Inyo County Free Library - New Acquisitions
January 2013 - February 2013
These are books and media new to the library and cataloged by the Inyo County Free Library.
Additional information about each title can be found in the catalog (click on the title). For older acquisition lists choose from Select another list. To request any of these titles please contact your local library branch.
NEW RELEASE The new religious intolerance: overcoming the politics of fear in an anxious age By Nussbaum, Martha Craven Publishing Date: 2012 Classification: 200 Call Number: 201.723 NUS "What impulse prompted some newspapers to attribute the murder of 77 Norwegians to Islamic extremists, until it became evident that a right-wing Norwegian terrorist was the perpetrator? Why did Switzerland, a country of four minarets, vote to ban those structures? How did a proposed Muslim cultural center in lower Manhattan ignite a fevered political debate across the United States? In The New Religious Intolerance, Martha C. Nussbaum surveys such developments and identifies the fear behind these reactions. Drawing inspiration from philosophy, history, and literature, she suggests a route past this limiting response and toward a more equitable, imaginative, and free society." -- Provided by publisher. |
By Castaneda, Carlos Publishing Date: c1981 Classification: 200 Call Number: 299.7 CAS His legend and his power have grown through two generations, in five astonishing volumes, including The Teachings of Don Juan and A Separate Reality. Now, in this haunting and deeply personal book, Castaneda takes the reader into the very heart of sorcery, challenging both imagination and reason. |
NEW RELEASE No one's world: the West, the rising rest, and the coming global turn By Kupchan, Charles Publishing Date: c2012 Classification: 300 Call Number: 303.482 KUP The world is on the cusp of a global turn. Between 1500 and 1800, the West sprinted ahead of other centers of power in Asia and the Middle East. Europe and the United States have dominated the world since. But today the West's preeminence is slipping away as China, India, Brazil and other emerging powers rise. Although most strategists recognize that the dominance of the West is on the wane, they are confident that its founding ideas democracy, capitalism, and secular nationalism will continue to spread, ensuring that the Western order will outlast its primacy. |
Blue collar intellectuals: when the enlightened and the everyman elevated America By Flynn, Daniel J. Publishing Date: c2011 Classification: 300 Call Number: 305.552 FLY |
NEW RELEASE Obama and the Middle East: the end of America's moment By Gerges, Fawaz A. Publishing Date: c2012 Classification: 300 Call Number: 327.7305 GER "During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised to distance the United States from the neoconservative foreign policy legacy of his predecessor, George W. Bush, and usher in a new era of a global, interconnected world. More than two years have passed since his inauguration, and the reality of President Obama's approach is in stark contrast to the ebullient and optimistic image that he originally built up. In fact, Obama is not committed to redefining U.S. foreign policy in a transformational way, but to calibrating and correcting the Bush policies, and reclaiming the neorealist approach that defined America's foreign policy since WWII. Taking stock of Obama's first year in the White House, this book places his engagement in the Middle East within the broader context of U.S. foreign policy since 9/11 and examines key areas that have posed a challenge to his administration. Middle East expert Fawaz Gerges highlights the administration's widening credibility gap and lack of resolve and political will to directly confront policy challenges head-on, and offer essential strategic recommendations for advancing U.S. relations with the Muslim world"--Provided by publisher. |
The good fight: hard lessons from Searchlight to Washington By Reid, Harry Publishing Date: c2008 Classification: 300 Call Number: 328.7309 REI In a voice that is real and passion-filled, Senator Reid tells the tale of two places, intertwining his own story of growing up in the tiny mining town of Searchlight, Nevada, with the cautionary tale of Washington, D.C.--From publisher description. |
NEW RELEASE The prosperity of vice: a worried view of economics By Cohen, Daniel Publishing Date: c2012 Classification: 300 Call Number: 330 COH What happened yesterday in the West is today being repeated on a global scale. Industrial society is replacing rural society: millions of peasants in China, India, and elsewhere are leaving the countryside and going to the city. New powers are emerging and rivalries are exacerbated as competition increases for control of raw materials. Contrary to what believers in the "clash of civilizations" maintain, the great risk of the twenty-first century is not a confrontation between cultures but a repetition of history. In The Prosperity of Vice , the influential French economist Daniel Cohen shows that violence, rather than peace, has been the historical accompaniment to prosperity. Peace in Europe came only after the barbaric wars of the twentieth century, not as the outcome of economic growth. What will happen this time for today's eagerly Westernizing emerging nations? Cohen guides us through history, describing the European discovery of the "philosopher's stone": the possibility of perpetual growth. But the consequences of addiction to growth are dire in an era of globalization. If a billion Chinese consume a billion cars, the future of the planet is threatened. But, Cohen points out, there is another kind of globalization: the immaterial globalization enabled by the Internet. It is still possible, he argues, that the cyber-world will create a new awareness of global solidarity. It even may help us accomplish a formidable cognitive task, as immense as that realized during the Industrial Revolution--one that would allow us learn to live within the limits of a solitary planet. |
NEW RELEASE Ninety days: a memoir of recovery By Clegg, Bill Publishing Date: 2012 Classification: 300 Call Number: 362.29 CLE In this stark memoir, a follow-up to Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man, literary agent and author Clegg describes his struggle to stay clean. |
A child called "it": and, The lost boy : one child's courage to survive By Pelzer, David J. Publishing Date: c1995 Classification: 300 Call Number: 362.76 PEL |
NEW RELEASE By McDermott, Terry Publishing Date: 2012 Classification: 300 Call Number: 363.325 MCD Drawing on access to key sources as well as jihadis and family members, provides a comprehensive account of the search for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the elusive mastermind of the September 11 plot against the United States. |
NEW RELEASE Midnight in Peking: how the murder of a young Englishwoman haunted the last days of old China By French, Paul Publishing Date: 2012 Classification: 300 Call Number: 364.1523 FRE Chronicles the efforts of two detectives--one British and one Chinese--as they raced to find an Englishwoman's killer in 1937 before the Japanese invasion of Peking. |
NEW RELEASE By Tejada, Susan Mondshein Publishing Date: c2012 Classification: 300 Call Number: 364.1523 TEJ It was a bold and brutal crime--robbery and murder in broad daylight on the streets of South Braintree, Massachusetts, in 1920. Tried for the crime and convicted, two Italian-born laborers, anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, went to the electric chair in 1927, professing their innocence. Journalist Susan Tejada has spent years investigating the case, sifting through diaries and police reports and interviewing descendants of major figures. She discovers little-known facts about Sacco, Vanzetti, and their supporters, and develops a tantalizing theory about how a doomed insider may have been coerced into helping professional criminals plan the heist. The author takes a panoramic view of the case, allowing the reader to see the personalities as individuals. She also paints a fascinating portrait of a bygone era: Providence gangsters and Boston Brahmins; nighttime raids and midnight bombings; and immigration, unionism, draft dodging, and violent anarchism in the turbulent early years of the twentieth century. In many ways this is as much a cultural history as a true-crime mystery or courtroom drama. Because the case played out against a background of domestic terrorism, in a time that echoes our own, we have a new appreciation of the potential connection between fear and the erosion of civil liberties and miscarriages of justice. |
NEW RELEASE By Wexler, Stuart Publishing Date: c2012 Classification: 300 Call Number: 364.1524 WEX Chronicles a multi-year effort to kill Martin Luther King Jr. by a group of the nations most violent right-wing extremists. |
NEW RELEASE Straphanger: saving our cities and ourselves from the automobile By Grescoe, Taras Publishing Date: 2012 Classification: 300 Call Number: 388.4 GRE Taras Grescoe rides the rails all over the world and makes an elegant and impassioned case for the imminent end of car culture and the coming transportation revolution. "I am proud to call myself a straphanger," writes Taras Grescoe. The perception of public transportation in America is often unflattering--a squalid last resort for those with one too many drunk-driving charges, too poor to afford insurance, or too decrepit to get behind the wheel of a car. Indeed, a century of auto-centric culture and city planning has left most of the country with public transportation that is underfunded, ill maintained, and ill conceived. But as the demand for petroleum is fast outpacing the world's supply, a revolution in transportation is under way. Grescoe explores the ascendance of the straphangers--the growing number of people who rely on public transportation to go about the business of their daily lives. On a journey that takes him around the world--from New York to Moscow, Paris, Copenhagen, Tokyo, Bogotá, Phoenix, Portland, Vancouver, and Philadelphia--Grescoe profiles public transportation here and abroad, highlighting the people and ideas that may help undo the damage that car-centric planning has done to our cities and create convenient, affordable, and sustainable urban transportation--and better city living--for all"-- |
NEW RELEASE In pursuit of the unknown: 17 equations that changed the world By Stewart, Ian Publishing Date: 2012 Classification: 500 Call Number: 511.326 STE In In Pursuit of the Unknown, celebrated mathematician Ian Stewart uses a handful of mathematical equations to explore the vitally important connections between math and human progress. We often overlook the historical link between mathematics and technological advances, says Stewart--but this connection is integral to any complete understanding of human history. Equations are modeled on the patterns we find in the world around us, says Stewart, and it is through equations that we are able to make sense of, and in turn influence, our world. Stewart locates the origins of each equation he presents--from Pythagoras's Theorem to Newton's Law of Gravity to Einstein's Theory of Relativity--within a particular historical moment, elucidating the development of mathematical and philosophical thought necessary for each equation's discovery. None of these equations emerged in a vacuum, Stewart shows; each drew, in some way, on past equations and the thinking of the day. In turn, all of these equations paved the way for major developments in mathematics, science, philosophy, and technology. Without logarithms (invented in the early 17th century by John Napier and improved by Henry Briggs), scientists would not have been able to calculate the movement of the planets, and mathematicians would not have been able to develop fractal geometry. The Wave Equation is one of the most important equations in physics, and is crucial for engineers studying the vibrations in vehicles and the response of buildings to earthquakes. And the equation at the heart of Information Theory, devised by Claude Shannon, is the basis of digital communication today. An approachable and informative guide to the equations upon which nearly every aspect of scientific and mathematical understanding depends, In Pursuit of the Unknown is also a reminder that equations have profoundly influenced our thinking and continue to make possible many of the advances that we take for granted. |
By Frazier, Kendrick Publishing Date: 1985 Classification: 500 Call Number: 523.2 FRA Contains photographs, text, and six essays on the solar system. |
By Miller, Russell Publishing Date: c1983 Classification: 500 Call Number: 551.1 MIL Presents evidence supporting Alfred Wegener's theory of continental drift. Explains plate tectonics and discusses what is known of the earth's crust and upper mantle. |
By Bailey, Ronald H. Publishing Date: c1982 Classification: 500 Call Number: 551.3 BAI Discusses the theory of glaciers and of the Ice Age as propounded by Venetz and later espoused by Agassiz, and discusses modern glaciers and explorations of the polar ice cap. |
NEW RELEASE The ocean of life: the fate of man and the sea By Roberts, Callum Publishing Date: c2012 Classification: 500 Call Number: 551.46 ROB Putting our exploitation of the seas into historical context, Roberts offers a devastating account of the impact of modern fishing techniques, pollution, and climate change, and reveals what it would take to steer the right course while there is still time. |
By Clark, Champ Publishing Date: c1982 Classification: 500 Call Number: 551.48 CLA Discusses the flood control problem on such major river systems as China's Yellow River, the Mississippi, the Ganges, and the Nile. Presents some of the world's major dams, and some disastrous floods. |