Our holiday gift to you this year? Free books!
We’re placing donated books that won’t be added to our collections on shelves in the Mcnab Reading Room on the 2nd floor of the Killam. Look for the big poster with the kid on the pile of books, and help yourself. Free book covers too!
For serious fashionistas only.
A follow-up to the bestselling “Manolo Blahnik Drawings,” this book presents a collection of Manolo’s celebrated shoe designs. It’s organized thematically to express his interests and passions: art history, architecture, film (including his renowned designs for Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette), theatre, and flora and fauna. All done in shoes. Imelda eat your heart out!
The University of Google: Education in the (Post) Information Age. By Tara Brabazon
“..the internet offers a glut of information on everything-under-the-sun, a mere mouse-click away…We lose the capacity to sift, discard and judge. Information is no longer for social good, but for sale.
Tara Brabazon argues that this information fetish has been profoundly damaging to our learning institutions and to the ambitions of our students and educators. In The University of Google she projects a defiant and passionate vision of education as a pathway to renewal, where research is based on searching and students are on a journey through knowledge, rather than consumers in the shopping centre of cheap ideas.”
Prolific award-winning writer, Dal English instructor, TV broadcaster, publisher and surfer extraordinaire Lesley Choyce is celebrating the publication of two new novels with a double book launch at the Killam Library. (Read the Dal News November 16 interview with Lesley.)
Random: If You Think Life Makes Sense Do Not Read This Book (Red Deer Press), a young adult novel and Raising Orion (Thistledown Press), Choyce’s first novel for adults in over seven years, were both published this October.
Choyce is the author of more than seventy books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction for adults, teens and children. His writing has earned him several awards, including two Dartmouth Book Awards and the Ann Connor Brimer Award for the young adult novel Good Idea Gone Bad (1993). His work has been translated into Spanish, French, Danish and German. He lives and surfs year-round at Lawrencetown Beach N.S.
Thursday November 18, 7:30 pm
Special Collections Reading Room
5th floor, Killam Library
This free event is open to the public. Come join the celebration!
This evening at 7:30 in the Killam Library, writer and filmmaker Shandi Mitchell will be reading excerpts from her novel Under This Unbroken Sky, winner of a Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award, and the Thomas H. Raddall Atlantic Fiction Prize.
Read our own Ian Colford’s review of Under This Unbroken Sky, and the Dal News interview with Shandi.
See you at the reading!
Anuja Siwakoti (standing) and friends with shipment of books
Anuja Siwakoti, the 3rd year Dal student who initiated the Dalhousie chapter of Books With Wings and did the lion’s share of the work, is tired but elated. “We collected, catalogued, labeled and packaged 50 boxes of medical and science textbooks and 50 boxes of chemistry and math textbooks,” she says proudly. “The pick-up truck will deliver our boxes to the Canadian Forces Unit in Montreal. From there, the Canadian Forces will send our boxes to Afghanistan whenever they have free space in their aircraft. “
The Dal Libraries supported the Books With Wings project by housing donation boxes and helping to promote the initiative (see our blog post of April 2010). We’re thrilled to have had the honor of being even a small part of Book With Wings at Dal, from the very beginning to the moment when the loaded truck left the Killam.
And now Anuja, who’s doing a challenging double major in Microbiology and Immunology and Social Anthropology, can get back to focusing on her studies. She has a message for the Dal community: “I would like to thank everyone for their contribution towards this collaborative effort. Your help to support education in the war-ravaged country of Afghanistan will be highly appreciated by students over there who have limited access to textbooks and other educational resources.”
7:30 pm, Thursday October 28
Special Collections Reading Room
5th Floor, Killam Library
494-3615 for more info
The Killam Library is proud to host a reading by the winner of the 2010 Thomas Head Raddall Fiction Award, local writer and filmmaker Shandi Mitchell.
Shandi graduated from Dal with a degree in English and Theatre. Her award-winning short films have been featured at festivals across North America. In 2008, she was awarded the Canada Council’s Victor Martin-Lynch Staunton Endowment in Media Arts.
Her debut novel Under This Unbroken Sky was simultaneously published by Penguin Canada, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (UK) and Harper Collins (US) in August 2009. It has sold in nine countries, including translation rights for Chinese, Hebrew, Dutch and Italian. Under This Unbroken Sky won the 2010 Commonwealth Regional Prize for First Book (Canada/Caribbean), the Thomas Head Raddall Fiction Award, and the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award.
This reading is hosted by Dalhousie University Archives & Special Collections, holders of the Thomas Head Raddall Collection, and is sponsored by the Canadian Literary Collections Project. Visit the CLCP website for further information!
Dalhousie’s reading Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes this fall and maybe some of you were lucky enough to meet the author himself on campus. But did you know that not only has Hill written two other novels—Any Known Blood and Some Great Thing—he’s also the author of a bestselling memoir (Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada) and several non-fiction books, most recently The Deserter’s Tale: the Story of an Ordinary Soldier Who Walked Away from the War in Iraq. All of these are either on the shelf at the Dal Libraries or available through Novanet, so check them out!
The Book of Negroes
PS 8565 I444 B66 2009Any Known Blood
PS 8565 I444 A89 1997Some Great Thing
PS 8565 I444 S6 1992Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada
PS 8565 I444 Z53 2001The Deserter’s Tale: The Story of an Ordinary Soldier Who Walked Away From the War in Iraq
DS 79.76 K494 2007Women of Vision: The Story of the Canadian Negro Women’s Association, 1951-1976
HS 2265 C3 H55 1996Trials and triumphs: The Story of African-Canadians
F 1035 N3 H543 1993
Did you know that May is “Get Caught Reading” month? What have we caught YOU reading this spring? Share your latest find with other book and library lovers!
[Guest post by Anuja Siwakoti]
Hello, my name is Anuja Siwakoti. I am a second year Dal student doing my double major in Microbiology and Immunology and Social Anthropology. I am writing this blog post to notify you about Books With Wings, a collaboration between Canadian students and university students in Afghanistan.
Since 2002, students from ten universities across Canada have been collecting donated textbooks to send via Canadian Forces to universities in Kabul, Kandahar and Herat, working together under the Books with Wings project. As of September 2009, we will have sent over 8500 up-to-date medical books worth nearly $1.4 million to the medical schools of Afghanistan to restructure their libraries destroyed due to war at various times in history and even at present.
Zakia Zahra Biswas, Anuja Siwakoti, Sunisha Neupane, Jason MacGregor (Bruce Bottomley photo)
English
Biochemistry
Business
Computer Science
Dentistry
Education
Engineering
Mathematics
Midwifery
Public Health
Science
Since we want students in developing countries to be updated with recent medical innovations in the Western world, we are collecting health sciences related textbooks such as dentistry, medicine, radiology, nursing, etc. that are published after 2000. However, any year of publication is acceptable for textbooks related to other disciplines. If you’d like to make a donation, please look for the drop-off boxes in the Killam, Sexton and Kellogg libraries.
First and foremost, I would like to thank Dr. Richard Gordon, the initiator of this project at the University of Manitoba, who incorporated students across Canada to contribute for this noble cause. On behalf of the Books With Wings team, I would also like to thank the Dalhousie Libraries for supporting this project. I thank the Chemistry, English, and Sociology and Cultural Anthropology departments for their help in the initiative phase of this project. Last but not least, I am grateful to Sunisha Neupane, Co-Director of this project; Rosie Ashton, medical school representative; and Qura-tul-ain Haider, Zakia Zahra Biswas, Jason MacGregor, Sophie Thapa and Jamie Aaron for contributing their valuable time and efforts towards this project.
If you would like to learn more about us, then please visit the Books With Wings website.
I thank you very much for your support and generosity.
Anuja Siwakoti
Co-director of Books With Wings at Dalhousie University
E-mail : an752929@dal.ca