Tuesday, January 25, 2011

E-Book of the Week: Doing Time Together

Comfort, Megan. Doing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of the Prison. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Based on Comfort's doctoral dissertation, Doing Time Together examines the lives of women who have a significant other imprisoned in San Quentin. She discusses such issues as how the lives of the women are affected in terms of finances and living situation. She explains how they too in some respects become part of the prison system, having to follow its not always consistent rules to visit and keep in contact with their partners. Comfort also touches on such issues as why women choose to stay with men after they go to prison or even begin relationships with men who are already in prison.

Previewed by Danielle Whren Johnson, Digital Access Librarian. Click here to read this book.

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

E-Book of the Week: Amy Beach, Passionate Victorian

Block, Adrienne Fried. Amy Beach, Passionate Victorian: the Life and Works of the American Composer, 1867-1944. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Tracing Amy Beach’s life from her childhood as a musical prodigy in New England through her career as composer of works such as her Gaelic Symphony, Three Browning Songs, and Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in C sharp minor, Adrienne Fried Block (co-director of the City University of New York’s Project for the Study of Women in Music) provides the first full-length critical biography of Amy Beach, the "Dean of American Women Composers” with Amy Beach, Passionate Victorian. The first focus of this biography is how Amy Beach’s legacy fits in with other composers of her generation: with detailed musical analyses, Block illustrates how Beach wrote in a style closer to the Romantic idiom than to the techniques of the avant-garde European composers of her time. The second is how Beach’s adherence to the traditional roles of a Victorian woman impacted her musical career, for example noting that Beach’s husband for many years restricted her public performances to one recital per year. Amy Beach, Passionate Victorian includes numerous musical examples, a catalog of Beach’s works, and a reprinting of Amy Beach’s “Music’s Ten Commandments as Given for Young Composers.”

Previewed by Anna D'Agostino, Serials/Cataloging Librarian. Click here to read this book.

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

E-Book of the Week: Future of Education

Egan, Kieran. Future of Education : Reimagining Our Schools from the Ground Up. New Haven, CT: Yale  University Press, 2008.

Egan, an avant-garde educational reformer, explores the three big ideas and aims of education—academic, social, and developmental growth—and exposes their flaws and fundamental incompatibility. He speaks to the idea of learning as the use of “cognitive tools” and proposes and describes a process called Imaginative Education that would take place over the next fifty years and dramatically change teaching and curriculum while delivering the skills and understanding that children need to acquire.  He states and gives examples that show that “the professional expertise of teachers … is tied up with their skill in knowing the subjects they teach and teaching them in a way that can engage the imaginations and emotions and humor of their students.”
 
Previewed by Joanne Helouvry, Head of Research & Instruction Services. Click here to read this book.

Thursday, January 6, 2011

Spring Semester Course Reserves

It is now time to plan reserves—both print and media—for your spring classes. The beginning of the semester is busy, and reserve requests are handled on a first-come/first-serve basis, so please plan accordingly. As the semester progresses, you may add material at any time, and we can usually make it available to students within 24 hours.

Reserve requests can be submitted through campus mail or via the Faculty Request form. For detailed information about submitting requests, electronic reserves, and reserves delivered through Blackboard, please visit our Faculty Resources page. If you have any questions or concerns about book or article reserves, please contact Linda Tanton, x6823, or ltanton@ndm.edu / ltanton@loyola.edu. For media reserves, please contact Pat Turkos, x6822, or pturkos@ndm.edu / ppturkos@loyola.edu.

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

E-Book of the Week: Persons of Color and Religious at the Same Time

Morrow, Diane Batts. Persons of Color and Religious at the Same Time: The Oblate Sisters of Providence, 1828-1860. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

The Oblate Sisters of Providence were organized in 1828 in Baltimore as the first permanent community of Roman Catholic women religious of African descent in the United States. They founded St. Frances Academy for the education of young girls of color; this institution lives on today as a coeducational high school on East Chase Street in Baltimore. This study by Morrow (Associate Professor of History and African American Studies, University of Georgia) analyzes aspects of the relationships among the Oblate Sisters, the Catholic Church, and antebellum southern society, highlighting the critical role the sisters played in their own history.

Previewed by Jack Ray, Associate Director. Click here to read this book.

Monday, January 3, 2011

New in 2011: E-Book of the Week

Over the last couple of semesters, you may have noticed more and more e-books coming up in your library catalog search results. Our e-book collection covers a range of disciplines, including nursing, history, literature, and many more. As a way of highlighting the diversity of this collection, we're introducing a new feature: E-Book of the Week. Each Wednesday, visit the homepage to see a short review of an e-book from our collection. The books are being chosen and reviewed by librarians from every department, in hopes that this will give you a sense of the breadth of this online collection.

We hope you enjoy this new feature! If you have any questions about our e-book collection, please contact the Research Assistance Desk at (410) 617-6802 or askemail@loyola.edu.