New Lease Book: The Wilder Life:

The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie by Wendy McClure

Book Review at the Christian Science Monitor

New Book: The Photographs of Marion Post Wolcott

Image credit: By Marion Post Wolcott [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

What a great selection of photographs capturing primarily the Southern States (although there are a few stray photos from Wyoming, Montana, Missouri, and Vermont)! Wolcott was a photographer for the Farm Services Administration in the 1930s and 1940s, and these photographs were selected by the Library of Congress as part of the Fields of Vision series that showcases the work of individual photographers in that project. I loved the old painted signs on buildings, the glimpses into the home life of persons such as the photograph of a North Carolina woman in her kitchen, the old court docket book from Granville County, North Carolina, the painted advertisements on buildings such as the one in Natchez, Mississippi, the people hard at work, and the photos of children enjoying life. I could go on and on.

New E-Books!

Here is some information regarding our newest e-books!

One of our e-book collections, ACLS Humanities E-Book, will add almost 550 titles to the collection in 2011. They have rescheduled the release and it is now taking place in two stages: the first release of 250 has just gone live; the second release, with the remaining titles, will take place in late May or early June. The list of all these forthcoming titles in spreadsheet format is now available online at: http://www.humanitiesebook.org/titlelist.html. (Catalog records will be available for the complete set of titles in late May, and will be added to our online catalog at that time.) HEB’s eighth round of new titles includes 542 electronic books covering a wide range of disciplines and fields. Among the most prominent new additions are another 141 titles in Film and Media Studies, 46 more in Philosophy, 57 in Central and Eastern European Studies, 41 in Music and Musicology, 33 in Jewish Studies, as well as 29 more in Bibliography and 30 in Linguistics and Literature. With these new additions HEB will retain its core concentrations in History and expand strong collections in Women’s Studies (254 titles total), Literature (138), Music and Musicology (127), Latin American Studies (114), Middle Eastern (112) and Mediterranean-Byzantine Studies (67), and Methods and Theory (84), among other fields across the Humanities.

The Invisible Bridge - by Julie Orringer

This book has been on my "wish list" to read ever since we obtained it via our lease book program last year. It is longlisted for the prestigious Orange Prize for fiction. I decided it was time to read it.

Andras Levi, a Hungarian Jew, manages to secure a chance to study architecture in France. This book chronicles his time in France and his brother's chance to study medicine in Italy. Then they lose their student visas and must return home. The hardships suffered by them and by their families are chronicled in the book. I was a bit intimidated by the size of this book -- almost 600 pages, but I need not have worried. Orringer is a very skillful storyteller and kept my attention throughout the entire book. The characters are well drawn. The atrocities suffered by the Jews during the Holocaust are never easy to read, so be prepared to shed a few tears. I am impressed by the amount of research that the author must have done to write such a marvelous piece of historical fiction. 5 stars.

By the way, the library has three other Orange Prize nominees for this year on our Lease Book shelves: Room by Emma Donoghue, Great House by Nicole Krauss, and The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht.