Please join us on July 12th at noon in room 209 in the Gleeson library. The library copy is checked out so you are welcome to request it through Link+ or at the SF Public Library. The SF Public library also has sound recordings and digital editions available for check out.

As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there–longtime friends, bandmates, and co-regents of Brokeland Records, a kingdom of used vinyl located in the borderlands of Berkeley and Oakland. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, two semi-legendary midwives who have welcomed more than a thousand newly minted citizens into the dented utopia at whose heart–half tavern, half temple–stands Brokeland. When ex-NFL quarterback Gibson Goode, the fifth-richest black man in America, announces plans to build his latest Dogpile megastore on a nearby stretch of Telegraph Avenue, Nat and Archy fear it means certain doom for their vulnerable little enterprise. Meanwhile, Aviva and Gwen also find themselves caught up in a battle for their professional existence, one that tests the limits of their friendship. Adding another layer of complication to the couples already tangled lives is the surprise appearance of Titus Joyner, the teenage son Archy has never acknowledged and the love of fifteen-year-old Julius Jaffes life. (back cover)

“By defining speech as reportable ‘sexual harassment’ even when it does not offend a reasonable person, the Education Department has cast a dark cloud over academic freedom and the ability to debate important issues about sexual morality, norms, and roles that may offend some listeners.” Read the full article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The Library provides access to The Chronicle of Higher Education to all USF faculty, staff, and students.

The Chronicle of Higher Education is the No. 1 source of news, information, and jobs for college and university faculty members and administrators. The Chronicle is a nine-time finalist for the National Magazine Awards, and one of its columnists was a finalist for a 2005 Pulitzer Prize. The Chronicle has also received honors from the Education Writers Association, the Society of News Design, the EPpy Awards, and the Webby Awards, among others. In 2007 The Chronicle was ranked in the 10 most credible news sources by Erdos & Morgan, a widely used survey of thought leaders in the United States. The Utne Reader that year named The Chronicle for “best political coverage” among independent newspapers.

Have you seen the library’s letter of gratitude to graduating student assistants? Stop by and see the letter, as well as a display of the books that have been dedicated to these students.

We’ll miss all of our student assistants and student users over the summer.  If you’re taking classes and/or hanging out in the city, though, we’ll be open so please come on by!

“The Plague of Doves,” by Louise Erdrich.  We will meet on June 14th at noon in room 209 (if room unavailable, other location tbd) of the Gleeson Library.  If you are unable to obtain a copy from the Gleeson Library, you may request it from Link+ or get it at SFPL. (San Francisco Public Library also has digital copies available for your E-book reader.)

The unsolved murder of a farm family haunts the small, white, off-reservation town of Pluto, North Dakota. The vengeance exacted for this crime and the subsequent distortions of truth transform the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation and shape the passions of both communities for the next generation. The descendants of Ojibwe and white intermarry, their lives intertwine; only the youngest generation, of mixed blood, remains unaware of the role the past continues to play in their lives. Evelina Harp is a witty, ambitious young girl, part Ojibwe, part white, who is prone to falling hopelessly in love. Mooshum, Evelina’s grandfather, is a seductive storyteller, a repository of family and tribal history with an all-too-intimate knowledge of the violent past. Nobody understands the weight of historical injustice better than Judge Antone Bazil Coutts, a thoughtful mixed blood who witnesses the lives of those who appear before him, and whose own love life reflects the entire history of the territory. In distinct and winning voices, Erdrich’s narrators unravel the stories of different generations and families in this corner of North Dakota. Bound by love, torn by history, the two communities’ collective stories finally come together in a wrenching truth revealed in the novel’s final pages. (summary)

Need a break from finals week? Come check out the Museum Studies class’ final project – the newest exhibition in USF’s Rare Book Room. “Unbind” with our student-curated exhibition, Unbound: Moving Through Time, Memory & Place in Modern Book Arts. This special exhibition is on display until June 14^th, 2013, in the Donohue Rare Book Room on the third floor of Gleeson Library. Students curated the collection in a way that focuses on a journey of time, memory and place in modern book arts. Highlighting three “worlds” – Worlds Near & Far, Poetic and Literary Worlds, and Imagined Worlds – the exhibition progresses from existing places and historical moments to more abstracted, mythic evocations.

This project gave 20 Art History/Arts Management students (including me!) the chance to get hands-on experience in curating and designing an exhibition from start to finish. With the assistance of the Donohue Rare Book Room’s curator John Hawk, our Museum Studies Professor Kate Lusheck, and Design Professors Scott Murray and Stuart McKee, we worked on all aspects of the exhibition—curating the display, developing the exhibition theme and curatorial sub-themes, creating the exhibition labels and wall panels, and designing and conceptualizing the public relations materials (print and online). By splitting into two teams – the curatorial team and the design/public relations team – we spent the semester selecting works to display, researching and writing about the objects in the exhibition, photographing them, and designing PR materials, in just a matter of months! (The typical planning window of many museum exhibitions is a few years.)

Join us on May 9^th from 12pm to 2:30pm in the Donohue Rare Book Room for our free, public exhibition reception, with gallery talks by the student curators.  Bring your smartphones and tablets too. Our exhibition labels will be available using QR codes.

So come take a mental break from your textbooks to get lost in the beauty and meaning of these often-overlooked books! We hope to see you there.

Check us out on Tumblr too!  http://unboundusfca.tumblr.com/

– Katelyn Frager, Junior Museum Studies student, Art History/Arts Management Major

There is consternation at Wikipedia over the discovery that hundreds of novelists who happen to be female were being systematically removed from the category “American novelists” and assigned to the category “American women novelists.” … The word that came to mind … was sexism. And who could disagree? Joyce Carol Oates expressed her view on Twitter: “Wikipedia bias an accurate reflection of universal bias. All (male) writers are writers; a (woman) writer is a woman writer.” Elaine Showalter tweeted in response that this was not what she’d had in mind in titling a book A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers: “Wikipedia is cutting down on American writers category by taking women out of it! A new step backwards.”

Read the full article from the New York Review of Books.  Gleeson Library provides free online access to all New York Review of Books articles from its beginnings in 1963 to the present to current USF students, staff, and faculty.

About the New York Review of Books: With a worldwide circulation of over 135,000, The New York Review of Books has established itself, in Esquire‘s words, as “the premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English language.” The New York Review began during the New York publishing strike of 1963, when its founding editors, Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein, and their friends, decided to create a new kind of magazine—one in which the most interesting and qualified minds of our time would discuss current books and issues in depth. Just as importantly, it was determined that the Review should be an independent publication; it began life as an independent editorial voice and it remains independent today. Read more about the NYRB.

During this past month, Gleeson Library participated in raising awareness, during a month-long, campus-wide series of events by featuring a display of tee shirts made by students USF, based on the work of the Clothesline Project, along with books and other materials on healing from sexual trauma and getting help, supporting victims, and rape prevention for men and women. The display has been taken down, but the conversation and awareness building continues.

If you have questions, concerns, or want to know more about sexual assault prevention and healing, please click here, or here.

The program is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served. All are welcome to attend. For further information, please call (415) 422-2036.

John Hawk
Head Librarian
Special Collections & University Archives

“A Covert Affair: Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS ,” by Jennet Conant.  We will meet on May 10th at noon in room 209 (if room unavailable, other location tbd) of the Gleeson Library.  Since there are no copies in the Gleeson Library, you may request it from Link+ or get it at SFPL.

…account of Julia and Paul Child’s experiences as members of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in the Far East during World War II and the tumultuous years when they were caught up in the McCarthy Red spy hunt in the 1950s and behaved with bravery and honor. It is the fascinating portrait of a group of idealistic men and women who were recruited by the citizen spy service, slapped into uniform, and dispatched to wage political warfare in remote outposts in Ceylon, India, and China. The eager, inexperienced 6 foot 2 inch Julia springs to life in these pages, a gangly golf-playing California girl who had never been farther abroad than Tijuana. Single and thirty years old when she joined the staff of Colonel William Donovan, Julia volunteered to be part of the OSS’s ambitious mission to develop a secret intelligence network across Southeast Asia. Her first post took her to the mountaintop idyll of Kandy, the headquarters of Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, the supreme commander of combined operations. Julia reveled in the glamour and intrigue of her overseas assignment and lifealtering romance with the much older and more sophisticated Paul Child, who took her on trips into the jungle, introduced her to the joys of curry, and insisted on educating both her mind and palate. A painter drafted to build war rooms, Paul was a colorful, complex personality. (summary)