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Tag: twentieth century

Caroline Maniaque-Benton and Meredith Gaglio, eds. Whole Earth Field Guide

Published by SB on January 1, 2018

Caroline Maniaque-Benton and Meredith Gaglio, eds. Whole Earth Field Guide. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016. xii, 107p., ill. ISBN 9780262529280. US $34.95.

The Whole Earth Field Guide is a heavily illustrated, welcome contribution to the study of the remarkable multiyear enterprise which began humbly in 1968. This book aims “to introduce the reader to the intellectual world to which the Catalog opened a door,” and it looks exclusively to the National Book Award-winning Last Whole Earth Catalog (1971) to do so (ix).

Continue readingCaroline Maniaque-Benton and Meredith Gaglio, eds. Whole Earth Field Guide

Cheryl Knott. Not Free, Not for All: Public Libraries in the Age of Jim Crow

Published by SB on February 24, 2017

Cheryl Knott. Not Free, Not for All: Public Libraries in the Age of Jim Crow. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015. x, 312p., ill. ISBN 9781625341785. US $28.95.

Cheryl Knott’s Not Free, Not For All: Public Libraries in the Age of Jim Crow is a long overdue study that examines twentieth-century African-American information history and counters the fictive image of American public libraries as community spaces accessible to all. Knott argues convincingly that restricted library access for African Americans was a willful act, codified in state legislative policies that were subsequently enforced by Southern librarians.

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Anita Starosta. Form and Instability: Eastern Europe, Literature, Postimperial Difference

Published by CI on November 11, 2016

Anita Starosta. Form and Instability: Eastern Europe, Literature, Postimperial Difference. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016. x, 222 p. ISBN 9780810132023. US $34.95 (paperback).

Europe – that is, its Western half – continues to represent, by way of its literature, a powerful referent of identity for East Europeans. Anita Starosta’s investigation of the novelists’ forays into the existing Western literary frames of authority suggests that East European writers constantly measured themselves by and against Europe. She selected works, mainly in Polish and on Polish culture, by writers of Czech, Hungarian, and Polish descent, to study Europe and readability challenges.

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Mark O’Brien and Felix M. Larkin, eds. Periodicals and Journalism in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Writing Against the Grain

Published by CI on July 3, 2016

Mark O’Brien and Felix M. Larkin, eds. Periodicals and Journalism in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Writing Against the Grain. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2014. 240 p. ISBN: 9781846825248. £47.38 (hardback).

This book is a selection of essays on Irish periodicals and magazines in twentieth-century Ireland, and it is a valuable resource for anyone interested in the public sphere in this country. The introduction makes the point that “there is no genuine freedom of expression in the public sphere unless a wide variety of outlets is available to accommodate those with something to say” (9).

Continue readingMark O’Brien and Felix M. Larkin, eds. Periodicals and Journalism in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Writing Against the Grain