'Sweet Valley Confidential: Ten Years Later'

I’ve been looking forward to this release for several months, so I was understandably eager to get a copy as soon as it was released. Sweet Valley Confidential: Ten Years Later begins with the Wakefield twins separated – Elizabeth in New York and Jessica back home in Sweet Valley. We find out that Elizabeth has been victim of some unforgivable betrayal, and Jessica is desperate to contact her. The betrayal? Jessica has stolen Elizabeth’s longtime boyfriend Todd Wilkins!

Francine Pascal and St. Martin’s Press released the first chapter online months prior to the release of the book, and I have to say, this betrayal of Jessica’s is probably the most obvious twist imaginable. Many of us fell in love with the Sweet Valley that included kidnappings, murder, evil twins and vampires, so this new book is relatively mild in comparison.

Even thou there are many new characters, Pascal features many characters from the original series and updates us on what other folks have been doing. Some fans of the original Sweet Valley High series may be disappointed that some of the old characters are peripheral characters rather than major players in the action, but I think that may be one of the more realistic things about the book. How many of us are still close friends with exactly the same group of people that we knew in high school? Things change, even in Sweet Valley.

'How We Decide' by Jonah Lehrer

Jonah Lehrer’s How we decide initially appealed to me because I have a sibling who is infamously indecisive. But it sat on my Amazon wish list for months until a friend mentioned it and said it was really good. Finally, I picked up the book. Happily, my friend was right; ‘How we decide’ is a fantastic book that discusses the different aspects of decision-making. Lehrer talks about the way the brain works using language that is accessible to people who aren’t experts in psychology; his use of stories and descriptions of studies makes the topic engaging and fun.

I know many people who pride themselves in their ability to make decisions rationally and logically. Although the ability to reason is undeniably important, Lehrer argues that rationality is actually counterproductive when making choices. Rather, Lehrer advocates the use of emotions and intuition when making decisions. Even if a person doesn’t choose to alter his behaviors based on Lehrer’s recommendations, it is still an enjoyable and interesting book.

And regardless of how you feel about football’s Tom Brady, I challenge you to read Lehrer’s anecdote without having him rise in your opinion.

"Pride and Prejudice" Forever. And Ever.

Will the world ever get tired of rewriting Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice? Probably not; this is unfortunate, because it’s already been done about a million times. For those of you who don’t know, Pride and Prejudice is a classic novel about the proud Mr. Darcy who is destined to fall in love with the lively (and prejudiced) Elizabeth Bennet.

Because most of the rewrites of Pride and Prejudice are modern, they are also quite a bit racier. Some stories put Elizabeth and Darcy in modern settings while others are sequels that speculate about the subsequent lives of the characters. All offer dramatically different portrayals of the lives of two of the best known literary figures.

Luckily, Southwestern College’s Library has a variety of different versions to choose from:
The classic: Pride and Prejudice
Sequels: Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife and Darcy & Elizabeth
A Modernization: The Trials of the Honorable F. Darcy

Check with your Librarian if you’re interested in a book from a different location.

New Books - October 15-25

Here are just a few of the new books you'll find in the Dayton Library this week. Enjoy!

Medical
3-2-1 Code It!
Deep Tissue Massage (RM721 .F47 2006)
Kinesiology Foundations for OTAs & PTAs (QP303 .S655 2005)
Review Questions and Answers for Dental Assisting (RK60.5 .F57 2009)
Clinical Evidence Pediatrics (RA440 .A1 2005)
The Secret Language of Eating Disorders (RC552 .E18 C53 1997)

Criminal Justice
Live from Death Row, Mumia Abu-Jamal (HV8699 .U5 A65 1996)
Preparing for Terrorism: an Emergency Services Guide (HV6432 .B82 1998)
A Man Named Dave: a Story of Triumph and Forgiveness (HV883 .C2 P47 1999)

Fiction and Literature
Sounder, William H Armstrong (PZ7 .A73394 So 1969)
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison (PS3563 .O8749 S6 1987)
Beloved, Toni Morrison (PS3563 .O8749 B4 2004)
The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison (PS3563 .O8749 1970)
White Teeth, Zadie Smith (PR6069 .M59 W47 2001)
Naked, David Sedaris (PS3569 .E3248 Z569 1998)
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald (PS3511 .I9 G7 1995)

Other
Ship of Gold: in the Deep Blue Sea (G530 .K56 1999)
Women of the Forest (F2520.1 .M8 M83 1985)
Home Town, Tracy Kidder (F74 .N86 K53 2000)
10 Things You Gotta Know about Your First Year of College (LB2343.3 .M68 2005)
Points of View: Readings in American Government and Politics (JK21 .P59 2004)
Winning at Work Without Losing at Life (HF5386 .A75 1994)
Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem (HQ756 .B57 1995)

Fear of Flying?

The Black Box: All-New Cockpit Voice Recorder Accounts of Inflight Accidents, edited by Malcom MacPherson (TL553.5 .B23 1998). is a collection of transcript excerpts from twenty-eight cockpit voice recorder tapes from the 1980s and '90s. At first the premise of the book seemed unbearably ghoulish. But as a reviewer for The New York Times says, “Once the book has caught your attention, it is hard to throw off its spell."

The editor, a novelist and journalist, began collecting the flight records in a not surprisingly unsuccessful attempt to alleviate his fear of flying. Each chapter contains a description of the situation within and outside the airplane before the accident, excerpts from the actual transcript, and finally an explanation describing what caused the accident and how many people died.

Metal fatigue is the most common cause of the disasters. There are also mid-air collisions, birds, being shot down by the Russians, flying into a mountain, pilot inattention, fires in the cargo hold, and undetermined. One pilot, although aware he was low on fuel, for some reason didn’t want to let the air traffic controllers know this.

The pilots, co-pilots, flight engineers, and flight attendants are reassuringly serious about their work even before the planes get into trouble. In most cases, there’s little banter and a lot of pre-flight checklisting, which would be boring except that we know what the flight crew does not: that really bad trouble is just a few seconds away.

It’s hard for me to imagine how the crew members maintained their composure moments before disaster, but even most of the pilots who are clearly to blame seem relatively unflappable, with only one crew reacting as I would have done:

CAPTAIN: Four twenty-seven, emergency!
COPILOT: [Screams]
CAPTAIN: Pull …
COPILOT: Oh …
CAPTAIN: Pull … Pull …
COPILOT: God …
CAPTAIN: [Screams]
COPILOT: No …

The last chapter is the longest: MacPherson explains that he has ended with the 1989 Sioux City, Iowa, disaster because “of what it says about the professionalism and sometimes heroism or airlines’ crews.” Of the pilot, he says,

He knew the predicament, yet he rose above it, especially when a representative of United Airlines’ System Aircraft Maintenance in San Francisco refused to believe what the crew of Flight 232 was telling him; his insistence that all three hydraulic systems could not have been destroyed became a running joke for the flight crew in the ongoing emergency.

MacPherson points out what we all know—that flying is far safer than driving. There are some years when no one at all dies in a commercial airplane in the United States.The book also confirms something else I’ve long suspected: that flying is much more difficult than driving, and it’s a good thing that the people who do it have a lot of training and experience.

‘The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Manga Edition): An Illustrated Leadership Fable’ by Patrick Lencioni

It is safe to say that I wouldn’t have read this book if it weren’t in graphic novel form. Furthermore, I wouldn’t have read this graphic novel if it weren’t something curriculum-related that I purchased for our library. Lencioni’s story is about a business with disorganized unsuccessful leadership that hires a new CEO to turn the company around. Several meetings take place in which she confronts the tension of the existing management and attempts to teach them to work together effectively.

The end of this book gives specific advice for carrying out the team reformation that the author recommends. It’s difficult to say whether this book would be helpful to me if I were actually in a team leadership position. Most of the advice makes sense and is clearly explained. But is the advice too simple? It seems like some of the things discussed may be obvious, but maybe this is the problem – management techniques that work are so deceptively simple that they get overlooked.

As I’m sure some are aware, Lencioni has written The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (non-Manga edition), on which this edition is based. I can’t comment on how similar the content is, not having read the original. However, as a person who reads very little in the way of business management books, I can say that this is a tolerably entertaining, quick and painless read.

'Life of Pi' by Yann Martel

It feels that many people will have already read the novel Life of Pi, so this review may not be terribly helpful to those people. But I have read this book recently and enjoyed it thoroughly, so there will be a review anyway. Life of Pi is the story of a teenage boy, Pi Patel, who is travelling with his family from Asia to North America when the ship sinks. The ship had also been transporting many of the family’s zoo animals, and four of these animals, a zebra, an orangutan, a hyena and a Bengal tiger, end up on a lifeboat with Pi. After a short time, Pi and the tiger are the only two remaining. Life of Pi is a survival story combined with the unusual element of fear, admiration and love of the Bengal tiger, Robert Parker.

Pi is a very religious boy and though the book is not heavy-handed in this respect, there is frequent evidence of his faith throughout. When looked at in these terms, Pi’s love and fear of Richard Parker elevates the tiger to a deity-like status. By staying by his side during his darkest time, the tiger saves Pi from desperation and certain death. If Martel had written a novel about a shipwreck survivor that saved himself through his own faith in god, this wouldn’t have been an unusual book at all; it is the transfer of religious love to a living being that makes the book uncommonly endearing.

All in all, a wonderful book with a bittersweet ending – C.S. Lewis would have been proud.