New Non-fiction
Number Go Up by
In 2021 cryptocurrency went mainstream. Giant investment funds were buying it, celebrities like Tom Brady endorsed it, and TV ads hailed it as the future of money. Hardly anyone knew how it worked--but why bother with the particulars when everyone was making a fortune from Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, or some other bizarrely named "digital asset"? As he observed this frenzy, investigative reporter Zeke Faux had a nagging question: Was it all just a confidence game of epic proportions? What started as curiosity--with a dash of FOMO--would morph into a two-year, globe-spanning quest to understand the wizards behind the world's new financial machinery. Faux's investigation would lead him to a schlubby, frizzy-haired twenty-nine-year-old named Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF for short) and a host of other crypto scammers, utopians, and overnight billionaires. Faux follows the trail to a luxury resort in the Bahamas, where SBF boldly declares that he will use his crypto fortune to save the world. Faux talks his way onto the yacht of a former child actor turned crypto impresario and gains access to "ApeFest," an elite party headlined by Snoop Dogg, by purchasing a $20,000 image of a cartoon monkey. In El Salvador, Faux learns what happens when a country wagers its treasury on Bitcoin, and in the Philippines, he stumbles upon a Pokémon knockoff mobile game touted by boosters as a cure for poverty. And in an astonishing development, a spam text leads Faux to Cambodia, where he uncovers a crypto-powered human-trafficking ring. When the bubble suddenly bursts in 2022, Faux brings readers inside SBF's penthouse as the fallen crypto king faces his imminent arrest. Fueled by the absurd details and authoritative reporting that earned Zeke Faux the accolade "our great poet of crime" (Money Stuff columnist Matt Levine), Number Go Up is the essential chronicle, by turns harrowing and uproarious, of a $3 trillion financial delusion.
Call Number: HG1710.3 .F38 2023ISBN: 9780593443811Publication Date: 2023-09-12
Collective Body : Aleksandr Deineka at the limit of socialist realism by
A study of the Socialist Realist aesthetic focusing on the artist Aleksandr Deineka. Dislodging the avant-garde from its central position in the narrative of Soviet art, Collective Body presents painter Aleksandr Deineka's haptic and corporeal version of Socialist Realist figuration not as the enemy of revolutionary art, but as an alternate experimental aesthetic that, at its best, activates and organizes affective forces for collective ends. Tracing Deineka's path from his avant-garde origins as the inventor of the proletarian body in illustrations for mass magazines after the Revolution through his success as a state-sponsored painter of monumental, lyrical canvases during the Great Terror and beyond, Collective Body demonstrates that Socialist Realism is best understood not as a totalitarian style, but rather as a fiercely collective art system that organized art outside the market and formed part of the legacy of the revolutionary modernisms of the 1920s. Collective Body accounts for the way the art of the October Revolution continues to capture viewers' imaginations through the sheer intensity of its evocation of the elation of collectivity, making viewers not only comprehend but also truly feel socialism, and retaining the potential to inform our own art-into-life experiments within contemporary political art. Deineka figures in this study not as a singular master, in the spirit of a traditional monograph, but as a limited case of the system he inhabited and helped to create.
Call Number: N6999.D4 K53 2024ISBN: 9780226827162Publication Date: 2024-03-19
Ancient Africa by
A panoramic narrative that places ancient Africa on the stage of world history This book brings together archaeological and linguistic evidence to provide a sweeping global history of ancient Africa, tracing how the continent played an important role in the technological, agricultural, and economic transitions of world civilization. Christopher Ehret takes readers from the close of the last Ice Age some ten thousand years ago, when a changing climate allowed for the transition from hunting and gathering to the cultivation of crops and raising of livestock, to the rise of kingdoms and empires in the first centuries of the common era. Ehret takes up the problem of how we discuss Africa in the context of global history, combining results of multiple disciplines. He sheds light on the rich history of technological innovation by African societies--from advances in ceramics to cotton weaving and iron smelting--highlighting the important contributions of women as inventors and innovators. He shows how Africa helped to usher in an age of agricultural exchange, exporting essential crops as well as new agricultural methods into other regions, and how African traders and merchants led a commercial revolution spanning diverse regions and cultures. Ehret lays out the deeply African foundations of ancient Egyptian culture, beliefs, and institutions and discusses early Christianity in Africa. A monumental achievement by one of today's eminent scholars, Ancient Africa offers vital new perspectives on our shared past, explaining why we need to reshape our historical frameworks for understanding the ancient world as a whole.
Call Number: DT25 .E35 2023ISBN: 9780691244099Publication Date: 2023-06-20
Jesus and John Wayne by
How did a libertine who lacks even the most basic knowledge of the Christian faith win 81 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2016? And why have white evangelicals become a presidential reprobate's staunchest supporters? These are among the questions acclaimed historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez asks in Jesus and John Wayne, which delves beyond facile headlines to explain how white evangelicals have brought us to our fractured political moment. Challenging the commonly held assumption that the ?moral majority? backed Donald Trump for purely pragmatic reasons, Du Mez reveals that Donald Trump in fact represents the fulfillment, rather than the betrayal, of white evangelicals' most deeply held values. Jesus and John Wayne is a sweeping account of the last seventy-five years of white evangelicalism, showing how American evangelicals have worked for decades to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism, or in the words of one modern chaplain, with "spiritual badass." As Du Mez explains, the key to understanding this transformation is to recognize the role of culture in modern American evangelicalism. Many of today's evangelicals may not be theologically astute, but they know their VeggieTales, they've read John Eldredge's Wild at Heart, and they learned about purity before they learned about sex -- and they have a silver ring to prove it. Evangelical books, films, music, clothing, and merchandise shape the beliefs of millions. And evangelical popular culture is teeming with muscular heroes, mythical warriors and rugged soldiers, men like Oliver North, Ronald Reagan, Mel Gibson, and the Duck Dynasty clan, who assert white masculine power in defense of "Christian America." Chief among these evangelical legends is John Wayne, an icon of a lost time when men were uncowed by political correctness, unafraid to tell it like it was, and did what needed to be done. Trump, in other words, is hardly the first flashy celebrity to capture evangelicals' hearts and minds, nor is he the first strongman to promise evangelicals protection and power. Indeed, the values and viewpoints at the heart of white evangelicalism today: patriarchy, authoritarian rule, aggressive foreign policy, fear of Islam, ambivalence toward #MeToo, and opposition to Black Lives Matter and the LGBTQ community, are likely to persist long after Trump leaves office. A much-needed reexamination, Jesus and John Wayne explains why evangelicals have rallied behind the least-Christian president in American history and how they have transformed their faith in the process, with enduring consequences for all of us.
Call Number: BR526 .D85 2020ISBN: 9781631495731Publication Date: 2020-06-23
Replay by
In this intergenerational graphic memoir, renowned video game designer Jordan Mechner traces his family's journey through war, Nazi occupation, and everyday marital strife.1914. A teenage romantic heads to the enlistment office when his idyllic life in a Jewish enclave of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is shattered by World War I.1938. A seven-year-old refugee begins a desperate odyssey through France, struggling to outrun the rapidly expanding Nazi regime and reunite with his family on the other side of the Atlantic.2015. The creator of a world-famous video game franchise weighs the costs of uprooting his family and moving to France as the cracks in his marriage begin to grow.Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner calls on the voices of his father and grandfather to weave a powerful story about the enduring challenge of holding a family together in the face of an ever-changing world.
Call Number: D804.195 .M434 2024ISBN: 9781250873750Publication Date: 2024-03-19
New Fiction
Parable of the Sower by
The time is 2025. The place is California, where small walled communities must protect themselves from hordes of desperate scavengers and a roaming band of people addicted to a drug that activates an orgasmic desire to burn, rape and murder. When one small community is overrun, Lauren Olamina, an eighteen-year-old black woman with the hereditary trait of 'hyperempathy' - which causes her to feel others' pain as her own - sets off on foot along the dangerous coastal highways, moving north into the unknown.
Call Number: PS3552.U827 P37 2016ISBN: 9781609807191Publication Date: 2017-02-28
Poems of Arab Andalusia by
These poems, from the astonishing 10th- through 13th-century civilization in Andalusia, are based on the codex of Ibn Sa'id, who wanted poems "whose idea is more subtle than the West Wind, and whose language is more beautiful than a fair face." Spanish readers have long been enchanted by their enduring appeal through the versions by Emilio García Gómez. This poetry of Arab Andalusia made a profound impact on Spain's Generation of '27. Rafael Alberti says that it "was a revelation for me and had a great influence on my work, but above all influenced the work of Federico García Lorca." "Cola Franzen's vibrant, delicious and faithful renderings of this poetic motherlode are, to quote from a poet in her marvelous compilation, 'shooting stars that leap agile as acrobats.'"--Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno, author of An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles "Of those things which delight the senses (according to a Tradition of the Prophet) the chiefest are 'water, green things & a beautiful face'; therefore a poetry of noble exquisiteness limits itself to certain tropes, in which the wisdom of sensuality is endlessly rediscovered. Blow dust from the folios of the vanished Moors & be stabbed by the URGENT NECESSITY of light-dappled fountains, the fractals of the garden, the transmutations of desire."--Peter Lamborn Wilson, author of Ploughing the Clouds Cola Franzen has translated from Spanish some twenty volumes of prose and poetry, including Claudia Guillén's The Challenge of Comparative Literature, and Dreams of the Abandoned Seducer by Alicia Borinsky.
Call Number: PJ8414.5.E5 P6 1989ISBN: 9780872862425Publication Date: 1989-01-01
As You Like It: Texts and Contexts by
Four sets of thematically arranged primary documents and illustrations accompany the original play as As You Like It: Texts and Contexts put key themes into context in order to open up discussion.
Call Number: PR2803.A2 B76 2014ISBN: 9780312399320Publication Date: 2014-01-09
Tell Me I'm Worthless by
Alison Rumfitt's Tell Me I'm Worthless is a dark, unflinching haunted house story that confronts both supernatural and real-world horrors through the lens of the modern-day trans experience. "Alison is like the twisted daughter of Clive Barker and Shirley Jackson. Tell Me I'm Worthless is an intense read full of shocks and buckets of gore. It's brilliant." --Joe Hill, New York Times bestselling author "A triumph of transgressive queer horror." --Publishers Weekly, STARRED review Three years ago, Alice spent one night in an abandoned house with her friends, Ila and Hannah. Since then, Alice's life has spiraled. She lives a haunted existence, selling videos of herself for money, going to parties she hates, drinking herself to sleep. Memories of that night torment Alice, but when Ila asks her to return to the House, to go past the KEEP OUT sign and over the sick earth where teenagers dare each other to venture, Alice knows she must go. Together, Alice and Ila must face the horrors that happened there, must pull themselves apart from the inside out, put their differences aside, and try to rescue Hannah, whom the House has chosen to make its own. Cutting, disruptive, and darkly funny, Tell Me I'm Worthless is a vital work of trans fiction that examines the devastating effects of trauma and how fascism makes us destroy ourselves and each other. "Easily one of the strongest horror debuts in recent memory." --Booklist, STARRED review Also by Alison Rumfitt: Brainwyrms
Call Number: PR6118.U74 T45 2023ISBN: 9781250866233Publication Date: 2023-01-17
Out of Bounds : British Black & Asian Poets by
From Aberdeen to the Isle of Wight, Out of Bounds is a newly charted map of Britain as viewed by its black and Asian poets. It takes the reader on a riveting, sensory journey through Scotland, England and Wales, showing the whole country from a fresh perspective. This extensive and ground-breaking anthology - with its sudden forks in the road, and its roads not taken - stops off in the Highlands and Islands, skirts the North East coast from Whitley Bay to the sands of Bridlington, wanders lonely through the Lake District and Yorkshire, climbs the mountains of Wales before descending to the Black Country and Southern England. Along the way it takes in lochs and landmarks from Glasgow's George Square and the Angel of the North to the London Eye and the Long Man of Wilmington. If alienation, unbelonging and dislocation remain key aspects of black and Asian experiences in Britain, what such terms simultaneously conceal are the rich and manifold attachments to place, region, city and landscape offered in Out of Bounds. The poems question the idea of an easy or singular identity, nimbly dealing with the triple bind of ethnic, geographical and poetic belonging. An alternative A to Z of the nation, a new poetic guide, the book enables us to look again at the UK's local and regional landscapes and the poets who pass through them. Out of Bounds is a definitive anthology that brings together new and established black and Asian writers and places them firmly on the map of what is great and not so great about Britain. Includes: Shanta Acharya, John Agard, Patience Agbabi, Moniza Alvi, James Berry, Jean 'Binta' Breeze, Vahni Capildeo, Merle Collins, Fred D'Aguiar, David Dabydeen, Imtiaz Dharker, Bernardine Evaristo, Khadijah Ibrahiim, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Jackie Kay, Tariq Latif, Sheree Mack, Jack Mapanje, E.A. Markham, Daljit Nagra, Grace Nichols, Louisa Adjoa Parker, Michelle Scally-Clarke, Seni Seneviratne, John Siddique, Lemn Sissay, Dorothea Smartt, Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, Benjamin Zephaniah, and many others.
Call Number: PR1178.B55 O98 2012ISBN: 9781852249298Publication Date: 2012-05-24
New Journals
OWU Library Update
Beeghly Library will be closed for the 2023-24 academic year. Library services will continue, relocating primarily to Hobson Library in the Schimmel/Conrades Science Center. For more details:
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