Summer 2009
Welcome to Among Friends
Dear Friend,
A supplement to this electronic newsletter is a special book review group on the goodreads website. You'll find Friends book reviews at www.goodreads.com. We have enjoyed exploring this new site, and we hope you will find it interesting, too. I encourage you to post a review, comment on one already posted and invite your friends to visit the site. If you would rather read book reviews on the Friends website, just click here.
Your comments about our new electronic newsletter will be helpful as we explore additional opportunities to enhance our communication with you. Please forward Among Friends to anyone you know who might be interested in learning more about the Duke Libraries. I hope you are having a good summer, and making time for some wonderful reading.
Sincerely,
Deborah Jakubs
Rita DiGiallonardo Holloway University Librarian and Vice Provost for Library Affairs
Friends Celebrate Libraries at Annual Dinner
The Friends Annual Dinner is held each spring to celebrate the achievements of the Libraries, thank Friends for their support and encourage individuals to become Friends and take an active role in promoting and supporting the Duke Libraries.
The event this year took place on Wednesday, May 13, in the Doris Duke Center at the Sarah P. Duke Gardens. Bland Simpson, Bowman & Gordon Gray Professor of English and Creative Writing, UNC Chapel Hill; author; and longtime member of the Red Clay Ramblers provided the evening's musical entertainment.
During the business portion of the meeting, Andy Armacost, Barbara Collie, Jacqueline Looney, Frances Rollins, Ginger Wilson, Kathy World and undergraduate Arthur Leopold were elected to three-year terms as members of the Friends Executive Committee. Mary Siedow and Leslie Dillon were elected as chair and vice-chair for the 2009-2010 year.
We would like to thank members of the Friends Executive Committee who finished their terms, Robert Bliwise, Barbara Branson (co-chair), Rachel Davies, Elizabeth Dunn, Barbara Fish, Pela Gereffi, and student members Jennifer Welsh (graduate) and Jared Mueller (undergraduate).
We would also like to thank SunTrust Bank, MacThrift Office Furniture, the Gothic Bookshop and Whole Foods for generously supporting the event.
Book Collectors Contest
In alternate years, the Friends of the Duke University Libraries and the Gothic Bookshop co-sponsor the Jeremy North Book Collectors Contest, named for the first manager of the Duke's Gothic Bookshop. The contest recognizes student book collectors with prizes in the form of gift certificates to the Gothic for first and second place in undergraduate and graduate categories. Undergraduate winners receive $500 for first place and $250 for second. Graduate student winners receive $700 for first place and $500 for second. This year the contest judging took place on Friday, April 24, at the Bryan Student Center. Judging the entries in public at the student center for the first time allowed more interaction among students, judges and visitors and provided more visibility for the Friends and the contest.
Friends Executive Committee members Leslie Dillon, Ruth Ross, David Stein and Jennifer Welsh judged the entries and selected the winners. Tyler Huffman won first place in the undergraduate category for his collection titled Islam and the Middle East, and Jessi Laloma was awarded second place in this category for her collection titled Before Lassie, Ther Was Lad: The Works of Albert Payson Terhune. Cynthia Greenlee-Donnell's collection, African Voices, was awarded first place in the graduate category, and Joel Schlosser placed second with his An American Pléaide collection.
Many thanks to all the students who shared their treasures with us. We wish you many, many years of enthusiastic collecting. Thanks also to the Gothic Bookshop at Duke University for co-sponsoring this Friends of the Libraries event.
Helping Students
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As students studied for finals in April, Friends and library staff were preparing special treats for them. On the evening of April 27th, stressed out first-year students were greeted with trays of home baked goodies as they entered Lilly Library on East Campus. The same surprise awaited students studying in Perkins the next evening. Greatly appreciative students gobbled down thousands of delectable sweets on their way to find a quiet study spot. There is no doubt these treats helped make finals a little more bearable. Thank you to all the bakers.
This year, a group of Duke alumni working at Microsoft wanted to do something to help students during exams. After learning about our Friends study breaks, they chose to make a gift to sponsor part of the event. We appreciate Microsoft's support, and the continued. dedication of our bakers
If you are interested in baking for study breaks, we can always use more treats, please contact Lizzy Mottern in the Library Development Office, lizzy.mottern@duke.edu or (919) 660-5856.
Visit the Libraries Virtually
While the Libraries expect to record 2 million visits this year, we realize many have not been able to come to campus since the opening of the Bostock Library and von der Heyden Pavilion in 2005 and the 2008 inauguration of the Link and the transformed floors 2-4 of Perkins.
To share these exciting developments, we have produced a virtual tour of the Perkins Library complex. Just click the link to the left to watch the tour. Students say that the physical transformation of the Libraries has fostered a strong collaborative energy that is more visible here than anywhere else on campus.
As you take the virtual tour, you will see that many of the Libraries’ most iconic spaces have been preserved as we have transformed and created new ones. We hope you will be struck by the beautiful, light-filled study spaces, the areas designed to encourage collaboration, and the way in which the enhancements improve the accessibility of collections.
It is not surprising to learn the Perkins and Bostock libraries and von der Heyden Pavilion are among the most popular places on the Duke campus. In fact, students responding to a 2008 Princeton Review survey ranked Duke’s libraries #3 in the “Best College Library” category. Take a minute and see why.
Support the Libraries
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This spring the Libraries developed an e-solicitation which was emailed to our supporters to encourage contributions. We love the end result and want to share it with you, just click on the link at left to see the campaign.
When you make a gift to the Libraries, you are supporting the acquisition of new materials as well as rare books and manuscripts, services to students and faculty, preservation of collections, and investment in new technology. Make a gift to the Libraries and transform lives.
Next time you make a gift, check out our new library gift form . It was developed as part of our e-solicitation.
Recommended by a Friend
Welcome to the summer 2009 book recommendations. Some interesting and timely books are featured below. These book notes may also be found on goodreads.com in a more interactive format. Goodreads offers the opportunity for readers to post comments, start discussions, add reviews, and share reviews electronically with others.
Special thanks for our contributors. We are always seeking entries for upcoming issues. If you have a book you would like to review for us to share with others, contact Lizzy Mottern; lizzy.mottern@duke.edu or (919) 660-5856.
If you are interested in purchasing these books, you may do so at Duke's Gothic Bookshop or the Regulator Bookshop on 9th Street in Durham.
The Cellist of Sarajevo
Steven Galloway
2008, Riverhead Press
The Cellist of Sarajevo a novel by Steven Galloway is set during the siege of Sarajevo and recounts a month in the lives of four residents as they struggle to survive the daily “atrocities against humanity” (The Hague charge against the perpetrators). One of the characters, the cellist of the title, is based on an actual musician, Vedran Smailovic, who risked his life on 22 successive days to play Tomasco Albinoni’s Gminor Adagio in the square where 22 people were killed by a shell while waiting in a bread line. The Adagio was (re)constructed from a fragment recovered from the ruins of Dresden. The stories of the four characters as they act out the values they believe are worth living and dying for are, like the Adagio, both emotionally powerful and beautiful.
– Janet Rabil
The Glass House
Daniel Mark Epstein
2009, Louisiana State University Press
This verse collection by noted biographer Daniel Mark Epstein is dedicated to fellow Baltimore author (and Duke University and Library alumna) Anne Tyler. Though some poems share Tyler’s Baltimore settings, Epstein’s subject matter is connection, loss, and the revelation that fresh perception finds in the previously known: “The Messenger” tells Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac from the viewpoint of the angel that intervened to prevent it, and “Eurylochus Recalls the Sirens” contrasts the common sailor’s response to that of Odysseus. The use of classical/mythological, biblical, and more recent literary cannon allusion, combined with traditional poetic forms (tercet, sonnet), produces an effect that is at once both analytical and elegiac in its impact.
His descriptions are marvels:
A luminous nocturnal jellyfish in “The Comb-Bearers” has 'skin thinner than tissue paper, a sheer piece/ Of moonlight on the sea.'
Life in “Dead Reckoning” is 'a voyage to a land unknown/ When nothing had been promised beyond hope.'
A setting crescent moon in “Hope,” 'vanishes … Like the hull of a ship without rigging/ That I was meaning to load with wishes'
And in “The White Quill,” 'A few lyrate leaves rain down on me/ Stems corymbed with winged samara seeds.'
After reading a library copy for this review, I bought the book.
– Mark Kearney
The Great Influenza, The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plaque in History
John Barry
2005, Penguin
This substantial book that exhaustively researched ( 60 pages of notes and bibliography) reads like a massive thriller, compelling the reader forward to find a vaccine/cure for this deadly, ever-mutating virus that killed more people in late 1918 and early 1919 than the plagues of the Middle Ages killed in a century. In the U.S., nearly seven times as many people died of this virus as died in World War I.John Barry, an award-winning historian who has received prizes for both his Rising Tide: the great Mississippi flood of 1927 and how it changed America, and The Great Influenza, weaves multiple strands of narrative together as he details how the epidemic spread and how doctors and researchers joined together to fight this global health crisis at the end of WWI. Barry argues persuasively that society's ability to contain another pandemic is a political as well as medical question. The similarities between the great influenza of 1918 and our current swine flu are chilling.
– Liz Roland
Safe Passage: the remarkable true story of two sisters who rescued Jews from the Nazis
Ida Cook
2008, Harlequin
This incredible book is the story of two young English sisters in London who, in the early 1920s, became instant and passionate opera lovers. With very limited means, they not only began to attend operas but also tried to meet their favorite singers. Over the years they were able to establish friendships with such stars as Galli-Curci, Rosa Ponselle, Ezio Pinza and Maria Callas.
During the mid-thirties the sisters’ opera tours in Germany, Austria and Italy brought them into contact with the desperate refugee problem. These two women who had never been involved in any political activity suddenly found themselves confronted with a situation in which they had acted and responded in a truly heroic manner. They were able to help refugees escape to freedom until World War II began with the German invasion of Poland in 1939.
I highly recommend this story of two opera-lovers who become deeply involved with helping political refugees in Nazi Germany.
- Leland R. Phelps
Cutting for Stone
Abraham Verghese
2009, Alfred A. Knopf
On September 20, 1954, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, a devout Indian Carmelite nun, goes into labor at the mission hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where she has worked for years as a surgical nurse. Her startled colleagues—unaware of her condition—correctly assume that the father is the mission surgeon, Dr. Thomas Stone. The nun dies as her identical twin sons are born, and Dr. Stone, grief-stricken, disappears from the hospital and from Ethiopia. The twins, left without parents, are adopted by the two remaining staff doctors who name the boys Marion and Shiva. The twins grow up nurtured by their adoptive parents and the staff of the mission hospital. It is no surprise that the boys become doctors since from their early teens, they have watched and participated in medical procedures at the hospital. Marion is the narrator of the story, and the reader follows him from his childhood, to his adulthood and his resentment over his brother’s betrayal, and finally to his escape from Ethiopia during a period of civil unrest. Landing in New York and gaining employment at an inner-city hospital, Marion is alone in a strange foreign city, but New York becomes for him a place of healing and reconciliation.
-Ann Wilder
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