News about library resources and services for DePaul University students, faculty, staff, alumni and friends
My colleagues and I often review recently acquired books by our library—most often fiction—for this blog, but this post, in honor of April, National Poetry Month, focuses on a few selected poems. Poetry, as Auden so famously wrote, “makes nothing happen.” And yet, it offers us powerful insights about the
A great read for celebrating Women’s History Month this March is Circe, by author Madeline Miller. Best selling author Miller tells the story of Circe, a witch from Homer’s Odyssey, and re-imagines the story of this relatively minor character. In this novel, Circe lives an unhappy life. Although she is an
March is Women’s History Month, and these exceptional books from the past year explore feminism, gender and women’s history from new perspectives. Reclaiming Our Space: How Black Feminists are Changing the World from the Tweets to the Streets Writer and activist Feminista Jones explains how black feminist thought and theory
Julia Phillips’ debut novel is set on the remote Kamchatka Peninsula in northeast Russia, which is only accessible by sea or air; no roads connect it to the mainland. Readers of Disappearing Earth will spend a year on Kamchatka trying to solve the mystery of two sisters who do not
Author Bina Venkataram’s stellar credentials include teaching in the program on Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, working as a journalist for The New York Times and the Boston Globe, and serving as a senior adviser for climate change innovation in the Obama White House. In this book, she unpacks
Reading Richard Powers’s The Overstory, I was reminded of George Herbert, the 17th-century metaphysical poet and priest, a “devotional lyricist” known for writing “pattern poems,” in which the lines are so arranged that they become visual, “concrete” representations of the subject of the poem. Powers’s novel offers a grand reworking
Early in Tara Westover’s fascinating memoir, we read about a significant moment in her life: when her mother finally decides to file the required paperwork for her children’s birth certificates. At the time, Westover is nine years old (her other siblings are much older), and it takes some effort to
This fascinating story of the rise and fall of Theranos was recently made into a movie for HBO: The Inventor: Out For Blood in Silicon Valley. Theranos is the Silicon Valley start-up that set out to revolutionize medicine. Elizabeth Holmes, the brilliant, charismatic CEO, promised to reinvent the way patients
Milkman, by Anna Burns, is both a fascinating and challenging read: It reaches the mind and the heart but also the marrow. The book is a deep immersion in the sensibilities of the characters living through “the Troubles,” those decades of sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland, during which at least
Shortlisted for the National Book Award last year, Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers tells a story of devastation and loss in Chicago during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. Interwoven with this narrative is a connected story set in modern day Paris, as a woman in her 50s, Fiona, searches for