ShelfLife@Texas

“The Campus Guide: The University of Texas at Austin” is much more than an overview of UT’s campus. The guide’s introduction presents archival material from the university’s origin as a single building on a hill through the campus’ “shack era” and successive attempts at master planning. It continues with gorgeous full-color photography of today’s beloved campus and unique, three-dimensionally rendered maps that lead the way on tours from the majestic tower at the Main Building to Texas Memorial Stadium; or
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The words people use are like fingerprints, revealing amazing insight into their personalities, emotional health, thinking style, group status and relationships. Social psychologist James W. Pennebaker, uses his groundbreaking research in computational linguistics to analyze pronouns, articles, prepositions, and a handful of other small function words in his latest book “The Secret Life of Pronouns:  What Our Words Say About Us” (Bloomsbury Press, August 2011).

“On their own, function words have very little meaning,” says Pennebaker, the Liberal Arts Foundation Centennial Professor
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Talia Stroud

Fox News, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Rush Limbaugh Show, National Public Radio — with so many options, where do people turn for news?

In her debut book, “Niche News: The Politics of News Choice,” (Oxford University Press, May 2011) Talia Stroud, assistant professor of communication studies in the College of Communication, investigates how people navigate these choices and the political implications that their choice ultimately entails. By combining an analysis of the various
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David Stuart’s new book, titled “The Order of Days: The Maya World and the Truth about 2012,” was just released by Random House. In this book, Stuart takes a hard look at the frenzy over 2012 and offers a fascinating and accurate trip through Mayan culture and belief.

“The Order of Days” establishes how the idea that the “end of the Mayan calendar,” which supposedly heralds the end of our own existence, says far more about our culture than about the
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Alberto Martinez. Photo by Judy Hogan, administrative assistant in the Department of History.

Legend has it Benjamin Franklin ventured out on a stormy day to fly a kite with a lightning rod and a key dangling on the end of the string. When the lightning struck the kite, the powerful bolt charged the metal key. Franklin then touched the key and got zapped, thus proving the electrical nature of lightning.

It is a captivating story. Yet just as Pecos Bill never
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The recent horrific events in Japan were a brutal reminder of just how fragile the human race is. Mother Nature has always been a force to be dealt with; now with our burgeoning population and the rapid urbanization of the planet, her power over our wellbeing is undeniable.

The tragedy in Japan is the most recent on record; however, it follows a decade of destruction. In 2001, the United States experienced a cataclysmic man-made disaster on September 11; in 2004, Asia
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All day, every day, Americans seek information. We research major purchases. We check news and sports. We visit government Web sites for public information and turn to friends for advice about our everyday lives. Although the Internet influences our information-seeking behavior, we gather information from many sources: family and friends, television and radio, books and magazines, experts and community leaders.

In  the newly-published “Everyday Information: The Evolution of Information Seeking in America,” co-edited  by William Aspray, professor in the School of
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While young women’s educational and career opportunities have skyrocketed over the past two decades, their opportunities for stable, long-term relationships have declined, according to the new book “Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate and Think About Marrying,” by University of Texas sociologists Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker.

The book has already received widespread attention, including on CNN, salon.com and The Washington Post. Regnerus, an associate professor in the Department of Sociology, recently sat down with us to discuss
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The 1960s in Central America, as in most parts of the world, was a period of intense political mobilization and social change. In “Arias de don Giovanni” (F&G Editores, June 2010) Arturo Arias, professor of Latin American literature in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, explores the consequences of the Central American diaspora in both the United States and Europe during this time of great transition.

Tracing a series of pivotal events during the 1960s – from the Cuban Revolution to mass exile
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Despite the hyper-visibility of Latinos and Latin American immigrants in recent political debates and popular culture, the daily lives of America’s new “majority minority” remain largely invisible and mischaracterized. Editors Frank Guridy (University of Texas at Austin), Gina Pérez (Oberlin College) and Adrian Burgos, Jr. (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) assemble a collection of essays in “Beyond El Barrio” (NYU Press, Oct. 2010) — that together, provide analyses that not only defy stubborn stereotypes, but also present novel narratives of Latina/o
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