Hilda C. Landers Library & Archives

If you’re looking for a quick beach read, Globalization: The Human Consequences may not be your best choice. On the other hand, there’s no reason why one has to read social theory in the fluorescent torture chamber of a dorm room. So if you want to contemplate neoliberal economics and globalized culture… here’s your one stop shop.

As far as social theorists go, Bauman is a lively and engaging writer. He has a way of turning interesting and provoking phrases (for example, he refers to American television as nightly “broadcasts from heaven” seen by the worlds’ struggling people who cannot hope to attain the falsified “as seen on tv” lifestyle). As the title suggests, Bauman isn’t wild about how “globalization,” this term that has become so ubiquitous as to become opaque, has come to define many aspects of our lives.

Like other writers on globalization, Bauman argues that the world has been “globalized” for a long time, but that the speed at which people, resources, and information flow across this globe has increased dramatically over the last fifty years. In a world disregarding any “speed limits,” social and ecological change has likewise sped up, at times with severe consequences.

While Bauman may draw the reader’s concern to troubling trends, his tone in this short (<120 pages) book is more descriptive than invective. He is interested in describing what globalization is, particularly in how it changes the way power is organized and effected.

Written at the turn of the century, Bauman’s critique remains relevant, if partial, fifteen years after its publication. But this is an interesting and engaging introduction to the philosophical and socio-political dimensions of a small, small, world going very, very, fast.

A thought provoking read for anyone in the social sciences or humanities.

It’s a small world after all…

Availability:  St. Mary’s Library, USMAI and COSMOS
Review Submitted by:  Shane D. Hall
Rating: Highly Recommended

I’m not drawn to murder mysteries with a lawyerly edge to them except when I’m out of “real” murder mysteries to read, but I may have found a whole new series in this author! (Well, the author is actually a duo of sisters, but still…) Light on the courtroom scenes and heavy on solving the murder(s), this book engaged me throughout. Nina Reilly is a prickly character about whom I come to care; I actually believe I will seek out her previous books to see how she came to where she is in this book (and where she goes hereafter). Not too heavy on narrative, the book moves at a nice pace.

Availability:  COSMOS
Review Submitted by: Jane Kostenko
Rating: Highly Recommended

Ray Bradbury’s classic novel Fahrenheit 451 satirizes the notion of censorship to a most extreme level in which most books are regarded as illegal, so much so that any house in which books are found must be burned to the ground, a job that firemen themselves are responsible for. The protagonist is a fireman who realizes that if people themselves were willing to burn with their books, the books must contain something extraordinary. Turning against his family and friends, Guy Montag goes on the run to revolutionize a world full of ignorance with one mission: stop the burning and save the books.

This novel presented intriguing ideas of censorship, politics, and the media which sometimes felt quite relatable, especially the explanation of how books came to be illegal. However, I will say that the novel was somewhat lacking in details about the lifestyle in this futuristic world, merely hinting at the intricacies of everyday life and making it hard to imagine the conditions in which Montag lived. The book also felt slightly rushed at times, because the author’s purpose seemed to be geared toward the social and political commentary more so than the plot itself. I would still recommend this book to anyone who enjoys dark, satirical novels or wants to reaffirm their appreciation for literature and its importance.

Availability: SMCM Library, USMAI and COSMOS
Review Submitted by: Brianna Glase
Rating: Recommended

A good read, featuring some interesting futuristic technology that raises ethical questions while juggling murder, all told from a lawyer’s perspective. Stephen White writes using female characters but does a nice job of it (that is, not using stereotypes). I did find myself annoyed throughout the book, though, as the characters take on more and more of a dangerous investigation because they couldn’t trust anyone. If it sounds like a million other storylines, it shouldn’t–this one was fairly unique, if not the best.

Availability:  COSMOS
Review Submitted by: Jane Kostenko
Rating: Recommended

Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, a near-future, repressive, uber-christian, New England splinter government that has usurped the United States after assassinating the president and gunning down Congress (Atwood never mentions if the Judicial made it out, but I guess we usually forget them anyway).

The role of a Handmaid is to be an “unworthy vessel.” A vessel for what? Children. In the Republic of Gilead, always on the crusading march to reclaim lost territory, children are a precious national resource. Pollution has made bearing children risky and uncertain business, and the extremely hierarchical Gilead has relegated this compulsory job to the Handmaids, erstwhile women in second marriages or single parenthood. The Handmaids are bred with “Commanders,” the elite of the new order, under the supervision of their Wives. Should one bear a child, it will be taken by the Wives. Should the handmaid fail to conceive, she will be sent to “The Colonies” to clean up nuclear or toxic waste without protective gear.

Offred’s life is a nightmare. She is confined to a small room, banned from reading, banned from talking to others, banned from voicing opinions. But the regime can’t stop Offred from thinking, and telling her story, silently to herself. She tells her story to you, the improbable reader through the ethos.

As an interesting kind of footnote at the end of the novel suggests, the horrific forms the repression of women and sexuality take in The Handmaid’s Tale are hardly novel; Atwood draws on specific historical precedents across the world and time to weave the web of oppression that has so hopelessly ensnared Offred (“Of Fred,” her Commander). But she is not wholly without hope. As Offred notes, “there will always be alliances” and always ghosts in the machine of any political system. She finds herself struggling to survive, first to live, and then to liberate herself.

I first read Handmaid’s Tale when I was in high school, and coming back to the book this summer was a delight. It was a demanding, inventive, read for any tenth grader, and attending to the tropes from various feminisms which play through the narrative were harder to grasp from the vantage point of a fifteen year old boy. I enjoyed this re-read because I am now more familiar with Atwood’s prolific oeuvre, and better able to appreciate a novelist who can juggle many different themes and topics with such terse parsimony of words. Atwood has a penchant for developing viscerally sickening dystopias, and one can find different germs of various elements of dystopia from her more recent Madaddam trilogy in Offred’s narrative. An utterly haunting book that showcases some of Atwood’s finest writing.

Rating: A book pregnant with sharp commentary, rich emotion, and amazing Scrabble words, I recommend it highly.

Availability:  St. Mary’s Library, USMAI and COSMOS
Review Submitted by:  Shane D. Hall
Rating: Highly Recommended

Erudites, who believe that intelligence is vital. The Candor people, who believe that honesty creates trust and loyalty. Amity, who believe that peace creates no evil. Dauntless, who believe that with bravery comes light. And Abnegation, the group that considered selfishness to be the root of all evil. These five factions are the whole of the country in which Divergent is set. Within it, there is Beatrice, an Abnegation who never really fit in, but believes in the way of her faction. Beatrice and her brother Caleb both are of age to attend the Choosing Ceremony, the event in which one may choose to stay with their faction or defect to another. But before that, they must take an aptitude test to see which factions they belong most in. Caleb, although seemingly perfect for Abnegation, is fit to Erudite for his interest in learning more. Beatrice on the other hand, is labeled as Divergent and told to tell no one of her placement. Read the book to find out what it is to be Divergent, and what it means for the nation.

Recommendation: A good summer read!

Availability: SMCM Library, USMAI and COSMOS
Review Submitted by:  Andrew Lachkovic
Rating: Highly Recommended

In 1962, a young American actress, thought to be dying, arrives by boat at a small Italian coastal village called Porto Vergogna. The actress, Dee Moray, is in Italy filming Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Pasquale, the Porto Vergogna innkeeper, immediately falls in love with the beautiful, innocent Dee.

Fifty years after their initial meeting, Pasquale travels to Hollywood to find Michael Deane, a legendary producer who may be the only person who knows what happened to Dee after she left Italy. Pasquale and Deane join Claire Silver (disillusioned Hollywood production assistant) and Shane Wheeler (a struggling screenwriter who describes, in great detail, his Donner Party-inspired script) to search for Dee Moray and discover the truth about her “illness,” her relationship with Richard Burton, and what really happened in Italy in 1962.

Walter’s hilarious descriptions of the disintegration of classic Hollywood into the miasma of reality TV (including biting descriptions of Deane himself) holds together the novel’s sometimes frayed narrative. Beautiful Ruins is full of laughs, and heart – perfect for the beach.

Recommendation: A good summer read!

Availability: SMCM Library, USMAI and COSMOS
Review Submitted by:  Kaitlyn Grigsby
Rating: Recommended

“To sleep perchance to dream– aye there’s the rub.”

The rub indeed! George Orr is a bland, “average” man in a near future, not-so-dystopian but not-so-nice future Portland, Oregon. The remarkable thing that sets George apart is his ability to dream “effectively.” When he dreams effectively the world changes to conform to his dream. He cannot control how and why he dreams, but after he is placed in an obligatory relationship with a psychiatrist who can hypnotize and “suggest” dreams to George, someone can.

But is reality, in all its complexity and history, malleable to even the most benevolent dreams of rational men? You’ll have to read to form your own opinion, but the quote from which the novel’s title is derived offers a suggestion: “To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven.” Chaung Tse: XXII.

A powerful meditation on the Western ideals of rationality, development, science, and human mastery over nature, Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven is a thought-provoking, brief, summer dream.

Rating: If heaven is for real, then surely the Lathe of Heaven is also the real deal. Take head Chaung Tse’s warning.

Availability:  USMAI and COSMOS
Review Submitted by:  Shane D. Hall
Rating: Highly Recommended

With all the hype surrounding John Green’s novels, especially with The Fault in our Stars movie being released in theaters, I was somewhat unwilling to jump on the John Green bandwagon, afraid that his novels wouldn’t live up to their popularity. However, I finished Looking for Alaska in less than two days. An extremely captivating story about Miles “Pudge” Halter’s first year in boarding school in Alabama, Looking for Alaska was a novel that I literally could not put down. Green cleverly heightened suspense by writing the novel in two sections, a “Before” and an “After” section, with the mystery of the event in the middle keeping me engaged. Green’s gift for symbolism and repeating motifs tied the whole novel together beautifully; there is no questioning that this is an extremely well-written novel.

That being said, I did have some criticisms of the book: many of the characters did not feel very realistic, and it took a while for the book to find an actual plot line. However, most of the characters were still likable, if not completely believable; and once a plot line did surface, it only served to captivate my interest more. I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys young adult novels, though as a friendly warning, it wouldn’t be a John Green novel if there wasn’t an element of tragedy incorporated into this coming of age story.

Availability:  USMAI and COSMOS
Review Submitted by: Brianna Glase
Rating: Recommended

A few days before I flew to spend the last days of July lounging on the beaches of North Carolina this summer, I picked up Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor. Sag Harbor is a great, thought provoking read that is perfect for getting you excited to go spend a week or two on a bay or ocean beach.

At the heart of this novel is the search for an “authentic identity,” one that has always resided within the self of community but has been overlooked or concealed from the searcher. There are no more fervent or doomed searchers than teenagers, and Whitehead loops his larger commentary on identity, particularly the “paradoxical” identity of upper-middle class African American identity in the post-Jim Crow era, around two brothers: Benji and Reggie. The boys are vacationing in Sag Harbor on Long Island, NY, an erstwhile whaling community that has become a vacationing site for successful New York and New Jersey African Americans. Benji is on a mission in Sag Harbor: to reshape his identity from a nerd who is an outsider at a “predominantly white” prep school during the year to a cool, sexy, hero. He narrates his foibles and follies to hilarious and poignant effect.

Although Benji’s relentless comic asides and episodic anecdotes give SH a meandering quality, the narrator’s stories weave a narrative web as tenacious as beach-grass roots, ramifying out in all directions to gather the grains of sand and stake out a claim next to the sea. I appreciated that Benji’s “adventures,” such as they are, remain consistently mundane and realistic. There’s no great arc toward the nerd finally finding love on the beach or some apocalyptic Separate Peace confrontation between the two brothers whom the reader is introduced to as “former twins heading in opposite directions” at the start of the novel. The adventures of Benji, Reggie, and there “gang” of friends are the kinds of banal, ill-conceived, anti-climactic, exaggerated, silly kinds of antics teenagers actually get into outside of made for TV miniseries with dramatic muzak accompaniment.

Through the mode of the bildungsroman, Whitehead uses this coming of age story to probe the ways in which individual and community identity are fashioned, displayed, hidden, refashioned, abandoned, and adopted as only a fifteen year old nerd can so obsess over. The book makes the reader question how these different identities are built and torn down in one’s own life and the life of society.

While I recommend this novel unequivocally, I would recommend some of Whitehead’s other novels more ardently to readers unfamiliar with one of contemporary fiction’s finest authors. In order: 1. John Henry Days, 2. The Intuitionist, 3. Zone One.

Harbor no other beach reads until you read this book (and others by the inimitable Mr. Whitehead).

Availability: SMCM Library, USMAI and COSMOS
Review Submitted by:  Shane D. Hall
Rating: Recommended