What exactly do aliens have to do with civil rights? What would drive supposedly sane people to believe something that defies all rational explanation? Why exactly are we so fascinated in what (or who) may exist outside the threshold of our world when we already have more than enough trouble to last lifetimes contained within our own borders? These are the questions that Matthew Bowman interrogates in his latest book The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill, a rigorously researched historical account of an alleged alien abduction of a married couple in 1961. Continue reading “The Truth is Out There?”
Category: New Books
Life Stories of Remarkable Women
March is Women’s History Month. It’s also National Reading Month! If our last post put you in the mood to read more biographies of women, the History, Philosophy, and Newspaper Library’s shelves are bursting with possibilities. Discover the fascinating lives of a 1st-century C.E. Jewish ruler, a neo-Platonist mathematician, an 18th-century Italian physicist, a 19th-century samurai grandmother, a dozen under-appreciated British philosophers, a Mexican independence fighter, a Sufi spy in Nazi-occupied Paris, an agnostic French Jew who became a Christian mystic, a Zimbabwean painter, a Black Canadian science fiction writer, and many, many more.
Here are a few recent biographies that jumped out at me: Continue reading “Life Stories of Remarkable Women”
Not the Camilla You Think It Is…
I had a tough time selecting a book to read and review for this blog this time. I didn’t know anything about the League of Nations or Woodrow Wilson, nor did I really care to learn the ins and outs of the gubernatorial races in mid-twentieth century Louisianan politics enough to continue reading the two books I started on those topics, so I turned on the TV and looked for a distraction. Continue reading “Not the Camilla You Think It Is…”
A Foucaldian February
If on these wintery rainy days of February, the structures of power are getting you down, consider coming to the History, Philosophy, and Newspaper Library and having a Foucaldian February. The library has a great many books by Foucault, about Foucault, about his writings, and generally inspired by Foucault, which will hold you in good stead until the last day of February (The 29th this year!) and even through to the next leap year (and well beyond.)
New Books: The Last Imperialist
Alan Burns came from one of those families where the children all seem to have been remarkable (in personality or intellect), consequential, and ideologically irreconcilable. The Last Imperialist by Bruce Gilley might have been a nuanced study of one such family (like those captivating Mitford biographies—I think there have been almost a dozen so far). Or it could have been about the devout Roman Catholic and Anglo West Indian, from birth an establishment outsider, who made it his life mission to defend the very establishment that had rejected him. Instead, Gilley chose to write an improbable apologia of the British Empire, and while he does fold some biography into the polemic, he’s so entirely united with Burns in admiration for colonialism that the book devolves into pure encomium somewhere around page three. Continue reading “New Books: The Last Imperialist”