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. The last 30 days of new arrivals are listed at the bottom of this post, where you’ll be sure to find something to read for class assignments, your own personal enrichment, or just to have some fun!

Moving pictures: a history of American animation from Gertie to Pixar and beyond by Darl Larsen, 2024.

“A fascinating look at the history of film and television animation in the United States, from the animated comic strips of the early 1900s to the proliferation of animation companies and hit films of the present”– Provided by publisher.

Pardon power : how the pardon system works — and why by Kim Wehle, 2024.

“The president’s power to pardon federal crimes is immense, with roots in ancient notions of mercy and amnesty. However, this power, seemingly boundless under the Constitution, lacks clear constraints, inviting concerns about abuse. Recent discussions in the U.S. Supreme Court have raised alarms about the potential for presidential abuse of pardons, highlighting the need for accountability within the pardon system to uphold the foundational premise that no one is above the law.”– Provided by publisher.

Survival is a promise : the eternal life of Audre Lorde by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, 2024.

“We remember Audre Lorde as an iconic writer and a quotable teacher whose words and face grace T-shirts, nonprofits’ annual reports, and campus diversity-center walls. But even those who are inspired by Lorde’s teachings on ‘the creative power of difference’ may be missing something fundamental about her life and work, and what they can mean for us today. Lorde’s understanding of survival was not simply about getting through to the other side of oppression or being resilient in the face of cancer. It was about the total stakes of what it means to be in relationship with a planet in transformation. The focus on Lorde’s quotable essays, to the neglect of her complex poems, has obscured her deep engagement with the natural world and the planetary dynamics of geology, meteorology, and biology. Lorde’s ecological imagery is not merely metaphorical but rather a literal guide to being of Earth on Earth, to survival–to living the ethics that a Black feminist lesbian warrior poetics demands. In Survival Is a Promise, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, the first researcher to explore the full depths of Lorde’s manuscript archives, illuminates the eternal life of Lorde. Lorde’s life and work become more than sound bites; they become a cosmic force, teaching us the grand contingency of life together on Earth.”–Book jacket flap copy.

What is antiracism? : and why it means anticapitalism by Arun Kundnani, 2023.

This scintillating intellectual and political history provides a new understanding of racism, and a better way to fight it.
Liberals have been arguing for nearly a century that racism is fundamentally an individual problem of extremist beliefs. Responding to Nazism, thinkers like gay rights pioneer Magnus Hirschfeld and anthropologist Ruth Benedict called for teaching people, especially poor people, to be less prejudiced. Here lies the origin of today’s liberal antiracism, from diversity training to Hollywood activism. Meanwhile, a more radical antiracism flowered in the Third World. Anticolonial revolutionaries traced racism to the broad economic and political structures of modernity. Thinkers like C.L.R. James, Claudia Jones, and Frantz Fanon showed how racism was connected to colonialism and capitalism, a perspective adopted even by Martin Luther King.

New Arrivals in the last 30 days:

(Arrivals are sorted by recency and then alphabetically)