry-brown-to-run-for-reelection.html#storylink=cp

"High School Principal Can Already Tell Students Are Going To Eat This One Alive"

"'The second I saw how excited she was to have her own classroom, I just knew that she was immediately going to be ripped into and gutted by those snarling little monsters,' Harker said of the enthusiastic 25-year-old woman currently making handwritten name tags for the rabid beasts who will 'tear her apart and leave her for dead' within a week."


From The Onion.

Dig Your Own Hole

"Using this technique, the team has made a remarkable discovery: they have found the remains of a military fortress, which was thought to have been destroyed.
"Standing in the middle of the yard, which is still enclosed by 6m-high (20ft) walls, Prof Everett points to a spot where he has found evidence of a subterranean tunnel system.
"'(The tunnels) would have been used for the fortifications. There would have been movement of man and ammunition; it would have been bomb proof and covered with earth so it would have been protected,' he explains.
"'We get signatures that indicate there is not only a tunnel, but magazine buildings too.'"


Rebecca Morelle at BBC.com explores "a hidden history lying beneath the prison of Alcatraz."

"He Never Made Me Laugh"

"I don’t know what sparked this phenomenon. Did the same thing happen to Lenny Bruce after he died? Is that another sign of the greatness of one’s spirit, that after you’re gone people try to gin up their personal stories by writing you into them? I don’t know. Maybe it’s their waking wish to go back in time and become friends which someone like Bill Hicks. Hell, if I were back in the early ’60s, I’d want to hang out with Lenny Bruce. Or Jonathan Winters."


Patton Oswalt in Slate remembers Bill Hicks.

"New Parents Wisely Start College Fund That Will Pay For 12 Weeks Of Education"

"'It’s just a small amount out of our paychecks, but it adds up. And it’s worth it to have the ease of mind that comes from knowing that, after inflation, we’ll be able to cover barely 9 percent of our little girl’s tuition as long as she takes the minimum course load and doesn’t do too many activities.'"


From The Onion.

"A Fraught and Mysterious Thing"

"In academia, by contrast, all the forces are pushing things the other way, toward insularity. As in journalism, good jobs are scarce—but, unlike in journalism, professors are their own audience. This means that, since the liberal-arts job market peaked, in the mid-seventies, the audience for academic work has been shrinking. Increasingly, to build a successful academic career you must serially impress very small groups of people (departmental colleagues, journal and book editors, tenure committees). Often, an academic writer is trying to fill a niche. Now, the niches are getting smaller. Academics may write for large audiences on their blogs or as journalists. But when it comes to their academic writing, and to the research that underpins it—to the main activities, in other words, of academic life—they have no choice but to aim for very small targets."


Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker considers academic writing.

"The Go-To Biography for Many Years to Come"

"Born to a prominent St. Louis family in 1914, Burroughs linked his lineage at every point to the fatal plotlines of American hubris and power. His mother’s family had been slave owners in the antebellum South; his paternal grandfather invented the adding machine, a building block in the embryonic military-­industrial-media complex. His uncle Ivy Lee, a pioneer of public relations, counted Hitler’s regime among his preferred clients. Burroughs himself spent time in Vienna in the 1930s and learned a lesson he never forgot: Everything Hitler did was legal. Laws could spur, not deter, the blackest of crimes. To top it off, young Bill had also attended the Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico, which in 1943 would be co-opted for the Manhattan Project. 'The sick soul, sick unto death, of the atomic age' became his great subject."


Ann Douglas in The New Times reviews Barry Miles's Call Me Burroughs: A Life.

"If You Were a Dinosaur in Canada When That Asteroid Hit the Yucatán, You Had Approximately Two Minutes to Live"

"Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid crashed into the Yucatán Peninsula, leaving behind a crater 110 miles wide and twenty miles deep and a colossally larger hole in the tree of life. The impact and its after­effects wiped out an estimated 75 percent of species, including, most famously, all non-avian dinosaurs. That event, the end-­Cretaceous extinction, is one of six massive die-offs in the history of the planet. Five of them happened in the distant past: 450 million, 375 million, 252 million, 200 million, and 66 million years ago. The sixth one is happening right now."


Kathryn Schulz in New York reviews Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.

"Winter Olympics Inspire Nation’s Youth To Try Sports Their Parents Can’t Afford"

"Though concerned about shelling out at least $3,000 before their children ever step foot on snow or ice, the nation’s parents were reportedly excited about the money they would inevitably save when American youths immediately quit the sports after complaining they were too difficult."


From The Onion.

"The Global Dimensions of His Public Career Remain Underexplored and Misunderstood"

"In particular, I highlighted the international context for Malcolm’s activism, the scope and significance of his plans abroad, the distinctions he made between civil rights and human rights, the separation he allowed between religion and politics, and the many ways that his afterlife has overshadowed his actual life."


In Humanity, Moshik Temkin introduces his 2012 essay about "the meanings of Malcolm X's life and death," which occurred forty-nine years ago this month.

Where the Truth Lies

"'Victory at Olustee,' as title headings in history books call it, was conjured up a generation after the Civil War ended. State law ordained that all children be taught the fictional version, and a Confederate war monument was not erected in Olustee until 1912 at the insistence of white supremacist nostalgists. The 'reenactment' of the battle, an even more recent anachronism, dates back only to 1977.  Participants in the actual battle recalled how horrible it was; just getting there was an ordeal of mud and insects.  Today’s reenactors strut their stuff on a clear-cut parade ground. The murder of the wounded plays no role in the festivities. In most accounts the presence of black troops, let along their heroism, is never mentioned."


Upon the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Olustee, T.D. Allman at The Daily Beast disputes neo-Confederate memory of Florida's largest Civil War conflict.

"Tradition, John. Discipline"

"The resistance to the humanities: In one of its guises, that of Dead Poets Society, it finally comes down to a preference for fans over critics, amateurs over professionals. Everyone engaged in the debates swirling around the humanities, it seems, is willing to let humanists pursue their interests as amateurs, letting 'poetry work its magic… in the enchantment of the moment.' Some of those who wish us well—so long as it doesn’t cost them anything, in terms of faculty lines, or course enrollments, or research funding—enjoy a fan’s relationship to the humanities themselves, and at best hope for the same for their students.
"Scholars and teachers of the humanities, however: We will insist on being welcomed to the table as professionals."


Twenty-five years after the release of Dead Poets Society, Kevin J.H. Dittmar in The Atlantic criticizes the movie's view of poetry.

"Fourth-Grader Drawing Big Blank On Which Year 9/11 Terror Attacks Occurred"

"'I know it begins with a two, and I remember it was near "Barack Obama becomes president" on our study timeline, but was it 2005? 2007?' said Ackerman under his breath, squinting down at his fill-in-the-blank test and firmly pressing his small fist against his forehead as he tried to recall whether the largest terrorist attack in American history happened before or after the Iraq War. 'Think, think, think. It’s got to be 2011, right? Yeah, that sounds right.'"


From The Onion.

"Class Animus Was—Is—Central to Who They Are and How They Think about the World"

"Maybe I concealed it too well, but this critique of the Democrats was supposed to have been one of the book’s big takeaway points. It was fun to mock the culture-war fantasies of the right but in doing so I also meant to challenge Clintonism. Yes, it had worked wonders in fundraising terms, but in forswearing the economic liberalism that appealed to working-class voters, it brought them electoral disaster. Again, the proof was all around us, in all the embarrassing defeats of those years, not to mention the needless capitulations like Al Gore’s in 2000. The bland centrist style that Democrats held so dear was political poison. To beat the right, I argued, they needed to move left.
"Today this sounds like advising them to dig a tunnel to Tasmania with their bare hands. It sounds preposterous. Not because the problems I wrote about in 'Kansas' have been solved—deindustrialization still defines the rust belt, depopulation is still clearing out the Great Plains, inequality grows worse and worse every year—but because every Democrat knows that the way you deal with a growing right is to make friends with Big Finance and do your part to fill the Big Prison. Left populism might sound nice, but everyone in D.C. knows it can never be a practical solution to any electoral problem."


Thomas Frank in Salon looks back at What's the Matter with Kansas? ten years later.

"Tactics Used to Secure Material Advantages in Social Contexts Perceived as Zero-Sum"

"Engagement with Du Boisian ideas might have made 'A Dreadful Deceit' more convincing (and its practical implications less ambiguous). Still, if contemporary discussions of race could be focused on the interconnections between racial ideologies, political power and economic vulnerability, as Jones would like, that would be a dramatic improvement over the 'postracial' narratives that currently reign."


Tommie Shelby in The New York Times reviews Jacqueline Jones's A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race From the Colonial Era to Obama’s America.

Wild Party Governs Your Show Angels Soup

The Los Angeles Times runs obituaries for actor Christopher Jones, television producer Arthur Rankin, political scientist Robert Dahl, actress Shirley Temple Black, comedian Sid Caesar, and baseball manager Jim Fregosi.

"History and Structure Drive the Bus"

"Of course The Triple Package isn’t really serious scholarship, notwithstanding the authors’ impressive credentials. As yet another intentionally provocative story for a trade press playing to the crowd, the Triple Package narrative works well. But as a rigorous substantive claim about persistent inequality among racial, ethnic, and religious groups, The Triple Package’s argument doesn’t begin to make the grade."
                                                                                                                                 
In Slate, Daria Roithmayr reviews Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld's The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America.

"The One Neighborhood in San Francisco that Cannot Be Gentrified"

"Families do live here because it is one of the most affordable places in the city. And people don’t realize how high the housing is in San Francisco. And so, if you can find a studio or one-bedroom here now for $1,200, that’s pretty affordable, compared to other places."


Spencer Michels at the PBS NewsHour discusses San Francisco's Tenderloin.

"So How Can Politicians Justify Cutting Off Modest Financial Aid to Their Unlucky Fellow Citizens?"

"If you follow debates over unemployment, it’s striking how hard it is to find anyone on the Republican side even hinting at sympathy for the long-term jobless. Being unemployed is always presented as a choice, as something that only happens to losers who don’t really want to work. Indeed, one often gets the sense that contempt for the unemployed comes first, that the supposed justifications for tough policies are after-the-fact rationalizations.

"The result is that millions of Americans have in effect been written off—rejected by potential employers, abandoned by politicians whose fuzzy-mindedness is matched only by the hardness of their hearts."

Paul Krugman in The New York Times looks at Republicans and unemployment.

"New Study Finds Only 88% Of Guitar Center Customers Become Famous Musicians"

"The study went on to conclude that every one of Guitar Center’s customers would almost certainly become international music celebrities if they started buying the most expensive kind of strings."


From The Onion.

"No One Thinks a Fix Will Be Simple"

"Some of these decisions will have to be undone in the near term, some will be undone by the implacable economics of residential development and agriculture, and some we will have to live with for decades more. Fatuous political posturing to give some groups of users priority over others is a waste of time, and one thing we have less of every dry day is time."


Michael Hiltzik discusses California's drought in the Los Angeles Times.

"He Was Buried beside His Wife 10 Months Later"

"Swift succeeds in showing a young couple united by a degree of class resentment and a political understanding of how their apparent ordinariness could spark a sense of sympathetic identification in the mass of voters who would eventually form Nixon’s 'silent majority.' More profoundly, the couple shared what the author calls 'an underlying, no-nonsense melancholy' that derived from 'the sadness of their difficult childhoods.' Their families had been scythed by silicosis and tuberculosis; at times, during their mutual climb and repeated crashes, the Nixons must have imagined they were fighting for air."


In The New York Times, Thomas Mallon reviews Will Swift's Pat and Dick: The Nixons, an Intimate Portrait of a Marriage.

"The Adjunctivitis Epidemic"

"Peter Brown, professor emeritus at the State University of New York, New Paltz, believes colleges are exploiting adjuncts so they can spend more on non-academic niceties."


Paul Solman at the PBS Newshour explores the reliance of colleges and universities on adjunct faculty.

"The Howard Hughes of Rock & Roll"

"'He was so innocent and bizarre and so truthful,' Hutton said of Wilson in the 1995 documentary, I Just Wasn't Made for These Times. 'He would frighten people. I took him to a party at Alice Cooper's and, afterwards, Alice, Iggy Pop and me went to his house to write something. There was a certain point of the night where Iggy said, "I'm leaving! This guy's nuts!" He had us singing "Short'nin' Bread" in parts.'"


Brian Chidester in the LA Weekly discusses Brian Wilson's unreleased "Bedroom Tapes."

"Newly Tenured Professor Now Inspired To Work Harder Than Ever"

"'I’m going to start teaching a lot more classes, advise as many Ph.D. candidates as possible, and voluntarily extend my office hours so I can provide students with as much one-on-one time as they need. Tenure is a huge honor, but it also comes with a lot of responsibility. From now on, anyone who enrolls in one of my classes can be certain my top priority will be how I can best serve them as a professor.'"


From The Onion.

"Is There Another Other Conclusion to Draw from Those Statistics than the Affordable Care Act Is Working?"

"The CBO report cuts the legs out from the GOP's attack on 'risk corridors,' a provision of the ACA that balances costs and expenses for insurance companies participating in the act by paying insurers whose coverage expenses exceed expectations by a certain margin in the first few years of the act, and collecting excess revenues from those whose expenses come in unexpectedly lower.
"We've previously identified this GOP position as the most cynical attack on the ACA of all—the Republicans choose to call it a 'bailout' of insurers; actually, it's a way of keeping premiums for some plans from getting out of hand, until the industry has more experience dealing with its new clientele. Unsurprisingly, the GOP is doubling down on this dishonesty by talking about eliminating the risk corridors as a condition for raising the federal debt limit."


Michael Hiltzik in the Los Angeles Times reacts to the Congressional Budget Office report on Obamacare.

"Brings to a Conclusion One of the Towering Achievements of Historical Scholarship of the Past Half-Century"

"Davis is fully aware of the moral ambiguities involved in the crusade against slavery, the process of abolition and the long afterlife of racism. Nonetheless, in a rebuke to those historians today who belittle the entire project of emancipation, he insists that the abolition of slavery in the Western Hemisphere was one of the profoundest achievements in human history, 'a crucial landmark of moral progress that we should never forget.' His monumental three-volume study helps to ensure that it will always be remembered."


In The Nation, Eric Foner reviews David Brion Davis's The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation.

Wee Judgment Boogie Bizarro

The Los Angeles Times reports the deaths of entertainment lawyer Don Engel, writer Anthony Lovett, cartoonist Morrie Turner, songwriter Anna Gordy Gaye, actor Maximilian Schell, and actor Philip Seymour Hoffman.

But Now I Think I'm Able to Carry On

"'It was less work than any song he'd ever written,' Guralnick says. 'It almost scared him that the song — it was almost as if the song were intended for somebody else. He grabbed it out of the air and it came to him whole, despite the fact that in many ways it's probably the most complex song that he wrote. It was both singular — in the sense that you started out, "I was born by the river" — but it also told the story both of a generation and of a people.'"


Arun Rath at NPR marks the fiftieth anniversary of Sam Cooke's greatest song.

"An Era of Great Hope and Brutal Disappointment"

"Of course, these changes also produced a violent reaction. As his title suggests, Egerton devotes considerable attention to the actions of homegrown 'terrorists' like the Ku Klux Klan and kindred organizations, which systematically targeted local political leaders and teachers and were probably responsible for the deaths of more Americans than Osama bin Laden. Egerton makes the important point that the old idea of the South being subject to an overbearing military occupation is a myth. The Army was rapidly demobilized after the war ended.

"'Reconstruction did not fail,' Egerton states, 'it was violently overthrown.'"

Eric Foner in The New York Times reviews Douglas R. Egerton's The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era.