JRP Connections: New Arrivals

Take a look at these items that arrived in the Library this week. You can find them in the JRP display.

Cruelty to animals was considered entertaining by many people in nineteenth-century America. At a time when cockfighting was widespread, and draymen beating horses on city streets was common, mobs greeted traveling circuses to gawk at exotic beasts. No animals suffered more than elephants, chained together on display, vulnerable to tormentors offering peppered apples and whiskey. Elephant keepers, many of whom were ill-paid alcoholics, could be just as abusive, using sharp hooks instead of kind words to control their charges. As circus owners P. T. Barnum and Adam Forepaugh touted their increasingly larger herds of elephants, sensational newspapers reported on a series of accidental deaths of their keepers. The elephants were always blamed. Weaving together stories about circus rivalries and the contest between power companies to wire America, Daly recounts how a once-beloved baby elephant grew up to be condemned to a public execution using electricity, the technical innovation of the time. Not for sensitive readers

review from Booklist

Nationally syndicated columnist David Yount shows how Quakers and the Society of Friends shaped the basic distinctive features of American life, from the days of the colonies, revolution and founders, to the civil rights movements of modern times: freedom, equality, community, straightforwardness, and spirituality.

Quaker prep schools and colleges continue to guide future generations of mostly non-Quaker students. Quaker spirituality is the basis for much of contemporary Christian spirituality. Yount makes clear that America would not have become what it is without the profound influence of the Friends.

synopsis from amazon.com



Junius Browne and Albert Richardson covered the Civil War for the New York Tribune until Confederates captured them as they tried to sneak past Vicksburg on a hay barge. Shuffled from one Rebel prison to another, they escaped and trekked across the snow-covered Appalachians with the help of slaves and pro-Union bushwhackers. Their amazing, long-forgotten odyssey is one of the great escape stories in American history, packed with drama, courage, horrors and heroics, plus moments of antic comedy.

On their long, strange adventure, Junius and Albert encountered an astonishing variety of American characters—Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, Rebel con men and Union spies, a Confederate pirate-turned-playwright, a sadistic hangman nicknamed “the Anti-Christ,” a secret society called the Heroes of America, a Union guerrilla convinced that God protected him from Confederate bullets, and a mysterious teenage girl who rode to their rescue at just the right moment.

Peter Carlson, author of the critically acclaimed K Blows Top, has, in Junius and Albert’s Adventures in the Confederacy, written a gripping story about the lifesaving power of friendship and a surreal voyage through the bloody battlefields, dark prisons, and cold mountains of the Civil War.

synopsis from amazon.com