New Arrival: Dave Eggers' A Hologram For The King

A couple of years after The Great Recession’s initial wallop, a “post-modern Willy Loman” careens from day to day in Saudi Arabia, leading a corporate IT team hoping to sell a holographic conferencing system to the country’s king.  Spare prose communicates the protagonist’s and other expatriate’s distracted and defensive disconnection, both from the Very Foreign Culture surrounding them and their own lives.  For the American, emblematic problems wait back home as he waits for the king.

Fans of author Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Zeitoun will find this “Hemingwayesque” prose a departure from those well received works.  A Hologram For The King was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award.

~Joseph Chmura, Assistant Director and Access Services Librarian

interˌdiscipliˈnarity

The Librarians have created a list of databases that are highly interdisciplinary (not general) in nature.  Please explore these databases, found here and let us know what you find!

Alt-Press Watch showcases voices from grassroots newspapers, magazines and journals. The database features over 670,000 articles from more than 230 publications from 1970 to the present.

American Periodicals Series Online™ (APS Online) includes digitized images of the pages of American magazines and journals published from colonial days to the dawn of the 20th century. Titles range from Benjamin Franklin's General Magazine to popular magazines such as Vanity Fair and Ladies' Home Journal to regional and niche publications and journals like The Dial, Puck, and McClure's.

AP Images is a source for original photographs and graphics from the Associated Press, from the present day dating back more than 100 years.

Credo Reference includes the full text of over 350 different reference works (encyclopedias, dictionaries, bilingual dictionaries, biographies, collections of quotations, etc.) containing over 3 million entries. Subject coverage is very broad and includes art, business, geography, history, language, law, literature, medicine, music, philosophy, psychology, religion, science, social sciences, and technology.

LGBT Life with Full Text is a comprehensive index to literature regarding Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender issues and contains full text for more than 130 LGBT journals, magazines and regional newspapers, as well as more than 170 full-text monographs/books. 

Music Online: Listening Package is a streaming audio collection of 140,000 music tracks from Alexander Street Press and includes: American Song, Classical Music Library, Contemporary World Music, Jazz Music Library, and Smithsonian Global Sounds.

VAST has high-quality video content in a broad range of subject areas, such as art, architecture, business, counseling and therapy, dance, economics, education, ethnic studies, ethnography, gay and lesbian studies, health, history, humanities, law and public safety, literature, opera, philosophy, political science, psychology, religion, science, theatre, and women’s studies and includes searchable transcripts and the ability to make custom clips and playlists.

Women’s Studies International covers the core disciplines in Women’s Studies up to the latest scholarship in feminist research and includes more than 586,600 records spanning from 1972 to present. This database supports curriculum development in the areas of sociology, history, political science and economy, public policy, international relations, arts and humanities, business, and education. Over 2,000 periodical sources are represented.