Readers' Nook

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FICTION

Colson Whitehead Crook manifesto Fic Whitehead
Eliza Jane Brazier Girls and their horses Fic Brazier
Emma Cline The guest Fic Cline
Edgard Telles Ribeiro The impostor Fic Telles Ribeiro
Siddhartha Deb The light at the end of the world Fic Deb
Luna McNamara Psyche and Eros Fic McNamara
Christine Pride You were always mine Fic Pride
Johanna Hedva Your love is not good Fic Hedva
Andrea Lee Red Island house Fic Lee
Kōbō Abe The woman in the dunes Fic Abe
Mikhail Bulgakov Heart of a dog Fic Bulgakov
Helen Schulman Lucky dogs Fic Schulman
Keziah Weir The mythmakers Fic Weir
R F Kuang Yellowface Fic Kuang

Historical Fiction
Heinrich von Kleist Michael Kohlhaas Fic Kleist
Kristin Harmel The Paris daughter Fic Harmel

Mystery, Suspense, Thrillers, Espionage & Intrigue
Chris Offutt Code of the hills Fic Offutt
Riley Sager The only one left Fic Sager
Joe Ide Fixit Fic Ide
Douglas J. Preston The cabinet of Dr. Leng : a Pendergast novel Fic Preston
S. A. Cosby All the sinners bleed Fic Cosby
Lynda La Plante Blunt force Fic La Plante
James Patterson Cross down Fic Patterson
Lynda La Plante Dark rooms Fic La Plante
Lynda La Plante The dirty dozen Fic La Plante
Lynda La Plante Unholy murder Fic La Plante

Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror
J. Zachary Pike Orconomics : a satire Fic Pike
Rebecca Yarros Fourth wing Fic Yarros
Mark J. Mitchell Magic war Fic Mitchell

Comic Books, Graphic Novels & Comic Strips
Junji Itō Uzumaki : spiral into horror 741.5 I893 Comics
Alverne Ball Across the tracks : remembering Greenwood, Black Wall Street, and the Tulsa Race Massacre 976.6 B187 Comics
David Gonzales Homies : a David Gonzales retrospective 741.5 G643 Comics
Charles Addams My crowd 741.5 A22m Comics

Short Stories
Jeffery Renard Allen Fat time and other stories Fic Allen
Julio Cortázar Blow-up, and other stories Fic Cortazar

Universal (Children's)
Fiction

Elaine Dimopoulos The remarkable rescue at Milkweed Meadow U Dimopoulos
J. Albert Mann The degenerates U Mann
Rafael Yockteng Afterward, everything was different : a tale from the Pleistocene U Yockteng
Van G. Garrett Juneteenth U Garrett
Tove Jansson Moomin and the spring surprise U Jansson
Moomin's little book of numbers. U Jansson
Tove Jansson Who will comfort Toffle? : a tale of Moomin Valley U Jansson
A. J. Irving The wishing flower U Irving
Nicola Skinner Starboard U Skinner
Roger Zelazny A night in the lonesome October U Zelazny

EBOOKS
M Ravenel The blackmail
M Dean Wright Welcome, caller
Pete Hegseth Battle for the American mind : uprooting a century of miseducation
Lis Smith Any given Tuesday : a political love story
Stefan Fatsis Word freak : heartbreak, triumph, genius, and obsession in the world of competitive scrabble players
Julio Cortar All fires the fire
Damon Galgut Arctic summer
Damon Galgut The Good Doctor
Damon Galgut In a strange room : three journeys
Damon Galgut The quarry
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight : a new verse translation
Jenna Kutcher How Are You, Really? : Living Your Truth One Answer at a Time.
W S Merwin Summer Doorways : a Memoir
Louise Mey The second woman
Michael A Singer Living untethered beyond the human predicament
David Grohl The storyteller : tales of life and music
Doris Lessing Martha Quest
Evelyn Waugh A handful of dust
Alverne Ball Across the tracks : remembering Greenwood, Black Wall Street, and the Tulsa Race Massacre
James Edward Mills The adventure gap : changing the face of the outdoors
Toni Morrison Beloved : a novel
Henry Threadgill Easily slip into another world : a life in music
Jancee Dunn Hot and bothered : what no one tells you about menopause and how to feel like yourself again
Edward C Baig iPhone for dummies.
David Lindsay-Abaire Kimberly Akimbo : a new musical based on the play David Lindsay-Abaire
Steve Sheinkin Rabbi Harvey rides again : A graphic novel of jewish folktales let loose in the wild west
Ben Judah Fragile empire : how Russia fell in and out of love with Vladimir Putin
E Jean Carroll The cheerleaders
Immanuel Kant The collected works of Immanuel Kant
Linda Joy Myers The forger of Marseille
Randy Schmidt Little girl blue : the life of Karen Carpenter
Immanuel Kant Logic
Yossi Klein Halevi Memoirs of a Jewish extremist : the story of a transformation
Gottlob Frege On sense and reference
Amy Butler Greenfield A perfect red : empire, espionage, and the quest for the color of desire
William Faulkner The Reivers : a reminiscence

The Mechanics Institute Library acquires new books each week. Some you will see on the new books tables, but members often check out some of the most popular books right away. If you do not know how to place a hold on a book, please call us at 415-393-0102 (or send a message to [email protected]). 

Quite a lot of what we think of when we think of "Vikings" comes to us more from popular culture than science or scholarship. Vikings never wore "horned helmets," for example, though we get the image from Richard Wagner who dressed his opera singers in truly mad costumes. Assumptions about Norse society implicit in movies and television shows mostly come to us from 20th and 21st century adaptations of the medieval sagas and not from the sagas themselves.  In short, most of the ideas we have about Vikings are either demonstrably false or unverifiable modern perceptions without evidence to support them. A wonderful antidote for those who have an interest in learning what we can know to be true has recently arrived in the library: The Bones of Birka : unraveling the mystery of a female Viking warrior, by C. M. Surrisi.

A "Trans" Viking? 

I found this a surprisingly quick read. Many may not think of archaeology as a dynamic field of study, but every time an archeologist digs up something new, that find can change or overturn previous ideas and explanations about how people in the past lived and what kind of people they were. Even technological advances, such as DNA testing of minute amounts of organic material still existent on bones, can lead to breakthroughs and brand new insights. This actually happened when scientists subjected the bones of a Viking (Norse) person discovered over a hundred years ago to DNA testing. A body considered since its discovery to be male and, judging from the grave goods, a high status warrior, tested as XX -- no Y chromosome to be found. 

To the surprise of the archaeologists, this discovery exploded through the popular media. They have had to field often contentious questions ever since. A trans Viking?! Really? But what does this DNA test result tell us, beyond the XX chromosome? 

From p. 120:
“A common observation made about the XX result was that the person might have been transgender.” The team didn't outright reject the idea but questioned it. “While we understand this line of thinking in the context of contemporary social debates, it should be remembered that this is a modern politicized, intellectual and Western term, and as such, is problematic (some would say impossible) to apply to people of the remote past. There are many possibilities across a wide gender spectrum, some perhaps unknown to us, but familiar to the people of the time. We do not discount any of them.” [emphasis added]

I cannot think of a better explanation for how we often make the mistake of applying the values, ideologies, customs, social norms and other contemporary frameworks for understanding human behavior to past societies and civilizations we know very little about. 

But this does not stop people from jumping to their own conclusions. In a tour de force of confirmation bias and motivated reasoning, many of those questioning the researchers demonstrate an almost desperate need to dismiss or dispute the fact that a 9th or 10th century society buried a biologically female person with grave goods typical of a warrior (and without any grave goods indicating she was the wife of a warrior).

from p.118-119

“People… do not want to believe that the Vikings buried a female body with all the objects and honors they would a male warrior,” according to Neill Price, leader of the research team. “I still sometimes get questions like, "But can you prove that there wasn't originally a second male body also in the chamber, which has since somehow disappeared?”” I tell them, "No, we can't, but only in the same way that we can't prove there was never a second female body there either. Or three of them in a pile, or an ostrich, and anything else for which there is no evidence whatsoever."

We make progress one discovery at a time. Although this one does not tell us how Vikings constructed gender nor does it give us the full story of all the ways that someone with two X chromosomes made their way through life in Viking society, we do know that earlier depictions of Norse society no longer hold true. 

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NON-FICTION

Arts, Architecture & Crafts
John Rohrbach Speaking with light : contemporary Indigenous photography 779 R739

Biography & Genealogy
Jeremy Denk Every good boy does fine : a love story, in music lessons 780.92 D396
Hannah Pick-Goslar My friend Anne Frank : the inspiring and heartbreaking true story of best friends torn apart and reunited against all odds 940.5318 P594
Gayle Wald Shout, sister, shout! : the untold story of rock-and-roll trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe 780.92 T367
Robert Greenfield True west : Sam Shepard's life, work, and times 812 S547tr

Books, Reading, Publishing, Journalism
James Campbell NB by J. C. : a walk through the Times Literary Supplement 072 C18

Business & Economics
Paul Millerd The pathless path : imagining a new story for work and life 650.1 M652
Marcus Collins For the culture : the power behind what we buy, what we do, and who we want to be 658.8 C712
George F. Gilder Life after capitalism :the meaning of wealth, the future of the economy, and the time theory of money 330.12 G46i
Michael Lind Hell to pay : how the suppression of wages Is destroying America 331.2 L742

Chess
Vinay Bhaṭ How I became a chess grandmaster 794.1092 B575
Experts on the Anti-Sicilian 794.1225 B20 E966
Valeri. Beim The enigma of chess intuition : can you mobilize hidden forces in your chess? 794.1 B422e
Vladimir Tukmakov Risk & bluff in chess : the art of taking calculated risk 794.1 T916r

Food & Drink
Claire Ptak Love is a pink cake 641.8653 P975
Stacey Mei Yan Fong 50 pies, 50 states : an immigrant's love letter to the United States through pie 641.865 F674
Martin Yan Martin Yan's China 641.5951 Y21m
Camper English The ice book : cool cubes, clear spheres, and other chill cocktail crafts 641.874 E361

History
Lesley Ann Richardson Creating beauty from the abyss : the amazing story of Sam Herciger, Auschwitz survivor and artist 940.5318 R521
Carroll Quigley The evolution of civilizations : an introduction to historical analysis 909 Q6
Panama-Pacific International Exposition Company The blue book : a comprehensive official souvenir view book of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition at San Francisco, 1915 ... Official publication. 606.1915 B65b
David Grann The Wager : a tale of shipwreck, mutiny, and murder 910.9164 G759
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad A stranger in your own city : travels in the Middle East's long war 956.7 A136
Alexander Larman The Windsors at war : the King, his brother, and a family divided 940.5341 L326
Mark. Wyman DPs : Europe's displaced persons, 1945-1951 940.53 W984
Christopher Ehret Ancient Africa : a global history, to 300 CE 960 E335

Home & Family Management
Emily Kenway Who cares : the hidden crisis of caregiving, and how we solve it 649.8 K377

Literature & Writing
Agota Kristof The illiterate 848 K929
Shirley Hazzard We need silence to find out what we think : selected essays 824.914 H431

Performing Arts & Music
Sean DeLear I could not believe it : the 1979 teenage diaries of Sean DeLear 780.92 D346
Tina Turner Tina ... : that's my life 780.92 T851

Philosophy, Psychology & Religion
Kate Cooper Queens of a fallen world : the lost women of Augustine's Confessions 242 C776

Politics & Government
Richard Haass The bill of obligations : the ten habits of good citizens 323.6 H1129
Timothy Egan A fever in the heartland : the Ku Klux Klan's plot to take over America, and the woman who stopped them 322.42 E28

Social Sciences & Current Events
Scott J. Shapiro Fancy Bear goes phishing : the dark history of the information age, in five extraordinary hacks 364.16 S529
Judith Lewis Herman Truth and repair : how trauma survivors envision justice 362.88 H551
Jeremiah Moss Feral city : on finding liberation in lockdown New York 307.76 M913
Joëlle Gergis Humanity's moment : a climate scientist's case for hope 363.738 G367
John Perlin A forest journey : the role of trees in the fate of civilization 333.75 P451
Jeff Madrick Invisible Americans : the tragic cost of child poverty 362.5 M183

Travel & Geography
Raymond Hosler Bay Area Bike Rides Deck, Revised Edition : 50 rides for mountain, road, and casual cyclists 917.946 H826
Portugal 914.69 L847
111 places in New York that you must not miss 917.47 O584
Dordogne, Bordeaux & the southwest coast. 914.47 E975