UCBA Library’s March Spotlight: Memoirs

by Christian Boyles

The UCBA Library is excited to showcase titles in our collection which we hope will be of interest.  We will feature different genres, authors, or themes, so watch for new titles at the start of each month. Spotlight titles can be found at the Library’s Information Desk.

book covers

March’s Spotlight is Memoirs.

  • Poet Warrior by Joy Harlo
  • Daring to Drive by Manal Al-Sharif
  • Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Diaz
  • Where the Past Begins by Amy Tan

Interested in more titles? Ask Us!

UCBA Library’s February Spotlight: Fiction

by Christian Boyles

The UCBA Library is excited to showcase titles in our collection which we hope will be of interest.  We will feature different genres, authors, or themes, so watch for new titles at the start of each month. Spotlight titles can be found at the Library’s Information Desk. 

collage of book covers

February’s Spotlight is Fiction. 

  • Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates 
  • The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers 
  • Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead 
  • Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge 

Interested in more fiction titles? Ask Us! 

UCBA Library’s January Spotlight

by Christian Boyles

The UCBA Library is excited to showcase titles in our collection which we hope will be of interest.  We will feature different genres, authors, or themes, so watch for new titles at the start of each month. Spotlight titles can be found at the Library’s Information Desk.

Book covers

January Spotlights

January’s Spotlight is Short Story Collections.

Interested in more short stories? Ask Us!

Poetry Book Display at UCBA Library

by Christian Boyles and Casey Harloe

display of poetry books at UCBA LibraryAre you a fan of long-winded rambles? Do you want to feel seen? Looking for some quick reads? If so, check out the new display located right inside the front door at the UCBA Library where this month we feature a wide range of poetry curated by our very own resident poet, Casey Harloe.

From the works of Frank O’Hara, Ocean Vuong, and Maya Angelou, there is something for everyone here to enjoy. You can stop by the UCBA Library through the month of February to find your new favorite poem.

Native American Heritage Month at UCBA Library

By: Casey Harloe and Christian Boyles

Native American Heritage month is a time to celebrate rich and diverse cultures, traditions, and histories and to acknowledge the important contributions of Native people. Heritage Month is also an opportune time to educate the general public about tribes, to raise a general awareness about the unique challenges Native people have faced both historically and in the present, and the ways in which tribal citizens have worked to address these challenge.  To learn more, please visit our display, which was curated by our student worker Casey Harloe, located across from the Library’s service desk.

US Labor Movement Display at UCBA Library

By Sarah Horton and Christian Boyles 

Labor movement graphic of raised fist

Labor shortages. Strikes. Calls for a reassessment of how and where we work and are compensated.  As contemporary labor movements continue to dominate the news cycle, UCBA library student worker, Sarah Horton, has pulled together a collection of titles that covers the history and recent events in US labor movements. To learn more about how we got from then to now, please visit our display located just inside the entrance to the library.

From the Virtual Desk of….Christian Boyles

Like all of us, the Librarians and Staff at the UCBA Library have settled into a new routine of working at home.  We invite you to see how we keep the (virtual) lights on at the Library while still providing support to our UCBA community.

I’m Christian Boyles, the Collection Services Manager at your UCBA Library.  Here’s a quick tour of my new workspace.

Thanks for stopping by my office and I hope you are doing well, staying healthy, and I hope to see you soon again in the Library.

by Christian Boyles

March Book of the Month

Your UBCA Library’s Book of the Month  for March 2020 

All the Light We Cannot See 

By Anthony Doerr 

All the Light We Cannot See book cover

A stunningly ambitious and beautiful novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie Laure lives with her father in Paris within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of the locks (there are thousands of locks in the museum). When she is six, she goes blind, and her father builds her a model of their neighborhood, every house, every manhole, so she can memorize it with her fingers and navigate the real streets with her feet and cane. When the Germans occupy Paris, father and daughter flee to Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast, where Marie-Laure’s agoraphobic great uncle lives in a tall, narrow house by the sea wall. In another world in Germany, an orphan boy, Werner, grows up with his younger sister, Jutta, both enchanted by a crude radio Werner finds. He becomes a master at building and fixing radios, a talent that wins him a place at an elite and brutal military academy and, ultimately, makes him a highly specialized tracker of the Resistance. Werner travels through the heart of Hitler Youth to the far-flung outskirts of Russia, and finally into Saint-Malo, where his path converges with Marie-Laure. Doerr’s gorgeous combination of soaring imagination with observation is electric. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. 

Is it checked out?  Don’t worrywe’ve got you covered: 

 The Secrets We Keep (PS3616.R463 S43 2019)At the height of the Cold War, two secretaries are pulled out of the typing pool at the CIA and given the assignment of a lifetime. Their mission: to smuggle Doctor Zhivago out of the USSR, where no one dare publish it, and help Pasternak’s magnum opus make its way into print around the world. Glamorous and sophisticated Sally Forrester is a seasoned spy who has honed her gift for deceit all over the world — using her magnetism and charm to pry secrets out of powerful men. Irina is a complete novice, but under Sally’s tutelage quickly learns how to blend in, make drops, and invisibly ferry classified documents. Their story is intertwined with that of the decades-long affair between Pasternak and his mistress and muse, Olga Ivinskaya, who was sent to the Gulag and inspired Zhivago’s heroine, Lara 

320 rue St Jacques : the Diary of Madeleine Blaess (ebook)In November 1939 Madeleine Blaess, a French-born, British-raised student, set off for Paris to study for a doctorate in Medieval French literature at the Sorbonne. In June 1940, the German invasion cut off her escape route to the ports, preventing her return to Britain. She was forced to remain in France for the duration of the Occupation and in October 1940 began to write a diary. Intended initially as a replacement letter to her parents in York, she wrote it in French and barely missed an entry for almost four years.  

Madeleine’s diary is unique as she wrote it to record as much as she could about everyday life, people and events so she could use these written traces to rekindle memories later for the family from whom she had been parted. Many diaries of that era focus on the political situation. Madeleine’s diary does reflect and engage with military and political events. It also provides an unprecedented day-by-day account of the struggle to manage material deprivation, physical hardship, mental exhaustion and depression during the Occupation. The diary is also a record of Madeleine’s determination to achieve her ambition to become a university academic at a time when there was little encouragement for women to prioritise education and career over marriage and motherhood. Her diary is edited and translated here for the first time. 

The Last Metro (streaming film): Gérard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve star as members of a French theater company living under the German occupation during World War II in François Truffaut’s gripping, humanist character study. Against all odds, a Jewish theater manager in hiding; a leading man who’s in the Resistance; increasingly restrictive Nazi oversight, the troupe believes the show must go on. Equal parts romance, historical tragedy, and even comedy, The last metro (Le dernier métro) is Truffaut’s ultimate tribute to art overcoming adversity. 

 

by Christian Boyles

November Book of The Month

by Christian Boyles

You know a bit about them from the hit musical….Now, you can get the rest of the story.

 

Eliza Hamilton book cover

Eliza Hamilton: The Extraordinary Life and Times of the Wife of Alexander Hamilton

A strong pioneer woman, a loving sister, a caring mother, and in her later years, a generous philanthropist, Elizabeth “Eliza” Schuyler Hamilton had many sides. Mazzeo follows Eliza through her early years in New York, into the ups and downs of her married life with Alexander, beyond the aftermath of his tragic murder, and finally to her involvement in many projects that cemented her legacy as one of the unsung heroes of our nation’s early days.

Hamilton book cover

Hamilton: An American Biography by Tony Williams

Tony Williams provides readers with a concise biography that traces the events and values that enabled Hamilton to rise from his youth as a dispossessed orphan to Revolutionary War hero and Founding Father, a life uniquely shaped by America and who, in turn, contributed to the creation of the American regime of liberty and self-government. He was one of key leaders in the American Revolution, a chief architect of America’s constitutional order of self-government, and the key figure in Washington’s administration creating the institutions that governed America. Williams expertly weaves together biography with historical events to place Hamilton as one of the most important founding fathers.

Are they checked out?  Don’t worrywe’ve got you covered.

James Madison and the Making of America (E342 .G88 2012): James Madison, our fourth President and icon of the conservative movement. In it, the author, a historian looks beyond Madison’s traditional moniker, “The Father of the Constitution”, to find a more complex and realistic portrait of this influential Founding Father. Instead of an idealized portrait of Madison, the author treats readers to the story of a man who often performed his founding deeds in spite of himself: Madison’s fame rests on his participation in the writing of The Federalist Papers and his role in drafting the Bill of Rights and Constitution. Yet, he thought that the Bill of Rights was unnecessary and insisted that it not be included in the unamended Constitution which, he lamented, was entirely inadequate and, likely, would soon fail.

Ladies of Liberty: the Women that Shaped Our Nation (E302.5 .R64 2008): Cokie Roberts sheds new light on the generation of heroines, reformers, and visionaries who helped shape our nation with this blend of biographical portraits and behind-the-scenes vignettes chronicling women’s public roles and private responsibilities. Drawing on personal correspondence, private journals, and other primary sources–many of them previously unpublished–Roberts brings to life the extraordinary accomplishments of women who laid the groundwork for a better society. Alm

ost every quotation here is written by a woman, to a woman, or about a woman.

The History of the United States – The Founding Fathers of the United States (streaming film): A fascinating, in-depth study of the founding fathers of the United States. Learn about the cultures and societies upon which they based the U.S. government and discover the influence of Egyptian, Greek and Native American cultures on our own. This program discusses the former system of government our founders took notice of most and explore the origin and creation of the Declaration of Independence.

October Book of the Month

No Visible Bruises bookcover

We call it domestic violence. We call it private violence. Sometimes we call it intimate terrorism. But whatever we call it, we generally do not believe it has anything at all to do with us, despite the World Health Organization deeming it a “global epidemic.” In America, domestic violence accounts for 15 percent of all violent crime, and yet it remains locked in silence, even as its tendrils reach unseen into so many of our most pressing national issues, from our economy to our education system, from mass shootings to mass incarceration to #MeToo. We still have not taken the true measure of this problem.

In No Visible Bruises, journalist Rachel Louise Snyder gives context for what we don’t know we’re seeing. She frames this urgent and immersive account of the scale of domestic violence in our country around key stories that explode the common myths—that if things were bad enough, victims would just leave; that a violent person cannot become nonviolent; that shelter is an adequate response; and most insidiously that violence inside the home is a private matter, sealed from the public sphere and disconnected from other forms of violence. Through the stories of victims, perpetrators, law enforcement, and reform movements from across the country, Snyder explores the real roots of private violence, its far-reaching consequences for society, and what it will take to truly address it.

Is it checked out?

No worries, we have more titles on the subject.

Framing the Victim : Domestic Violence, Media, and Social Problems – HN59.2 .B468 2004

Violent Partners : a Breakthrough Plan for Ending the Cycle of Abuse – HV6626.2 .M58 2008

Teen Dating Violence : How Peers Affect Risk & Protective Factors – ebook

 By Christian Boyles