Meriam Library News

Hensel, J. (2004). After the Wall: Confessions from an East German Childhood and the Life the Came Next. New York: Public Affairs.

Where were you when the Berlin Wall fell? How old were you? Do you remember people talking about it?

Jana Hensel was 13 on November 9, 1989, the day the Wall came down. She wrote After the Wall (on order for the library -- in the meantime you can get it through Interlibrary Loan) to describe a life in transition, from her life as a young citizen of East Germany to a teenager of a newly reunified Germany. As she puts it,

The Wall fell and left our world utterly confused. We were just becoming teenagers when suddenly everything started spinning around us. We were too young to understand what was happening, and too old not to understand that big changes were in the making (p. 163).

But she refrains from offering a formulaic interpretation of how good or bad life in East Germany was, or how good or bad things have been since then. Instead she offers a straightforward account of the changes she experienced. In so doing she adds new dimension to standard accounts of life in East Germany and later reunified Germany. She writes that

After the Wall, we soon forgot what everyday life in [East Germany] was like, with all its unheroic moments and ordinary days. We repressed our actual experiences and replaced them with a series of strange, larger than life anecdotes that didn't really have anything to do with what our lives had been like. The fact that we began exchanging such stories ourselves shows how much we had internalized the West German take on our history. We had forgotten how to tell our own life stories in our own way, instead adopting an alien tone and perspective (p. 25).

With stories that are frequently enjoyable, potentially disillusioning, and always enlightening, Hensel reclaims these accounts of life in East Germany from foreign reinterpretations, and offers an account of what life was like after the Wall was torn down.

Contributed by Aaron Bowen

Silva, P.J. (2007). How to write a lot: A practical guide to productive academic writing. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

This is an excellent book, and will be particularly useful for your upcoming paper. And the paper after that. And, in fact, everything you write in college.

How to Write a Lot presents a useful, practical approach to writing. Not that it's wildly groundbreaking - it's not. In many ways it states the obvious. But what it does do is pull a clear methodology for writing together - motivating yourself to write, and writing clearly and efficiently. It serves as a one-stop resource for managing this whole process. And it is a short book written in a clear, straightforward, easily understood style. You can read it in a day or two, and then use the strategies it presents to earn back the time you spend reading it by finishing your paper ahead of time.

Paul J. Silva is a psychologist and tends to draw his examples of the writing process from the psychology field, but his approach to writing is easily applied to other fields. Silva also writes for an audience of graduate students and professors, but again, his approach may be applied to undergraduate papers just as easily as to graduate research. In short, for anyone who feels bogged down / hampered / frustrated / etc by the process of writing, this book presents some useful, practical strategies for alleviating that frustration and producing the writing you need to produce.

Contributed by Aaron Bowen

William Gibson has long been one of my favorite authors. Certainly I find him a talented writer, but my favorite aspect of his work is his futurism - his thought on how different technologies affect our social world. He is best known for Neuromancer (1984), a book that saw the first use of the word "cyberspace" and envisioned the Internet six years before the net was released to the general public.

Continue reading "William Gibson - Spook Country (Putnam, 2007)" »

Tired of reading so many scholarly journal articles? Does the idea of spending a quiet weekend at home with the latest Stephen King novel appeal to you? If the answer to either of those questions is "yes!" check out the library's collection of popular books. On the second floor opposite the Copy Center you'll find an assortment of current fiction and nonfiction, chosen to (hopefully) satisfy the leisure reading interests of students, faculty and staff. Mysteries, literary fiction, historical fiction, and science fiction are all represented. And if you enjoy reading nonfiction, you'll find that there, too. Read about a California winery in The House of Mondavi: the Rise & Fall of an American Wine Dynasty or get the dish on Princess Di in Tina Brown's The Diana Chronicles. Try out a few recipes from Alice Waters' The Art of Simple Cooking or Giada De Laurentiis' Giada's Family Dinners. Take a trip to ancient Egypt with Michelle Moran in Nefertiti: A Novel.

Continue reading "Popular fiction and nonfiction in the library" »