There’s an interesting profile of and a link to audio of an interview with Emily Monosson, editor of Motherhood, the Elephant in the Laboratory: Women Scientists Speak Out at Blue Planet Almanac: Dr. Emily Monosson, Neighborhood Toxicologist.

Mitch Horowitz (author of Occult America) included Pioneer Prophetess: Jemima Wilkinson, the Publick Universal Friend by Herbert A. Wisbey Jr. in his list of Esoteric Classics on BoingBoing on October 1. Horowitz writes:

Pioneer Prophetess by Herbert A. Wisbey. Jr.
A painstakingly researched biography of one of the least-known but widely influential occult figures in American history: the Publick Universal Friend, a spirit channeler who became the nation’s first female religious leader in 1776.

The October 4 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle featured an article about Counter Culture: The American Coffee Shop Waitress by Candacy A. Taylor. Read it here.

Recent arrivals in our warehouse include:

Merlin: Knowledge and Power through the Ages by Stephen Knight
Changing the Course of AIDS: Peer Education in South Africa and Its Lessons for the Global Crisis by David Dickinson

Nice notice of Counter Culture: The American Coffee Shop Waitress by Candacy A. Taylor in “The Best In . . .” column of the Wall Street Journal on September 19:

CAREER WAITRESSES One of the most delightful books to cross our desks this summer is titled “Counter Culture: The American Coffee Shop Waitress.” The author, Candacy A. Taylor, a photographer and writer, traveled more than 26,000 miles, interviewing “lifers” (waitresses age 50 and older, primarily) in diners and coffee shops across the U.S. The result is a series of striking portraits and remarkable profiles—a look, in Ms. Taylor’s words, at an “overlooked group of working women who…do more than just serve food. They are part psychiatrist, part grandmother, part friend.” A wonderful read.

The October 1 issue of Library Journal contains the following glowing review of On the Irish Waterfront: The Crusader, the Movie, and the Soul of the Port of New York by James T. Fisher:

“Fisher captures with great clarity and encyclopedic detail the multilayered and fascinating history of the New York-New Jersey waterfront depicted in Elia Kazan’s Oscar-winning 1954 film On the Waterfront. Fisher’s impeccable research delves into the real-life stories behind the characters, particularly Pete Corridan, the crusading Catholic priest who tried to reform the longshoremen’s union and the recently deceased Budd Schulberg, who adapted Malcolm Johnson’s 1949 Pulitzer Prize-winning “Crime on the Waterfront” newspaper series for the screen. Fisher considers every angle of the story astutely and meticulously, setting it well in its mid-20th-century American context. This engaging narrative is essential reading for both labor historians and cinema buffs, plus anyone studying the waterfront, working-class and immigrant history, anticommunism, blacklisting, and the House Un-American Activities Committee.”—Donna L. Davey, NYU Library

The Asia Society has announced the winner and honorable mentions for its inaugural Bernard Schwartz Book Award. The winner of the 2009 award is Tearing Apart the Land: Islam and Legitimacy in Southern Thailand by Duncan McCargo. Currency and Contest in East Asia: The Great Power Politics of Financial Regionalism by William W. Grimes is one of four books selected for honorable mention by the award jury. Congratulations to them both and to the other authors selected for honorable mention.

Read the entire press release here: Asia Society Announces Winner of 2009 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award

Dani Filc, author of Circles of Exclusion: The Politics of Health Care in Israel guest-blogged about Health Care Lessons from Israel on the Washington Post’s Short Stack blog.

Recent arrivals in our warehouse include:

To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War by Rebecca Manley
The Colony of New Netherland: A Dutch Settlement in Seventeenth-Century America by Jaap Jacobs

Gwynn Dujardin reviews Shakespeare’s Foreign Worlds: National and Transnational Identities in the Elizabethan Age by Carole Levin and John Watkins in the September 24 issue of the Times Higher Education Supplement:

“A lively alternative to the vaunted monograph, and a more focused volume than the usual essay collection, this collaborative inquiry into boundary making and crossing is neither univocal nor thoroughly interdisciplinary. I intend this as a compliment. For it is the juxtaposition of Watkins’ broad-brush style to Levin’s meticulous presentation that brings the possibilities and limits of the contemporary humanities boldly into view. This study courts the academic audience it deserves, yet it might also divert a tax and tuition-paying public fatigued by stories of academic territoriality and often led to mistake intellectual innovation and flexibility for moral laxity and relativism. . . . The disparate entries from two disciplinary “worlds” require the reader to step in and exercise critical discernment. In this respect, with English history the common ground, and Shakespeare a generous host to the discussion, Shakespeare’s Foreign Worlds represents a serious and welcome entry to both academic and public discourse.”

Read the whole review here.