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.

Frozen by Richard Burke London: Orion, 2004 PR 6102 U75 F76 2003 "When his childhood friend, Verity, is found at the foot of Beachy Head, barely alive, Harry's life is thrown into turmoil. He can't accept that the happy-to-lucky girl he grew up with would try to kill herself. And he should know. He was closer to her than anyone, wasn't he?"

	Poplorica: A Popular History of the Fads, Mavericks, Inventions, and Lore that Shaped Modern America by Martin J. Smith and Patrick J. Kiger New York: HarperCollins, 2004 E 169.1 S63 2004 "Pop culture meets pop reference in this irreverent tour of twenty unlikely events, innovations, and individuals that forever changed how we live today—the food we eat, the places we live, the love we make, the fads we follow, the clothes we wear, the products we buy, and much more."

Loud and Clear by Anna Quindlen New York: Random House, 2004 PS 3567 U336 L68 2004 "In this remarkable book, Anna Quindlen, one of America's favorite novelists and a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist, once again gives us wisdom, opinions, insights, and reflections about current events and modern life....With her trademark insight and her special ability to convey the impact public events have on ordinary lives, Quindlen combines her commentary on American society and the world at large with reflections on being a woman, a writer, and a mother."

	The Bells in Their Silence: Travels Through Germany by Michael Gorra Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004 DD 21.5 G67 2004 "Nobody writes travelogues about Germany. The country spurs many anxious volumes of investigative reporting—books that worry away at the 'German problem,' World War II, the legacy of the Holocaust, the Wall, reunification, and the connections between them. But not travel books, not the free-ranging and impressionistic works of literary nonfiction we associate with V. S. Naipaul and Bruce Chatwin. What is it about Germany and the travel book that puts them seemingly at odds? With one foot in the library and one on the street, Michael Gorra offers both an answer to this question and his own traveler's tale of Germany."

The Call of the Mall by Paco Underhill New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004 HF 5430.3 U53 2004 "Paco Underhill, the Margaret Mead of shopping, has run hundreds of research assignments in malls across the country (and in Tokyo and European capitals). He has visited them, observed his fellow mall-ers, looked long and hard for his car in mammoth parking lots, chatted up the staffers, gone hunting for jeans with adolescent girls and anniversary shopping with guys. The result is a bright, ironic, funny, and shrewd portrait of the mall—America's gift to personal consumption, its most powerful icon of global commercial muscle, the once new and now aging national town square, the place where we convene in our leisure time."

	Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories by Joan Silber New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004 PS 3569 I414 I33 2004 "Set in France, Italy, New York, and China, in past and present, these stories cover lifetimes, much in the manner of Alice Munro and William Trevor. Intense in subject yet calm in tone, they are about longings—often held for years—and the ways sex and religion become parallel forms of dedication and comfort."

	Status Anxiety by Alain De Botton London: Hamish Hamilton, 2004 HM 821 D43 2004 "Alain de Botton, bestselling author of The Consolations of Philosophy and The Art of Travel, asks—with lucidity and charm—where worries about our status come from and what if anything we can do to surmount them. With the help of philosophers, artists and writers, he examines the origins of status anxiety—ranging from the consequences of the French Revolution to our secret dismay at the success of our friends—before revealing ingenious ways in which people have learnt to overcome their worries in their search for happiness."

The Book of Ten Nights and a Night by John Barth New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004 PS 3552 A75 B37 2004 "Here are tales of aging, time, possibility, and relationships. And in typically Barthian fashion, they are framed by the narration of a veteran writer, Graybard, and his flirtatious, insouciant muse, WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). During the eleven days that follow September 11, 2001, Graybard and WYSIWYG debate the meaning and relevance of writing and storytelling in the wake of disaster, or TEOTWAW(A)KI—The End Of The World As We (Americans) Know It."

	Debutante: Rites and Regalia of American Debdom by Karal Ann Marling Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004 HQ 1229 M25 2004 "It is an institution that seems almost hopelessly out of date, a social relic of bygone times. The very word debutante evokes images of prim, poised beauty, expensive gowns, and sumptuous balls, all of which seem anachronistic in these post-women's liberation times. But as Karal Ann Marling reveals, debdom in America is alive and well and ever evolving."