Tag Archives: book of the month

July Book of the Month

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by Christian Boyles

Leper Spy Book Cover

The Leper Spy by Ben Montgomery
D802.P5 M66 2017

About the book

The GIs called her Joey. Hundreds owed their lives to the tiny Filipina woman who was one of the top spies for the Allies during World War II, stashing explosives, tracking Japanese troop movements, and smuggling maps of fortifications across enemy lines for Gen. Douglas MacArthur. As the Battle of Manila raged, young Josefina Guerrero walked through gunfire to bandage wounds and close the eyes of the dead. Her valor earned her the Medal of Freedom, but the thing that made her an effective spy was a disease that was destroying her.

Guerrero suffered from leprosy, which so horrified the Japanese they refused to search her. After the war, army chaplains found her in a nightmarish leper colony and campaigned for the US government to do something it had never done: welcome a foreigner with leprosy. The fight brought her celebrity, which she used on radio and television to speak for other sufferers. However, the notoriety haunted her after the disease was arrested, and she had to find a way to disappear.

Is it checked out? Don’t worry about it. Here are some other titles on the subject.

And if I Perish : Frontline U.S. Army Nurses in World War II | D807.U6 M66 2003

In World War II, 59,000 women voluntarily risked their lives for their country as U.S. Army nurses. When the war began, some of them had so little idea of what to expect that they packed party dresses; but the reality of service quickly caught up with them, whether they waded through the water in the historic landings on North African and Normandy beaches, or worked around the clock in hospital tents on the Italian front as bombs fell all around them. For more than half a century these women’s experiences remained untold, almost without reference in books, historical societies, or military archives. After years of research and hundreds of hours of interviews, Evelyn M. Monahan and Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee have created a dramatic narrative that at last brings to light the critical role that women played throughout the war. From the North African and Italian Campaigns to the Liberation of France and the Conquest of Germany, U.S. Army nurses rose to the demands of war on the frontlines with grit, humor, and great heroism. A long overdue work of history, And If I Perish is also a powerful tribute to these women and their inspiring legacy.

Women at War : the Women of World War II | D810.W7 L47 2002 

When the men went off to the front in World War II, a huge vacuum was left behind in the family, in the workplace, and in society at large. Women soon stepped into the breach in the factories, on the farms, in transport and public services, as well as in auxiliary military services, intelligence and espionage. Women endured the hardships of separation and rationing, as well as aerial bombardment, arrest, interrogation and perhaps imprisonment in a labour camp. Socially, women gained new skills and acquired a new sense of freedom, independence and equality, which they would take with them into the post-war world. From a German pin-up to American photographers, from Japanese women’s police to all women British orchestras, from Soviet women typists in the field to German pilots, from prisoners of war to secret agents, Women at War in World War II is a testament to these courageous and capable women and their experience, in both Allied and Axis countries. Included are first-person accounts, from the London air-raid warden to nurses caught in the raids on Pearl Harbor to flight technicians in Toronto.

The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter DVD | D810.W7 L53 2007

Among the many sweeping social changes engendered by World War II was the influx of women into previously male-dominated workplaces. Documentary filmmaker Connie Field interviews five of these women. Black and white, urban and rural, poor and middle-class, the former defense employees relate their treatment during and then after the war, when they often faced discrimination from their male co-workers and employers, even as they were publicly praised for leading the war effort at home..

The reminiscences are intercut with the realities of the period – old news, films, recruiting trailers, March of Time clips, and pop songs such as “Rosie the Riveter.” These often serve to highlight the disparities between how women were portrayed in wartime media and the actual experiences of these five women.

 

June Book of the Month

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by Christian Boyles

Fast Food Genocide book cover

Fast Food Genocide: How Processed Food is Killing Us and What We Can Do About it
TX357 .F84 2017

About the book

Fast food is far more than just the burgers, fries, and burritos served at chain restaurants; it is also the toxic, human-engineered products found in every grocery store across America. These include: cold breakfast cereals; commercial and preserved (deli) meats and cheeses; sandwich breads Continue reading →

UCBA Library’s Book of the Month for May

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by Christian Boyles

Book Cover

How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story                           HD9696.8.U64 S6343 2018

About the book

The improbable and exhilarating story of the rise of Snapchat from a frat boy fantasy to a multi-billion dollar internet unicorn that has dramatically changed the way we communicate.   In 2013 Evan Spiegel, the brash CEO of the social network Snapchat, and his co-founder Bobby Murphy stunned the press when they walked away from a three-billion-dollar offer from Facebook: how could an app teenagers use to text dirty photos dream of a higher valuation? Was this hubris, or genius?  In How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars, tech journalist Billy Gallagher takes us inside the rise of one of Silicon Valley’s hottest start-ups. Snapchat developed from a simple wish for disappearing pictures as Stanford junior Reggie Brown nursed regrets about photos he had sent. After an epic feud between best friends, Brown lost his stake in the company, while Spiegel has gone on to make a name for himself as a visionary–if ruthless–CEO worth billions, linked to celebrities like Taylor Swift and his wife, Miranda Kerr.  A fellow Stanford undergrad and fraternity brother of the company’s founding trio, Gallagher has covered Snapchat from the start. He brings unique access to a company Bloomberg Business called “a cipher in the Silicon Valley technology community.” Gallagher offers insight into challenges Snapchat faces as it transitions from a playful app to one of the tech industry’s preeminent public companies. In the tradition of great business narratives, How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars offers the definitive account of a company whose goal is no less than to remake the future of entertainment.

Is it checked out? Don’t worry about it. Here are some other titles on the subject.

Brotopia : Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley | HD6060.5.U5 C52 2018

For women in tech, Silicon Valley is not a fantasyland of unicorns, virtual reality rainbows, and 3D-printed lollipops, where millions of dollars grow on trees. It’s a “Brotopia,” where men hold all the cards and make all the rules. Vastly outnumbered, women face toxic workplaces rife with discrimination and sexual harassment, where investors take meetings in hot tubs and network at sex parties.    In this powerful exposé, Bloomberg TV journalist Emily Chang reveals how Silicon Valley got so sexist despite its utopian ideals, why bro culture endures despite decades of companies claiming the moral high ground (Don’t Be Evil! Connect the World!)–and how women are finally starting to speak out and fight back.    Drawing on her deep network of Silicon Valley insiders, Chang opens the boardroom doors of male-dominated venture capital firms like Kleiner Perkins, the subject of Ellen Pao’s high-profile gender discrimination lawsuit, and Sequoia, where a partner once famously said they “won’t lower their standards” just to hire women. Silicon Valley’s aggressive, misogynistic, work-at-all costs culture has shut women out of the greatest wealth creation in the history of the world. It’s time to break up the boys’ club. Emily Chang shows us how to fix this toxic culture–to bring down Brotopia, once and for all.

Wild Ride: Inside Uber’s Quest for Global Domination | HE5620.R53 L37 2017

In your pocket is something amazing: a quick and easy way to summon a total stranger who will take you anywhere you’d like. In your hands is something equally amazing: the untold story of Uber’s meteoric rise, and the massive ambitions of its larger-than-life founder and CEO. Before Travis Kalanick became famous as the public face of Uber, he was a scrappy, rough-edged, loose-lipped entrepreneur. And even after taking Uber from the germ of an idea to a $69 billion global transportation behemoth, he still describes his company as a start-up. Like other Silicon Valley icons such as Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, he’s always focused on the next disruptive innovation and the next world to conquer.  Both Uber and Kalanick have acquired a reputation for being combative, relentless, and iron-fisted against competitors. They’ve inspired both admiration and loathing as they’ve flouted government regulators, thrown the taxi industry into a tailspin, and stirred controversy over possible exploitation of drivers. They’ve even reshaped the deeply ingrained consumer behavior of not accepting a ride from a stranger—against the childhood warnings from everyone’s parents. Uber has made headlines thanks to its eye-popping valuations and swift expansion around the world. But this book is the first account of how Uber really became the giant it is today, and how it plans to conquer the future.

Silicon Valley | Streaming Film

American Experience, TV’s most-watched history series, brings to life the compelling stories from our past that inform our understanding of the world today. The collection includes a number of great episodes from the series, including American Experience Silicon Valley. In 1957, decades before Steve Jobs dreamed up Apple or Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook, a group of eight brilliant young men defected from the Shockley Semiconductor Company in order to start their own transistor business. Their leader was 29-year-old Robert Noyce, a physicist with a brilliant mind and the affability of a born salesman who would co-invent the microchip — an essential component of nearly all modern electronics today, including computers, motor vehicles, cell phones and household appliances.

April Book of the Month

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by Christian Boyles

Nomadland book cover

Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century
HD6280 .B77 2017

About the book

From the beet fields of North Dakota to the National Forest campgrounds of California to Amazon’s CamperForce program in Texas, employers have discovered a new, low-cost labor pool, made up largely of transient older Americans. Finding that social security comes up short Continue reading →

March Book of the Month

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by Christian Boyles

March 2018

Tainted Witness book coverTainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives
K3243 .G55 2017

About the Book

In 1991, Anita Hill’s testimony during Clarence Thomas’s Senate confirmation hearing brought the problem of sexual harassment to a public audience. Although widely believed by women, Hill was defamed by conservatives and Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court. The tainting of Hill and her testimony is part of a larger social history in which women find themselves caught up in a system that refuses to believe what they say. Hill’s experience shows how a tainted witness is not who someone is, but what someone can become. Tainted Witness examines how gender, race, and doubt stick to women witnesses as their testimony circulates in search of an adequate witness. Judgment falls unequally upon women who bear witness, as well-known conflicts about testimonial authority in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries reveal. Women’s testimonial accounts demonstrate both the symbolic potency of women’s bodies and speech in the public sphere and the relative lack of institutional security and control to which they can lay claim. Each testimonial act follows in the wake of a long and invidious association of race and gender with lying that can be found to this day within legal courts and everyday practices of judgment, defining these locations as willfully unknowing and hostile to complex accounts of harm. Bringing together feminist, literary, and legal frameworks, Leigh Gilmore provides provocative readings of what happens when women’s testimony is discredited. She demonstrates how testimony crosses jurisdictions, publics, and the unsteady line between truth and fiction in search of justice.

Is it checked out? Don’t worry about it. Here are some other titles on the subject.

Wrongful Convictions book cover

Wrongful Convictions of Women: When Innocence Isn’t Enough KF9756 .F74 2016 : Marvin Free and Mitch Ruesink reveal the distinctive role that gender dynamics so often play in the miscarriage of justice. Examining more than 160 cases involving such charges as homicide, child abuse, and drug-related offenses, the authors explore systemic failures in both policing and prosecution. They also highlight the intersecting roles of gender and race. Demonstrating how women encounter circumstances that are qualitatively different than those of men, the authors illuminate unique challenges facing women in the criminal justice system.

Equality on Trial book cover

Equality on trial: gender and rights in the modern American workplace (ebook): Synthesizing the histories of work, social movements, and civil rights in the postwar United States, Equality on Trial recovers the range of protagonists whose struggles forged the contemporary meanings of feminism, fairness, and labor rights.

Sisters of ’77 (DVD) HQ1403.N34 S67 2005: chronicles the 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston, Texas, which took place November 18-21, 1977. The goal of the National Women’s Conference was to end discrimination against women and promote their equal rights. The conference was sponsored by President Gerald Ford’s Executive Order 11832 and federally funded through HR 9924. It brought together over 20,000 women and men from around the United States.

Sisters of 77 Cover ImageSisters of ’77 provides a look at a pivotal weekend that changed the course of history and the lives of the women who attended. The film incorporates rare archival footage and interviews of leaders relating this history to the present. Former first ladies Lady Bird Johnson, Betty Ford, and Rosalynn Carter were notable conference participants, and many influential women leaders attended, including Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Eleanor Smeal, Ann Richards, Coretta Scott King, Billie Jean King, and Barbara Jordan.[3] The attendees included a wide range of women, such as Republicans, Democrats, African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinas, Native American, pro-choice, pro-life, straight, gay, liberal and conservative women.

 

 

 

The UCBA Library’s Book of the Month

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by Christian Boyles

February 2018

A History of the United States in Five Crashes book cover

A History of the United States in Five Crashes
HB3722 .N39 2017

About the Book

In this absorbing, smart, and accessible blend of economic and cultural history, Scott Nations, a longtime trader, financial engineer, and CNBC contributor, takes us on a journey through the five significant stock market crashes in the past century to reveal how they defined the United States today.

The stories behind the great crashes are filled with drama, human foibles, and heroic rescues. Taken together they tell the larger story of a nation reaching enormous heights of financial power while experiencing precipitous dips that alter and reset a market where millions of Americans invest their savings, and on which they depend for their futures. Scott Nations vividly shows how each of these major crashes played a role in America’s political and cultural fabric, each providing painful lessons that have strengthened us and helped us to build the nation we know today.

A History of the United States in Five Crashes clearly and compellingly illustrates the connections between these major financial collapses and examines the solid, clear-cut lessons they offer for preventing the next one.

Is it checked out?  Don’t worry about it.  Here are some other titles on the subject.

Inside JobInside Job DVD cover (DVD) HB3722 .I57 2011: Provides an analysis of the global financial crisis of 2008, which at a cost of over $20 trillion, caused millions of people to lose their jobs and homes in the worst recession since the Great Depression, and nearly resulted in a global financial collapse. Through exhaustive research, and extensive interviews with key financial insiders, politicians, journalists, and academics, traces the rise of a rogue industry which has corrupted politics, regulation, and academia.

Booms and Busts book coverBooms and Busts: an encyclopedia of economic history from Tulipmania of the 1630s to the global financial crisis of the 21st century. (ebook): This authoritative set explores three centuries of good times and hard times in major economies throughout the world. More than 400 signed articles cover events from Tulipmania during the 1630s to the U.S. federal stimulus package of 2009, and introduce readers to underlying concepts, recurring themes, major institutions, and notable figures. Written in a clear, accessible style, “Booms and Busts” provides vital insight and perspective for students, teachers, librarians, and the general public – anyone interested in understanding the historical precedents, causes, and effects of the global economic crisis. 

After the Music Stopped book coverAfter the music stopped: the financial crisis, the response, and the work ahead. HB3717 2008 .B55 2013: Many fine books on the financial crisis were first drafts of history–books written quickly to fill the need for immediate understanding. Alan S. Blinder, former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, takes the time to understand the crisis and create a truly comprehensive and coherent narrative of how the worst economic crisis in postwar American history happened, what the government did to fight it, and what we must do from here–mired as we still are in its wreckage. Blinder shows how the U.S. financial system, grown far too complex for its own good–and too unregulated for the public good–experienced a perfect storm beginning in 2007. When America’s financial structure crumbled, the damage proved to be not only deep, but wide. It took the crisis for the world to discover, to its horror, just how truly interconnected–and fragile–the global financial system is. Blinder offers clear-eyed answers to the questions still before us, even if some of the choices ahead are as divisive as they are unavoidable.