Bryan Hull, Assistant Librarian and Head of Digital Publishing recommends: Bruce by Peter Ames Carlin
I’ve been enjoying getting to know “The Boss” better through Peter Carlin’s Bruce. As a longtime Springsteen fan, I tended to think that I had a general idea of who Bruce as a person is. I really only had parts of the story. Bruce goes into detail about the early life, family, early bands, and growing up in Freehold, New Jersey which would become a sometimes idyllic but rough and tumble backdrop for many songs. The book also illustrates how Springsteen would inevitably transition from being a lead guitar prodigy to a stadium sellout front man. Once the book reaches 1973’s Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. the stories become much more familiar and known for most Springsteen fans. For a casual listener or observer, however, Bruce does a great job filling in the gaps between albums and the pop culture phenomenon of the 1970’s and 80’s and the later career journey of Bruce Springsteen.
Carmin I. Smoot, Digital Publishing Program Manager recommends A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe
In a time when the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic continue to shape our lives and the world around us, it is a strange comfort to know that this is by no means a new story.
Daniel Defoe compiled his prescient A Journal of the Plague Year in 1722. Defoe was born in 1660, only a young child at the time that the bubonic plague began to claim so many lives, so the observations were likely borrowed from the journals of his uncle, Henry Foe. Many of these observations from 350 years ago seem eerily familiar- Defoe even advocated for something akin to social distancing. “In a word, they would consider of separating the people into smaller bodies, and removing them in time farther from one another-and not let such a contagion as this, which is indeed chiefly dangerous to collected bodies of people, find a million of people in a body together […]”
A Journal of the Plague Year was a slow-burning read for me, but well worth tackling! I recommend checking it out if you’re interested in reading a highly detailed account of the Great Plague of London, an event that changed the course of world history, and drawing your own comparisons to more recent events.
