Student Art Exhibit & Reception on April 12, 5-7pm

The Loyola/Notre Dame Library is pleased to announce a new exhibit of student art, which will be displayed in the Ferguson Gallery from April 12 - April 30, 2012. Please join us for a reception to honor these talented students on April 12, 2012, from 5-7pm in the Ferguson Gallery. Matthew Suprunowicz and Sarah Bowen are senior studio art majors at Loyola University Maryland, and this exhibit represents the culmination of their work here at the University. Please contact Jennie Ray at jbray1@loyola.edu with any questions.Hope to see you there!

Ebook of the Week - Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America.

Glickman, Lawrence B.  Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America.

Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2009

A definitive history of consumer activism, Buying Power traces the lineage of this political tradition back to our nation’s founding, revealing that Americans used purchasing power to support causes and punish enemies long before the word boycott even entered our lexicon. Taking the Boston Tea Party as his starting point, Lawrence Glickman argues that the rejection of British imports by revolutionary patriots inaugurated a continuous series of consumer boycotts, campaigns for safe and ethical consumption, and efforts to make goods more broadly accessible. He explores abolitionist-led efforts to eschew slave-made goods, African American consumer campaigns against Jim Crow, a 1930s refusal of silk from fascist Japan, and emerging contemporary movements like slow food. Uncovering previously unknown episodes and analyzing famous events from a fresh perspective, Glickman illuminates moments when consumer activism intersected with political and civil rights movements. He also sheds new light on activists’ relationship with the consumer movement, which gave rise to lobbies like the National Consumers League and Consumers Union as well as ill-fated legislation to create a federal Consumer Protection Agency.*

Preview provided by John Breitmeyer.  Click here to read the book.

*Reprinted from Amazon Book Description, July 30, 2009

Introducing Seeker!

Seeker is an exciting new all-encompassing database that searches books, journal and news articles, DVDs, business publications, and many other resources. It combines the library catalog with most of the other library databases, giving a streamlined search that will let you access everything at once. The link to Seeker is in the top right corner of the library webpage. Try it out and fill out this short survey to let us know what you think! You can also email us at askemail@loyola.edu. 

Ebook of the Week - Racing Odysseus: A College President Becomes a Freshman Again

Martin, Roger H. Racing Racing Odysseus: A College President Becomes a Freshman Again. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008

The idea of reliving youth is a common fantasy, but who among us is actually courageous enough to try it? After surviving a deadly cancer against tremendous odds, college president Roger H. Martin did just that--he enrolled at St. John's College, the Great Books school in Annapolis, Maryland, as a sixty-one-year-old freshman. This engaging, often humorous memoir of his semester at St. John's tells of his journey of discovery as he falls in love again with Plato, Socrates, and Homer, improbably joins the college crew team, and negotiates friendships across generational divides. Along the way, Martin ponders one of the most pressing questions facing education today: do the liberal arts still have a role to play in a society that seems to value professional, vocational, and career training above all else? Elegantly weaving together the themes of the great works he reads with events that transpire on the water, in the coffee shop, and in the classroom, Martin finds that a liberal arts education may be more vital today than ever before. This is the moving story of a man who faces his fears, fully embraces his second chance, and in turn rediscovers the gifts of life and learning.

Previewed by John Breitmeyer*.  Click here to read the book  


*Synopsis reprinted from Amazon book description, Sept. 2, 2008.

Ebook of the Week - Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life.

Norgaard, Kari Marie. Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2011.


Global warming is perhaps the most significant environmental issue of our time, yet public response in Western nations has been meager. Why have so few taken action?  In Living in Denial, sociologist Kari Norgaard searches for answers to this question, drawing on interviews and ethnographic data from her study of "Bygdaby," the fictional name of an actual rural community in western Norway that experienced an unusually warm winter in 2000-2001. Stories in local and national newspapers linked the warm winter explicitly to global warming, yet residents did not write letters to the editor, pressure politicians, or cut down on use of fossil fuels. Norgaard attributes this lack of response to the phenomenon of socially organized denial, by which information about climate science is known in the abstract but disconnected from political, social, and private life, and sees this as emblematic of how citizens of industrialized countries are responding to global warming in general. Norgaard finds that for the highly educated and politically savvy residents of Bygdaby, global warming was both common knowledge and unimaginable. She traces this denial from emotions, to cultural norms, to political economy. Her report from ‘Bygdaby,’ supplemented by comparisons throughout the book to the United States, tells of the larger story behind our paralysis in the face of alarming predictions from climate scientists.

Previewed by John Breitmeyer.  Click here to read the book.

Feeney, Denis. Caesar's Calendar: Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

Denis Feeney’s Caesar's Calendar investigates time and its contours as described by the ancient Romans, both the early empire and later, as Rome exerted its influence as a major world power. Feeney welcomes the reader into a world where time was changeable, and where simply ascertaining a date required a complex and often contentious cultural narrative. Feeney lucidly investigates the pertinent systems, including the Roman calendar (which is still our calendar) and its near-perfect method of capturing the progress of natural time, as well as its incorporation of the rhythms of consular government, the plotting of sacred time, and the meshing of the Roman city-state's concept of time with those of the foreigners they encountered. Because this web of time was Greek before the Romans transformed it, the book is also an interesting study in the cross-cultural interaction between the Greek and Roman worlds.

Feeney's treatment of specialized historical material is engaging and accessible, and ranges from details of the time schemes used by Greeks and Romans to accommodate the Romans' unprecedented rise to world dominance to an edifying discussion of the fixed axis of B.C./A.D. (or B.C.E./C.E.), and the supposedly objective "dates" implied. He closely examines the time divisions between myth and history, and concludes by demonstrating the impact of the reformed calendar on the way the Romans conceived of time's recurrence. Feeney's book achieves a reconstruction of the Roman conception of time – and it may transform the way his readers inhabit and experience time as well.

Previewed by John Breitmeyer.  Click here to read the book.

Ebook of the Week - Christmas in America: A History

Restad, Penne L.  Christmas in America: A History.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

In Christmas in America, Penne Restad reveals that Christmas has always been an ambiguous meld of sacred thoughts
and worldly actions, as well as a reflection of our changing society. In these 240 pages, Restad captures the rise and transformation of our most universal national holiday.  Christmas was sometimes solemn, sometimes wildly social -- and sometimes not celebrated at all. Virginians hunted, danced, and feasted, city dwellers flooded the streets in raucous demonstrations, and Puritan New Englanders denounced the whole affair. Restad shows that as times changed, Christmas changed--but it always grew in popularity.

In the early 1800s, New York served as an epicenter of the newly emerging holiday, drawing on its roots as a Dutch colony (St. Nicholas was particularly popular in the Netherlands, even after the Reformation), and aided by such men as Washington Irving. In 1822, another New Yorker named Clement Clarke Moore penned a poem now known as "'Twas the Night Before Christmas," virtually inventing the modern Santa Claus. Well-to-do townspeople displayed a German novelty, the decorated fir tree, in their parlors; an enterprising printer discovered the money to be made from Christmas cards; and a hodgepodge of year-end celebrations began to coalesce around December 25 and the figure of Santa. The homecoming significance of the holiday increased with the Civil War, and by the end of the nineteenth century a full- fledged national holiday had materialized, forged out of borrowed and invented custom alike, and driven by a passion for gift-giving. By the twentieth century, Christmas had  seeped into every niche of our conscious and unconscious lives to become a festival of epic proportions. Restad carries the story through to our own time, revealing the inescapable presence, and ambiguous meaning, of Christmas in contemporary culture.

Previewed by John Breitmeyer.  Click here to read the book.