LibGuides: What's New: What's New

Disability Pride Month

Disability Pride : Dispatches From a Post-ADA World

Since the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) passed over thirty years ago, changes can be seen everywhere - wheelchair ramps, braille signs and menus, public transit lifts, closed captioning on TVs, "reasonable accommodations" by employers such as flextime and telecommuting, and myriad other measures. People under thirty have not lived in a world without these measures - a new generation has grown up with disability rights as the norm.

In Disability Pride, disabled journalist Ben Mattlin weaves together interviews and reportage to introduce a cavalcade of individuals, ideas, and events to trace the generation that came of age after the ADA reshaped America, and how it is influencing the future. He documents how autistic self-advocacy and the neurodivergent movement upended views of those whose brains work differently. He lifts the veil on a thriving disability culture - from social media to high fashion, Hollywood to Broadway - showing how the politics of beauty for those with marginalized body types and facial features are sparking widespread change.

Demystifying Disability : What to Know, What to Say, and How to be an Ally

People with disabilities are the world's largest minority, an estimated 15 percent of the global population. But many of us - disabled and nondisabled alike - don't know how to act, what to say, or how to be an ally to the disability community. Demystifying Disability is a friendly handbook on the important disability issues you need to know about, including: how to appropriately think, talk, and ask about disability; recognizing and avoiding ableism (discrimination toward disabled people); practicing good disability etiquette; ensuring accessibility becomes your standard practice, from everyday communication to planning social events; appreciating disability history and identity; and identifying and speaking up about disability stereotypes in media.

Authored by celebrated disability rights advocate, speaker, and writer Emily Ladau, this practical, intersectional guide offers all readers a welcoming place to understand disability as part of the human experience.

How to ADHD : An Insider's Guide to Working with Your Brain (Not Against It)

In this honest, friendly, and shame-free guide, Jessica McCabe - creator of the award-winning YouTube channel How to ADHD - shares the hard-won insights and practical strategies that have helped her survive, even thrive, in a world not built for her brain. Diagnosed with ADHD at age twelve, Jessica struggled with a brain that she didn't understand. She lost things constantly, couldn't finish projects, and felt like she was putting more effort in than everyone around her while falling further and further behind. At thirty-two years old - broke, divorced, and living with her mom - Jessica decided to look more deeply into her ADHD challenges.

The key to navigating a world not built for the neurodivergent brain, she discovered, isn't to fix or fight against its natural tendencies but to understand and work with them. She explains how ADHD affects everyday life, covering executive function impairments, rejection sensitivity, difficulties with attention regulation, and more. With quotes from Jessica's online community, informative sidebars, and reading shortcuts designed for the neurodivergent reader, How to ADHD will help you recognize your strengths and challenges, tackle "bad brain days," and be kinder to yourself in the process.

Against Technoableism : Rethinking Who Needs Improvement

A manifesto exploding what we think we know about disability, and arguing that disabled people are the real experts when it comes to technology and disability. When bioethicist and professor Ashley Shew became a self-described "hard-of-hearing chemo-brained amputee with Crohn's disease and tinnitus," there was no returning to "normal." Suddenly, well-meaning people called her an "inspiration" while grocery shopping or viewed her as a needy recipient of technological wizardry. Most disabled people don't want what the abled assume they want - nor are they generally asked. Why do abled people frame disability as an individual problem that calls for technological solutions, rather than a social one? In a warm, feisty, opinionated voice and vibrant prose, Shew shows how we can create better narratives and more accessible futures by drawing from the insights of the cross-disability community. For the future is surely disabled - whether through changing climate, new diseases, or even through space travel. It's time we looked closely at how we all think about disability technologies and learn to envision disabilities not as liabilities, but as skill sets enabling all of us to navigate a challenging world.

Parenting at the Intersections : Raising Neurodivergent Children of Color

What if parenting were an act of social justice? In this part storytelling, part self-inquiry book, authors and therapists Jaya Ramesh and Priya Saaral situate parenting children of color with neurodivergence within the context of various interlocking systems of oppression, including settler colonialism, White supremacy, ableism, and capitalism. These intersections engender isolation and loneliness. Using the voices of parents on the front lines and other experts, Parenting at the Intersections offers an invitation to parents to slow down and reflect on their own parenting journeys. When parents can be given space to listen to their own voices, to connect with their children, and find community with others, they can find the most radical ways to disrupt systems of oppression.

New in the Library

Where the Dead Wait by Ally Wilkes
Call Number: PR6123 .I5363 W48 2023

William Day should be an acclaimed Arctic explorer. But after a failed expedition, in which his remaining men only survived by eating their dead comrades, he returned in disgrace.

Thirteen years later, his second-in-command, Jesse Stevens, has gone missing in the same frozen waters. Perhaps this is Day's chance to restore his tarnished reputation by bringing Stevens--the man who's haunted his whole life--back home. But when the rescue mission becomes an uncanny journey into his past, Day must face up to the things he's done.

Abandonment. Betrayal. Cannibalism.

Aboard ship, Day must also contend with unwanted passengers: a reporter obsessively digging up the truth about the first expedition, as well as Stevens's wife, a spirit-medium whose séances both fascinate and frighten. Following a trail of cryptic messages, gaunt bodies, and old bones, their search becomes more and more unnerving. The restless dead are never far behind in this "breathtaking achievement"
My Name Was Eden by Eleanor Barker-White
Call Number: PR6102 .A7637 M9 2024

One twin vanished. The other twin remained. Until now...

When her daughter Eden came home from the hospital, Lucy was profoundly relieved. Eden had survived a drowning incident and had no apparent brain damage, no serious injuries, not even a scratch on her. Lucy fervently welcomed having a second chance at being the good mother she should have been before her teenager's accident.

Until Eden tells her that Eden isn't her name. Until she starts calling herself Eli. The name Lucy had reserved for Eden's unborn twin.

Don't worry, says the doctor. Eden is completely fine, says her husband. Of course I'm fine, Eden says, with that strange new smile of hers. I didn't die. I'm here.

But Lucy knows something's very wrong with Eden. She's not her maddening, complicated teenage girl anymore--this straight-backed, even tempered, steady-eyed child in her house is someone else entirely. Eden, it seems, is the twin who disappeared...
Picture Perfect Autumn by Shelley Noble
Call Number: PS3614 .O253 P53 2023

Dani Campbell is the latest darling of the Manhattan art scene. As a self-taught photographer, Dani is loving every minute of her sudden popularity, but has no idea how she got there, or a clue as to how to stay. On a shoot at an antiques barn, she discovers an envelope of old photos and sees in them what her photos are missing. Her search for their source leads Dani to a small Rhode Island town, a dilapidated American Gothic beach house--and Lawrence Sinclair.

Reclusive and bitter, the last thing eighty-year-old Lawrence wants to think about is photography--the thing that inadvertently led to his son's death and tore his family apart. But Dani is determined and persuasive, and Lawrence can't help but be intrigued by the girl with spiky hair who wants to learn from him, when almost everyone else just wants to relieve him of his substantial fortune.

Dani and Lawrence's mentorship blossoms unexpectedly, but everything is put in jeopardy by the appearance of Lawrence's estranged grandson, Peter. Peter is determined to spend some time reconnecting with his grandfather and to get rid of the supposed fortune hunter after Lawrence's money. But Dani is not what he was expecting, and he soon discovers that they have more things in common than not.

Brought together by fortune, fate, and the ties that bind, all three embark on journeys of discovery and love.
Pelican Girls by Julia Malye
Call Number: PS3613 .A5247 P45 2024

Paris, 1720. La Salpêtrière hospital is in crisis: too many occupants, not enough beds. Halfway across the world, France's colony in the wilds of North America has space to spare and needs families to fill it. So the director of the hospital rounds up nearly a hundred female "volunteers" of childbearing age--orphans, prisoners, and mental patients--to be shipped to New Orleans.

Among this group are three unlikely friends: a sharp-tongued twelve-year old orphan, a mute 'madwoman,' and an accused abortionist. Charlotte, Pétronille, and Geneviève, along with the dozens of other women aboard La Baleine, have no knowledge of what lies ahead and no control over their futures. Strangers brought together by fate, these brave and fierce young women will face extraordinary adversity--pirates, slavedrivers, sickness, war--but also the private trauma of heartbreak and unrequited love, children born and lost, cruelty and unexpected pleasure, and a friendship forged in fire that will sustain through the years.
Starling House by Alix E. Harrow
Call Number: PS3608 .A783854 S73 2023

Opal is a lot of things--orphan, high school dropout, full-time cynic and part-time cashier--but above all, she's determined to find a better life for her younger brother Jasper. One that gets them out of Eden, Kentucky, a town remarkable for only two things: bad luck and E. Starling, the reclusive nineteenth century author of The Underland, who disappeared over a hundred years ago.

All she left behind were dark rumors--and her home. Everyone agrees that it's best to ignore the uncanny mansion and its misanthropic heir, Arthur. Almost everyone, anyway.

Opal has been obsessed with The Underland since she was a child. When she gets the chance to step inside Starling House--and make some extra cash for her brother's escape fund--she can't resist.

But sinister forces are digging deeper into the buried secrets of Starling House, and Arthur's own nightmares have become far too real. As Eden itself seems to be drowning in its own ghosts, Opal realizes that she might finally have found a reason to stick around.

Traffic by Ben Smith
Call Number: PN4867.2 .S65 2023

The origin story of the Age of Disinformation: the candid inside tale of two online media rivals, Jonah Peretti of HuffPost and Buzzfeed and Nick Denton of Gawker Media, whose delirious pursuit of attention at scale in the first two decades of the 21st century helped release the dark forces that would overtake the internet and American society. If attention is the new oil, Ben Smith's Traffic is the story of the time between the first gusher and the impact of climate change.

The curtain opens in Soho in the early 2000's, in that brief moment after the first dotcom crash and before Google, Apple, and Facebook exploded, when it seemed that New York City rather than Silicon Valley might become tech's center of gravity. There, within a few square blocks, Nick Denton's merry band of nihilists at his growing Gawker empire and Jonah Peretti's sunnier crew at HuffPost and Buzzfeed were building the foundations of click-bait media. It was tech's age of innocence: the old establishment might have been discredited by the Iraq War, but digital news would facilitate the spread of truth. Progressive activists were first to the scene, and for a while it seemed they were the scene. After all, didn't they get Barack Obama elected? Ben Smith, who would go on to earn a controversial reputation as Buzzfeed's editor-in-chief, was either there or talked to everyone who was, and in his trademark fashion, he chronicles it all with marvelous lucidity scored with dark wit, sparing no one--and certainly not himself. Denton and Gawker were seen at the time as the black hats, but in Smith's hands the story is much more nuanced: yes, Denton's ideology of radical transparency was problematic, but at least he had an ideology.

Jonah Peretti survived long after Denton's Gawker perished because his focus on clicks was relentlessly content-agnostic. But as with the proverbial sorcerer's apprentice, unintended consequences began to gain momentum. At the heart of Traffic is one of the great ironies of our time: the internet, which was going to help the left remake the world in its image, has become the motive force of right populism. As Smith and his colleagues and rivals thought they were inventing digital media, other figures, flickering around the margins of their story, had different designs. People like Steve Bannon and Andrew Breitbart and Gavin McInnes and Chris Poole, the creator of 4chan, all seemed like minor characters in the narrative in which Nick and Jonah and crew were the stars. By 2020, any reasonable observer might wonder if the opposite wasn't the case. To understand how we got here, "Traffic" is essential and enthralling reading.
A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth by James Tejani
Call Number: HE554.L7 T45 2024

The Port of Los Angeles is all around us. Objects we use on a daily basis pass through it: furniture, apparel, electronics, automobiles, and much more. The busiest container port in the Western hemisphere, it claims one-sixth of all US ocean shipping. Yet despite its centrality to our world, the port and the story of its making have been neglected in histories of the United States. In A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth, historian James Tejani corrects that significant omission, charting the port's rise out of the mud and salt marsh of San Pedro estuary--and showing how the story of the port is the story of modern, globalized America itself. By the mid-nineteenth century, Americans had identified the West Coast as the republic's destiny, a gateway to the riches of the Pacific.

In a narrative spanning decades and stretching to Washington, DC, the Pacific Northwest, Civil War Richmond, Southwest deserts, and even overseas to Europe, Hawaii, and Asia, Tejani demonstrates how San Pedro came to be seen as all-important to the nation's future. It was not virgin land, but dominated by powerful Mexican estates that would not be dislodged easily. Yet American scientists, including the great surveyor George Davidson, imperialist politicians such as Jefferson Davis and William Gwin, and hopeful land speculators, among them the future Union Army general Edward Ord, would wrest control of the estuary, and set the scene for the violence, inequality, and engineering marvels to come. San Pedro was no place for a harbor, Tejani reveals. The port was carved in defiance of nature, using new engineering techniques and massive mechanical dredgers. Business titans such as Collis Huntington and Edward H. Harriman brought their money and corporate influence to the task. But they were outmatched by government reformers, laying the foundations for the port, for the modern city of Los Angeles, and for our globalized world. Interweaving the natural history of San Pedro into this all-too-human history, Tejani vividly describes how a wild coast was made into the engine of American power. A story of imperial dreams and personal ambition, A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth is necessary reading for anyone who seeks to understand what the United States was, what it is now, and what it will be.
I Heard There Was a Secret Chord by Daniel J. Levitin
Call Number: ML3920 .L465 2024

Neuroscientist and New York Times bestselling author of This Is Your Brain on Music Daniel J. Levitin reveals how the deep connections between music and the human brain can be harnessed for healing. Music is perhaps one of humanity's oldest medicines as well as its most universal: from China to the Ottoman Empire, Europe to Africa and pre-colonial South America, cultures have developed rich traditions for using sound and rhythm to ease suffering, spur healing, and calm the mind. Despite this history, musical therapy has long been considered the remit of ancient practice and alternative medicine, if not outright quackery and pseudoscience. In the last decade, however, an overwhelming body of scientific evidence has emerged that persuasively argues music can offer profoundly effective treatment for a whole host of ailments, from Alzheimer's to PTSD, depression, pain, and cognitive injury. It is, in short, one of the most potent and remarkably promising new therapies available today. A work of dazzling ideas, cutting-edge research, and joyful celebration of the human mind, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord explores the critical role music has played in human evolution, illuminating how the story of the human brain is inseparable from the creative enterprise of music that has bound cultures together throughout history. Music insinuates itself into our earliest memories; it is intimately connected to our emotional regulation and cognition; its shared rhythms and sounds are essential to our social behaviors. As neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin demonstrates in this mind-expanding follow-up to This Is Your Brain on Music--which revolutionized our understanding of the neuroscience of song--medical researchers are now finding that these same deep connections can be harnessed to create profound benefits for those both young and old.
Paradise of the Damned by Keith Thomson
Call Number: E129 .R2 T46 2024

As early as 1530, reports of El Dorado, a city of gold in the South American interior, beckoned to European explorers. Whether there was any truth to the stories remained to be seen, but the allure of unimaginable riches was enough to ensnare dozens of would-be heroes and glory hounds in the desperate hunt. Among them was Sir Walter Raleigh: ambitious courtier, confidant to Queen Elizabeth, and, before long, El Dorado fanatic. Entering the Elizabethan court as an upstart from a family whose days of nobility were far behind them, Raleigh used his military acumen, good looks, and sheer audacity to scramble into the limelight. Yet that same swagger proved to be his undoing, as his secret marriage to a lady-in-waiting enraged Queen Elizabeth and landed him in the Tower of London. Between his ensuing grim prospects at court and his underlying lust for adventure, the legend of El Dorado became an unwavering siren song that hypnotized Raleigh. On securing his release, he journeyed across an ocean to find the fabled city, gambling his painstakingly acquired wealth, hard-won domestic bliss, and his very life. What awaited him in the so-called New World were endless miles of hot, dense jungle packed with deadly flora and fauna, warring Spanish conquistadors and Indigenous civilizations, and other unforeseen dangers. Meanwhile, back at home, his multitude of rivals plotted his demise. Paradise of the Damned, like Keith Thomson's critically acclaimed Born to Be Hanged, brings this story to life in lush and captivating detail. The book charts Raleigh's obsessive search for El Dorado--as well as the many doomed expeditions that preceded and accompanied his--providing not only an invaluable history but also a gripping narrative of traveling to the ends of the earth only to realize, too late, that what lies at home is the greatest treasure of all.
The Black Box by Henry Louis Gates
Call Number: E185.625 .G38 2024

A magnificent, foundational reckoning with how Black Americans have used the written word to define and redefine themselves, in resistance to the lies of racism and often in heated disagreement with each other, over the course of the country's history. Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s legendary Harvard introductory course in African American Studies, The Black Box: Writing the Race, is the story of Black self-definition in America through the prism of the writers who have led the way. From Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, to Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison--these writers used words to create a livable world--a "home"--for Black people destined to live out their lives in a bitterly racist society. It is a book grounded in the beautiful irony that a community formed legally and conceptually by its oppressors to justify brutal sub-human bondage, transformed itself through the word into a community whose foundational definition was based on overcoming one of history's most pernicious lies. This collective act of resistance and transcendence is at the heart of its self-definition as a "community." Out of that contested ground has flowered a resilient, creative, powerful, diverse culture formed by people who have often disagreed markedly about what it means to be "Black," and about how best to shape a usable past out of the materials at hand to call into being a more just and equitable future. This is the epic story of how, through essays and speeches, novels, plays, and poems, a long line of creative thinkers has unveiled the contours of--and resisted confinement in--the "black box" inside which this "nation within a nation" has been assigned, willy nilly, from the nation's founding through to today. This is a book that records the compelling saga of the creation of a people.

Noor by Nnedi Okorafor
Call Number: PS3615 .K67 N66 2021

Anwuli Okwudili prefers to be called AO. To her, these initials have always stood for Artificial Organism. AO has never really felt... natural, and that's putting it lightly. Her parents spent most of the days before she was born praying for her peaceful passing because even in-utero she was "wrong". But she lived. Then came the car accident years later that disabled her even further. Yet instead of viewing her strange body the way the world views it, as freakish, unnatural, even the work of the devil, AO embraces all that she is: a woman with a ton of major and necessary body augmentations. And then one day she goes to her local market and everything goes wrong.

Once on the run, she meets a Fulani herdsman named DNA and the race against time across the deserts of Northern Nigeria begins. In a world where all things are streamed, everyone is watching the "reckoning of the murderess and the terrorist" and the "saga of the wicked woman and mad man" unfold. This fast-paced, relentless journey of tribe, destiny, body, and the wonderland of technology revels in the fact that the future sometimes isn't so predictable.

Expect the unaccepted.
The Many Daughters of Afong Moy by Jamie Ford
Call Number: PS3606 .O737 M36 2022

From the New York Times bestselling author of "Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet" comes a powerful novel about the love that binds one family of women across generations.

Dorothy Moy breaks her own heart for a living. As Seattle's former poet laureate, that's how she describes channeling her dissociative episodes and mental breakdowns into her art. But when her five-year-old daughter, Annabel, exhibits the same behavior and begins remembering things and events she has never experienced, Dorothy believes the past has truly come to haunt the present. If she doesn't take radical steps, her daughter will be doomed to face the same debilitating depression that has marked her life. Through epigenetic therapy-an experimental treatment designed to mitigate inherited trauma - Dorothy intimately connects with the past generations of women in her family: Faye Moy, a nurse in Burma serving with the Flying Tigers; Afong Moy, the first Chinese woman to set foot in America; Zoe Moy, a student in England at a famous school with no rules; Lai King Moy, a girl quarantined in San Francisco during a plague epidemic; and Greta Moy, a tech executive with a unique dating app. Through reliving their painful stories, Dorothy comes to understand the true cost of inherited pain. As the past bleeds into the present, Dorothy discovers that trauma isn't the only thing she's inherited. A stranger is searching for her in each time period. A stranger who's loved her through all of her genetic memories. And that person is most certainly not her current husband, Louis. To protect her daughter's future, Dorothy must break the cycle and find a way to cross time and resolve all past traumas, to find the love that has long been waiting, and find peace for Annabel. Even if it means she must sacrifice her only chance at life and happiness.
Two Wrongs Make a Right by Chloe Liese
Call Number: PS3612 .I3357 T86 2022

There's much ado about everything when two adversaries become allies and fake a relationship to fool their meddling friends in this swoony, inclusive reimagining of the Bard's beloved play "Much Ado About Nothing".

Jamie and Bea have nothing in common except a meet-disaster and the mutual understanding that they couldn't be more wrong for each other. But when the people closest to them play Cupid and trick them into dating, Jamie and Bea realize they have something else in common after all - an undeniable need for revenge. Soon their plan is in place: 1. Fake date. Obnoxiously. Convince the meddlers they're madly in love. 2. Break up. Spectacularly. Dash everyone's hopes and put a stop to the matchmaking madness - once and for all. To convince everyone they've actually fallen for each other, Jamie and Bea will have to nail the performance of their lives. But as their final act nears and playing parts becomes easier than not, what once felt fake now seems all too real. What if Cupid's arrow wasn't so off the mark? And what if two wrongs do make a right?
Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde
Call Number: PR6106 .F67 S53 2009

It's summer, it's hot, it's our world, but not as we know it. Entire cities lie buried beneath overgrown fields and forests. Technology from another time litters the landscape, and there is evidence of great upheaval. Welcome to Chromatacia, where for as long as anyone can remember society has been ruled by a Colortocracy. From the underground feedpipes that keep the municipal park green, to the healing hues viewed to cure illness, to a social hierarchy based upon one's limited color perception, society is dominated by color. In this world, you are what you can see.

Eddie Russett wants to move up. He has better-than-average red perception, and he is on a half promise to Constance Oxblood, whose powerful family want the reddest possible son-in-law to strengthen their hue. But once Eddie and his father relocate to the backwater village of East Carmine, these carefully cultivated plans and expectations are quickly upended. In this new town, Eddie must contend with lethal swans, sneaky Yellows, inviolable rules and an enforced marriage to the hideous Violet deMauve. But then he encounters the intriguing Grey named Jane, whose bold defiance of the Rules makes him realize that the apparent peace of his world is as much an illusion as color itself.

As Jane opens Eddie's eyes to the cruel regime that lies behind the gaily painted facade, he realizes that understanding the social order is one thing, but questioning it is quite another. Questions are considered unthinkable rude, and rudeness, along with bad manners, uncouth language and inadequately shined shoes, leads to one place: permanent relocation, or Reboot. Eddie must tread a very fine line between total conformity - accepting the path, partner and career delineated by his hue - and an instinctive curiosity that only gets him into trouble. In a world of enforced simplification, answers are in short supply, and every question begets another: What was the "Something That Happened"? Why does no one ever return from the long-abandoned village of High Saffron? Where did all the spoons go? Is there more to color than just color? Most important, can Eddie ask Jane out for tea and cakes at the Fallen Man before she has him eaten by a carnivorous tree?
The Stormchasers by Jenna Blum
Call Number: PS3602 .L863 S76 2010

As a teenager, Karena Jorge has always been the one to look out for her twin brother, Charles, who suffers from bipolar disorder. But as Charles begins to refuse medication and his manic tendencies worsen, Karena finds herself caught between her loyalty to her brother and her fear for his life. Always obsessed with the weather - enraptured by his own impulses - Charles starts chasing storms, and his behavior grows increasingly erratic... until a terrifying storm chase with Karena ends with deadly consequences, tearing the twins apart and changing their lives forever.

Two decades later, Karena gets a call from a psychiatric ward in Wichita, Kansas, to come pick up her brother, whom she hasn't seen or spoken to for twenty years. She soon discovers that Charles has lied to doctors, taken medication that could make him dangerously manic, and disappeared again. Having exhausted every resource to try and track him down, Karena realizes she has only one last chance of finding him: the storms. Wherever the tornadoes are, that's where he'll be. Karena joins a team of professional storm chasers - passionate adventurers who will transform her life and give her a chance at love and redemption - and embark on an odyssey to find her brother before he reveals the violent secret from their past and does more damage to himself... or to someone else.