Preview Shelf by Janice Clauser

Library News and Notable New Books

If You Like Books, Try These! - Here is a group of miscellaneous new books with rather intriguing titles, first "Burying the Dead but Not the Past: Ladies' Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause". Author Caroline Janney writes about how white, southern women formed the LMAs to retrieve and rebury Confederate soldiers scattered throughout the region immediately following the Civil War. These women relocated and re-interred the remains of 72,000 soldiers, nearly 28 percent of the 260,000 lost in the war. They prepared elaborate burials and held Memorial Days even as the region was still occupied by northern soldiers. The result was to craft a sympathetic Confederate position that northerners and in some cases southern African Americans could find palatable.

Second on the list, Allan Metcalf's "OK" is "the improbable story of America's greatest word, said to be the most frequently spoken or typed word on the planet". Metcalf describes how OK was born in a 1839 newspaper article as a humorous abbreviation for "oll korrect" (all correct), used through "Okey-Dokey" of the '20s through "I'm OK You're OK" of the 1970s and the absurd "Okeley Dokeley" on The Simpsons. "The Battery" is Henry Schlesinger's first popular history of the technology that harnessed electricity and powered the greatest scientific and technological advances of our time. He says, "As an author, I'd like to believe this is the first book in which Wolfman Jack, Michael Faraday, Lord Byron, and the band Metallica appear between the same covers."

"Cathedrals of Science" is Patrick Coffey's study of the personalities and rivalries that made modern chemistry. He notes that early scientists were the first to be seen by their countries as military assets, for poison gas in World War I, and the Manhattan Project in World War II. Anti-Semitism was also a force in American chemistry, after the Nazis pushed Jewish scientists from their posts in the 1930s. There was sexism: Linus Pauling seeing that his rival Dorothy Wrinch's funding was blocked. The author chooses 13 chemists who built modern chemistry.

"Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life" where Karen Armstrong uses teachings of the great world religions, notes Love Your Enemies as the final step. Sarah Palin's "America by Heart" contains her reflections on family, faith, and the flag, inspired by encounters with ordinary men and women as she has traveled throughout the country. She also includes brief readings from classic and contemporary texts that have inspired her, as well as portraits of Americans whom she admires.

"Neoconservatism" by Justin Vaisse, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, finds three distinct stages: the New York intellectuals who reacted against the 1960 leftists; the Scoop Jackson Democrats who tried to preserve a mix of hawkish anticommunism abroad and social progress at home, and the Neocons of the 1990s and 2000s who are no longer either liberals or Democrats. It's the biography of a movement. Lucinda Bassett offers "the Solution" for each of us to conquer fear and control our future, a 21-day emotional makeover she has presented to major corporations, professional associations, and educational institutions, on radio and television programs, and in high-profile publications.

A large book "The Making of the Empire Strikes Back" is the 30th anniversary tribute to the blockbuster film Star Wars, Episode 5, presented as an all-inclusive anthology by J. W. Rinzler with a forward by Ridley Scott.