THE FRIDAY LIST
Every week, new books and eBooks are arriving at RLB Library! Below are a few highlighted titles that are placed in the 1st floor leisure reading kiosk. There you’ll also find past The Friday List titles, but there are many more that we just don’t have room to show off. So make sure to browse the stacks and explore our eBook collection, where you’ll be sure to find something to read for class assignments, your own personal enrichment, or just to have some fun!
Morningside : the 1979 Greensboro massacre and the struggle for an American city’s soul, by Aran Shetterly, 2024
On November 3, 1979, as activist Nelson Johnson assembled people for a march adjacent to Morningside Homes in Greensboro, North Carolina, gunshots rang out. A caravan of Klansmen and Neo-Nazis sped from the scene, leaving behind five dead. Known as the “Greensboro Massacre,” the event and its aftermath encapsulate the racial conflict, economic anxiety, clash of ideologies, and toxic mix of corruption and conspiracy that roiled American democracy then–and threaten it today. In 88 seconds, one Southern city shattered over irreconcilable visions of America’s past and future. When the shooters are acquitted in the courts, Reverend Johnson, his wife Joyce, and their allies, at odds with the police and the Greensboro establishment, sought alternative forms of justice. As the Johnsons rebuilt their lives after 1979, they found inspiration in Nelson Mandela’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Martin Luther King Jr’s concept of Beloved Community and insist that only by facing history’s hardest truths can healing come to the city they refuse to give up on. This intimate, deeply researched, and heart-stopping account draws upon survivor interviews, court documents, and the files from one of the largest investigations in FBI history. The persistent mysteries of the case touch deep cultural insecurities and contradictions about race and class. A quintessentially American story, Morningside explores the courage required to make change and the evolving pursuit of a more inclusive and equal future.
Nothing stays put : the life and poetry of Amy Clampitt, by Willard Spiegelman, 2023
With the publication of her first book of poems, at the age of sixty-three, Amy Clampitt rose meteorically to fame, launching herself from obscurity to the upper ranks of American poetry all but overnight, and living a whirlwind eleven years until her death in 1994. Here we have the first full-length study of this patron saint of late bloomers-of her poetry, and of the lifetime it took her to find the true form for her words. “For the ocean, nothing / is beneath consideration,” Clampitt writes in her canonical poem “Beach Glass”-neither is it for her biographer, the renowned poetry scholar Willard Spiegelman, who in this Iowan Quaker, born to a family of farmers in 1920, discovers a woman of dazzling intellect, staunch progressive politics, and an inexhaustible sense of wonder for the world and the words we’ve invented to describe it. Giving equal weight to the life and the poetry, Spiegelman untangles Clampitt’s famously allusive lines to reveal the experiences they emerged from, pulling the curtain back on her nearly four decades of artistic anonymity, and in doing so assembling a rich period piece of Manhattan during the days in which Clampitt worked for Oxford University Press and the National Audubon Society-writing cheery, discursive office memos, and two novels that no one would publish, before finding her stride in verse. Nothing Stays Put is a gift to poetry fans, an inspiration to artists striving at any age, and an ode to this most unlikely of literary celebrities, who would publish five acclaimed books and win a MacArthur “Genius Grant” nearly all in the final decade of her life.
The pursuit of happiness : how classical writers on virtue inspired the lives of the founders and defined America, by Jeffrey Rosen, 2024
The Declaration of Independence identified ‘the pursuit of happiness’ as one of our unalienable rights, along with life and liberty. Jeffrey Rosen profiles six of the most influential founders–Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton–to show what pursuing happiness meant in their lives. By reading the classical Greek and Roman moral philosophers who inspired the Founders, Rosen shows us how they understood the pursuit of happiness as a quest for being good, not feeling good–the pursuit of lifelong virtue, not short-term pleasure. Among those virtues were the habits of industry, temperance, moderation, and sincerity, which the Founders viewed as part of a daily struggle for self-improvement, character development, and calm self-mastery. They believed that political self-government required personal self-government. For all six Founders, the pursuit of virtue was incompatible with enslavement of African Americans, although the Virginians betrayed their own principles.
Social media and youth mental health, edited by Vicki Harrison, Anne Collier, and Steven Adelsheim, 2025
This text demonstrates the influence that social media has in all aspects of young lives and summarizes the latest research findings on more than a dozen different aspects of social media as they relate to youth mental health. It is divided into two sections: Part 1 examines youth and social media use through multiple lenses of adolescent development, and Part 2 considers social media’s clinical applications and implications for youth. The goal is to provide a comprehensive look at the impact of social media on the mental health of young people today and a foundational framework from which mental health professionals, policymakers, industry leaders, and researchers can consider a renewed phase of innovation that puts youth health and well-being at the forefront.