This week is the Binns Lecture on the Sacred and Secular, and Power and Justice in Society. The guest speaker will be Dr. Amy Jill Levine, who holds a B.A. from Smith College, an M.A. and Ph.D. from Duke University, and an honorary Doctor of Ministry from the University of Richmond. Her most recent publications include The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (Harper San Francisco, 2006), the edited collection, The Historical Jesus in Context (Princeton University Press, 2006) and the fourteen-volume series, Feminist Companions to the New Testament and Early Christian Writings (Continuum). She is committed to eliminating anti-Jewish, sexist, and homophobic theologies.
The Panel Discussion will be in White Science Room 107 on Tuesday, October 28th, at 3:30 p.m. The moderator will be Dr. Chance, and the discussion will be "What Kind of Jew Was the Apostle Paul?"
On Tuesday October 28th at 7:30 p.m. Dr. Amy Jill Levine will be giving the lecture on "Understanding the Jewish Jesus" in Gano, and on Wednesday, October 29th at 10:15 she will be speaking on "The Women Who Followed Jesus."
We have a number of Dr. Levine's books in the library, I would like to invite everyone to come and browse some of her works before the lectures. They are on display on the counter past the circulation desk.

(Information on Dr. Levine taken from http://www.vanderbilt.edu/gradschool/religion/faculty/facultypages/levine.html).

Happy Fall Break!

Since I think everyone is ready for a break, today's blog will be about some fun and interesting facts about books and authors. I am always excited to learn something new, and share the knowledge with others, and these are some things I never knew:

Agatha Christie's fictional character Hercule Poirot is the only fictional character ever to be honored with an obituary on the front page of The New York Times.

Agatha Christie is the top-selling English-language author of all time. She wrote 78 mystery novels that have sold an estimated 2,000,000,000 copies.

Author Dr. Seuss wrote the book "Green Eggs and Ham" because the editor made him a bet that he could not write a book, which contained less than fifty words.

During his entire lifetime, Herman Melville's timeless classic of the sea, "Moby Dick," sold only 3,715 copies.

Ernest Vincent Wright wrote a fifty thousand-word novel, "Gadsby," without any word containing the letter "e."

General Lew Wallace's best seller Ben Hur was the first work of fiction to be blessed by a pope.

George Orwell's book "Animal Farm" was turned down many times by different publishers. One of them actually said, "it was impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.A."

In 1998, Ten Speed Press publishing company published a book, "The Eat A Bug Cookbook" by David George Gordon that contains over 33 bug recipes.

Keeping Warm With an Axe, is the title of a real how-to book.

The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. has the world's largest collection of comic books with over 5,000 titles and 100,000 issues.

The Main Library at Indiana University sinks over an inch every year because when it was built, engineers failed to take into account the weight of all the books that would occupy the building.

Shakespeare used around 29,000 different words in his plays. About 10,000 of those words had never previously been used in any surviving English literature. Around 6,000 words only appear once.

The Guinness Book of World Records, first published in 1955, got into itself nineteen years later, in 1974, by setting a record as the fastest-selling book in the world.

Emily Dickinson wrote over 1,800 poems. Only seven were published in her lifetime, all without her consent.

Sources Cited:
http://www.interesting-facts.net/
http://www.dysan.net/weird/show/646.html
http://www.sentex.net/~ajy/facts/literature.html

Dr. Niall Ferguson is the guest speaker for the Hall Distinguished Visiting Professor Lecture on October 16th at 7:30 p.m. His topic will be "Sinking Globalization: What Could Go Wrong?" In Curry Library, we have a section featuring Dr. Niall, who is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, in anticipation of the upcoming event. Five of his books are on display, which are part of the Curry Library's collection. There are also articles he has published, and a book and magazine in which he is featured.


We have had some questions lately regarding EReserve, so I wanted to take some time this week to explain how to access the EReserve collection. EReserve is a collection of PDF documents that are made available to students by the professors. The professor can upload an article or other material to EReserve through Curry Library. Here is the process to access these documents:

• To access this material, you will go to Curry Library's home page online, and click on "EReserve" under "Quick Links." This will take you to the EReserve log-in page.
• Once you are on the page, you will click on "the "Electronic Reserves and Reserves Pages" link. It will take a few seconds for the pages to load.
• Once the page has loaded, you can search by "course page," or choose by "Department," or "Instructor." I have generally found that browsing by Department is the easiest.
• When you have found the course you are looking for, click on the course link under "Course Number." At this time, it will ask you for your password. The password is always the current semester abbreviation followed by the last two digits of the year. For example, the password to access documents in this semester would be FA08, for Fall of 2008.
• These documents are in PDF format, and you will be able to open and print the document. Adobe Acrobat Reader is available in a free download at http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html if you do not currently have the software loaded on your computer.
• Then click on the "Accept" button, and the list of EReserve documents for the course selected will be listed. Click on the document you would like to open, and the dialog box will open asking you whether you would like to open or save the document. If you only want to print the document, I recommend clicking "Open," if you want to save the document, save it and you can open it from your computer later on.

You can access these documents from any computer, you do not have to be on a Curry Library computer or even the Jewell network. As always, if you have any questions feel free to contact us for help!

We have new bestsellers!

Curry Library contracts with a company to "rent" newly released books for our Jewell faculty and students. The new books are rotated through our library about every three months, and can be checked out for the same amount of time as books in our regular collection. Some of the authors include Keith Olbermann, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Janet Evanovich, Karl Rove, James Patterson, and Kurt Vonnegut. For all you Vonnegut fans out there, the new Vonnegut book is called "Armageddon in Retrospect" and is a collection of previously unpublished stories, published just this year. So if there is a newly released bestseller on your reading list, make sure you check out our new book section to the left of the front doors. We may just have what you're looking for.

We also have a new book section that Curry Library has purchased, which is located behind the information desk. When Curry Library purchases a new book, it is shelved in the New Books section until it is incorporated into our main collection. This section has many newly released books and bestsellers. There are a lot of interesting new titles, such as Theories of Everything, Arab Comic Strips, and What's so great about Christianity, as well as others that are sure to spark your interest. Come browse these new additions to our collection and you'll be sure to find a great read!