UDM Libraries Book of the Week

The Tainted Gift: The Disease Method of Frontier Expansion by Barbara Alice Mann The speculation that the United States did infect Indian populations has long been a source of both outrage and skepticism. Now there is an exhaustively researched exploration of an issue that continues to haunt U.S.-Native American relations. Barbara Alice Mann’s The Tainted Gift: The Disease Method of Frontier Expansion offers riveting accounts of four specific incidents: The 1763 smallpox epidemic among native peoples in Ohio during the...

Future of the internet–and how to stop it by Jonathan Zittrain This extraordinary book explains the engine that has catapulted the Internet from backwater to ubiquity—and reveals that it is sputtering precisely because of its runaway success. With the unwitting help of its users, the generative Internet is on a path to a lockdown, ending its cycle of innovation—and facilitating unsettling new kinds of control. IPods, iPhones, Xboxes, and TiVos represent the first wave of Internet-centered products that can’t be...

Test Tube Families: Why the Fertility Market Needs Legal Regulation by Naomi Cahn The birth of the first test tube baby in 1978 focused attention on the sweeping advances in assisted reproductive technology (ART), which is now a multi-billion-dollar business in the United States. Sperm and eggs are bought and sold in a market that has few barriers to its skyrocketing growth. While ART has been an invaluable gift to thousands of people, creating new families, the use of someone...

The Praeger Handbook of Play Across the Life Cycle: Fun from Infancy to Old Age by Luciano L’Abate Most American adults have little respect for play, for themselves or, increasingly, for their children. Are we losing anything with this attitude? Yes, says longtime clinical psychologist Luciano L’Abate. In a book that has a message for us all, L’Abate presents research showing that play, as one scholar put it, “is not a luxury, but rather a crucial dynamic of healthy physical,...