Need a Little More R&R Before School Starts? Try this!
Aug 18, 2009
Again, by R&R we mean not only rest & relaxation, but also “RECENT & RECOMMENDED”—books and other materials to help you rest and relax! Here are a few of our R&R titles, recently acquired at Miller Library—just waiting for you to check out from the “New Book Display”:
1. Taste of New York: Signature dishes of the best restaurants.
2. The Unlikely Disciple: a sinner’s semester at America’s holiest university.**
3. Handle with Care: a new novel by Jodi Picoult
4. Festive Occasions Cookbook
5. New DVDs (1-week check-out, but renewable): Ratatouille (great for the kids!) Doubt (with Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman): still in processing.
**from Publishers Weekly on Kevin Roose’s The Unlikely Disciple: In what could be described as religious gonzo journalism, Roose documents his experiences as a student for a semester at Liberty University, the largest Christian fundamentalist university in the United States. Coming from progressive Brown University, the author admits that the transition to Liberty, with its iron-clad attempts at controlling student behavior, came with much anxiety. He trains himself to control his foul language and even begins to pray and study the Bible regularly, much to the bewilderment of his liberal Quaker parents. He suffers his way through a course debunking evolution, but finds enjoyment in a Scripture class. Roose may be young—he's a 19-year-old college sophomore—but he writes like a seasoned veteran and obviously enjoys his work. He quickly makes friends at Liberty, but is naïvely stunned and not a little disgusted by their antigay rhetoric. School founder Rev. Jerry Falwell granted Roose an interview for the student newspaper shortly before the famous evangelical's death in May 2007. “Complicated” is how Roose describes Falwell, which is a good descriptor for his undercover student experience.
