Goodwin Reads Fiction This Summer!

This is not the New York Times Best Seller List. It is our list.

The Bad Doctor: The Troubled Life and Times of Dr. Iwan James
by Ian Williams

In our new graphic medicine collection.

---

The Narrow Road to the Deep North
by Richard Flanagan

“Sort of Australian War and Peace”

---

Parable of the Sower
by Octavia E. Butler

The first American science fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Fellowship—highly recommended.

---

Disclaimer
by Renee Knight

Psychological thriller, this year’s Gone Girl.

---

Everything I Never Told You
by Celeste Ng

“Ghostly debut novel about a Chinese family calls to mind The Lovely Bones.”

---

Family Life: A Novel
by Akhil Sharma

An immigrant story like no other.

---

The Present Moment
by Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye

Hidden treasure of African writing—one of Kenya’s most internationally respected writers—don’t miss it.

---

The Final Silence
by Stuart Neville

Lee Child’s say “crime fiction doesn’t get much better.”

Freshman Reading Focuses on Diversity, Racial Equality

Social justice. Climate change. Racial inequality. Immigration. Hunger. While those topics might read like a laundry list of some of the world’s biggest problems, they are just a few of the issues covered in books that are required reading for freshmen at colleges across the country.

Freshman reading programs are popular among institutions, used as a community-building project that helps freshmen to unite academically with a common discussion on one book. The selections are generally skewed toward nonfiction (although fiction is sometimes selected), and choices for this year are no different.

Submitted To Inside Higher Ed by Jacqueline Thomsen on July 22, 2015

Some of the popular choices are:

• Just Mercy: A Story of Redemption and Justice (top pick) Bryan Stevenson*
• The Good Food Revolution: Growing Healthy Food, People and Communities Will Allen*
• Bad Feminist: Essays Roxane Gray (on order)
• Garbolgoy: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash  Edward Humes*
• Station Eleven Emilty St. John Mandel*
• The Other Wes Moore Wes Moore*
• Enrique’s Journey Sonia Nazario*
• Slaughterhouse Five Kurt Vonnegut
• A Farewell to Arms Ernest Hemingway*
• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness  Michelle Alexander*
• Between the World and Me Ta-Nehisi Coates*

*in the Hoffman Family Library collection

Docuseek2 Webinars

Faculty are invited to attend a webinar profiling Docuseek2.

Two sessions of the webinar will be held on July 21, 2015 at 11:00 -11:30 a.m. EDT and July 29, 2015 at 2:00-2:30 p.m. EDT.

Docuseek2 provides exclusive educational streaming access to content from Bullfrog Films, Collective Eye Films, Icarus Films (including The Fanlight Collection and dGenerate Films), Kartemquin Films, Sincerely Films, Terra Nova Films, Scorpion TV and Villon Films. The Docuseek2 database is comprised of over 670 titles including over 35 titles added since the beginning of the year.

Docuseek2 supports traditional key word searches, but expands to include searching through descriptions and transcripts, and additionally includes an expanded subject taxonomy allowing you to combine subject category searches with grade level, length, filmmaker, awards, format and other characteristics to focus your search. Detailed analytics and MARC records with permanent links to the films are also available.

Periodical Subscriptions

Unless specifically requested, the library is not renewing these periodicals because they are full text usually for the last 20 years in multiple databases:

• Country Extra
• Country Living
• Discover
• Grit
• Handyman
• Inc.
• Instructor
• Money
• Mother Earth News
• Mother Jones
• Psychology Today
• Scientific American
• Vanity Fair
• Vegetarian Times
• Writer’s Digest

If you want a hard copy subscription continued, please contact Library Director Marilyn Nowlan.

Evolving Learning for the New Digital Era

Wednesday, July 8, 2015 2:00:00 PM EDT – 3:00:00 PM EDT

Please join the library staff for this webinar supported by Blackboard.

Colleges and universities are no longer taking their first steps into the use of digital tools for either in-person or online instruction. Rather this is an era of refinement of strategies.

Colleges have used digital teaching tools so long enough that they can track success and failure and adjust accordingly. Colleges that experimented with MOOCs are applying lessons learned to in-person instruction. With hybrid formats increasingly popular, colleges are mixing and matching the best of in-person and online instruction. And for all of higher ed, having the right learning strategies is closely related to enrollment and financial goals.

Join Inside Higher Ed editor Scott Jaschik and technology reporter Carl Straumsheim for a lively discussion on these issues. Before attending the webinar, we invite you to download our free booklet, Evolving Learning for the New Digital Era, a compilation of articles and opinion essays from Inside Higher Ed offering a range of ideas and perspectives, at www.insidehighered.com/booklets. The Evolving Learning for the New Digital Era booklet and webinar are made possible in part by the support of Blackboard. Your registration information will be shared with the company.

Captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing is provided by CaptionAccess for all Inside Higher Ed webinars. I will provide transcripts upon request.

-Marilyn

Hurston/Wright Founding Members Award for College Writers

We want to encourage all eligible students to submit their work to be considered for the Hurston/Wright Founding Members Award for College Writers before the deadline on December 1, 2014:

Since 1990 the Hurston/Wright Foundation has presented awards to Black college writers. With the 2014 award we are introducing a new award, the Hurston/Wright Founding Members Award for College Writers. This award, now open to poets as well as fiction writers is generously underwritten by a supporter of the Hurston/Wright Foundation with a cash award of $3,000.
​
​Eligibility: At the time of submission, applicants must be enrolled full-time as an undergraduate or graduate student in a U.S. college or university. Writers who have published a book in any genre are ineligible.

Happy 250th Birthday to the Hartford Courant

Very warm birthday wishes from us to the Hartford Courant. The paper celebrate 250 years of publishing today. The front page reminds us how, while so many things change, many stay the same. On that day in 1764 the publishers felt compelled to warn readers that:

Nothing but FRUGALITY can now save the distressed northern colonies from impending ruin.

Transition

The library is now subscribing to Transition. Transition is an international journal of politics, culture, and ethnicity from Beijing to Bujumbura and is edited at the W.E.B. DuBois Institution for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Three times a year, it featured fiction, creative non-fiction, narrative journalism, art and cultural criticism, political commentary, interviews with important figures and thinkers, book and film reviews, and poetry. Contributors have included James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Martin Luther King, Jr., Paul Theroux, Nadine Gordiner, Wole Soyinka, Jamaica Kincaid, Kofi Annan, Carlos Fuentes, Toni Morrison, Spike Lee, and Russell Banks. Transition is a unique forum for the freshest, most compelling, most curious ideas about race.

The current issue of Transition pays tribute to those who “agitate the establishment.” Issue 114, Gay Nigeria, grapples with anti-gay sentiment in Africa, and remembers poet-activist Amiri Baraka. The issue also includes tales quintessentially diasporic: a Ghanaian slave-fort turned five-star resort by a British ex-pat; a West African merchant-missionary returning former slaves to his Gold Coast homeland; and tips on how to freak out your American roommate.

Points of View Debate Blog

I hope you all know about the new Points of View Debate Blog, a valuable online tool that students and faculty can access free of charge. You can also access the blog directly from the Points of View Reference Center in the “Spotlight” section. The blog is an excellent place for students to formulate intelligent opinions, exchange views with other students, keep pace with current events, and hone their persuasive writing skills. It is useful for a wide range of subjects and covers many cross-curricular topics (295 specific topics total). Each month, the blog moderator will choose a new debate topic based on current events in the news, and then regularly post related blog entries discussing different facets of the subject, and promoting comments from students.

Points of View Debate Blog seems like an excellent way to use our Points of View Reference Center, and motivate students to follow the news, learn critical thinking skills, and improve their writing. It could work well as a bonus project or a homework assignment. All comments are reviewed by the blog moderator before appearing on the blog website. I like that the blog encourages students to write thoughtful responses, not superficial comments. It looks like a very valuable resource that could be useful for a wide range of classes, especially those using social media assignments.

Duke Ellington Was Born 115 Years Ago Today

via YouTube.

Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington was born in Washington, D.C. on April 29, 1899. According to one reviewer shortly after his death in 1974, “Duke Ellington was not only the most protean and durably original of all jazz composers.  He was also the most astonishingly, creatively productive composer in American history so far” (Hentoff). 

You can start learning more about the jazz great using the Single Search Research Starter biography (Collier) [login required].

Better yet, listen to the man’s music right now:

Collier, J. (2010). Duke Ellington. American National Biography (From Oxford University Press).

Hentoff, N. (1976). Indigenous Music. Nation, 223(19), 606.