About the new book list

11/4/2009

The RSS feeds for the new books list is updated every Wednesday and contains a list of books added to the Ellis Library collection for the last six weeks. The titles are grouped by call number classification, and are listed by week and alphabetically by title.

Books for the most recent weeks are currently on the New Books Shelves inside the north entrance of Ellis Library. They can be checked out.

On monsters : an unnatural history of our worst fears / Stephen T. Asma. (11/4/2009)

11/4/2009

View title at
Amazon.com

Amazon.com Review

Real or imagined, literal or metaphorical, monsters have exerted a dread fascination on the human mind for many centuries. Using philosophical treatises, theological tracts, newspapers, films, and novels, author Stephen T. Asma unpacks traditional monster stories for the clues they offer about the inner logic of our fears and fascinations throughout the ages.

Take a Closer Look at the Mythical Creatures from On Monsters
Click on image to enlarge

The manticore monster was thought to favor human flesh.
Descriptions of the beast appear in the natural history texts of Ctesias, Aristotle, and Pliny.

Call #: GR825 .A86 2009

The natural history of unicorns / Chris Lavers. (10/21/2009)

10/21/2009

View title at
Amazon.com

Review

"The origin of the species and its later fame told in lore and legend is cleverly told." (The Times (London) )

"Chris Lavers traces our fascination with the idea of a one-horned horse back 2,000 years in this scholarly history of unicorns . The history of the unicorn shows human beings at our imaginative best and our manipulative worst." (Daily Telegraph (London) )

"Chris Lavers has done it again. A fascinating, intelligent and unusual book. From the first page I was completely hooked." (Pat Shipman, author of Femme Fatale )

"A mind opening work of intricate scholarship. If unicorns do exist I hope they never catch one. A great read that will grace my library." (Professor David Bellamy )

"A vivid and highly readable trek following the trail of this elusive beast." (Booklist )

"Intriguing. .The history of a non-existent animal is, by definition, a series of diversions from actuality, and, by reversing that trajectory, Lavers' book takes us to some fascinating places." (Financial Times )

"Lively, compelling, full of anecdote, wry scepticism and an honest humility about the things it is simply impossible for us to know for certain. . . . The book, like its subject, is not quite one thing nor another, but a fascinating hybrid." (The Guardian )

"In this lively survey, Lavers explores the roots and the evolution of Ctesias' elusive beast... Lavers capably balances tales of individual enthusiasts with broader cultural considerations to show how the unicorn's 'connections with our myth-making reveal much about our engagement with the natural world.'" (The New Yorker )

"Lavers ingeniously tracks the myth-making of the unicorn. . . . Lavers's enthusiasm is infectious . . . an elegant, colorful guide to the unicorn's myth, marvel, and the ties that have bound it to human progress." (Kirkus Reviews (Starred) )

"Whimsical, scholarly and continually absorbing." (The Spectator )

Call #: GR830.U6 L38 2009

Images of the wildman in Southeast Asia : an anthropological perspective / Gregory Forth. (9/16/2009)

9/16/2009

View title at
Amazon.com

Product Description

The book examines ‘wildmen’, images of hairy humanlike creatures known to rural villagers and other local people in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. Sometimes described in considerable detail, the creatures are reported as still living or as having survived until recent times. The aim of the book is to discover the source of these representations and their status in local systems of knowledge, partly in relation to distinct categories of spiritual beings, known animals, and other human groups. It explores images of the wildman from throughout Southeast Asia, focusing in particular on the Indonesian islands, and beyond, including the Asian mainland, Africa, North America, Africa, Australia, and Oceania.

The book reveals how, in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, ‘wildmen’ cannot readily be explained as imaginary constructs rooted in cultural values and social institutions, nor as simply another kind of ‘spirit’. Also critically examined is a view of such figures as fundamentally similar expressions of a pan-human mental ‘archetype’. Forth concludes that many Asian and African figures are grounded in experience or memories of anthropoid apes supplemented by encounters with ethnic others. Representations developed among European immigrants (including the North American ‘sasquatch’) are, in part, similarly traceable to an indirect knowledge of primates, informed by long-standing European representations of hairy humans that have coloured western views of non-western peoples and which may themselves originate in ancient experience of apes. At the same time, the book demonstrates how Indonesian and other Malayo-Polynesian images cannot be explained in the same way, and explores the possibility of these reflecting an ancient experience of non-sapiens hominins.

About the Author
University of Alberta, Canada

Call #: GR308 .F67 2008

MU Libraries New Books: Folklore

About the new book list

On monsters : an unnatural history of our worst fears / Stephen T. Asma. (11/4/2009)

Amazon.com Review

The natural history of unicorns / Chris Lavers. (10/21/2009)

Review

Images of the wildman in Southeast Asia : an anthropological perspective / Gregory Forth. (9/16/2009)