Friday, June 8, 2012

Recent Acquisitions

The books, they do accumulate. Recent additions:

Actual books:
Howe, Daniel Walker (2007) What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. Oxford University Press. Bought to feed my obsession with the Finger Lakes area in the mid-nineteenth century (by going big picture). The title suggests a generalists approach, but the damn thing is over 900 pages. I've not read it cover-to-cover yet, but it's been super handy for dipping-in for references to obscure things like the establishment of the telegraph and the etymology of snail mail.

Sappol, Michael (2002) A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America. Princeton University Press. Borrowed it twice from inter-library loan, finally had to get my own copy. Bioethics, revolutions in medicine, identity, anatomy, and popular fiction... all in here. If you're interested in what the living are doing in the nineteenth century, you should check out their relationships with the dead. Looking forward to reading it again (and having it handy when I need to cite it...)

Saitta, Dean (2007) The Archaeology of Collective Action. University Press of Florida. According to the book cover, it includes archaeology of protests, labor strikes, and slave uprisings. Looking forward to reading it.

Voss, Barbara L. and Eleanor Conlin Casella (2012) The Archaeology of Colonialism: Intimate Encounters and Sexual Effects. Cambridge University Press. This will probably be the first of this batch that I read; I find both Voss' and Casella's work fascinating. Lots of new things to read about in this edited volume that offers exactly what the title describes.

Kindle Accumulations:
The Hunger Games series. I liked it. Haven't seen the movie, but liked the books.

One of Robyn Hobb's Liveship Traders series (can't recall which off the top of my head).

Yep, I read fantasy/sci-fi when not reading archaeology. Don't judge.

2 comments:

JaneB said...

fantasy/sci-fi often seem to have quite an affinity with archaeology to me - it's trying to combine hints to build up a picture of a society, dealing with very different circumstances and yet with people firmly in the middle of them being people, just like we do - only in sci-fi someone's imagination fills in the gaps and knows the answers, if it's any good.

Or that could just be self-justification, since I also read both...

CK said...

No judging here! Just applause.