Shelf Life
Surfing, plane crashes, Baltimore families, flu pandemics, survival traits, attention spans and infographics. Very different topics that all have two things in common: They are in today’s column, but more importantly, they have never been checked out! We have discovered these “hidden gems” on our shelves and are delighted to share them with you this month—which just so happens to be Get Caught Reading Month.
“Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life” by William Finnegan is primarily about surfing, but it is also the story of growing up in the 1960s and ’70s. It is the story of a childhood spent going to school barefoot in Hawaii. After that came a move to the West Coast, where Finnegan grew to adulthood in and around the water. He has a passion for chasing waves and gliding over huge walls of water, riding on a thin piece of polyurethane. You don’t have to be a surfer to enjoy this amazingly good writer: a memoir, an obsession, a way of life that’s long gone.
More adventures, but from a colder climate, in “81 Days Below Zero: The Incredible Survival Story of a World War II Pilot in Alaska’s Frozen Wilderness” by Brian Murphy. Leon Crane was a city kid from Philadelphia when his plane crashed in the Yukon. He was the only survivor. With just a knife and a parachute, the Army aviator had to learn how to stay alive
in December of 1943.
A harsh story of endurance makes some of us turn to a cozy family melodrama, and Anne Tyler weaves a wonderful story in “A Spool of Blue Thread.” The Whitshank family is a large middle-class Baltimore clan: grandparents Red and Abby, their four grown children and many grandchildren. Their rambling old home is the center of Whitshank life and everything that happens there— it’s a great choice if you like multi-generational stories about families.
“The Dog Stars” by Peter Heller takes us into a post-apocalyptic future where families have virtually disappeared. However, there’s Hig, a survivor hoping to find others like himself who were somehow immune. Since the worldwide flu pandemic, Hig is alone except for his dog, Jasper. Their home is an abandoned airport, where Hig occasionally takes a small plane out, scouting for other survivors. Sounds
gloomy, but it’s not without a ray of hope amid all the disaster.
Speaking of hope, the human race has come a long way since prehistoric days—and maybe we should have stayed there. That is what one doctor believes, arguing that the attributes that originally made us stronger are now wiping us out in “Too Much of a Good Thing: How Four Key Survival Traits are Now Killing Us“by Dr. Lee Goldman. His theory states that our four crucial prehistoric survival traits—appetite, thirst, fear and blood clotting—are no longer necessary in today’s world and are the main cause of human disease and death.
Survival in business today means standing out in a crowd and getting your message out. How do you do it? Learn how in “Captivology: The Science of Capturing People’s Attention” by Pen Parr. The human attention span is bombarded with so much information that it simply can’t keep up, but using triggers to appeal to their attention will help you succeed.
If too much information sounds familiar, you might want to contain it with an infographic. Data, numbers, statistics sometimes seem dull or overwhelming. That’s where infographics are a handy tool. They bring data to life and make everything more colorful, fun and engaging. Take a look at some especially interesting ones in “The Infographic Guide to Life, the Universe and Everything” by Thomas Eaton.
Hopefully one of these titles sounds interesting enough to take a chance on a book that has never been checked out! There are even more choices on display in the library, so come see us and pick out a summer read to take wherever you may go. Don’t wait! Get caught reading one of our hidden gems this summer. You may be the very first person to check it out of the library!
(Lauri Wilson is the cataloging and digital content librarian and Philip Shackelford is the library director at South Arkansas Community College.)