June Book of the Month

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 Closed May 28th for Memorial Day

memorial day graphic

The UCBA Library will be closed Monday, May 28th in honor of Memorial Day.  We will resume our regular Summer Semester hours on Tuesday, May 29th at 8:00 am.  Please visit our hours webpage to view all UCBA Library hours, including holidays and any exceptions to our regular schedule.

UCBA Library’s Book of the Month for May

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 SiliconValley. 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.

Announcing the UCBA Button Design Contest Winner

Amber holding buttonAmber Lanese’s winning button design

Congratulations to Amber Lanese, the winner of a $30 UC Bookstore Gift certificate, UCBA candy-filled cup and bragging rights! Her design entry received the most votes of any entrant, and has been crowned the winner!

Amber with prize and winning buttonAmber with gift and winning button

We want to send a big thank you to everyone who participated in our button design contest and helped make it a success!

display of all button entries

 

April Book of the Month

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

From the Desk of…Elizabeth Sullivan

Elizabeth Sullivan, Library Operations Manager, UCBA Library.

Welcome to my own little nook of the UCBA Library! I’m clearly hard at work, but I’ll happily pause and give you a peek into my space.

UCBA Faculty Share Research at Lightning Talks

by Lauren Wahman

The UCBA Library was excited to host its first Lightning Talks on Thursday, March 22.  Three faculty showcased their current research through informal, 15-minute presentations.  Attendees had the opportunity Continue reading

From the Desk of … Michelle McKinney

I’m Michelle McKinney, Reference and Web Services Librarian for the UCBA Library. I’m usually behind the camera for the From the Desk Of… posts but it’s time for me to switch gears and welcome you to my office space. There’s no rhyme or reason to my set-up or decor. I like being surrounded by photos of family and friends. I’ve also started displaying a few of the gazillion art projects that my sons create. It’s not unusual to come across small toys that have accidentally ended up in my purse during our hectic mornings.

March Book of the Month

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.