MORDENISATION OF SCHOOL LIBRARY A BOON FOR QUALITY EDUCATION(Accepted for NCERT, NEW DELHI)
Mr.Shiba Bhue Librarian, K.V
North lakhimpur
Guwahati R.O (Assam)
ABSTRACT
Libraries are store house of knowledge, as an integral part of education system helps a lot in achieving the sprit of the human values, creativity, scientific temper attitudes and sense of innovative ness above all enriched intellectual excellence among children. This article discusses how the recent development in information technology and library information science enhanced the qualitative and sustainable learning in school environment and what role to be played by school library in the wake of global knowledge society and current digital and electronic environment.
KEY WORD-
Library Automation, Information Literacy, Knowledge Management, Information Management, Social Network. Blog, Wiki, You Tube.
INTRODUCTION
An educational system can not be complete with out well equipped library that is why Dr. S. Radhakrishnan has told library as the heart of educational institution
Above all Gandhi Ji way of complete education which seeks development of body, mind and sprit could not be fulfilled without proper library system. Over the years libraries are in the way of transformation from so called library to modern library and information center .In the recent wake automated digital library system library hold its prime importance and its role in participation in the process of quality education is second to none. The school library of Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangatahan, Navodaya Vidayalaya Samiti and other school of the country should also modernize their school library in order to promote quality and sustainable education.
WHAT IS A SCHOOL LIBARARY
A school library or a school library media center is libraries within a school where students, staff, and often, parents of a public, state or private fee paying school have access to a variety of resources. The goal of the school library media center is to ensure that all members of the school community have equitable access "to books and reading, to information, and to information technology.
A school library media center uses all types of media are automated, and utilize the Internet as well as books for information gathering. School libraries are distinct from public libraries because they serve as learner-oriented laboratories which support, extend, and individualize the school's curriculum.A school library serves as the center and coordinating agency for all material used in the school.
PURPOSE OF SCHOOL LIBRARY
The school library exists to provide a range of learning opportunities for both large and small groups as well as individuals with a focus on intellectual content, information literacy, and the learner. In addition to classroom visits with collaborating teachers, the school library also serves as a place for students to do independent work, use computers, equipment and research materials; to host special events such as author visits and book clubs; and for tutoring and testing.
The school library media center program is a collaborative venture in which school library media specialists, teachers, and administrators work together to provide opportunities for the social, cultural, and educational growth of students. Activities that are parts of the school library media program can take place in the school library media center, the laboratory classroom, through the school, and via the school library's online resources.
HOW IT CANBE MOREDENISED
Library modernization is nothing but using all recent tools and technology developed in the wake of advancement in information technology and library information science. The libraries in the school are no longer need to be neglected, its should be became hub of knowledge and information and participate in the process of quality and sustainable education.
FOSTREING REDING HABIT
Now a days reading skill among student diminishing to some extent owing to the present trends in the sphere of science and technology, reading serve a transport which leads student to the realm of fantasy, beauty politics, history sport, games travel, entertainment and education. It provide them relaxation and recreation and make them aware life around us .It will enhanced their and out look sense of judgment and Student life became productive and meaning full.
Reading habit can be stimulated by
1- Updated and strong library collection suits to the need of children.
2- Organizing extramural lecture, observing importance day and celebrating Gandhi, Vivekananda and other great personality birth day in library premises.
3- Setting up separate section in library like career guidance and counseling current affairs etc.
4- By providing other services like newspaper clipping, print out of online .information.
5- Providing other web based service and information literacy technique.
LIBRARY AUTOMATION
Library automation is nothing but mechanization of traditional library activities like classification cataloging circulation serial, reference and administration. The whole process of library can automation will be possible with little investment by school and technical knowledge by librarians. Open source free library automation software like EVERGREEN, KOHA, PMB, and NEW GENLIB. Library automation not only save the time of user but also meet the growing demands of children with little span of time.
ONLINE PUBLIC ACESS CATALOG (OPAC)
As information specialists, school librarians develop a resource base for the school by using the curriculum and student interests to identify and obtain library materials, organize and maintain the library collection in order to promote independent reading and lifelong learning. Materials in the library collection can be located using an Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC) is an online database of materials held by a library or group of libraries. Users typically search a library catalog to locate books, videos, and audio recordings owned or licensed by a library.
INFORMATION LITERACY
This conception, used primarily in the library and information studies field, and rooted in the concepts of library instruction and bibliographic instruction, is the ability "to recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate and use effectively the needed information” In this view, information literacy is the basis for life-long learning, and an information literate person is one who:
Recognizes that accurate and complete information is the basis for intelligent decision making.
Recognizes the need for information.
Knows how to locate needed information.
Formulates questions based on information needs.
Identifies potential sources of information.
Develops successful search strategies.
Accesses sources of information including computer-based and other technologies.
Evaluates information no matter what the source.
Organizes information for practical application.
Integrates new information into an existing body of knowledge.
Uses information in critical thinking and problem solving.
Uses information ethically and legally.
Since information may be presented in a number of formats, the term information" applies to more than just the printed word. Other literacy Such as visual, media, computer, network, and basic literacy are implicit in information literacy. Modern library information system will be helpful in providing information literacy to the school children and teacher.
ONLINE ACESS TO EDUCATIONAL WESITES
There are number of e resources for school children some are also freely available that are to be teach to the student by school librarian. The school library also teach the student regarding other educational websites, search engine, educational games and other education related tools in library through the internet.
INFORMATION MANAGEMENT
Information management entails organizing, retrieving, acquiring and maintaining information. The students by using library online resources learn how to store, organized Retrieve information in different media like CDROM Floppy disk, Pen drives, so in this process they learn the information management technique.
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT (KM)
Comprises a range of practices used in an organization to identify, create, represent, distribute and enable adoption of insights and experiences. Such insights and experiences comprise knowledge, either embodied in individuals or embedded in organizational processes or practice. Library became part in the process of knowledge management in school by creating distribute identifying required knowledge among the student, teachers. Above all for the institution.
TEHONOLOGY ENABLED LIBRARY SYSTEM
BLOGS
Blogs is fundamentally 2.0, and their global proliferation has enormous implications for libraries. Blogs may indeed be an even greater milestone in the history of publishing than web-pages. They enable the rapid production and consumption of Web-based publications. In some ways, the copying of printed material is to web-pages as the printing press is to blogs. Blogs are HTML for the masses. The most obvious implication of blogs is that it is easy to E-Publishing and a school librarian can provide blog service integrated to the school library website about information which helpful for school children.
SOCIAL NETWORK
Social network are perhaps the most promising and embracing technology wich can be integrated in library service. They enable messaging, blogging, streaming media, and tagging. MySpace, Face Book, Delicious, Frappr, and Flickr are networks that have enjoyed massive popularity. While MySpace and FaceBook enable users to share themselves with one another (detailed profiles of users' lives and personalities), Del.icio.us enables users to share Web resources and Flickr enables the sharing of pictures. Frappr is a bit of a blended network, using maps, chat rooms, and pictures to connect individuals. If knowledge of this entire social network can be imparted by librarian the knowledge level of student will be enhance and online community will be developed which will be paid good dividend to the student in the higher classes.
YOU TUBE
You Tube is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. You Tube was created in mid-February 2005 by three former PayPal employees. The San Bruno-based service uses Adobe Flash technology to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips and music videos, as well as entertainment content such as video logging and short original videos. Now a days IITs are also started to give their course through the you tube. You toube will be very useful particularly for the primary classes’ student.
CONCLUSION.
School library which is the library in the foundation of education, unless and until the foundation strong the building may collapse so modernization of school library never be underestimated. In order to cope up with increasing demand of quality and sustainable education school library need to be modernized with the recent development in library tools and technique and library information science.
REFERENCES
1- http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/Home.portal Retrieved on 5/1/09
2- http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch. Retrieved on 5/1/09
3- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_library
4- http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/mcb/120/1995/00000003/00000003/art00002 Retrieved on 7/1/09
5- Sangam July 2007.KVS New Delhi.
6- Vidyalaya Patrika2003-04 Noonmati K.VS.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Sunday, January 04, 2009
A Reading List for Barack —and the Rest of Us
A Reading List for Barack —and the Rest of Us
This year’s best reads for help us better understand ourselves
By Barbara Genco -- School Library Journal, 1/1/2009
Also in this article:Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth.The Numerati.The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully.This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind.The Great Swim.Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines.Old Masters, New World: America’s Raid on Europe’s Great Pictures.Lost on Planet China: The Strange and True Story of One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation, or How He Became Comfortable Eating Live Squid.Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
Illustration by Victor Juhasz.With the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, and the most troops overseas since Richard Nixon’s presidency, President-elect Obama will certainly have his work cut out for him. But at least Obama is a reader (and a writer), and, as we all know, there is no better antidote to the stress of the present than an hour or so lost in a good book. This year’s selection of great reads—for President Obama as well as the rest of us—was created to help us better understand our past, our present, our brave new future.
Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth.Atwood, Margaret. House of Anansi. 280 p.
Trust Margaret Atwood, the Canadian Booker Prize–winner and best-selling author of dystopian novels like The Handmaid’s Tale, to penetrate the economic heart of darkness: debt. These five essays were taken from Atwood’s 2008 Massey Lectures, which were broadcast on CBC’s Radio One. (To hear them, visit www.cbc.ca/ideas/massey.html.) Self-revelatory and anecdotally rich, the essays are mind-expanding and often downright funny. For Atwood, “payback is not about debt management, or sleep debt, or the national debt.” Instead, she views debt as human and imaginative, something that “magnifies both voracious human desire and ferocious human fear.” She limns the literary, cultural, and historical aspects of debt—concluding that it has much more to do with human nature than economics—and ransacks history, literature, pop culture, and even theology, drawing on personalities both real and imagined (like Dickens’s Ebenezer Scrooge and Disney’s Uncle Scrooge McDuck). Clever and timely, Atwood’s essays are a lot more engaging than anything you’re likely to find in The Economist.
The Numerati.Baker, Stephen. Houghton. 256 p.
Baker, a writer for BusinessWeek and coauthor of blogspotting.net—a blog that examines how “cutting-edge technologies are changing business and society”—introduces readers to the men and women of the “new math intelligentsia” and explores the changes in technology and data crunching that underlie most of today’s sophisticated marketing and business plans. Baker shows us how these new data profilers are using a ginormous amount of online data to predict trends and anticipate the actions of all sorts of groups—from consumers and voters to gamblers and potential terrorists. At the core of this work are algorithms, which come into play whenever we visit an online merchant like Amazon.com, where, for example, a sophisticated set of programming commands present us with shopping options based on our past purchases. Happily, the work of these “numerati” isn’t all profit driven. Google’s recent announcement that as a result of a spike in the number of searches for “flu and flu-like symptoms” it was able to predict the onset of influenza a full two weeks before the Centers for Disease Control is an example of how this data can become a force for good. (To learn more about Google’s prediction, go to www.google.org/flutrends.) In fact, one of the numerati that Baker interviewed predicted that the world’s next Jonas Salk will probably be a mathematician—not a physician. Now what are the odds of that?
The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully.Chittister, Joan. BlueBridge. 240 p.
By 2020, 18 percent of our nation will be more than 65 years old. If you’re already in the 65-plus column or will enter it in the next 12 years or have grandparents or parents in that age bracket, this book is for you. Chittister, who’s a spry 72, is a Roman Catholic Benedictine nun and cochair of the United Nations Global Peace Initiative for Women. In a series of interconnected meditative essays, she explores “the many dimensions of the aging process, its purpose and its challenges, its struggles and its surprises, its problems and its potential, its pain and joys.” Although a few of her chapters read like a Gray Panthers manifesto, most reveal the author’s breathtakingly frank and clear-eyed awareness that old age is all about “facing that time of life for which there is no career plan.” While aging may have been the catalyst for these meditations, don’t put off reading them until you’re officially an old codger. We can all draw strength from Chittister’s essays on regret (“the sand trap of the soul”), nostalgia (“the temptation to take refuge in what is no more”), and forgiveness (which allows us to “forgive ourselves for being less than we always wanted to be”). She reminds readers of all generations that aging doesn’t have to be a depressing series of losses culminating in a decline toward death. Instead, she says, getting older has allowed her “to come alive in ways I have never been alive before.”
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.Faust, Drew Gilpin. Knopf. 346 p.
What makes a “good death”? In mid-19th-century America, it meant taking time to carefully scrutinize one’s life, select a final resting place, and remember others who had previously died. Families wanted to know that their dying loved ones were well prepared to meet God within the bosom of their family. (The affecting death scene Louisa May Alcott crafted for Beth in Little Women is a prototype of a good death.) Unfortunately, a good death was unavailable to many of the 620,000 Confederate and Union soldiers who died in the Civil War. Faust, the president of Harvard University, demonstrates how the “work of death” uniquely characterized the war and its aftermath. Parents were often not informed of the fate of their deceased sons—there was no plan in place. There were also no dog tags. As soldiers prepared for battle, they pinned pieces of paper on their uniforms with information for their next of kin. Combatants often carried a small Bible or a pocket diary—partly for themselves and partly to assure their families that they had been well disposed at the hour of their death. Soldiers also prized family photos. In fact, many fallen soldiers were found with photos in hand. There were few marked graves, and many soldiers were buried in open, mass graves to avoid contagion. One enduring benefit of the otherwise disastrous Civil War was the creation of organized care for the living and the dying: the American Red Cross and the founding of our national cemeteries. Brilliant and inclusive, this is moving social history.
Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind.Marcus, Gary. Houghton. 224 p.
Marcus, a cognitive neuroscientist and psychology professor, launches some spirited salvos against the intelligent design movement. He carefully marshals research on the brain and cognitive development to counter the belief that we and, most especially, our brains are perfect as originally created. For Marcus, the human mind is definitely imperfect and far from being made “in God’s image.” Furthermore, the human brain is a “kluge—an engineering term for a clumsy or inelegant, yet surprisingly effective, solution to a problem.” Stymied? Think about your brain as a crafty solution cooked up by TV secret agent Angus MacGyver. Why else would the human brain have such a superb capacity for reasoning paired with a seriously flawed memory system and a tendency to neglect the facts when making choices? Along the way, Marcus also reflects on why happiness is nearly always elusive, why human language is essentially ambiguous and communication so complicated, and why we develop false memories. He also reminds us that there’s a neurological reason why teens are innately susceptible to suggestion and impetuous to boot (as if we didn’t already know that). After all, the teenage brain is wired for pleasure, not for analysis. When all is said and done, the human brain is prima facie a product of evolution, a “series of little fixes.” So the next time you find yourself disoriented while trying to multitask or distracted by some shiny object, remember that our brains are a work in progress—and cut yourself some slack.
The Great Swim.Mortimer, Gavin. Walker. 336 p.
Before super-swimmers Michael Phelps and Mark Spitz captured Olympic gold, there was Gertrude Ederle. The daughter of a German-born butcher from New York City, Ederle was already an Olympic gold medalist when, in 1925, she swam 21 miles from the Battery in Lower Manhattan to Sandy Hook, NJ, in 7 hours and 11 minutes (a record that remained unbroken until 2006). The next summer Ederle, along with five other women, attempted to swim the English Channel. A precursor to today’s reality TV shows, the swimmers were sponsored by tabloid newspapers and readers aligned themselves with their favorites, turning a friendly competition into a media circus. Mortimer includes wonderful details about Ederle’s training, her scandalous two-piece bathing suit emblazoned with an American flag, a diet that would shock today’s sports nutritionists, and the required “greasing up” (layering on olive oil, lanolin, and Vaseline) to protect her skin from the cold waters. The swim across the Channel was grueling. When Ederle emerged on the shores of Kent, England, after 14 hours and 39 minutes (breaking the male record by a full two hours), the media attention was overwhelming. On her return to the United States, Ederle was honored by a ticker-tape parade and hounded by enormous crowds. Sadly, fame was fleeting. Nine months later, aviator Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic solo flight eclipsed all other achievements, and Ederle was kicked to the curb. Nevertheless, her record for swimming the Channel stood until 1950.
Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines.Muller, Richard A. Norton. 354 p.
Muller, a physics professor and winner of a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship, prepared this accessible briefing based on his renowned course for nonscience students. While every president has a bevy of science advisors, Muller’s book can serve as a primer for the rest of us; it provides a clear understanding of the major scientific trends and challenges that will affect our lives during the next four to eight years. Broad essays on topical matters, such as terrorism, energy, nukes, space, and global warming, are divided into comprehensible subsections. And for those of us who are time-challenged, each section’s final “Presidential Summary” serves up just the facts. Some of Muller’s analyses buck conventional wisdom. For example, writing about terrorism, he cautions that low-tech attacks may be harder to defend against than their high-tech counterparts (witness the recent spate of terrorist raids in Mumbai) and a natural gas explosion may be a greater threat to urban dwellers than the aftermath of a so-called “dirty bomb.” Understandable and genuinely fascinating, this is the best sort of required reading.
Old Masters, New World: America’s Raid on Europe’s Great Pictures.Saltzman, Cynthia. Viking. 352 p.
Next time you’re viewing a painting by a European Old Master in an American museum take a careful look at the label. Did you know that the core collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Boston Museum of Fine Art, Washington’s National Gallery, and many other smaller museums are the products of a very public largesse? In the 19th century, our newly minted museums were desperately seeking cultural credibility. Increasingly, it became the fashion for wealthy entrepreneurs to go abroad and greedily gobble up vast amounts of European painting, sculpture, and architectural fragments. These exported treasures boosted their new owners’ social standings even as they provided our museums with the “right” sort of art that demonstrated that Americans could possess refined cultural sensibilities every bit as elevated as the ancien régimes. Saltzman, a skilled art historian, is no slouch when it comes to explaining the social history of the Gilded Age, and she introduces readers to such compelling and single-minded personalities as the Boston aesthete Isabella Stewart Gardner, Henry Clay Frick (a Carnegie protégé and a steel tycoon in his own right), and the renowned financier J. P. Morgan. Begun for private pleasure, the Frick, Gardner, and Morgan collections, still housed in their original opulent mansions, have since morphed into unique public treasures. Meticulously researched and wonderfully detailed, Old Masters is a real eye-opener.
Lost on Planet China: The Strange and True Story of One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation, or How He Became Comfortable Eating Live Squid.Troost, J. Maarten. Broadway. 304 p.
With the world becoming smaller and more homogenized by the second, Troost thinks the next (and perhaps final) great journey for Westerners will be to China—an enormous country (3.7 million square miles) with a huge population (over 1.3 billion people) and the world’s largest economic engine. Though most Westerners now depend on China’s consumer products, relatively few of us have traveled beyond its well-worn tourist routes, and even fewer have begun to grasp its vast human, economic, linguistic, and geographic diversity. Troost is a wacky, 21st-century Marco Polo who successfully integrates history, economics, politics, and Chinese high and low culture into a fast-paced narrative that’s self-deprecating, refreshingly ironic, and often laugh-out-loud funny. He muses on China’s often startling juxtaposition of the ancient and modern and the relentless pressures on the former communal society to adjust to capitalism’s triumph over communism. While Troost chronicles such unappealing Chinese ticks as spitting, crowding, and a penchant for jumping lines, he also reveals a culture of unrelenting hard work, love of children, and an ever-present sense of history. As the subtitle suggests, the author shares enough tales about extreme cuisine to rival the exploits of star chef Anthony Bourdain. If you read only one book about China this year, be sure it’s this one. And while you’re at it, consider enrolling the kids in a Mandarin class. According to Troost, they’re going to need it. Soon.
Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.Wartzman, Rick. Public Affairs. 320 p.
In April 1939, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath shot to the top of our nation’s best-seller lists. Meanwhile, throughout California’s San Joaquin Valley (the destination of the fictional Joads and other “Oakies” who fled the Dust Bowl), the publication of this masterpiece brought long-standing social and political unrest to a head. Steinbeck, a native of Salinas, CA, was vilified as a radical, rabble-rousing writer of the shocking and obscene. And that same month, Grapes was publicly banned by the Kern County Board of Supervisors, who asserted that the novel “offended our citizenry by falsely implying that many of our fine people are a low, ignorant, profane, and blasphemous type living in a vicious and filthy manner.” Plus, it “is filled with profanity, lewd, foul, and obscene language unfit for use in American homes.” Kern County Librarian Gretchen Kneif was particularly eloquent in her letter to the library board: “If a book is banned today, what will be banned tomorrow? …It’s such a vicious and dangerous thing to begin and may… lead to… the same thing we see in Europe today.” Two years later, the ban was lifted, though Steinbeck’s works continued to be under siege. This is compelling social history and an incisive case study of censorship in action.
This year’s best reads for help us better understand ourselves
By Barbara Genco -- School Library Journal, 1/1/2009
Also in this article:Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth.The Numerati.The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully.This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind.The Great Swim.Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines.Old Masters, New World: America’s Raid on Europe’s Great Pictures.Lost on Planet China: The Strange and True Story of One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation, or How He Became Comfortable Eating Live Squid.Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
Illustration by Victor Juhasz.With the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, and the most troops overseas since Richard Nixon’s presidency, President-elect Obama will certainly have his work cut out for him. But at least Obama is a reader (and a writer), and, as we all know, there is no better antidote to the stress of the present than an hour or so lost in a good book. This year’s selection of great reads—for President Obama as well as the rest of us—was created to help us better understand our past, our present, our brave new future.
Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth.Atwood, Margaret. House of Anansi. 280 p.
Trust Margaret Atwood, the Canadian Booker Prize–winner and best-selling author of dystopian novels like The Handmaid’s Tale, to penetrate the economic heart of darkness: debt. These five essays were taken from Atwood’s 2008 Massey Lectures, which were broadcast on CBC’s Radio One. (To hear them, visit www.cbc.ca/ideas/massey.html.) Self-revelatory and anecdotally rich, the essays are mind-expanding and often downright funny. For Atwood, “payback is not about debt management, or sleep debt, or the national debt.” Instead, she views debt as human and imaginative, something that “magnifies both voracious human desire and ferocious human fear.” She limns the literary, cultural, and historical aspects of debt—concluding that it has much more to do with human nature than economics—and ransacks history, literature, pop culture, and even theology, drawing on personalities both real and imagined (like Dickens’s Ebenezer Scrooge and Disney’s Uncle Scrooge McDuck). Clever and timely, Atwood’s essays are a lot more engaging than anything you’re likely to find in The Economist.
The Numerati.Baker, Stephen. Houghton. 256 p.
Baker, a writer for BusinessWeek and coauthor of blogspotting.net—a blog that examines how “cutting-edge technologies are changing business and society”—introduces readers to the men and women of the “new math intelligentsia” and explores the changes in technology and data crunching that underlie most of today’s sophisticated marketing and business plans. Baker shows us how these new data profilers are using a ginormous amount of online data to predict trends and anticipate the actions of all sorts of groups—from consumers and voters to gamblers and potential terrorists. At the core of this work are algorithms, which come into play whenever we visit an online merchant like Amazon.com, where, for example, a sophisticated set of programming commands present us with shopping options based on our past purchases. Happily, the work of these “numerati” isn’t all profit driven. Google’s recent announcement that as a result of a spike in the number of searches for “flu and flu-like symptoms” it was able to predict the onset of influenza a full two weeks before the Centers for Disease Control is an example of how this data can become a force for good. (To learn more about Google’s prediction, go to www.google.org/flutrends.) In fact, one of the numerati that Baker interviewed predicted that the world’s next Jonas Salk will probably be a mathematician—not a physician. Now what are the odds of that?
The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully.Chittister, Joan. BlueBridge. 240 p.
By 2020, 18 percent of our nation will be more than 65 years old. If you’re already in the 65-plus column or will enter it in the next 12 years or have grandparents or parents in that age bracket, this book is for you. Chittister, who’s a spry 72, is a Roman Catholic Benedictine nun and cochair of the United Nations Global Peace Initiative for Women. In a series of interconnected meditative essays, she explores “the many dimensions of the aging process, its purpose and its challenges, its struggles and its surprises, its problems and its potential, its pain and joys.” Although a few of her chapters read like a Gray Panthers manifesto, most reveal the author’s breathtakingly frank and clear-eyed awareness that old age is all about “facing that time of life for which there is no career plan.” While aging may have been the catalyst for these meditations, don’t put off reading them until you’re officially an old codger. We can all draw strength from Chittister’s essays on regret (“the sand trap of the soul”), nostalgia (“the temptation to take refuge in what is no more”), and forgiveness (which allows us to “forgive ourselves for being less than we always wanted to be”). She reminds readers of all generations that aging doesn’t have to be a depressing series of losses culminating in a decline toward death. Instead, she says, getting older has allowed her “to come alive in ways I have never been alive before.”
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.Faust, Drew Gilpin. Knopf. 346 p.
What makes a “good death”? In mid-19th-century America, it meant taking time to carefully scrutinize one’s life, select a final resting place, and remember others who had previously died. Families wanted to know that their dying loved ones were well prepared to meet God within the bosom of their family. (The affecting death scene Louisa May Alcott crafted for Beth in Little Women is a prototype of a good death.) Unfortunately, a good death was unavailable to many of the 620,000 Confederate and Union soldiers who died in the Civil War. Faust, the president of Harvard University, demonstrates how the “work of death” uniquely characterized the war and its aftermath. Parents were often not informed of the fate of their deceased sons—there was no plan in place. There were also no dog tags. As soldiers prepared for battle, they pinned pieces of paper on their uniforms with information for their next of kin. Combatants often carried a small Bible or a pocket diary—partly for themselves and partly to assure their families that they had been well disposed at the hour of their death. Soldiers also prized family photos. In fact, many fallen soldiers were found with photos in hand. There were few marked graves, and many soldiers were buried in open, mass graves to avoid contagion. One enduring benefit of the otherwise disastrous Civil War was the creation of organized care for the living and the dying: the American Red Cross and the founding of our national cemeteries. Brilliant and inclusive, this is moving social history.
Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind.Marcus, Gary. Houghton. 224 p.
Marcus, a cognitive neuroscientist and psychology professor, launches some spirited salvos against the intelligent design movement. He carefully marshals research on the brain and cognitive development to counter the belief that we and, most especially, our brains are perfect as originally created. For Marcus, the human mind is definitely imperfect and far from being made “in God’s image.” Furthermore, the human brain is a “kluge—an engineering term for a clumsy or inelegant, yet surprisingly effective, solution to a problem.” Stymied? Think about your brain as a crafty solution cooked up by TV secret agent Angus MacGyver. Why else would the human brain have such a superb capacity for reasoning paired with a seriously flawed memory system and a tendency to neglect the facts when making choices? Along the way, Marcus also reflects on why happiness is nearly always elusive, why human language is essentially ambiguous and communication so complicated, and why we develop false memories. He also reminds us that there’s a neurological reason why teens are innately susceptible to suggestion and impetuous to boot (as if we didn’t already know that). After all, the teenage brain is wired for pleasure, not for analysis. When all is said and done, the human brain is prima facie a product of evolution, a “series of little fixes.” So the next time you find yourself disoriented while trying to multitask or distracted by some shiny object, remember that our brains are a work in progress—and cut yourself some slack.
The Great Swim.Mortimer, Gavin. Walker. 336 p.
Before super-swimmers Michael Phelps and Mark Spitz captured Olympic gold, there was Gertrude Ederle. The daughter of a German-born butcher from New York City, Ederle was already an Olympic gold medalist when, in 1925, she swam 21 miles from the Battery in Lower Manhattan to Sandy Hook, NJ, in 7 hours and 11 minutes (a record that remained unbroken until 2006). The next summer Ederle, along with five other women, attempted to swim the English Channel. A precursor to today’s reality TV shows, the swimmers were sponsored by tabloid newspapers and readers aligned themselves with their favorites, turning a friendly competition into a media circus. Mortimer includes wonderful details about Ederle’s training, her scandalous two-piece bathing suit emblazoned with an American flag, a diet that would shock today’s sports nutritionists, and the required “greasing up” (layering on olive oil, lanolin, and Vaseline) to protect her skin from the cold waters. The swim across the Channel was grueling. When Ederle emerged on the shores of Kent, England, after 14 hours and 39 minutes (breaking the male record by a full two hours), the media attention was overwhelming. On her return to the United States, Ederle was honored by a ticker-tape parade and hounded by enormous crowds. Sadly, fame was fleeting. Nine months later, aviator Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic solo flight eclipsed all other achievements, and Ederle was kicked to the curb. Nevertheless, her record for swimming the Channel stood until 1950.
Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines.Muller, Richard A. Norton. 354 p.
Muller, a physics professor and winner of a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship, prepared this accessible briefing based on his renowned course for nonscience students. While every president has a bevy of science advisors, Muller’s book can serve as a primer for the rest of us; it provides a clear understanding of the major scientific trends and challenges that will affect our lives during the next four to eight years. Broad essays on topical matters, such as terrorism, energy, nukes, space, and global warming, are divided into comprehensible subsections. And for those of us who are time-challenged, each section’s final “Presidential Summary” serves up just the facts. Some of Muller’s analyses buck conventional wisdom. For example, writing about terrorism, he cautions that low-tech attacks may be harder to defend against than their high-tech counterparts (witness the recent spate of terrorist raids in Mumbai) and a natural gas explosion may be a greater threat to urban dwellers than the aftermath of a so-called “dirty bomb.” Understandable and genuinely fascinating, this is the best sort of required reading.
Old Masters, New World: America’s Raid on Europe’s Great Pictures.Saltzman, Cynthia. Viking. 352 p.
Next time you’re viewing a painting by a European Old Master in an American museum take a careful look at the label. Did you know that the core collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Boston Museum of Fine Art, Washington’s National Gallery, and many other smaller museums are the products of a very public largesse? In the 19th century, our newly minted museums were desperately seeking cultural credibility. Increasingly, it became the fashion for wealthy entrepreneurs to go abroad and greedily gobble up vast amounts of European painting, sculpture, and architectural fragments. These exported treasures boosted their new owners’ social standings even as they provided our museums with the “right” sort of art that demonstrated that Americans could possess refined cultural sensibilities every bit as elevated as the ancien régimes. Saltzman, a skilled art historian, is no slouch when it comes to explaining the social history of the Gilded Age, and she introduces readers to such compelling and single-minded personalities as the Boston aesthete Isabella Stewart Gardner, Henry Clay Frick (a Carnegie protégé and a steel tycoon in his own right), and the renowned financier J. P. Morgan. Begun for private pleasure, the Frick, Gardner, and Morgan collections, still housed in their original opulent mansions, have since morphed into unique public treasures. Meticulously researched and wonderfully detailed, Old Masters is a real eye-opener.
Lost on Planet China: The Strange and True Story of One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation, or How He Became Comfortable Eating Live Squid.Troost, J. Maarten. Broadway. 304 p.
With the world becoming smaller and more homogenized by the second, Troost thinks the next (and perhaps final) great journey for Westerners will be to China—an enormous country (3.7 million square miles) with a huge population (over 1.3 billion people) and the world’s largest economic engine. Though most Westerners now depend on China’s consumer products, relatively few of us have traveled beyond its well-worn tourist routes, and even fewer have begun to grasp its vast human, economic, linguistic, and geographic diversity. Troost is a wacky, 21st-century Marco Polo who successfully integrates history, economics, politics, and Chinese high and low culture into a fast-paced narrative that’s self-deprecating, refreshingly ironic, and often laugh-out-loud funny. He muses on China’s often startling juxtaposition of the ancient and modern and the relentless pressures on the former communal society to adjust to capitalism’s triumph over communism. While Troost chronicles such unappealing Chinese ticks as spitting, crowding, and a penchant for jumping lines, he also reveals a culture of unrelenting hard work, love of children, and an ever-present sense of history. As the subtitle suggests, the author shares enough tales about extreme cuisine to rival the exploits of star chef Anthony Bourdain. If you read only one book about China this year, be sure it’s this one. And while you’re at it, consider enrolling the kids in a Mandarin class. According to Troost, they’re going to need it. Soon.
Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.Wartzman, Rick. Public Affairs. 320 p.
In April 1939, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath shot to the top of our nation’s best-seller lists. Meanwhile, throughout California’s San Joaquin Valley (the destination of the fictional Joads and other “Oakies” who fled the Dust Bowl), the publication of this masterpiece brought long-standing social and political unrest to a head. Steinbeck, a native of Salinas, CA, was vilified as a radical, rabble-rousing writer of the shocking and obscene. And that same month, Grapes was publicly banned by the Kern County Board of Supervisors, who asserted that the novel “offended our citizenry by falsely implying that many of our fine people are a low, ignorant, profane, and blasphemous type living in a vicious and filthy manner.” Plus, it “is filled with profanity, lewd, foul, and obscene language unfit for use in American homes.” Kern County Librarian Gretchen Kneif was particularly eloquent in her letter to the library board: “If a book is banned today, what will be banned tomorrow? …It’s such a vicious and dangerous thing to begin and may… lead to… the same thing we see in Europe today.” Two years later, the ban was lifted, though Steinbeck’s works continued to be under siege. This is compelling social history and an incisive case study of censorship in action.
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