UT Library Online - PCL - Collections

Featured books from the New Books Collection in the main lobby of the
Perry-Castañeda Library

All titles in the New Books Collection have a 2 week loan period. Click on the call number to check the item's current status.
PCL highlights 10-15 current, general interest books twice a month. All quotes are from book dustjackets.

Splendid Omens: A Novel by Robley Wilson New York : St. Martin's Press, 2004 PS 3573 I4665 S65 2004 "It's 1993 and Alec Thompson is traveling to Maine, to witness at the marriage of his painter friend, Webb Hartley. When Alec arrives at the wedding scene, he is surprised that no one-including Pru Mackenzie, Webb's 30-year younger bride-to-be-is on hand to welcome him. He soon learns the reason; his best friend has suffered a fatal heart attack, and the wedding is off."

	The Real Thing: Truth and Power at The Coca-Cola Company by Constance L. Hays New York: Random House, 2004 HD 9349 S634 C639 2004 "The Real Thing is a portrait of America's most famous product and the men who transformed it from mere soft drink to symbol of freedom. The story, starting with Coke's creation after the Civil War and continuing with its domination of the domestic and worldwide soft-drink business, is a uniquely American tale of opportunity, hope, teamwork, and love, as well as salesmanship, hubris, ambition, and greed."

The Girl Watchers Club: Lessons From the Battlefields of Life by Harry Stein New York: HarperCollins, 2004 D 736 S784 2004 "For nearly four decades, the Girl Watchers, a group of World War II veterans living in Monterey, California, have gotten together every week to shoot the breeze, solving the world's problems and their own. Now in their late seventies and eighties, the Girl Watchers remain fiercely independent-minded and highly principled. Yet as seriously as they've always taken life's challenges, these men have never taken themselves too seriously."

	The Working Poor: Invisible in America by David K. Shipler New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004 HC 110 P6 S48 2004 "As David K. Shipler makes clear in this powerful, humane study, the invisible poor are engaged in the activity most respected in American ideology—hard, honest work. But their version of the American Dream is a nightmare: low-paying, dead-end jobs; the profound failure of government to improve upon decaying housing, health care, and education; the failure of families to break the patterns of child abuse and substance abuse. Shipler exposes the interlocking problems by taking us into the sorrowful, infuriating, courageous lives of the poor—white and black, Asian and Latino, citizens and immigrants. We encounter them every day, for they do jobs essential to the American economy. "

Hope and History: Making Peace in Ireland by Gerry Adams London: Brandon, 2003 DA 990 U46 A427 2003 "An author as well as an activist, [Adams] brings a vivid sense of immediacy and a writer's understanding of narrative to this story of triumph of hope in what was long considered a intractable bloody conflict. He conveys the tensions of the peace process, the sense of teetering on the brink, and he has a sharp eye and acute ear for the more humorous foibles of political allies and enemies alike."

	Goat: A Memoir by Brad Land New York : Random House, 2004 HQ 799.2 V56 L36 2004 "Reeling from a terrifying assault that has left him physically injured and psychologically shattered, nineteen-year-old Brad Land must also contend with unsympathetic local police, parents who can barely discuss "the incident" (as they call it), a brother riddled with guilt but unable to slow down enough for Brad to keep up, and the feeling that he'll never be normal again. When Brad's brother enrolls at Clemson University and pledges a fraternity, Brad believes he's being left behind once and for all. Desperate to belong, he follows. What happens there—in the name of "brotherhood," and with the supposed goal of forging a scholar and a gentleman from the raw materials of boyhood—involves torturous late-night hazing, heartbreaking estrangement from his brother, and, finally, the death of a fellow pledge. Ultimately, Brad must weigh total alienation from his newfound community against accepting a form of brutality he already knows too well."

In Defense of Globalization by Jagdish Bhagwati Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004 HF 1359 B499 2004 "Globalization has been blamed for everything from child labor to environmental degradation, cultural homogenization, and a host of other ills affecting rich and poor nations alike. Not a day goes by without impassioned authors and activists, whether anti- or pro-globalization, putting their oars into these agitated waters. When all is said, however, we lack a clear, coherent and comprehensive sense of how globalization works, and how it might be made to work better."

	The Montana Frontier: One Woman's West by Joyce Litz Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico, 2004 F 739 G53 L58 2004 "This true story of a Victorian-era young woman who follows her husband to a small town with the improbable name of Gilt Edge, Montana, will remind readers of Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose, the classic novel of a woman's life in the Mountain West. As a young girl, Lillian Weston, the author's grandmother, aspired to be a concert pianist. However, as a young woman in turn-of-the-century New York, she became a newspaper columnist. Her marriage to Frank Hazen took her west in 1899, ending her career as a newspaperwoman. She turned her writing skills to journals, diaries, stories, and poems, which traced her family's life on a frontier that was no longer unspoiled."

The Grandmothers by Doris Lessing New York: HarperCollins, 2003 PR 6023 E833 G69 2003B "With the four short novels in this collection, Doris Lessing once again proves that she is unrivalled in her ability to capture the truth of the human condition. The Grandmothers—Two women, close friends, fall in love with each other's teenage sons, and these passions last for years, until the women end them, promising a respectable old age. Victoria and the Staveneys—A poor black girl has a baby with the son of a liberal middle-class family and finds that her little girl is slowly being absorbed into the world of white privilege and becoming estranged from her. The Reason for It—Certain to appeal to fans of Shikasta and Memoirs of a Survivor, it describes the birth, flourishing, and decline of a culture long, long ago, but with many modern echoes. A Love Child—A soldier in World War II, during the dangerous voyage to India around the Cape, falls in love on shore leave and remains convinced that a love child resulted from the wartime romance."

	Haymarket: A Novel by Martin Duberman New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003 PS 3554 U25 H39 2003 "Haymarket is a true-to-history account of terror, revolution, and uncompromising love. Lucy Gonzalez and her husband, Albert Parsons, were at the center of the most bitter class conflict in U.S. history, culminating in the Haymarket Square riot in 1886. The violent deaths there on a mid-spring night produced a wave of hysteria across the nation, leading ultimately to the trial and hanging of the leaders of the anarchist-socialist movement."

The Future of Iraq: Dictatorship, Democracy, or Division? by Liam Anderson & Gareth Stansfield New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004 DS 79.65 A687 2004 "Reordering Iraq is the lynchpin of America's successful involvement in the Middle East. The challenge may be impossible. The Future of Iraq provides a primer on the history and political dynamics of this pivotal state divided by ethnic, religious, and political antagonisms, and provocatively argues that the least discussed future of Iraq might be the best: managed partition."