Current Picks

The Forever War / Dexter Filkins.

Seven years into Afghanistan, five years into Iraq: what have we learned?  Dexter Filkins recounts his experiences as a journalist experiencing, in the tradition of Michael Herr, the lives of US troops as well as Afghan and Iraqi civilians, in all their complexity, sorrow, anger, pain, and occasional joys.  "We drew closer to each other, the hacks and the vets and the diplomats, anyone who'd been over there.  My friend George... told me he couldn't have a conversation with anyone about Iraq who hadn't been there.  I told him i couldn't have a conversation with anyone who hadn't been there about anything at all."
Find it in the Library:DS79.76.F53 2008

Random House Dictionary of American Slang

This work-in-progress applies thorough scholarship, in the matter of the Oxford English Dictionary, to US popular speech, especially to the words we don't like to acknowledge that we use or used, like N***r.  It does not, yet, have an on-line equivalent, and has so far only completed letters A through O.  Use it as an entertaining look at our linguistic past, or for insights into our prejudices
Find it In the Library: Reference PE2846 .H57 1994

Everything is Miscellaneous : the power of the new digital disorder / David Weinberger. 

Proving the usefulness of a college philosophy major, Weinberger fearlessly and enthusiastically reviews all previous efforts to organize reality -- periodic table, Linnaeus' classification, Dewey Decimal System, Ranganathan's colon classification "and more" -- then moves on to the third order opened up by cooperative efforts to create a Semantic Web using multiple ontologies, social tagging sites such as del.icio.us and flickr, providing a hopeful overview of the potential to make library-stuff and web-stuff even more accessible through cooperation.
Find it In the Library: General Stacks HD30.2 .W4516 2007

Rod Serling Conference proceedings 2008

Conference presentations ranged from personal descriptions of working with Rod at Ithaca College to serious academic studies of his writing.  Audio or video of most sessions are available for your viewing in the College Library, including several sessions on Rod Serling's struggles to treat serious subjects despite objections from sponsors and censors.
The Conference featured a table reading (probably the first performance ever) of Serling's "Noon on Doomsday", inspired by the murder of Emmit Till.
Link to WorldCat Record

 A Person of interest  by Susan Choi

A bomb explosion in the office next door to Professor Lee kills a popular, younger colleague. Lee, Everyasian with the stereotypical name for Asian academics, becomes a "person of interest" to investigators (and the designated villain to his neighbors and colleagues), mostly because he does not conform to public mourning customs, but he also discovers that he is connected to this terrorist. FBI agents and newspeople with cameras follow him, his neighbors stone his house, and he sets out to reestablish connections with most of the people in his past, and along the way becomes a hero, and a better father.
Find it In the Library: Pop Reading F Choi