Odyssey Online

…we have two recently written biographies on the late  Senator Edward Kennedy.  They are Vincent Bzdek’s The Kennedy Legacy: Jack, Bobby, Ted and a Family Dream Fulfilled, and The Last Lion: the Fall and Rise of Teddy Kennedy by writers from the Boston Globe.  Get to know the man before the President’s eulogy.

…didn’t take long before book recommendations poured forth, again.  Some time back we listed new Dick Cheney biographies, and along with the former Vice President Donald Rumsfeld was a tremendously controversial figure in the Bush administration.  In the course of blog reading I stumbled upon a very strong review of Bradley Graham’s new biography of the man titled By His Own Rules: the Ambitions, Successes, and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld.  We also have in the collection Andrew Cockburn’s 2007 biography Rumsfeld, His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy.

…while I spent much of the summer running up and down the shelves looking for books to recommend, it didn’t mean I wasn’t near obsessive about following blogs…couple of interesting pieces from that sphere…firstly a nicely titled Are Kindles and iPods the End of Culture Snobbery? which investigates…contrasts…books with content.  The piece also has an interesting take on how we translate people by what they read.  On a like topic the author of that piece, Derek Thompson, reports on Amazon’s trials and tribulations establishing the user-license that will to Kindle content bring. One of the elements to Kindle that may substantively change the human relation to discourse is whether, if the Kindle becomes norm, one will in fact own the book, I mean content, once it has been Kindle-ized.

Also, to file under knowing blogging, before retiring from Obsidian Wings Hilzoy (pen-name) wrote blogged Good to Know, a narrative about how an unsubstantiated report moves around the blog sphere. For all that is good about the “new journalism” which blogs create/inspire they are still a buyer beware market that beg critical reading…

…with today’s post we conclude our summer reading recommendations. Certainly, there will be book recommendations from time to time right here on Odyssey Online, but we’ll also get back to blogging about the SLU Libraries, libraries in general, information technology, academics and the internet, and of course reading and readers. So for you readers (by way of summer gone and autumn upon us) who wish to have a book on the side, one to compliment the reading being done in the name of an academic pursuit, here are four books of poems, no thematic constant, only that within them are poems that catch one’s attention, dare I say, hint at truth:

• A Gilded Lapse of Time by Gjertrud Schnackenberg
• Florida Poems by Campbell McGrath
• Red Lacquered Chopsticks by Betty Warrington-Kearsley
• Book of Haikus by Jack Kerouac, edited by Regina Weinreich

Yes, that Jack Kerouac, the man who wrote On the Road.  Any of these are perfect to escape with, the days assigned reading done…

…last year with the death of John Updike we here at the SLU Libraries did some thinking and writing about Updike’s work, and with our summer reading recommendations winding down we have in our browsing collection two books by Updike that reflect the man at the end of his life.  One is titled Endpoint and Other Poems, some of which were published in the New Yorker and are about Updike’s last days.  He also has a poem titled Baseball which is one of the better poems you’ll ever read about the sport.  There is also a collection of short stories titled My Father’s Tears and Other Stories. Certainly in the waning days of summer reflecting on and with John Updike is time well spent…

…not entirely sure why this title “came to me in the night” but Baron Wormser, a Maine resident and a fine poet, wrote a memoir titled The Road Washes Out in the Spring: A Poet’s Memoir of Living Off the Grid, and as the title suggests it is much about “living off the grid.”  This is a very well written book, and a good study in self reliance, circa, 2009.

…also, here is a quick piece from the Boston Globe about what students have been reading at brother and sister institutions around the Northeast…

…one of the more popular “little” collections we have is our Browsing Collection. This is a recreational reading collection located just outside our Special Collections area, and among these books we’ve tried to include work by contemporary poets.  Here are four that are worth a look:

• Twigs and Knucklebones by Sarah Lindsay
• The Dangerous Shirt by Alberto Rios
• Rough Candle by Betsy Sholl
• The Ginkgo Light by Arthur Sze

Dog days of August, try a new poet?

…we’re back, tanned, rested, and ready as was once quipped in a Saturday Night Live skit back long ago when Saturday Night Live was watchable. Lately, on the television and elsewhere, the debate about a national health care plan is dominating the air waves.  We have many helpful titles on this subject and via an Encore search and a few terms like medical policy United States we find:

• The Public-Private Health Care State: Essays on the History of American Health Care Policy by Rosemary Stevens
• Differential Diagnoses: A Comparative History of Health Care Problems and Solutions in the United States and France by Paul V. Dutton
• Truth, Lies, and Public Health: How We are Affected When Politics and Science Collide by Madelon Ludin Finkel
• Shredding the Social Contract: The Privatization of Medical Care by John Geyman
• Medicare: A Policy Primer by Marilyn Moon
• One Nation Uninsured: Why the U.S. Has No National Health Insurance by Jill Quadagno

Plenty of perspective on this ongoing, important, and emotional debate…