Come see what staff members are recommending this month. The staff picks display is on one side of the new materials spinner rack, to the right as you enter the library. We encourage you to check these items out, so don't be shy about taking them right over to the circulation desk. Here are this month's picks with descriptions:

Laura's Picks

Paper Moon by Joe David Brown

Brown's 1971 novel was the basis for the hit film by director Peter Bogdanovich, who provides a new introduction to this reprint. Narrated by 11-year-old Addie Loggins, the story follows her adventures with Long Boy, who may or may not be her father, as they con suckers out of their money in the Depression-era South. Both kids and adults can have great fun with this book. -Library Journal

Stephen Rolfe Powell: glassmaker by Stephen Rolfe Powell

An illustrated introduction to internationally acclaimed glass artist Stephen Rolfe Powell's career, this book charts the evolution of Powell's remarkable body of work. Dazzling photographic close-ups not only detail the luminous murrini patterns that have become Powell's signature but also reveal new ways of appreciating the complex interplay of color and texture in his art. Biographical and analytical essays by Mark Lucas, Laurie Winters, and James Yood explore such topics as the teamwork that is so critical to Powell's unique glassmaking process; his teaching and learning experiences on the road, from the former Soviet Union to Salt Lake City during the Olympics; and the story of the two freak injuries that deeply affected his work and how he thinks about it. Reflections by Kenn Holsten, Marvin Lipofsky, Dante Marioni, Bonnie Marx, John Roush, and Lino Tagliapietra further supplement the book. The book's stunning photographs encourage the viewer to see Powell's work from different viewpoints, and they highlight the unique interactions between transparent, opaque, and translucent glass and Powell's bold color combinations. Stephen Rolfe Powell: Glassmaker vividly portrays the tension and excitement involved in the artist's nontraditional, collaborative approach to working with molten glass. -Publisher Description

In Character: Actors Acting by Howard Schatz

Photographer Schatz (Athlete) turns his lens to actors and challenges them to show off their craft. Many of the names are well known (Chevy Chase, Danny Glover, James Earl Jones, Edie Falco), but Schatz includes character actors as well, making for a balanced gathering. The actors are given a one-line description of a situation and are then photographed close up, with only their heads and hands to use. Although some reactions are broad and make for lively photographs—many people open their mouths so wide that every filling gleams—it's the subtle shifts in expression that stand out. With only their faces available to convey the response to a complex situation, some actors choose to make tiny adjustments; these smaller, more contained expressions are intriguing, as when Robert Vaughn gives only a kindly smile when asked to be "a pediatrician with a bright five-year-old cancer patient who is making up an intriguing fairy tale," or when Ellen Burstyn purses her lips slightly to become "a woman scorned." Beyond giving a glimpse of each actor's range, Schatz includes his subjects' thoughts on their profession. Although his work makes a zesty entry to the coffee table stack, Schatz's portraiture is also a vital, thrilling window into the breadth of an actor's range. -Publishers Weekly

Ara's Picks

Human Accomplishment: the pursuit of excellence in the arts and sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 by Charles Murray

...the book is, more often than not, brilliant. In lucid prose, Murray methodically addresses and refutes most of the predictable counterarguments to his thesis. Taking local biases into account, he assesses various regions' contributions to human accomplishment by tabulating how many figures from a specific part of the world are cited in 50 percent or more of standard encyclopedic compendia, including Islamic and Far Eastern sources. Murray begins his survey at 800 B.C., arguing that innovation before then had been more species-wide than individual, and had tended largely to evanesce rather than become established, other than in China. Summarizing the work of Jared Diamond (of Guns, Germs and Steel fame), he shows that serious innovation requires advanced civilizations of the sort that geography helped bring about earlier in the Middle East and elsewhere than, for example, in Africa. Murray argues that, with the leisure and specialization that agricultural surpluses allowed, China and the Islamic world gave the West a run for its money at first but that ultimately an efflorescence in a few Western European countries after 1400 turned the world upside down. Linear perspective, polyphonic music, the novel, mathematical proof and the scientific method are largely the product of the Dead White Males whom we are taught to assume have been celebrated at the expense of subalterns written out of the history books. -The Washington Post

Jane Eyre: an authoritative text by Charlotte Bronte

The text reprinted in this new edition is that of the 1848 third edition text-the last text corrected by the author. Contexts includes eighteen new selections and two new subsections: "Charlotte and Jane's Illustrated Book"-which includes a letter from Bronte to her publisher W. S. Williams; "Vignettes from Bewick"; and "Charlotte Bronte and Bewick's 'British Birds'"-and "Charlotte Bronte as Governess," which includes letters to Emily Brontë, Ellen Nussey, W. S. Williams, and "The Governess-Grinders." Criticism collects six major essays on Jane Eyre, four of them new to the Third Edition. Contributors include Adrienne Rich, Sandra M. Gilbert, Jerome Beaty, Lisa Sternlieb, Jeffrey Sconce, and Donna Marie Nudd. A new Chronology and updated Selected Bibliography are also included. -Publisher Description

Ran dir. by Akira Kurosawa, DVD and laserdisc

As critic Roger Ebert observed in his original review of Ran, this epic tragedy might have been attempted by a younger director, but only the Japanese master Akira Kurosawa, who made the film at age 75, could bring the requisite experience and maturity to this stunning interpretation of Shakespeare's King Lear. It's a film for the ages--one of the few genuine screen masterpieces--and arguably serves as an artistic summation of the great director's career. In this version of the Shakespeare tragedy, the king is a 16th-century warlord (Tatsuya Nakadai as Lord Hidetora) who decides to retire and divide his kingdom evenly among his three sons. When one son defiantly objects out of loyalty to his father and warns of inevitable sibling rivalry, he is banished and the kingdom is awarded to his compliant siblings. The loyal son's fears are valid: a duplicitous power struggle ensues and the aging warlord witnesses a maelstrom of horrifying death and destruction. Although the film is slow to establish its story, it's clear that Kurosawa, who planned and painstakingly designed the production for 10 years before filming began, was charting a meticulous and tightly formalized dramatic strategy. As familial tensions rise and betrayal sends Lord Hidetora into the throes of escalating madness, Ran (the title is the Japanese character for "chaos" or "rebellion") reaches a fever pitch through epic battles and a fortress assault that is simply one of the most amazing sequences on film. -Review by Jeff Shannon

Romeo and Juliet dir. by Franco Zeffirelli, DVD and VHS

Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 adaptation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet was unique in its day for casting kids in the play's pivotal roles of, well, kids. Seventeen-year-old Leonard Whiting and 15-year-old Olivia Hussey play the titular pair, the Bard's star-crossed lovers who defy a running feud between their families in order to be together in love. Typically played on stage and in previous film productions by adult actors, the innocent look and rawness of Whiting and Hussey resonated at the time with a burgeoning youth movement from San Francisco to Prague. The tragic romance at the center of the story also clicked with anti-authority sentiments, but even without that, Zeffirelli scores points by validating the ideals and passions of strong-willed adolescents. Less successful are scenes requiring the actors to have a fuller grasp of the text, though the best thing going remains the unambiguous duel between Romeo and Tybalt (Michael York). Lavishly photographed by Pasquale de Santis on location in Italy, this Romeo and Juliet brought a different tone and dimension to a story that had become tiresome in reverential presentations. -Review by Tom Keogh

The Annotated Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, ed. by Michael Patrick Hearn

This volume reproduces Denslow's color drawings from the first edition (1900) and includes previously unpublished illustrations. Despite the popularity of that work, whose copyright author and illustrator shared, the two never collaborated again. As the self-styled Royal Historian of Oz, Baum went on to write 13 more Oz adventures; his mantel was then passed to Ruth Plumly Thompson, editor of the Philadelphia Public Ledger's Sunday children's page, who produced an additional 19 titles. John R. Neill, illustrator of all the Oz books but the first, then wrote three more sequels, and since his death in 1943 (Baum died in 1919), numerous others have tried their hand at an Oz story. So powerful was the book's spell that its Russian translator, Aleksandr Volkov, wrote several sequels of his own in Russian for Soviet citizens. Hearn, described by the publisher as "the world's leading Oz scholar," mines The Wizard in this wide-ranging assay of the multifarious strands that fed the imaginations of Baum and Denslow. His explanations and conjectures are enhanced by commentary from such luminaries as Salman Rushdie and Gore Vidal. Of comparable weight to the annotations are the extensive biographical sketches of Baum and Denslow, which elucidate the era in which the book was conceived. The annotations can wander at times, perhaps unavoidably, into tenuous speculation or somewhat irrelevant asides, yet the book is invaluable in pointing out discrepancies that generations of children have wondered about (why the Munchkins live in the east of in some of the Oz books, at other times in the west). And those who know both book and film will delight in discovering why, e.g., the book's Silver Shoes became the film's Ruby Slippers. Hearn, unlike Martin Gardner, the author of The Annotated Alice (LJ 12/99), had many sequels and a film to treat. His painstaking annotation shows us Baum's Wizard as a whiz of a wiz if ever a wiz there was. Highly recommended. -Library Journal

Arsen's Picks

Getting even: why women don't get paid like men-- and what to do about it by Evelyn Murphy

More than 40 years after the Civil Rights Act prohibited gender bias in the workplace, women are still earning almost 25% less than comparably employed men. For Murphy, the reason why is obvious: persistent unintentional, and sometimes even intentional, discrimination. "Today's conventional wisdom about what causes the gender wage gap ignores anything that happens behind employers' doors," Murphy, who has a doctorate in economics and is a former lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, points out. To open those doors, she examined scores of recent lawsuits, which provided her with more than 200 pages worth of stories and statistics guaranteed to convince even the most satisfied working woman that on-the-job discrimination is "still with us, and it's not going away on its own." Murphy, with the help of Graff, a senior correspondent for the American Prospect, analyzes five types of discrimination--"blatant sex discrimination, sexual harassment, workplace sex segregation, everyday discrimination and discrimination against mothers"--and calculates that, over a lifetime, each working woman loses between $700,000 and $2 million because of them--that means less money for bills, homes, investments and retirement plans. As an antidote, the book's last third offers detailed case studies of MIT, Mitsubishi and the state of Minnesota, working sites that, under pressure, implemented large-scale changes to address inequities. Murphy gives readers the tools and the inspiration they'll need to tackle individual discrimination issues without necessarily going to court, but her goal is obviously larger than that. As the president of the WAGE Project, she aims to rile the public at large into action so that the wage gap can be closed, for good, in the next 10 years. -Publishers Weekly

King Corn: You are what you eat dir. by Aaron Wolff

King Corn is a fun and crusading journey into the digestive tract of our fast food nation where one ultra-industrial, pesticide-laden, heavily-subsidized commodity dominates the food pyramid from top to bottom. Fueled by curiosity and a dash of naivete, college buddies Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis return to their ancestral home of Greene, Iowa to figure out how a modest kernel conquered America. With the help of some real farmers, oodles of fertilizer and government aide, and some genetically modified seeds, the friends manage to grow one acre of corn. Along the way, they unlock the hilarious absurdities and scary but hidden truths about America's modern food system in this engrossing and eye-opening documentary. A graceful and frequently humorous film that captures the idiosyncrasies of its characters and never hectors (Salon), King Corn shows how and why whenever you eat a hamburger or drink a soda, you're really consuming ... corn. -Publisher Description

Unchained Memories by Spencer Crew and Cynthia Goodman, book and DVD

The HBO documentary chronicled by this book (and sharing its title) is narrated by Whoopi Goldberg and features dramatic readings by Samuel L. Jackson, Ossie Davis, Oprah Winfrey and others. Yet the testimony and 60 duotones here still speak for themselves. Bringing together more than 40 recollections from the more than 2,000 interviews conducted by the Depression-era WPA, this book acts as a small-scale, superlative introduction to the huge memory repository to be found in libraries and in the recent book-and-audio collection Remembering Slavery, which presents actual WPA slave narrative recordings along with much longer transcriptions. (The WPA's 17-volume set, archived as the Slave Narratives collection, remains available.) After short introductions from Harvard eminence Gates, and Crew and Goodman of the Freedom Center, the editors divide the book into eight chapters ("Slave Auctions," "Work," "Family," "Living Conditions," "Abuse," "Special Occasions," "The Runaway," "Emancipation"), each with an explanatory introduction, that juxtapose slavery-era photos with the recollections of former slaves, sometimes shown in photos from the time of the interview. With its featured selection by Black Expressions, the BOMC and the History Book Club, this title should do exactly as intended: raise individual awareness of the terrible legacy every citizen a former slave-holding country must carry. -Publishers Weekly