UDM Libraries Book of the Week

By Richard Bak

Welcome to Detroitland, where award-winning journalist Richard Bak brings to life episodes from roughly a century of Detroit’s colorful history. Bak tackles familiar names like Frank Murphy, the Purple Gang, the Lone Ranger, “Potato Patch” Pingree, and Charles Lindbergh. He also introduces little-known characters like the Black Legion, Detroit’s own version of the Ku Klux Klan; Johnny Miler, the man who walloped Joe Louis in the Brown Bomber’s first-ever amateur fight; patrolman Ben Turpin, the terror of Black Bottom criminals; Sophie Lyons, legendary “Queen of the Underworld” and Detroit philanthropist; and Shorty Long, Brenda Holloway, the Velvettes, and other forgotten Motown artists of the ’60s.

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A rich ninety-minute weave of sounds, rare film clips, stills, and interviews that places the history of jazz into proper perspective. A captivating trek through the stylistic changes that have kept jazz so fresh for all these years. New Orleans traditions, stride, swing, boogie-woogie, big band, jump band, the singers, the dancers, the blues, bebop, Afro-Cuban, cool, free-form. It’s all here.

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By Dave Goulson

Bumblebees are familiar and charismatic insects, occurring throughout much of the world. They are increasingly being used as a model organism for studying a wide range of ecological and behavioural concepts, such as social organization, optimal foraging theories, host-parasite interactions, and pollination. Recently they have become a focus for conservationists due to mounting evidence of range contractions and catastrophic extinctions with some species disappearing from entire continents (e.g. in North America). Only by improving our understanding of their ecology can we devise sensible plans to conserve them. The role of bumblebees as invasive species (e.g. Bombus terrestris in Japan) has also become topical with the growing trade in commercial bumblebee nests for tomato pollination leading to establishment of non-native bumblebees in a number of countries.

Since the publication of the first edition of the book, there have been hundreds of research papers published on bumblebees. There is clearly a continuing need for an affordable, well-illustrated, and appealing text that makes accessible all of the major advances in understanding of the behaviour and ecology of bumblebees that have been made in the last 30 years.

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By Elias Aboujaoude

A penetrating examination of the insidious effects of the Internet on our personalities—online and off. Whether sharing photos or following financial markets, many of us spend a shocking amount of time online. While the Internet can enhance well-being, Elias Aboujaoude has spent years treating patients whose lives have been profoundly disturbed by it. Part of the danger lies in how the Internet allows us to act with exaggerated confidence, sexiness, and charisma. This new self, which Aboujaoude dubs our “e-personality,” manifests itself in every curt email we send, Facebook “friend” we make, and “buy now” button we click. Too potent to be confined online, however, e-personality traits seep offline, too, making us impatient, unfocused, and urge-driven even after we log off. Virtually You uses examples from Aboujaoude’s personal and professional experience to highlight this new phenomenon. The first scrutiny of the virtual world’s transformative power on our psychology, Virtually You shows us how real life is being reconfigured in the image of a chat room, and how our identity increasingly resembles that of our avatar.

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