The link below is to a book review of ‘Saving Eutychus – How to Preach God’s Word and Keep People Awake,’ by Gary Millar and Phil Campbell.
For more visit:
http://blogs.thegospelcoalition.org/erikraymond/2016/01/08/book-review-saving-eutychus/
Monthly Archives: January 2016
Not My Review: Prayer, by Tim Keller
The link below is to a book review of ‘Prayer,’ by Tim Keller.
For more visit:
http://blogs.thegospelcoalition.org/erikraymond/2016/01/06/book-review-prayer/
The Reading Nook
The link below is to an article that takes a look at how to create your own reading nook.
For more visit:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/emmacooke24/i-need-a-nook-right-now
Speed Reading Exposed
The link below is to an article that looks at the claims of speed reading.
For more visit:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/29/speed-reading-claims-discredited-by-new-report
The End of Paper Books?
The link below is to an article that considers the end of paper books.
For more visit:
http://www.teleread.com/e-reading-tips-apps-and-gadgets/publishing-pundits-think-paper-books-may-disappear-given-a-few-decades/
Turning a page: downsizing the campus book collections
Donald Barclay, University of California, Merced
When, in 2005, the University of Chicago entered into a US$81 million renovation of a major library building, one of the primary goals was to ensure that the university’s collection of printed books in the social sciences and humanities would remain under one roof.
That goal was achieved six years later. However, it also meant that a good part of the library’s print collection, while technically being “under the library roof,” was moved “under the ground.” The renovation included a subterranean automated system that can store and retrieve up to 3.5 million books.
Chicago’s library project could well represent the end of an era – the era of colleges and universities expending millions of dollars so that printed books can be housed in on-campus libraries.
In my 25-year career as an academic librarian, I have witnessed the explosion of digital technology into academic life and played a part in the ongoing struggle to balance digital information with the familiar solidity of print in academic library collections.
While I believe there will always be a place for the book in the hearts of academics, it is far less likely there will be a place for the book, or at least for every book, on the academic campus.
Changing goals of costly shelf space
Keeping a printed book in a library is not cheap.
The most recent analysis pegs the total cost of keeping one book in an open library stack (the kind that allows browsing) at $4.26 per year (in 2009 dollars). High-density shelving, a less costly alternative to open stacks, comes at $.86 per book, per year (again, in 2009 dollars).
And given the costs, academic financial officers blanch at proposals to build new on-campus storage capacity for thousands, in some cases millions, of books.
This is not to say that academic library construction and renovation have come to an end. But rather than being conceived of as on-campus book warehouses, academic libraries are today being reimagined as spaces in which learning, collaboration and intellectual engagement take center stage.
Look at the following examples:
At Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), the web page providing information on the construction of a new library building for the Monroe Park campus proclaims:
90% of the new space will be for student use, not for storing books or materials.
The University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) is in the midst of an addition and renovation project that will add 60,000 square feet of new library space and renovate 92,000 square feet of existing library space.
The stated goals of the UCSB project include such desiderata as “expanded wireless access,” “additional and enhanced group study and collaboration spaces,” and a “faculty collaboration studio.” Additional book capacity is not part of the plan.
Even more extreme, the University of Michigan’s $55 million renovation of its Taubman Health Sciences Library (completed in 2015) has removed all print books from the library in order to accommodate classrooms and “collaboration rooms.”
An entire floor is now devoted to “clinical simulation rooms” where medical students hone their diagnostic and clinical skills through simulated hands-on practice.
SeAMK Korkeakoulukirjasto, CC BY-NC-ND
All these are part of a mainstream trend in which the printed book, though still part of the academic library ensemble, is being relegated to the role of supporting player rather than the lead actor.
New ways of storage
In the face of these changes, academic librarians have no choice but to take action. Their challenge, though, is that there are simply too many print books and not enough on-campus space to store them.
The most obvious solution to too many books is “weeding,” the library profession’s term for removing books from a collection. While weeding creates space for new books, it has significant labor and disposal costs. Also, it can meet with stiff resistance from faculty and students.
So an increasingly popular strategy for managing overcrowded stacks is moving books to high-density, low-cost, off-campus storage.
This too can be met with resistance from faculty and students. For example, at Syracuse University, faculty reacted with with what was described as “fury” when campus librarians planned to move low-use books to an off-campus storage facility.
Even so, the practice has become routine for many academic libraries. As of 2014, an estimated 75 high-density academic library storage facilities have been built in the US.
Often located where land is cheaper and more plentiful than on crowded college campuses, climate-controlled high-density storage facilities house books and other library materials in space-saving compact shelving. While the items in such facilities are not browseable, their bibliographic records remain in the library catalog and the items themselves can be recalled if needed by a library user.
This number includes facilities that serve a single library. But it also includes several shared mega-facilities, such as:
The Research Collections and Preservation Consortium (ReCAP) – a partnership of Columbia University, The New York Public Library, and Princeton University – houses more than 12 million volumes.
Penn State, CC BY-NC
The Minnesota Library Access Center – serving the University of Minnesota along with a consortium of smaller libraries around the state – has a capacity of 1.5 million volumes.
The University of Texas and Texas A&M shared repository, which opened in 2013, has a capacity for over one million volumes and is designed to be expandable to a two-million-volume facility.
The statewide Ohiolink system includes five regional repositories whose shared capacity approaches 10 million volumes.
The combined University of California Northern and Southern Regional Library Facilities have the capacity to house a combined 13 million volumes.
But because of the high costs involved, books are also being weeded out as they are moved.
Rather than keeping five copies of Book X, each deposited by a separate library, a shared storage facility may keep only a single “best copy” to be shared by all the contributing libraries.
Things have gone so far that Texas’ high-density repository is home to books that are the shared property of both the University of Texas and Texas A&M, a rather astounding state of affairs for anyone familiar with the length and depth of the rivalry between the two institutions.
Future of campus libraries
Besides building shared repositories, academic libraries are also developing distributed storage projects as a way of reducing the pressure on library stack space.
Rather than relying on large repositories, distributed storage schemes are based on multilibrary agreements. A member library agrees to hold an archival print copy of a bound journal or monograph so that other members of the consortia can dispose of their copies.
Academic librarians have formed a task force to investigate the creation of a distributed shared monograph archive on behalf of HathiTrust, a shared digital preservation repository containing the scans of millions of printed books belonging to a coalition of academic libraries.
The proposed HathiTrust monograph archive will allow those same academic libraries to reduce the footprint of their on-campus collections by relying on shared archival copies of low-use, mostly public domain books whose full texts are available digitally via HathiTrust.
While there is certain to be resistance to any future plans to move books out of campus book stacks, the inescapable calculus of more print books and less on-campus space to house them will, in the end, overwhelm resistance.
Academic library consultant Lizanne Payne accurately sums up the current situation:
On most campuses, library shelf space is finite and even shrinking. Gone are the days when a proactive library director could argue successfully for a library expansion to house more books.
Traditionalists may not like it, but there is plenty of evidence to suggest that, in the long term, campuses will not require ever more space to house printed books.
Donald Barclay, Deputy University Librarian, University of California, Merced
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
How reading fiction can help students understand the real world
Melissa Tandiwe Myambo, University of California, Los Angeles
The real world is often overwhelmingly complicated. Literature can help. This is true at universities too: courses in comparative literature offer students new insights into their chosen disciplines by unlocking new, varied perspectives.
How can those studying political science truly grasp the terror of living under a dictator? Perhaps by reading Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat, a magnificent historical novel about the tyrannical Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic. Students who read it are unlikely to forget the dizzying Cold War political intrigues that led the US to first support Trujillo and then implement sanctions against him.
In area studies, students must learn about the politics of postcolonial government. Chinua Achebe’s 1966 novel, A Man of the People, explores how rapidly post-independence revolutionary zeal can turn venal as the corrupt, greedy postcolonial elite seizes the reins of power from the coloniser only to further strangle the majority.
I would suggest that teaching these and other subjects – history, economics, sociology, geography and many others – can only be enhanced by including novels, short stories and artistic feature films. Students will also benefit from learning the methods of critical reading that are inherent to literary study. In this article I will explore why this is the case, focusing largely on the important but contested field of international development studies.
Why development is about more than economics
International development studies cries out for a literary component precisely because it is such an ideological and normative subject. “Development” is itself a term that should demand ideological evaluation. It is more than economics. This is made clear by the UN’s Millennium and Sustainable Development Goals. These reiterate that “development” also focuses on cultural change, such as gender equity through empowering women and girls.
But the syllabus of almost any international development studies course contains a heavy dose of development economists: Amartya Sen, Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs. Or, if the professor is slightly more left-leaning, there will be works by anthropologists like James Ferguson and Arturo Escobar or brilliant political science professor Timothy Mitchell. Why only these? This is an area in which books in the humanities and arts are pertinent, yet one never sees a postcolonial novel on these syllabi.
It is frankly criminal. Development was constituted as a field of study and area of practice during the years of decolonisation after World War II. This was the very same time period which spawned the birth of what is today called postcolonial literature. But international development studies courses seldom broach the fundamental question of what is truly meant by development. Developing to what? For whose benefit? Under whose aegis? This question, however, is interrogated in a vast body of excellent fiction.
I have prescribed Nuruddin Farah’s 1993 novel, Gifts – inspired by Marcel Mauss’ classic ethnography The Gift – to my students. When development aid from powerful countries is donated to impoverished 1980s Somalia, a fine line is walked by both the West which “gives” and the Somalis who “receive.” The book is a long meditation on the tightrope act that teeters between donation and domination. Certainly my students learned more about how it really feels to be the recipient of donor aid from this novel than any of our social science readings, which were mostly written from the donors’ point of view.
Exploring different points of view
This isn’t to suggest that such novels are stand-ins for “native informants”, who are perceived to be experts about a culture, race or place simply because they belong to it. Quite the contrary. They should be read as literature, which literary critics like Mikhail Bakhtin describe as a jumble of competing viewpoints depending on language that always struggles to convey actual truth.
Point of view might be an easier concept for students to grasp at first than Bakhtin’s theory. It is a basic narrative technique that is explored in Literary Criticism 101 because it can change the way a story is told or perceived. In the rich 2006 film Bamako the people of Mali put the World Bank on trial to determine why their poisoned “gift” of development aid has left the country with such a debilitating debt burden.
From the World Bank’s perspective, development might mean one thing but for those “beneficiaries,” it means something quite different. Art has the power to convey that point of view with visceral impact. Isn’t this essential for international development students who aim to help the “other” to “develop”?
Room for myriad insights
The end state of “development,” which is implied but hardly ever explicitly theorised in international development studies, is “modernity” and becoming “modern”. This is a subject on which literature and literary theory can offer myriad insights.
Zakes Mda’s wonderful 2005 novel Heart of Redness depicts the tale of a contemporary village in post-apartheid South Africa. Here, two groups of villagers hold radically different positions on what development means to them. Does it mean street lamps and a casino resort that will bring tourists? Or maintaining a more “traditional,” environmentally-sustainable lifestyle albeit with some “modern” amenities? The villagers’ differing positions are also informed by their different views on their history of colonisation.
History is, of course, essential for understanding any subject. For this reason I’ve not restricted myself to postcolonial literature only in teaching my classes. Robinson Crusoe, first published in 1719, is an excellent novel for introducing the study of British imperialism which is a prerequisite for understanding our contemporary global cultural economy.
Pushing for positive change
In our globalising world, the stakes could not be higher. Many of our students will end up making policy, allocating aid, driving the global economy. They will change the world. Literature and humanistic thinking enable them to change it for the better.
Melissa Tandiwe Myambo, Fublright-Nehru Scholar, Research Associate, Centre for Indian Studies, Wits University, University of California, Los Angeles
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Not My Review: Some Kind of Courage, by Dan Gemeinhart
Six years on: the enduring influence of J. D. Salinger
Emma Michelle, University of Melbourne and Anne Maxwell, University of Melbourne
Today marks six years since celebrated writer J. D. Salinger passed away at his home in Cornish, New Hampshire, at the age of 91. Famously shunning all aspects of public life for decades prior to his death, he published no new work after 1965 and gave no interviews after 1980. Yet he apparently continued to write every day with a religious diligence.
In 1972 a girlfriend observed “he has completed at least two books, the manuscripts of which now sit in the safe”.
Unsealed portions of depositions taken in 1986 showed Salinger confirmed under oath that he was writing “Just a work of fiction. That’s all”.
And then after his death, a 2013 book and documentary detailed five new works he approved for publication between 2015 and 2020, however so far none have eventuated.
Today on the anniversary of his death, we reflect on how J. D. Salinger’s writing first influenced the world and how it continues to do so now.
The Catcher in the Rye and young-adult fiction
For many teenage readers The Catcher in the Rye was a revelation. The earliest critics called protagonist Holden Caulfield a “lout,” his angst and suffering “cute,” and his rebellious nature “the differential revolt of the lonesome rich child,” though none could overlook the 1951 novel’s commercial success and popularity with adolescents.
Wikipedia Commons. Lotte Jacobi Collection, University of New Hampshire
The Catcher in the Rye has sold 65 million copies worldwide and continues to sell 250,000 more each year, frequently as a prescribed text in high school curricula.
Salinger’s pre-eminence as a youth writer is mainly attributed to the way he successfully captures the language of young people and depicts themes that appeal to teenage sensibilities. John Green – perhaps the most popular contemporary author of young-adult fiction – said last year that “anybody who writes about teenagers does so in the shadow of Salinger”.
Rarely (if ever) does a list of the best young-adult fiction omit the novel and, as David Levithan wrote in 2010:
The Catcher in the Rye was one of the first books on the shelf of our young adult [sic] literature, and for almost sixty years we’ve written plenty more in an attempt to keep it company.
Controversy: the death of John Lennon
Little, Brown and Company
Once a text gains a diehard following it is vulnerable to extremes of interpretation. When Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon in December of 1980 he was found reading The Catcher in the Rye at the scene. Inside the book he’d written “This is my statement” and signed off as Holden Caulfield.
Months later, John Hinckley Jr. tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan and police found a copy of the novel in his hotel room.
Salinger never gave public comment on the shootings during his lifetime. Yet by all accounts he despised critics misreading his texts, and one could assume that murder is a most extreme misreading of Holden stood for. Critics have rightly asserted that Holden’s rebellion “never quite transcends the adolescent pique at wrong guys and boring teachers,” and that Holden:
… wanders through New York with a genuine desire, to quote an old Beatles tune, to “take a sad song and make it better”, but he doesn’t know how to begin […]. Simply put, it appears Chapman misread The Catcher in the Rye.
Film and the work of Wes Anderson
The Catcher in the Rye has inspired leagues of on-screen stories – notably Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and Six Degrees of Separation (1990 play and 1993 film). A drama about Salinger’s life has been announced and will address “the birth of The Catcher in the Rye,” despite his insistence that a film adaptation of the novel must never arise.
This film is supposedly based on a 2011 biography, perhaps an interesting way of circumventing the writer’s wishes.
Yet nowhere is his influence in film felt more than the work of Wes Anderson. Salinger’s Glass family (who feature heavily in his later work) are reconstructed in Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) as three child prodigies struggle to adjust to adult life.
Margot’s bathtub conversation with her mother is clear homage to a scene in Salinger’s 1957 novella Zooey, and even her favourite coat finds its twin in a Salinger story.
The precocious young lovers in Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom (2012) replicate numerous child figures in Salinger’s fiction. Children in Salinger’s work are equal parts characters and symbols of virtue, where the integrity and innocence of childhood is idealised and broken adults can find salvation in their “wonderful directness“.
Anderson’s film is no different, with Suzy and Sam repeatedly shown as “resourceful, optimistic, capable of loyalty and love – all the qualities with which their elders struggle”.
Despite the prospect of forthcoming titles, 2015 came and went and the world was left wanting. The J. D. Salinger Literary Trust was busy fighting a small publisher over foreign licensing rights for some old short stories, and any schedule for forthcoming Salinger books is still to be confirmed.
However, despite this absence, there remains abundant evidence of his influence in the contemporary world.
Emma Michelle, , University of Melbourne and Anne Maxwell, Assoc. Professor, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Not My Review: What is the Incarnation? by William B. Evans
The link below is to a book review of ‘What is the Incarnation?,’ by William B. Evans.
For more visit:
http://www.credomag.com/2016/01/12/what-is-the-incarnation-michael-a-g-haykin/
At the BookShelf 
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