ShelfLife@Texas

This weekend, be sure to tune in to C-SPAN2 Book TV to watch two University of Texas at Austin professors discuss their books.

American Studies Professor Julia Mickenberg will discuss her book “Tales for Little Rebels” on Sunday, Nov. 13 at 12:45 p.m., and on Monday, Nov. 14 at 12:45 p.m.

Synopsis: Rather than teaching children to obey authority, to conform, or to seek redemption through prayer, 20th century leftists encouraged children to question the authority of those in power. “Tales for Little Rebels”
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The South has always been celebrated for its food. From collard greens and okra to heaping plates of biscuits and gravy, Southern food is as much a state of mind as it is a matter of geography.

Combining the study of food culture with gender studies, Elizabeth Engelhardt, associate professor of American studies, explores the many hidden culinary contours of Southern life below and beyond the Mason-Dixon Line.

Digging deep into community cookbooks, letters, diaries, and other archival materials, Engelhardt describes the
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Book lovers, foodies, artists and scholars will partake in an annual rite of fall here in Austin: The Texas Book Festival. The 16th annual Texas Book Festival will take place in and around the Texas State Capitol and nearby venues on Oct. 22-23.

The lineup includes more than 250 authors, an eclectic mix of top literary names, bestselling novelists, political and nonfiction notables, cookbook superstars, Texas writers, children’s authors and promising newcomers.

The talent pool also includes University of Texas at Austin
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Nina Godiwalla’s memoir of working on Wall Street begins with a sweaty walk to work through New York City, catching her heel in a grate, begging for help from a nearby blood-soaked fishmonger and eventually arriving at the JP Morgan office only to discover that she was at the wrong building.

Little did she know that temperamental high heels would be the least of her troubles in the years ahead.

Godiwalla, BBA ’97, chronicles the rest of her harrowing finance career in
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Since the days of the American Revolution, nation-building has been deeply embedded in America’s DNA. Yet no other country has created more problems for itself and for others by pursuing impractical reconstruction efforts in war-torn nations, argues Jeremi Suri, professor in the Department of History and the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs.

In his new book “Liberty’s Surest Guardian: American Nation-Building from the Founders to Obama,” Suri examines more than 200 years of U.S. policy to explain the successes and failures
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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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Educational psychologist Richard Valencia’s most recent book, “Dismantling Contemporary Deficit Thinking” (Routledge, 2010), was selected by the American Educational Research Association (AERA) for the 2011 Outstanding Book Award.

“Dismantling Contemporary Deficit Thinking” critiques “deficit thinking,” an approach to student academic failure fraught with racial and class bias that places blame upon the student and his or her background. The deficit thinking approach has existed for almost a century and has been applied to American minority students.

Described as a “superlative treatment” of deficit
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Historian Neil Foley’s book, “Quest for Equality: The Failed Promise of Black-Brown Solidarity” (Harvard University Press, May 2010) was selected by the Texas Institute of Letters as the most significant scholarly book for 2010.

“Quest for Equality” examines the complicated relationship between African Americans and Mexican Americans in Texas and California during World War II and the post-war era.

Named by the Huffington Post as one of the 17 “best political and social awareness books of 2010, “Quest for Equality” provides a historical context
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The cover art for “Beyond El Barrio: Everyday Life in Latina/o America” features tall, spindly apartment complexes overlooking a street that disappears into the distance. The buildings are a reflection of barrios themselves: colorful, unbound by straight lines and rigid structures, each one different yet tied together as a community.

Frank Guridy, co-editor of “Beyond El Barrio” (NYU Press, 2010) and associate professor in the Department of History, set out to explore these notions of el barrio as both a place and
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