LISNews: Librarian News

Post for January 2

The Book Calendar has posted the January 1 entry.

Site that features a new book everyday - Book Calendar 2013

NYT has a list of a 100 notable books for 2012. You can see all the books here.

The Japanese have stumbled upon an extraordinary way to do mental arithmetic very, very fast: Become proficient with an abacus, then discard it and do your calculations using a mental image of one. The results are mind-boggling

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/alexs-adventures-in-numberland/2012/oct/29/mathematics

British Airways Boeing 747-400 in D-Check

Pocket Neighborhoods: Creating Small-Scale Community in a Large-Scale World

Pocket Neighborhoods: Creating Small Scale Community in a Large Scale World introduces an antidote to faceless, placeless sprawl — small scale neighborhoods where people can easily know one another, where empty nesters and single householders with far-flung families can find friendship or a helping hand nearby, and where children can have shirt-tail aunties and uncles just beyond their front gate.
The book describes inspiring pocket neighborhoods through stories of the people who live there, as well as the progressive planners, innovative architects, pioneering developers, craftspeople and gardeners who helped create them. -- Read More

I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution

I Want My MTV tells the story of the first decade of MTV, the golden era when MTV's programming was all videos, all the time, and kids watched religiously to see their favorite bands, learn about new music, and have something to talk about at parties. From its start in 1981 with a small cache of videos by mostly unknown British new wave acts to the launch of the reality-television craze with The Real World in 1992, MTV grew into a tastemaker, a career maker, and a mammoth business. Featuring interviews with nearly four hundred artists, directors, VJs, and television and music executives, I Want My MTV is a testament to the channel that changed popular culture forever.

I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution

New books in Amazon Top 100
http://nonstopbooks.blogspot.com/2012/10/new-books-in-amazon-top-100.html

Includes links to media pieces that discuss books.

The phone once coveted by the elite and the powerful is becoming an object of ridicule as Androids and iPhones corner the smartphone market.

http://goo.gl/WeyJG

What was done 50 years ago: Come Up and Get Me: An Autobiography of Colonel Joe Kittinger

Eric Lomax, a former British soldier who was tortured by the Japanese while he was a prisoner during World War II and half a century later forgave one of his tormentors — an experience he recounted in a memoir, “The Railway Man” — died on Monday in Berwick-upon-Tweed, England. He was 93. Full article in the NYT.

Book: Railway Man: A POW's Searing Account of War, Brutality and Forgiveness

Photographer Edward Curtis decided to chronicle the experience of the vanishing Native American tribes at the end of the 19th century. It was an unbelievably ambitious project that would define Curtis, his work and his legacy.

Full piece on NPR

Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us about Popular Culture

Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Theory and Interpretation of Narrative)

Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible: Cognition, Culture, Narrative

Dining By Rail: The History and Recipes of America's Golden Age of Railroad Cuisine

Readers who sigh at the names "Super Chief" and "Zephyr," and who remember the meal Cary Grant ate on the train in North by Northwest , may find this book fulfilling their wildest dreams. In an attempt to "preserve a record of one of the ways we used to eat," rail fan and Penn State professor Porterfield presents a detailed history of train dining. Beginning as an alternative to railroad station eateries, train dining reached its peak in 1930, when 1732 railroad dining cars were registered with the Interstate Commerce Commission, and all but ended in 1971 with telegrams like the May 1 order to Union Pacific to shut its passenger lines and make way for Amtrak. Model railroaders and social historians will find the 150 photographs and illustrations invaluable: a photo spread with dimensions of the pantry of the New York Central's Twentieth Century Limited, a sample 1920s dinner menu from the Milwaukee Railroad's Pioneer Limited, descriptions of staff sleeping quarters. The second half of the book offers 250 recipes from 48 railroad lines, featuring early-20th-century fare like Lobster Newburg New York Central, Poinsettia Salad-Merchant's Limited and Baked Potato Pennsylvania. For authentic American versions of lamb fricassee, deviled eggs and blanc mange presented without campiness or apology, this is the source. -- Read More

When I Was a Child I Read Books: Essays

Washington Post: Marilynne Robinson’s ‘When I Was a Child I Read Books’: Essays on faith, reading

New York Times: Her Calling

Read the Booklist starred review on Amazon. First line of review - There is more food for thought in one of Robinson’s well-turned paragraphs than in entire books.

The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets

Ted Kooser has been writing and publishing poetry for more than forty years. In the pages of The Poetry Home Repair Manual, Kooser brings those decades of experience to bear. Here are tools and insights, the instructions (and warnings against instructions) that poets—aspiring or practicing—can use to hone their craft, perhaps into art. Using examples from his own rich literary oeuvre and from the work of a number of successful contemporary poets, the author schools us in the critical relationship between poet and reader, which is fundamental to what Kooser believes is poetry’s ultimate purpose: to reach other people and touch their hearts.

Much more than a guidebook to writing and revising poems, this manual has all the comforts and merits of a long and enlightening conversation with a wise and patient old friend—a friend who is willing to share everything he’s learned about the art he’s spent a lifetime learning to execute so well.

Note: Kooser was U. S. Poet Laureate from 2004-2006

The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets

From Princeton University Press:

The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking

See video trailer for book.

The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking presents practical, lively, and inspiring ways for you to become more successful through better thinking. The idea is simple: You can learn how to think far better by adopting specific strategies. Brilliant people aren't a special breed--they just use their minds differently. By using the straightforward and thought-provoking techniques in The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking, you will regularly find imaginative solutions to difficult challenges, and you will discover new ways of looking at your world and yourself--revealing previously hidden opportunities. -- Read More

A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

(Oxford University Press)

One of the great fears many of us face is that despite all our effort and striving, we will discover at the end that we have wasted our life. In A Guide to the Good Life, William B. Irvine plumbs the wisdom of Stoic philosophy, one of the most popular and successful schools of thought in ancient Rome, and shows how its insight and advice are still remarkably applicable to modern lives.

In A Guide to the Good Life, Irvine offers a refreshing presentation of Stoicism, showing how this ancient philosophy can still direct us toward a better life. Using the psychological insights and the practical techniques of the Stoics, Irvine offers a roadmap for anyone seeking to avoid the feelings of chronic dissatisfaction that plague so many of us. Irvine looks at various Stoic techniques for attaining tranquility and shows how to put these techniques to work in our own life. As he does so, he describes his own experiences practicing Stoicism and offers valuable first-hand advice for anyone wishing to live better by following in the footsteps of these ancient philosophers. Readers learn how to minimize worry, how to let go of the past and focus our efforts on the things we can control, and how to deal with insults, grief, old age, and the distracting temptations of fame and fortune. We learn from Marcus Aurelius the importance of prizing only things of true value, and from Epictetus we learn how to be more content with what we have. -- Read More

Some five star reviews on Amazon are worth more than others.

The books:

Into That Silent Sea: Trailblazers of the Space Era, 1961-1965

In the Shadow of the Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965-1969

The books have five star reviews from many people. One review stands out. There is a five star review by Al Worden. Alfred Worden was the pilot of Endeavour, the command-module for the Apollo 15 mission in 1971. Some five star reviews are worth more than others.