Moon Landing--Astronautics

Title: Moon Landing
Author: Richard Platt & David Hawcock
Call Number: TL789.8.U6A5777 2008 Pages: Pop-up

ISBN: 978-0-7636-4046-0

Review: "This book is packed with amazing details about rockets, mission planning, space suits, and more!"--Cover back.

Beyond the Zonules of Zinn--Human Anatomy

Title: Beyond the Zonules of Zinn
Author: David Bainbridge
Call Number: QM451B35 2008
ISBN: 978-0-674-02610-0
Pages: 338 pgs., with index.

Review:
From Publishers Weekly
In this geographical tour of the nervous system, readers will find an entertaining and enlightening history of neuroscience and a look at the anatomy of the brain. A clinical anatomist at Cambridge University, Bainbridge (The X in Sex) has had ample opportunity to examine the brain and ponder its origins and function—as well as the many strange and marvelous names of its parts, labeled long before anyone knew what they did. The Zonules of Zinn—a name from an ancient map, from a souk, from another galaxy—are small fibers attached to the lens of the eye that adjust it for seeing at different distances. Bainbridge discusses the history and function of each name: in addition to hillocks and pyramids are the Almonds (amygdalae), part of the emotional response system, and the locus coeruleus, or sky-blue place, involved in alertness and stress. Your brain even has its own Area 51, thanks to a German neuroanatomist whose system of numbering different regions of the cerebral cortex is still used today. Bainbridge's tour also includes short discussions of nervous system disorders like multiple sclerosis and epilepsy. The book's relaxed pace, interesting tangents and broad coverage make this book eminently suitable for anyone curious about the brain. 30 b&w illus.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Hidden on the Mountain--World History/Asia

Title: Hidden on the Mountain
Authors: Deborah Durland Desaix and Karen Gray Ruelle
Call Number: DS135F89
ISBN: 0823419282
Pgs.: 275

Review:
From Booklist
In this inspiring photo-essay, the authors tell an amazing rescue story about a Nazi occupied Protestant community in south-central France that pulled together to save several thousand Jewish children from the Holocaust. Kathy Kacer's Hiding Edith (2006) tells a similar story from the viewpoint of one child. More detailed, this account is based on extensive research and interviews with 30 survivors and rescuers, who recall in diary-style entries how it was. Many readers will focus on the dramatic overviews and commentaries, but the personal details, accompanied by black-and-white photos, are unforgettable, too: living with fear; waiting for a letter ("Why haven't Mama and Pap sent for me?"); escaping to Switzerland. The research is a big part of the book, and the authors have provided extensive documentation as well as time lines, maps, bibliographies, and source notes that can help researchers find out more. Readers slightly younger and older than the target audience will find this compelling, too. Pair it with Carol Matas' novelization of the story, Greater than Angels (1998). Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

The Great Emergence--Christianity

Title: The Great Emergence
Author: Phyllis Tickle
Call Number: BR121.3T53 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8010-1313-3
Pages: 172 with index


Review: From Booklist
*Starred Review* Long an astute observer of religion, Tickle examines a phenomenon she refers to as the Great Emergence, a once-every-500-years trend within Christianity, in which a new and “more vital” form of the religion emerges. She believes such a development is happening now. To make her case, she examines the complex history of Christianity from Copernicus’ heretical idea that the earth circled the sun to the sixteenth-century Great Reformation to the Catholic Counter-Reformation. She also examines the effect on religion of great nineteenth- and twentieth-century cultural and social upheavals including those wrought by Darwin’s Origin of Species; Faraday’s field theory, which became foundational for the technology we all take for granted today; and the theories of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Albert Einstein, and Joseph Campbell. She explores the impact that the rise of the automobile has on Christian worship and church service while also making brief forays into the origins of Pentecostalism, the influence of Karl Marx, Buddhism, Alcoholics Anonymous, recreational drug use, and the changing roles of women and, hence, the notion of the traditional family, in society since World War II. Somehow all these diverse strands come together in a seamless fabric that, at fewer than 200 pages, is small but full of big ideas, a remarkable achievement of synthesis and thoughtful reflections. --June Sawyers

Unaccustomed Earth--American Literature

Title: Unaccustomed Earth
Author: Jhumpa Lahiri
Call Number: PS3562.A316U53 2008

Pages: 333 pgs.
ISBN: 978-0-307-26573-9

Review: From Booklist
*Starred Review* Following her thoughtful first novel, The Namesake (2003), which has been made into a meditative film, Lahiri returns to the short story, the form that earned her the Pulitzer Prize for her debut, Interpreter of Maladies (1999). The tight arc of a story is perfect for Lahiri’s keen sense of life’s abrupt and painful changes, and her avid eye for telling details. This collection’s five powerful stories and haunting triptych of tales about the fates of two Bengali families in America map the perplexing hidden forces that pull families asunder and undermine marriages. “Unaccustomed Earth,” the title story, dramatizes the divide between immigrant parents and their American-raised children, and is the first of several scathing inquiries into the lack of deep-down understanding and trust in a marriage between a Bengali and non-Bengali. An inspired miniaturist, Lahiri creates a lexicon of loaded images. A hole burned in a dressy skirt suggests vulnerability and the need to accept imperfection. Van Eyck’s famous painting, The Arnolfini Marriage, is a template for a tale contrasting marital expectations with the reality of familial relationships. A collapsed balloon is emblematic of failure. A lost bangle is shorthand for disaster. Lahiri’s emotionally and culturally astute short stories (ideal for people with limited time for pleasure reading and a hunger for serious literature) are surprising, aesthetically marvelous, and shaped by a sure and provocative sense of inevitability. --Donna Seaman