NEW PUBLICATIONS

C&RL News, May 2009
Vol. 70, No. 5

Anatomy of a Trial: Public Loss, Lessons Learned from The People vs. O. J. Simpson, by Jerrianne Hayslett (252 pages, November 2008), focuses primarily on Judge Lance Ito and his dealings with the press, jurors, and lawyers during the 1995 trial. As the court’s information officer and media liaison, Hayslett played a central role as Ito’s intermediary and was privy to many of his behind-the-scenes thoughts and conversations. In addition to providing an insider’s account of the media circus surrounding the case, she makes a strong case for the presence of cameras in the courtroom to ensure a fair trial. $29.95. University of Missouri. 978-0-8262-1822-3.

Controlling Desires: Sexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome, by Kirk Ormand (292 pages, November 2008), demonstrates through numerous classical sources that the Greeks did not have the same concept of gay and straight that we have today. An adult Greek man could love women or prepubescent boys with equal legal, moral, and social approval; however, they frowned on males retaining a passive role once a boy attained manhood. The Romans shared some of the Greek philosophy, but they added strictures on adultery that were intended to maintain the purity of Roman bloodlines. They also placed a high value on self-control. Ormand’s wide-ranging analysis, from Homer, Plato, Sappho, and Aristophanes to Plautus, Cicero, Ovid, and Petronius adds an additional level of insight into traditional classical studies. $49.95. Praeger. 978-0-275-98880-7.

Deciphering the Cosmic Number, by Arthur I. Miller (336 pages, April 2009), examines the unique relationship and collaboration between two scientists—Austrian theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who thought that answers to some problems in quantum mechanics might be solved through the mystical properties of numbers, and Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, who felt that the physical sciences could help explain his theories of archetypes and synchronicity. In 1931, the two met in Zürich and shortly afterward Pauli, who was having difficulties with depression, signed up for psychoanalysis with one of Jung’s pupils. His dreams were full of numbers and archetypal symbols, which fascinated Jung and contributed to his concept of synchronicity, while Jung’s numerological ideas inspired Pauli’s quest to understand the connection between the fine structure constant (1/137, a measure of the strength of the electromagnetic force) and other quantum principles. In 1952, they collaborated on a book, Naturerklärung und Psyche. Miller narrates this dual biography compellingly, comparing the two to Johannes Kepler and Robert Fludd at the dawn of the Scientific Revolution. $27.95. W. W. Norton. 978-0-393-06532-9.

Documentation, by Robert Hauptman (229 pages, April 2008), weaves together several threads of discourse on footnotes, marginalia, illustrations, and commentary into an engaging essay on the use of sources to validate or enhance scholarly texts. Hauptman, editor of the Journal of Information Ethics, offers many examples from Copernicus and the Talmud to Susan Sontag and Wikipedia to underscore the value of well-crafted documentation in evaluating an author’s work. He also critiques the major style guides (Chicago, Blue Book, APA, and MLA), laments the ubiquity of citation errors and documentation distortion, and reviews the value of citation indexing. Hauptman’s critical remarks are often amusing, as when he lambastes the typographical aberrations of Jacques Derrida and the imponderable footnotes in Finnegan’s Wake. $35.00. McFarland. 978-0-7864-3333-9.

Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England, by Jennifer Summit (343 pages, August 2008), looks at English libraries in the Renaissance, from 1431 to 1631, as institutions that both preserved and reinterpreted the literature of the Middle Ages. Summit argues that these Early Modern libraries were not intended to collect the past comprehensively; rather their holdings were selective and developed to support the causes of religious reform and the king’s secular authority—unlike medieval monastic materials that assumed the supremacy of the church. In the process of creating these new libraries, collections were demystified and transformed from monolithic assemblages of doctrine and dogma into “sources for a history of belief.” Summit examines several collections in detail, including the libraries of Duke Humfrey of Gloucester, Thomas More, Thomas Elyot, Matthew Parker, Edmund Spenser, Robert Cotton, and Thomas Bodley—all preserved at Cambridge, Oxford, or the British Museum. Throughout this book is the message that libraries work, like memory, “through selection and filtering, the active production of knowledge rather than the passive storage of information.” $35.00. University of Chicago. 978-0-226-78171-6.

The New Bibliopolis: French Book Collectors and the Culture of Print, 1880–1914, by Willa Z. Silverman (312 pages, August 2008), describes the Golden Age of book collecting and book arts in fin de siècle Paris, especially the eccentric author and journalist Octave Uzanne (1851–1931), the doyen of French bibliophilia, whose 1897 manifesto La Nouvelle Bibliopolis praised the amateur collector of fine books. Printing technologies were enabling the use of artistic illustrations, photographs, designer fonts, and decorative bindings that appealed to young French admirers of Symbolism and Art Nouveau. Silverman examines the bibliophiles’ excitement about the aesthetics of the luxury book, their firm belief that women could never become true book collectors, and Uzanne’s vision of low-cost audiobooks completely supplanting the printed page. $75.00. University of Toronto. 978-0-8020-9211-3.

Paper to Digital: Documents in the Information Age, by Ziming Liu (157 pages, October 2008), tracks the effects of the transition to digital documents on reading behavior and the dissemination of scholarly communication. Liu’s chapters are expansions of articles he has written for information science journals, but he manages to tie them together well. Topics include the lack of trust in digital media, gender differences in online reading, credibility issues in web-based research, and cultural differences in credibility assessment. $50.00. Libraries Unlimited. 978-1-59158-620-3.

Plant Biology for Cultural Heritage: Biodeterioration and Conservation, edited by Giulia Caneva, Maria Pia Nugari, and Ornella Salvadori (408 pages, January 2009), provides a comprehensive overview of botany from a conservator’s viewpoint and suggests practical applications for controlling and preventing damage from bacteria, fungi, algae, lichens, and plants. First published in Italy in 2005, this edition has been translated for the Getty Conservation Institute by Helen Glanville. It includes hundreds of black-and-white and color illustrations of biological attacks on wood, paper, textiles, parchment, stone, frescoes and stuccos, canvas paintings, photographs, and archaeological sites. The authors take a close look at the effects of environment and geography on specific botanical processes. $70.00. Getty Publications. 978-0-89236-939-3. 

George M. Eberhart is senior editor of American Libraries, e-mail: geberhart@ala.org