UDM Libraries Book of the Week

By Micheal A. Nielsen In Reinventing Discovery, Michael Nielsen argues that we are living at the dawn of the most dramatic change in science in more than 300 years. This change is being driven by powerful new cognitive tools, enabled by the internet, which are greatly accelerating scientific discovery. There are many books about how the internet is changing business or the workplace or government. But this is the first book about something much more fundamental: how the internet is...

By Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum The first-ever history of MTV’s first decade. In the beginning, nobody thought it would survive. Record labels were skeptical and cable operators were dismissive-perhaps rightfully so. MTV had an inventory of just one hundred clips, most by fringe British and Australian bands. The channel was available in only a few cities and towns. On the night the network launched, staffers celebrated at a bar in New Jersey because no Manhattan cable operator carried MTV....

By David O. Stewart In this vivid and brilliant biography, David Stewart describes Aaron Burr, the third vice president, as a daring and perhaps deluded figure who shook the nation’s foundations in its earliest, most vulnerable decades. In 1805, the United States was not twenty years old, an unformed infant. The government consisted of a few hundred people. The immense frontier swallowed up a tiny army of 3,300 soldiers. Following the Louisiana Purchase, no one even knew where the nation’s...

By Elizabeth Taylor Dowling Paul Jennings was born into slavery on the plantation of James and Dolley Madison in Virginia, later becoming part of the Madison household staff at the White House. Once finally emancipated by Senator Daniel Webster later in life, he would give an aged and impoverished Dolley Madison, his former owner, money from his own pocket, write the first White House memoir, and see his sons fight with the Union Army in the Civil War. He died...