Posts tagged with non-fiction in Blog Lost in the Stacks

A new book on diversity and inclusion in higher education.

Heidi Waleson, opera critic for the Wall Street Journal, provides an in-depth history of the New York City Opera from its founding, through 70 years of ups and downs, and on to its declaration of bankruptcy in 2013 and the aftermath.

In Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, Maryanne Wolf discusses the impact of reading digital content on the neural processing in the brain, deep reading, and empathy, among other topics.

This summer NPR's Science Friday Book Club is reading Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time.

Scottish journalist Alan Taylor writes about his friendship with Muriel Spark, author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, during the last decade and a half of her life. We learn about her life in rural Tuscany, her estrangement from her only son, her complex feelings about her native Scotland, and the teacher who inspired the character of Miss Brodie.

Elephant Company by Vicki Constantine Croke is a biography of "Elephant Bill" James Howard Williams and the hundreds of elephants he worked with in Burma in the first half of the last century.

Han’s book provides insight into current events—Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, Russian propaganda, etc.—Big Data is the new Big Brother and it is Big Business. All of our sharing, all of our liking, all of the tracking of our every digitally connected movement (both voluntary and involuntary) has created the digital panopticon. We are transparent, we are quantified, we are stored and retrieved, we are added and reduced. We are packages of data to be bought and sold. But, Big Data is a Smart Power. It is friendly and it is Likeable. The power of Big Data is that it knows us and increasingly it can shape and predict our behavior.

Reading Austen in America is an in-depth study of Jane Austen's earliest American readers. Author Juliette Wells focuses on the 1816 Philadelphia edition of Emma, the only edition of one of Austen's works to be published in the U.S. during her lifetime. Only six copies of this edition are known to exist today. Wells writes about the lives of the original owners of these copies, and their reactions to Austen's novels and characters. Later she discusses two transatlantic friendships that developed through a mutual love of Austen's works.

Written by leading authorities in their given fields, each volume in Oxford University Press' What Everyone Needs to Know(tm) series offers a balanced and authoritative primer on complex current event issues and countries.

Jane Austen in Performance is a study of Jane Austen's enduring popularity, from the 19th century to the present day. Author Marina Cano discusses such topics as the use of Jane Austen by the women's suffrage movement, Austen's popularity during and immediately after World War I, film and theatrical adaptations of her works, and fan fiction based on her novels.