Ever wondered what literary treasures are hidden in Eddie’s Library? Now is your chance to use the library as a place for discovering books that you didn’t know were there or didn’t think you’d be interested in.
Every month during term time, we’ll be putting up a new book that we have in our collection; you can have a wee read of the summary here and then if you’re interested, check it out of the library and enjoy.
If you know of a book we should select please do get in touch with and we’ll have a look.
***February 2012***
Bishops and Writers, Hastings, A. (ed.)
Chosen by Peter Allott, von Hugel Institute Researcher
Although it is thirty-five years since it was published, Bishops and Writers provides more than a snapshot of the vibrant intellectual life of St Edmund’s in the 1970s. In 1977 St Edmund’s occupied a central position on the intellectual landscape of English Catholicism. In English Catholic terms it had grown from a small hamlet in 1896 to a academic metropolis by 1977 and several of the contributors to this festschrift were major names in theology and ecclesiastical history.
The book itself is a tribute to Canon Garret Sweeney, Master of St Edmund’s from 1964-1976 and himself the author of four essays in part II of the book. Sweeney had become Master as the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) was coming to a close. The Council introduced sweeping reforms to the Catholic Church and these changes affected St Edmund’s as much as anywhere else. The essays in this book reflect this changed environment and also the attempt to understand how Vatican II was related to the history of the Church since Vatican I (1870-71).
Of the seven contributors, five were Catholic priests and three had been Dean of St Edmund’s. This reflects not only the clerical nature of St Edmund’s at the time but also of Catholic theology. It is therefore a window into a world which has now disappeared.
Nevertheless, many of the issues addressed in the book are of continued relevance to Catholic theology and history and despite its age, the book is not unknown. Indeed, it would be difficult to undertake any serious study of English Catholicism and avoid it. Derek Holmes’ essay on Newman and the First Vatican Council is as relevant now as it was when first published and the greater interest in Newman since his beatification by Pope Benedict XVI as part of his State Visit to the UK in 2010 will undoubtedly serve to resurrect interest in this topic. For the contributors, the seismic shifts in Catholicism were a largely contemporary event, barely history at all. Bernard Sharratt’s essay on English Catholicism in the 1960s is therefore particularly valuable. In addition to the predictable survey of the chaos caused by the papal reiteration of the prohibition on artificial contraception in 1968, Sharratt gives a valuable history of the Catholic struggle to provide education at all levels as well as its difficulty in dealing with an increasingly pluralistic society.
St Edmund’s had itself played a key part in that struggle and the final word is left to Sweeney himself. It was he who presided over the transformation of St Edmund’s in 1965 into a graduate college able to matriculate its own students, and as the author of the most comprehensive history of St Edmund’s yet published, it is hardly surprising that he is at pains to set the historical record straight.
***January 2012***
DISTINCTION: A SOCIAL CRITIQUE OF THE JUDGEMENT OF TASTE by Pierre Bourdieu (shelf mark 306.0944)
Chosen by Parul Bhandari PhD Student
I am sure many have wondered, many a more times, ‘what exactly is this French Culture about’? ‘The obsession with good food and good health?’ Pierre Bourdieu provides one of the most interesting analyses of these various conundrums about the French culture. Prescribed as an academic book for many students, it forms an easy and entertaining read even for those who do not belong to the particular educational cohort.
Unlike his usual rather cumbersome style of writing, Bourdieu in this book, provides an in depth analysis and nuanced description of the nexus between class, body and tastes, of the bourgeoisie in France. From the kind of food they eat to the specific way in which they eat, the choices of leisure, and spaces to meet, Bourdieu paints a gripping picture of the tastes and preferences of the French society. As Bourdieu quotes La Rouchefoucauld, “Our pride is more offended by attacks on our taste than on our opinion”, this books is an insight into the formation, pretense and desperation to acquire and sustain “taste”, while occasionally making digs at the French culture.
***October 2011***
The Ants by Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Wilson 595.7 HOL
Why not write a book about ants, in-fact write a book about ants that runs to over 700 pages and is heavier than a small dog. The authors have amassed all known knowledge about ants and compiled it into a book that won the Pulitzer Prize in general non-fiction. Yes it contains lots of scientific data that only ant nerds might be interested in, but delve deeper and you’ll begin to feel the passion for these wee critters that oozes from the authors.
Electron micrography combines with photographs and even paintings of ants going about their daily business. Did you know that in 1 hectare of the Amazon, the soil contains up to 8 million ants and together they make up 15% of the world’s biomass. The authors have created an exhausted piece of literature and yes you may be exhausted in lifting it off the shelf, but dip into this book every so often for a literary treat of anty facts.
***June 2011***
The George Shackle Bequest Shelf Mark 330.1 SHA
Chosen by Bruce Littleboy (Shackle Scholar 2011)
George Shackle was connected to Cambridge in spirit and life. Most of his books were published through the University Press, and his collected papers are housed in the University Library.
His connection with St Edmund’s was through Professor Stephen Frowen who was a Fellow Commoner here and who died in 2007. Frowen was Shackle’s postgraduate student at Leeds. The two became close friends, and their correspondence literally fills a book, Economists in Discussion: the correspondence between G.L.S. Shackle and Stephen F. Frowen, 1951-1992, published in 2004.
Professor Frowen established in perpetuity The GLS Shackle Biennial Memorial Lecture series.
Under the will of his widow, Catherine, a bequest was made to the College to fund a Shackle Fellowship and Studentship to promote an interest in and development of Shackle’s ideas. Catherine donated an important part of George’s book collection to the College. The collection of about forty works itself stands as a resource to attract scholarly study. Many are by Shackle, while others are about him and the central themes of his life’s work. Some are annotated in the margin by Shackle and indicate his careful reading; a few others contain handwritten inserts. Through bequests the College now not only provides economic support to Shackle scholars but now also provides material of significance deserving study in its own right.
Shackle aspired to re-orient economic theory by centring it on the deep uncertainty that decision-makers must confront. There is no mechanism that reveals the future to us now because we make the future through our current choices. We only have our hopes and imaginings; we do not have a quantitative formula as our guide. Shackle was a quiet and gentle man, but his ideas remain intriguing and highly subversive.
*** MAY 2011 ***
Walden and Civil disobedience by Henry David Thoreau 
Shelf Mark 818.303 THO
Chosen by Mohammad Razai
Simplify, simplify, simplify.
About a mile south of Concord village, Massachusetts, amid the lush woodlands is a small lake: the Walden Pond. There, within a few yards from the pond, in the summer of 1845 Henry David Thoreau built a single-room cabin and lived there for two years. In order, “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived”.
Thoreau’s Walden is a Transcendentalist’s manifesto; a great souls yearning
for spiritual truth; and an unfettered individual’s wonder at the natural
world. Walden is scornful of work culture, describing it as the spending of
the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable
liberty during the least valuable part of it.
Described as an antidote to American consumerism and materialism, Walden is
more than just Thoreau’s reflections in solitude.
I made my literary pilgrimage to that hallowed ground in the summer of
2010. I found Walden mesmerising, just as Thoreau describes it: I have
passed down the river before sunrise on a summer morning between fields of
lilies still shut in sleep; and when, at length, the flakes of sunlight from
over the bank fell on the surface of the water, whole fields of white
blossoms seemed to flash open before me, as I floated along, like the
unfolding of a banner.