What's hiding in our collection?

This past week, I committed a grave sin. I've done it before, but often for reasons having to do figuring out how to best expand the collection. This time, though, I just wanted to read it and we didn't have the book, so I ...

Well, I ... I ordered it from another university.

Okay, I'm kidding. Truth is, the availability of so many books from so many good universities is one of the Gallaudet University Library's many benefits, and I feel no real shame in taking full advantage of it. In this case, it was Perfectly Reasonable Deviations, a collection of Richard Feynman's personal letters, edited by his daughter.

If you don't know who Richard Feynman (pronounced FINE-man) is, shame on you. He was one of the most significant and well-respected physicists of his time, which actually comprised the majority of the 20th Century -- he was born in 1918 and died in 1988. He started out fairly young, earning his doctorate at Princeton and working at Los Alamos in his 20s, helping the military figure out how to build an atomic bomb during World War II, then moved on to figuring out the fundamentals of several very important aspects of quantum physics. He went on to become one of Caltech's most popular teachers, won a Nobel Prize for some of his work in 1965, and was one of the investigators of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986.

It all sounds relatively pedestrian until you dig into the details of his life, which Perfectly Reasonable Deviations lets you do. For instance, he was also a widely-known bongo player. Mad about bongos, actually. He played them all over the world and once joked that people knew him better for his drumming than his physics. He had two great loves of his life; his first wife died in the 1940s of tuberculosis while he was working at Los Alamos, and he met (and married) his second wife on the spur of the moment in the 1960s and she was with him when he died in 1988, just shy of 70 years old. In the twenty years that separated both wives, though, it is said that he was very popular with the young ladies.

This might sound odd to you, but he was also one of the first scientist-celebrities. Albert Einstein made headlines, but this guy made movies. His Lectures on Physics sold millions of copies on tape and in print, and he had his own television miniseries, where he just stood there and talked about physics. People ate it up; he was a brilliant and engaging teacher who was able to explain some of the most exotic concepts known to modern science (at that time, anyway) to complete laymen. He was the first Carl Sagan, Michio Kaku, and Neil deGrasse Tyson in terms of his recognizability, though much closer to Stephen Hawking in his contributions to quantum physics.

He also had a bit of a Mr. Wizard sensibility; he demonstrated to a Congressional hearing that the Challenger disaster was due in large part to frozen O-rings failing to protect the Shuttle from the superheated gases propelling it upward. How? By dropping a piece of O-ring material in a Styrofoam cup of ice water, then showing how the cold temperature made the O-ring return to its proper shape much more slowly than it should have, a vital characteristic when you don't want multibillion-dollar spacecraft exploding and people dying.

Perfectly Reasonable Deviations emphasizes his popular appeal quite a bit; it includes dozens of fan letters from a wide range of people, from car mechanics to British housewives, all thanking him for making it all perfectly clear to them and asking him questions one wouldn't expect to hear outside of a graduate-level physics course.

Of course, the larger message of Perfectly Reasonable Deviations is subtle: Although Feynman became busier and busier and more and more famous over the fifty-year period covered in the book, he answered almost every single letter personally, albeit occasionally with apologies for taking so much time to respond. His responses nevertheless show that he took the time to read them, think about them, and do his best to answer any questions that came up. And they certainly came up; he responded to questions about anything from the quirks of particle behavior to a father's worries about his science-loving son. The overall impression is one of a very smart, very funny guy who treated complete strangers with the utmost grace.

It's highly recommended if you're curious about the life and mind of one of modern science's seminal figures. No lab-coat-bedecked geek here!

And now, as another brilliant 20th-Century mind once said, on with the opera.

Did you know that Gallaudet University has had a library since 1864? We'll be celebrating our 150th birthday in 2014. One of the biggest advantages of our longevity is that we've had time to collect some truly interesting items, including the occasional 19th-Century specimen.

Those older books can be pretty fragile, though; we do have plenty of cool stuff dating from 1950 up to now. Let's take a look, starting with the magical stuff (literally) and moving to the just plain interesting:

A History of Magic and Experimental Science
This one kind of breaks the rule -- the first volume was published in 1923, but the last was published in 1958. The title constitutes an interesting juxtaposition, doesn't it? In general, this series of historical investigations covers the transition from superstition and magical thinking to the scientific method, starting with the Roman Empire (Volume 1, The first thirteen centuries of our era) and ending with the dawning of the Age of Enlightenment (Volume 8, The seventeenth century). It's a fascinating look at the history of our civilization and the foundations of the rationalism so venerated in some circles today.

The Magician, the Witch, and the Law
Another historical tome, this one focuses more specifically on medieval witchcraft and the effect it had on society and the legal code -- such as it was in a feudal age. It examines how magic in general influenced public thinking, analyzing public discourse and how leaders took advantage of the superstitious to achieve their own ends -- and how the witches and magicians of the time took advantage of this same credulity to achieve their own. It also goes into some detail about how medieval witchery clashed with the Inquisition and the tragic results.

Magic: A Reference Guide
Because I am hilarious like that, we'll wrap up the conjuration with a book on prestidigitation: stage magic. This book is a terrific look into how something that may appear on stage to be utterly unexplainable is actually totally rational; it's all a matter of manipulating objects, the audience, and the situation. It's a fascinating read!

How to Enjoy Ballet
I have no real interest in ballet or learning how to enjoy it, but isn't the title great? In all seriousness, ballet is one of the most difficult forms of dancing; it's highly reliant on a combination of technically-adept execution and aesthetic appeal. Not only are there specific moves, foot placements, and arm positions, but a dancer needs to be able to follow the music and transition from one position to another as smoothly and elegantly as possible. Like figure-skating, it's a much-misunderstood but extremely complex form of expression, and some people need help understanding it. This book is a great place to start!

Contemporary Hermeneutics
It's not the most welcoming of titles, I agree; "hermeneutics" is generally defined as the science of exegesis, particularly of spiritual writings. In this book, though, it's placed in an architectural context on a continuum from Pre-Classicism all the way up to Ecoism. It discusses how buildings are interpreted, often in terms of the prevailing beliefs of the time. For example, Thomas Jefferson's mansion in Virginia, Monticello, was designed in the Palladian tradition, which was heavily reliant on geometry, symmetry, and the designs of ancient Greek temples. That one of our founding fathers chose to build a house that resembled, in some ways, a three-thousand-year-old temple suggests that he saw some essential similarities between ancient Greek society and the civilization he was trying to build. It's a very fascinating book, especially when you get up into the incredible mishmash of architectural philosophies represented by early-20th-Century New York.

Soviet Economic Progress: Because of, or in Spite of, the Government
Part of the reason I find this book interesting is the perception I have of US-USSR relations around 1957, when this book was published. It just feels as though both countries were completely closed off to one another, their motives inscrutable to us, ours untrustworthy to them. Intellectually, though -- and partly because of this book -- I understand that that simply wasn't true. In fact, in Perfectly Reasonable Deviations, reviewed above, there are several letters between Dr. Feynman and the Soviets as he repeatedly declines their invitations to participate in a symposium in Leningrad. There was plenty of information exchange between both countries, regardless of how hostile both governments were toward one another.

After Hamelin
This one's a lot newer; published in 2000, it's a novel about an old woman who tells a story about the Pied Piper of Hamelin. If you're not familiar with the story, the town of Hamelin had a serious rat problem, and they hired the Pied Piper to use his magical pipe to lure all the rats away. However, when he was done, the town refused to pay him, so in revenge, he pulled out his pipe and took all the children away, and they were never seen again. That's the basic story as most people know it; in After Hamelin, the old woman reveals a new fact: one child stayed behind. The Pied Piper couldn't lure her away because she was deaf! Terrific book.

Face Reading
This is a cool book! It relies on the art of physiognomy: determining aspects of personality based on one's facial shape and features. It's an ancient Chinese art (one of many, it sometimes seems) known as siang mien. Your ears can predict your future (how does that work for deaf people, I wonder ... ), and various facial features can impute information about one's sexuality, success in relationships, and the outcome of each year of a person's life. There's some bona-fide medical stuff in there too: some diseases are indicated, first and foremost, by changes in facial characteristics, like the loss of eyebrow hair, changes in the shape of the nose, lip coloration, and the structure of the eye.

I think we'll stop here -- it's an interesting mishmash of stuff I've dug up. There are many more books like these throughout the collection; an hour's worth of browsing can yield some serious serendipity if you're after the weird and offbeat.

As a reminder: Next week, no post. I'll be at the big, giant ALA conference. The following week, you'll get an on-the-ground report from your friendly neighborhood librarian!

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Question of the Week
The Library printer I was using jammed! What do I do?
The first thing you should do is tell the person who's working at the Service Desk so he or she can fix it. If you're really pressed for time, you can also switch to the other printer. That's why we have two; sometimes things don't work quite right with one, so we have the other one as a backup.