CORNELL BOOKS
Books from faculty and alumni explore Truth, birds and the art of reading
"Birdscapes: A Pop-Up Celebration of Bird Songs in Stereo Sound"
From Bailey, green writings and an intro
Two new books from Cornell University Press (CUP) involve the history of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and two of its most important historical figures. "Liberty Hyde Bailey: Essential Agrarian and Environmental Writings" (2008), edited by Zachary Michael Jack, is the first anthology of the seminal writings by the legendary Cornell professor and dean of the Cornell Agriculture College from 1903 to 1913. It offers a comprehensive introduction to Bailey's revolutionary thinking on the urgent environmental, agrarian and educational issues of his day -- and our own.
"Autobiography of a Farm Boy" See larger image
In 1946 Bailey also provided the introduction to "Autobiography of a Farm Boy" (2009) by Isaac Phillips Roberts, who was a professor of agriculture at Cornell from 1873 to 1903, first dean of the faculty of agriculture and director of the Cornell Experiment Station. This book was originally published in 1916, reprinted by CUP 30 years later and is now back in print under CUP's "Fall Creek Books" imprint, which is dedicated to reviving classic books documenting the history, culture, natural history and folkways of New York.
Through the eyes of Truth
"Sojourner Truth's America" See larger image
"Sojourner Truth's America" (University of Illinois Press, 2009) by Cornell history professor Margaret Washington and slated for release in April, tells the story of 19th-century America through the life of Truth, a slave who became an unlikely anti-slavery activist. Washington unravels Truth's world within the broader panorama of slavery and abolition. Organized chronologically, the book examines the dynamics of Truth's times, beginning with her spirituality and early life as a slave. Washington traces Truth's awakening during the progressive surge that propelled her ascendancy as a rousing preacher and political orator despite her inability to read and write. For Truth, the significant model for the vision of the common humanity she embraced was a primitive, prophetic Christianity.
Pleasure reading
"In Defense of Reading: Teaching Literature in the Twenty-First Century" See larger image
An eloquent defense of the pleasure of reading literature is the heart of Daniel Schwarz's "In Defense of Reading: Teaching Literature in the Twenty-First Century" (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008, one of the books in the "Blackwell Manifesto" series featuring leading critics).
The book explores why we read, how we read and what we learn from reading imaginative literature. Schwarz, the Frederic J. Whiton Professor of English at Cornell, based the book on his "experience as a teacher, faculty member and scholar-critic at Cornell these past 41 years." He said writing the book not only gave him a chance to "articulate my ideas about reading, teaching and critical and scholarly writing -- and the crucial interrelationship among all three -- but also to argue for the place of traditional reading projects in the digital age.
"I think that my present and former students -- and perhaps other Cornellians who have majored in the humanities or taken some literature courses -- will smile when they read about my teaching and reading philosophies," he said.
Seven birdscapes, all atwitter
A new pop-up book, "Birdscapes: A Pop-Up Celebration of Bird Songs in Stereo Sound" (Chronicle Books LLC, 2008) by Miyoko Chu, director of communications at Cornell's Lab of Ornithology, celebrates diverse bird sounds in contrasting landscapes through art (illustrations by Julia Hargreaves) and audio.
Opening the book triggers 45 seconds of stereo bird songs and calls of recordings recently acquired by the lab's Macaulay Library.
The book's seven elaborately engineered, full-color pop-ups depict dozens of bird species in such North American habitats as grasslands, the Sonoran desert, an eastern deciduous forest, a Pacific seabird colony, the Arctic tundra and a cypress swamp.
Chu, author of "Songbird Journeys: Four Seasons in the Lives of Migratory Birds," includes text about various birds' fragile ecosystems. "We included the sounds of nocturnal fork-tailed and Leach's storm-petrels recorded on Saint Lazaria Island near Sitka, Alaska, just last year. Our recordists lay in sleeping bags with microphones as the air and ground pulsated with the sounds of storm-petrels flying overhead and courting in the burrows below," Chu told Amazon.com.
O magazine, published by Oprah Winfrey, called the book "a chirping, twittering, cawing, trilling love of a pop-up book."
The 18-page book retails for $60 and comes with batteries -- and an off switch.
Fathers demanding rights
A new book by Jocelyn Elise Crowley '92 explores the fathers' rights activist movement in the United States. "Defiant Dads: Fathers' Rights Activists in America" (Cornell University Press, 2008) has been featured -- unusual for a university press title -- on such programs as "Imus in the Morning" and Fox News' "Hannity and Colmes."
Crowley says this burgeoning rights movement gives voice to men who claim that with the breakdown of their own families they have been deprived of access to their children. The mostly white, middle-class rights groups examined by Crowley protest current child-support and child-custody policies and advocate on behalf of legal reforms that will lower fathers' child-support payments and help them obtain automatic joint custody of their children.
The author offers a balanced examination of these groups, based on interviews with more than 150 fathers' rights group members, observations of group meetings, and analyses of rhetoric and advocacy literature.
What did Aretha give Barack on Inauguration Day?
"Nick Salvatore with a copy of 'Singing in a Strange Land'" See larger image
What was in the beautifully blue-bowed box for President Barack Obama? On Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, Aretha Franklin presented Obama with 17 recorded sermons on CDs from her father (Rev. Dr. C.L. Franklin's collection of homilies recorded at the New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit, where he was the pastor for 38 years), a small bible engraved with a personal message and a copy of her father's biography, "Singing in a Strange Land: C.L. Franklin, the Black Church and the Transformation of America" (Little Brown & Company, 2005) by Nick Salvatore, author, historian and ILR School professor at Cornell. The copy presented to Obama was signed and inscribed by Salvatore for the occasion.
While Salvatore did not want to divulge the exact wording of his inscription to the new president, he said it expressed appreciation of how Obama has given renewed meaning to the 137th Psalm, the one that opens "Singing in a Strange Land" and figures prominently at the core of many of C.L. Franklin's sermons and performances.
"I am deeply pleased that Aretha Franklin included my biography of her father in her gift to the president -- and honored at the thought that, when time permits, he may indeed read it," Salvatore said.