Public urged to check out new titles
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Editor’s note: The following is the first of a regular column highlighting new acquisitions at the Salt Spring Island Public Library.
Our library is continually ordering and receiving new titles. We want to include materials of interest to all members of the community, so please drop in and let us know if there is a specific title or topic that you would like to see on the shelves of your library.
Just a few of the most recent titles on the shelves:
• Pension Paradigm: New Strategies for Wealth Management; Hugh Carter
• Dry Spring: the Coming Water Crisis of North America;Chris Wood
• The Unhealthy Truth: How Our Food is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About It; Robyn O’Brien
• Modern Canadian Plays: Vol. II; Jerry Wassermann (ed)
• Adventures in Architecture; Dan Cruickshank
• Understanding Iraq; William Polk
• Easy Gourmet Babyfood; Jordan Wagman & Jill Hillhouse.
Also check out:
• David Grann’s The Lost City of Z explores one of the greatest real mysteries of the 20th century: What happened to the British explorer Percy Fawcett on his quest to find the lost city of Z deep in the Amazon jungle? The result of Grann’s research is the gripping story of the extraordinary adventures not just of Fawcett but also of the hundreds who followed him into the Amazon over the decades since 1920. This is a tale of obsession, mystery, shrunken heads, hostile tribesmen, strange diseases and stranger nature. A good adventure read to enjoy from the comfort of your own fireside.
• Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms is Nicolette Niman’s memoir of her first-hand look at factory farming for meat production as well as the story of her own life and love with a cattleman. A vegetarian, environmental activist and attorney working for Robert Kennedy Jr., Niman is asked to investigate hog raising and butchering practices in the USA.
This request soon expands to cover the entire factory farming industry, both the bad and the commendable. The result is not just a condemnation of bad practices but a useful analysis of what can be done, and done right, to make meat production more humane, healthy and sustainable. Along the way, the reader follows Niman’s own story of intellectual and emotional growth and commitment.
• Darwin’s Garden: Down House & the Origin of the Species by Michael Boulter offers the reader an engaging tour through the actual life and public work of Charles Darwin that will help him or her to understand what Darwin’s thoughts, work and writings mean to our understanding of the world around us. Relying on Darwin’s own words along with careful regard for Darwin’s own environment, Boulter has drawn a meaningful, thoughtful, human portrait of this pivotal man and his ideas.
• In The Gift of Thanks: the Roots, Persistence, and Paradoxical Meanings of Social Ritual, social anthropologist Margaret Visser has once again managed to entertain, amuse and educate us.
This book is a fascinating inquiry into all aspects of “gratefulness,” from parents’ early rote teaching to the widely varying routines and requisites found in cultures all over the globe. Visser looks at “gratitude” as a key to understanding many aspects of everyday behaviours and expectations. The Gift of Thanks is an engagingly written look at ourselves.
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