Three on the Third is a monthly series in which we highlight three books new to the library collection. Summaries of the books are provided along with shelf location and a link to the item in the catalog. For the month of February, we’re sharing some fresh items to our Popular Reading Collection.
Talking to Strangers
by Malcolm Gladwell
In this thoughtful treatise spurred by the 2015 death of African-American academic Sandra Bland in jail after a traffic stop, New Yorker writer Gladwell (The Tipping Point) aims to figure out the strategies people use to assess strangers-to “analyze, critique them, figure out where they came from, figure out how to fix them,” in other words: to understand how to balance trust and safety. He uses a variety of examples from history and recent headlines to illustrate that people size up the motivations, emotions, and trustworthiness of those they don’t know both wrongly and with misplaced confidence.
POP HM 1111 .G53 2019
Catalog Link – Talking to Strangers
Permanent Record
by Edward Snowden
In 2013, twenty-nine-year-old Edward Snowden shocked the world when he broke with the American intelligence establishment and revealed that the United States government was secretly pursuing the means to collect every single phone call, text message, and email. The result would be an unprecedented system of mass surveillance with the ability to pry into the private lives of every person on earth. Six years later, Snowden reveals how he helped to build this system and why he was moved to expose it. Spanning the bucolic Beltway suburbs of his childhood and the clandestine CIA and NSA postings of his adulthood, Permanent Record is the account of a bright young man who grew up online — a man who became a spy, a whistleblower, and, in exile, the Internet’s conscience.
POP CT 275 .S6693 A3 2019
Catalog Link – Permanent Record
The Five
by Hallie Rubenhold
The untold story of the women killed by Jack the Ripper–and a gripping portrait of Victorian London–[this book] changes the narrative of these murders forever. Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Catherine, and Mary Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from some of London’s wealthiest and poorest neighborhoods, from the factory towns of middle England, and from Wales and Sweden. They wrote ballads, ran coffeehouses, lived on country estates; they breathed ink dust from printing presses and escaped human traffickers. What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888. The person responsible was never identified, but the character created by the press to fill that gap has become far more famous than any of these five women. For more than a century newspapers have been keen to tell us that ‘the Ripper’ preyed on prostitutes. Not only is this untrue, as historian Hallie Rubenhold has discovered, but it has prevented the real stories of these fascinating women from being told. Now, by drawing on a wealth of formerly unseen archival material and adding full historical context to the victims’ lives, Rubenhold finally sets the record straight, revealing a world not just of Dickens and Queen Victoria, but of poverty, homelessness, and rampant misogyny. They died because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time–but their greatest misfortune was to be born women.
POP HV 6535 .G6 L6578 2019
Catalog Link – The Five