UDM Libraries Book of the Week

By Eric Broug

Islamic geometric designs are admired worldwide for their beauty and marvelous intricacy, yet they are seldom understood. In this handsomely illustrated volume, Eric Broug analyzes and explains these complex designs in their historical and physical context.

Broug shows how, over the centuries, craftsmen were able to adorn buildings with wonderful geometric patterns using the simplest of tools and without recourse to mathematical calculations. Design elements created from straight lines and circles were placed in grids and then repeated and varied to generate seemingly limitless arrays of breathtaking patterns.

Chapters are devoted to each of the main families of geometric design—fourfold, fivefold, and sixfold—and to the complex combined patterns. Readers can follow the design processes by which these patterns were created and even learn to reproduce and invent geometric patterns for themselves. Broug’s original drawings accompany photographs of mosques, madrasas, palaces, and tombs from the Islamic world, ranging from North Africa to Iran and Uzbekistan, and from the eighth to the nineteenth centuries.
800 illustrations in color and black and white

CATALOG PAGE

By Hod Lipson and Melba Kurman

Fabricated tells the story of 3D printers, humble manufacturing machines that are bursting out of the factory and into homes, businesses, schools, kitchens, hospitals, even the fashion catwalk. The magic happens when you plug a 3D printer into today’s mind-boggling digital technologies. Add to that the Internet, tiny, low cost electronic circuitry, radical advances in materials science and biotech and voila! The result is an explosion of technological and social innovation.

Fabricated provides readers with practical and imaginative insights to the question “how will 3D printing technologies change my life?” Based on hundreds of hours of research and dozens of interviews with experts from a broad range of industries, Fabricated offers readers an informative, engaging and fast-paced introduction to 3D printing now and in the future.

CATALOG PAGE

Edited by Mark Connelly

Whether we love or hate it, Christmas has always played a special role in the cinema, and Christmas movies like “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Miracle on 34th Street” have a special place in popular affections. They almost constitute a mini-cinematic genre. So what does Christmas in the movies mean to societies across the Anglo-Saxon and European world and what does it have to say about them? The contributors to this book take a good look at popular Christmas films, decoding the messages they convey about preoccupations and attitudes internationally and about the different societies that produce them.

CATALOG PAGE

by Harvey Levenstein

There may be no greater source of anxiety for Americans today than the question of what to eat and drink. Are eggs the perfect protein, or are they cholesterol bombs?  Is red wine good for my heart or bad for my liver? Will pesticides, additives, and processed foods kill me?  Here with some very rare and very welcome advice is food historian Harvey Levenstein: Stop worrying!

In Fear of Food Levenstein reveals the people and interests who have created and exploited these worries, causing an extraordinary number of Americans to allow fear to trump pleasure in dictating their food choices. He tells of the prominent scientists who first warned about deadly germs and poisons in foods, and their successors who charged that processing foods robs them of life-giving vitamins and minerals. These include Nobel Prize–winner Eli Metchnikoff, who advised that yogurt would enable people to live to be 140 by killing the life-threatening germs in their intestines, and Elmer McCollum, the “discoverer” of vitamins, who tailored his warnings about vitamin deficiencies to suit the food producers who funded him. Levenstein also highlights how large food companies have taken advantage of these concerns by marketing their products to combat the fear of the moment. Such examples include the co-opting of the “natural foods” movement, which grew out of the belief that inhabitants of a remote Himalayan Shangri-la enjoyed remarkable health and longevity by avoiding the very kinds of processed food these corporations produced, and the physiologist Ancel Keys, originator of the Mediterranean Diet, who provided the basis for a powerful coalition of scientists, doctors, food producers, and others to convince Americans that high-fat foods were deadly.

In Fear of Food, Levenstein offers a much-needed voice of reason; he expertly questions these stories of constantly changing advice to reveal that there are no hard-and-fast facts when it comes to eating. With this book, he hopes to free us from the fears that cloud so many of our food choices and allow us to finally rediscover the joys of eating something just because it tastes good.

CATALOG PAGE