The Second Floor Librarians

From Publisher’s Weekly: “Computer scientist and Internet guru Lanier’s fascinating and provocative full-length exploration of the Internet’s problems and potential is destined to become a must-read for both critics and advocates of online-based technology and culture. “

From Kirkus Review: “The story of America’s first hippie commune, as well as American utopianism from the Mayflower to the 1960s and beyond….  A brief, enthralling history of a specific place and time, and of an enduring American idea.“

From Booklist: “Watman… takes us on an exciting and often-eccentric ride through the history (and present) of the moonshine business, at the same time chronicling his own frequently disastrous efforts to produce home-grown alcohol.”

From Publisher’s Weekly: “Invoking Ralph Manheim’s metaphor, Grossman compares the translator’s art to that of the actor transforming a playwright’s words in performance. Thus asserts award-winning translator Grossman…. The art of translation expands our ability to explore through literature the thoughts and feelings of people from another society or another time.“

From Booklist: “As adaptable as they are surreptitious, coyotes particularly love the suburbs, where food is abundant and natural predators rare. For wildlife biologist DeStefano, the coyote is thus an inspirational symbol of nature’s resilience: a wild animal that has learned to thrive amid human sprawl without our consent and in spite of our perennial efforts to banish them from our midst…. DeStefano’s willingness to probe his own ambivalence about the possibilities of coexistence with nature allows this selection to be about much more than just wild canines.”

From Publisher’s Weekly: “…nothing seems to conjure up the seventies quite so effectively as disco. But while the decade’s weltanschauung is often dismissed as merely polyester and platform heels, Echols aims for and thoroughly achieves a range of higher cultural insights. Using an encyclopedic knowledge of the eras biggest stars, she shows how all sorts of musical disco styles played a central role in broadening the contours of blackness, femininity, and male homosexuality in America. “

From Kirkus Review: “A fresh, no-nonsense take on the causes, human cost and continued relevance of the medieval Crusades.”

From Publisher’s Weekly: “Blinded in a senseless attack in his New York home in 1978, de Montalembert, then a filmmaker and painter, was violently forced out of his intensely visual world. In this raw memoir, more a brainstorming session than a narrative, he approaches his new life with stunning directness, navigating the environs of Manhattan and, not much later, Bali and Greenland, with precocious new confidence and ability.”

From Library Journal: “In the 19th-century American West, for a white man to marry a Chinese woman was almost unheard of; to have won her in a poker game was also unusual. Yet here Corbett … tells how the Chinese concubine Polly became the bride of Charles Bemis, a saloon keeper who took her to his remote Idaho gold-mining community. Around this story, Corbett gracefully weaves the history of the Chinese in the 19th-century American West, from the arrival of the first “celestials,” as they were known, through the anti-Chinese agitation at century’s end.”

From Publisher’s Weekly: “In this circuitous, stylish investigation, D’Agata … uses the federal government’s highly controversial (and recently rejected) proposal to entomb the U.S.’s nuclear waste located in Yucca Mountain, near Las Vegas, as his way into a spiraling and subtle examination of the modern city, suicide, linguistics, Edvard Munch’s The Scream, ecological and psychic degradation, and the gulf between information and knowledge.”