Reader’s Roundup: Monographic Musings & Reference Reviews

Column Editor: Corey Seeman (Director, Kresge Library Services, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan) <cseeman@umich.edu> Twitter @cseeman

Column Editor’s Note: This is the exact reason why I cannot stand new year’s resolutions. Did not make it out of February without breaking my only resolution that I dared write down. For those keeping score, this is what I shared:

To that end, I will share one of my New Year’s Resolutions for 2023. It is directed to my faithful and generous editor who often waits days, if not weeks, for my columns to arrive. Toni Nix is a fantastic collaborator who has helped with this column in ways that I likely cannot fully capture. So, it is to her that I set out my resolution to be a better column editor in 2023. I will get reviews back to my reviewers in a timely manner. I will get my columns in on time. I will get reviews out to the publishers when they are available. And while I will likely be distracted this year, I will keep this site up to date with all the information on this column — https:// www.squirreldude.com/atg-readers-roundup . While I am starting out a bit late, I do want to have some room to improve, right?

Well that streak is over. I almost made it to zero consecutive on-time columns. But alas, isn’t the entire dynamic of a new year’s resolution just a convenient opportunity to make a change that, quite honestly, you could implement any time? Why don’t we have a March 1st Resolution? Or any day for that matter. For many of us, we would have a better chance dropping a proton torpedo right down the reactor core of the Death Star (like Luke Skywalker did in that movie that all old people know as Star Wars) than actually following through with a resolution. For that matter, maybe the Empire should have their own resolution not to make weaknesses in their giant ships so darn easy to find.

The notion of a new year’s resolution (whether followed or forgotten) is a cultural one. And that is a good segue to talk about the four books in this column. These are all reference works. Two of them are from Bloomsbury Academic Publishing’s Cultural History series focusing on plants and shopping. Both of these works seem like exciting new entries for libraries that are covering everyday life and the role that plants and shopping play in them. We are only a few weeks away from the intersection of these two subjects, when people all over will run to nurseries to pick up annuals, vegetables, and perennials to continually perfect their gardens. Additionally, there are two reference works covering careers in writing and facts about presidents. I was going to make a comment about the latter subject, but I think I will let it pass.

I very much appreciate the work of the reviewers who really dig into the work and provide context that may be missing elsewhere. Thank you to my reviewers for this issue: Carolyn Filippelli (University of Arkansas – Fort Smith), Julie Huskey (Tennessee State University), Steve Sowards (Michigan State University) and my colleague Jared VanDyke (University of Michigan’s Kresge Library Services). As always, thank you very much for your work in bringing this column together.

If you would like to be a reviewer for Against the Grain, please write me at <cseeman@umich.edu>. If you are a publisher and have a book you would like to see reviewed in a future column, please also write me directly. You can also find out more about the Reader’s Roundup here (new site name) — https://www. squirreldude.com/atg-readers-roundup.

Happy reading and be nutty! — Corey

Giesecke, Annette and David Mabberley, eds. A Cultural History of Plants. 6 vols., London: Bloomsbury Academic Publishing, 2022. ISBN 978-1474273596, 1744 pages. $550 print. Also available in electronic version and by subscription or perpetual access.

Reviewed by Carolyn Filippelli (Reference Librarian, Boreham Library, University of Arkansas – Fort Smith) <Carolyn.Filippelli@uafs.edu>

A Cultural History of Plants is one of the titles in the new Bloomsbury Cultural Histories Series. The chief focus of the Cultural History of Plants is to show how plants are vital to and how they have impacted different cultures over time. Using a vast amount of detail, examples, and correlations, the work illustrates man’s dependence on plants for food, shelter, and clothing throughout historical periods and in many geographical locations. For example, much emphasis was placed on gardens in Roman times. The therapeutic mental health and wellness value of gardens, gardening, and forests has again been highlighted during the recent pandemic.

The only resolution worth keeping is taking more squirrel pictures. Working through that at the University of Michigan on February 3rd, 2023. A momma enjoying lunch and her not-so-little one waiting for her to finish.

The ambitious work consists of six volumes: One – Antiquity (10,000 BCE to 500 CE), Two –Post-Classical Era, (500 to 1400), Three – Early Modern Era (1400 to 1650), Four – Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, (1650 to 1800), Five – The Nineteenth Century (1800 to 1920), and Six – Modern Era (1920 to present).

The strong organizational features contribute to the usefulness of the work. For example, the same general themes are repeated in each volume. These include: Plants as Staple Foods, Plants as Luxury Foods, Trade and Exploration, Plant Technology and Science, Plants and Medicine, Plants in Culture, Plants as Natural Ornament, and Representation of Plants. Use of consistent themes shows how plants have affected all aspects of culture throughout time. Repetition of topics also makes it easy to focus on and trace one specific influence over time. Other helpful features include the preface to each volume, the extensive bibliographies, notes, and exquisite plant illustrations.

The coverage for Volume 6 continues through the last few years, but there will definitely be a need for updates. New materials will be needed to incorporate technological changes, developments in agriculture, space exploration, environmental crises, advances in healthcare, uses of new plants considered for medicinal and therapeutic uses such as marijuana, and issues of food security for growing populations. Our very survival depends on plants. In part, this is shown by the many titles that have been published on the influences of individual plants such as tobacco, cotton, corn, and silk.

The Cultural History of Plants is a unique work that fills a real need as a reference source. The wealth of details and the interweaving of historical events with plant life is outstanding. Historical time periods, ethnic and cultural groups, and varied aspects of culture — architecture, literature, medicine, food customs — are accounted for. From the description of plants in early gardens, the intensive efforts devoted to description and identification of plants, and the events showing how plants affected trade and exploration, the progress of civilization and its survival is seen as intertwined with plants. In university libraries, this work would have applications in the social sciences, humanities, and biological sciences. Editors Annette Giesecke, a professor of classics, and David Mabberley, a professor of botany have created a real treasure.

ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this in my library. (I want to be able to get up from my desk and grab this book off the shelf, if it’s not checked out.)

Stobart, Jon, ed. A Cultural History of Shopping. 6 vols., London: Bloomsbury Academic 2022. ISBN 978-1350027060 (set), 6 volumes. $550 print. Also available in electronic version and by subscription or perpetual access.

Reviewed by Julie Huskey (Head of Cataloging, Tennessee State University, Brown-Daniel Library, Nashville) <jhuskey@tnstate.edu>

“Shopping has a long and varied history,” (2) says volume editor Erika Rappaport (University of California, Santa Barbara) in the introduction to Volume 5 (In the Age of Revolution and Empire) of this six-volume set For most of human history, and certainly for the past three thousand or so years covered by this title, obtaining supplies needed or wanted for household and personal use has been a major task of everyday life.

However, the editors argue, few writers have addressed the complexity of shopping, an activity that is seen through the lens of the consumer, and, to a lesser extent, the retailer; earlier works have focused on larger-scale forces, such as manufacturing and shipping.

Each approximately two-hundred-page volume consists of a separate introduction, followed by eight chapters: “Practices and Processes,” “Spaces and Places,” “Shoppers and Identities,” “Luxury and Everyday,” “Home and Family,” “Visual and Literary Representations,” “Reputation, Trust and Credit,” and “Governance, Regulation, and the State.” The format works well, despite the span of time periods and locations. The examples are mostly from Europe (primarily Britain, the Netherlands, and Italy) and North America, with a few mentions of China and India. Series editor Jon Stobart, (Professor of Social History at Manchester Metropolitan University, England) authors the Series Preface and the “Home and Family” chapter in Volume 4 (The Age of the Enlightenment); the remaining chapters are authored by scholars (almost entirely PhDs, including a few independent scholars) representing a dozen countries.

Throughout the six volumes, the authors discuss the difficulty of pinning down the term “shopping”: how, they ask, does it differ from “provisioning,” “buying,” and “consuming”? Moreover, how one obtains even the most prosaic household items reveals a lot about social status; it can affect who does the shopping (servants, children, men, or women), where one shops, and the availability of credit. The term itself, according to James Davis and Richard Britnell (Vol. 2: 2) did not enter English until the eighteenth century. Moreover, the modern sense of the word — a means of self-expression, influenced by both individual and social forces — has its roots in the twentieth century, with the rise of the middle class, an increase in disposable income, and the explosion of advertising.

From Volume 1, Antiquity, where shopping takes place in Greek agora and Italian forums, to Volume 6, Modern Age, with its supermarkets, shopping malls, and e-commerce, the contributors discuss the evidence for the places and processes of shopping. Shopping is intertwined with a surprising range of topics, such as the status of shopkeepers, how governments raised revenue, and the ongoing perception of women as frivolous. The authors are careful to limit themselves to available evidence, to the extent that the set often reads like a literature review, but the text is engaging nevertheless. Well-selected illustrations (some color) and diagrams, extensive bibliographies, and volume-level indexes add to the polish and scholarship of the set.

A Cultural History of Shopping is a significant contribution to an often-overlooked aspect of social history, especially in its coverage of women, non-whites, and lower socioeconomic classes as consumers. It is most likely to appeal to upper-division undergraduates and graduate students, but if budgets permit, it would be a welcome addition to public libraries as well.

ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this in my library. (I want to be able to get up from my desk and grab this book off the shelf, if it’s not checked out.)

Mars, Laura, & Allison Blake. Careers in Writing & Editing. Grey House Publishing, Inc., 2020. 9781642653953, 580 pages. $125.00

Reviewed by Jared VanDyke (Collections Assistant, Kresge Library Services, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) <jaredpv@umich.edu>

The toolsets for editing and writing careers are as wide in variety as the field itself. Gone are the days when a student — of high school or collegiate level — could count on a communications degree to ferry them from one career goal and to the next. Students are now expected to remain versed and flexible in their skillset while working through this shifting, tech-driven landscape. The problem soon arises: how does a student fit their collection of unique platform experiences, style practices, and/or program knowledge into one career path? This is the central question Careers in Writing & Editing hopes to address.

This work selects a blanket approach as a reference resource. The title divides into the two sections of Industry Profiles and Career Profiles, and further breaks down possible communication fields within those sections. For example: the Industry section gives generalized profiles on groups, like legal services, while the Career Profiles section covers how paralegals use writing and editing tools. A librarian can find baseline information on most any field in question, whether it’s average salary figures or a listing of what training an aspirant would need. These factoids are often supplemented with testimonies from active career professionals, as well as what brands of education and training would benefit you the most on a particular path.

The most useful portion of this resource is the contact listings at the end of each industry and career profile. The workplace summations and professional interviews throughout are better supported by these listings, as they’re thorough rundowns for major industry organizations. This information can provide a useful launching point for those curious about the exemplars of their field and what their own place in those organizations might look like. As such, I see this resource as less of a career development tool and more of a historical and inspirational reference — not something a patron should live or die by, but something the reader can launch from.

Beyond the contact information, hard data is difficult to come by in this resource as all statistics are attached to a generalized bibliography at the book’s end. There are few instances of direct citation throughout the text, and much of the historical and professional context for these career paths is presented without a title or author to directly attribute. As an example, the text may list the number of court reporters working in 2018, with percentage breakdowns of responsibilities, but there’s no citation or reference showing how these statistics were generated or gathered. Checking the validity of the generalized information is critical since it’s a career guidebook … but the effort outweighs the usefulness of the information, leaving readers in a “Huh, that’s neat” cycle.

As a reference material, Careers can be summed up as aggregated Google results for those with nebulous, writing-based career goals. At best it is a guiding star for wishful highschoolers and unfocused college freshmen. At worst this resource is a second or third step between the reference question and what the patron requested.

ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this available somewhere in my shared network. (I probably do not need this book, but it would be nice to get it within three to five days via my network catalog.)

O’Neal, Michael J. (ed.). Facts About the Presidents: Insights, Intrigues, Personalities & Impacts from George Washington to Joseph R. Biden. 9th ed. Amenia, N.Y.: Grey House Publishing / Ipswich, Mass.: H. W. Wilson Co., 2022. 978-1-64265-895-8. vii + 1,085 pages. $195.00.

Reviewed by Steven W. Sowards (Associate Dean for Collection Strategies and Preservation, Michigan State University Libraries, East Lansing MI) <sowards@msu.edu>

This is a quintessential reference book on those who have held the office of United States Presidents. It’s made up of concise notes and statements, as well as chronologies and browsable lists. The 9th edition in this series covers events into the middle of 2021: it reports on the full length of the Donald Trump presidency, the election of 2020 and its aftermath, and the opening months of the Joseph Biden presidency.

Many of the “facts” here involve dates: birth, death, marriage, and landmark events, including elections and inaugurations. The founding editor of the series, Joseph Nathan Kane, brought a journalist’s zeal for “fact checking” to his work, here and in similar titles such as Famous First Facts (1st edition in 1933).

This kind of publication exemplifies the function of “authority” in reference work, and the contrast between untested internet tools and tested library resources. Authority is fundamental to much of what takes place in libraries. The Library of Congress maintains “name authority records”; our collections include “authoritative texts”; and librarians teach our users to identify “authoritative sources.” Implicit in authority is the existence of true and accurate information — facts — and pursuit of those facts is to some extent a 19th century aspiration coping today with 21st century relativism. Regardless of what we think about competing interpretations, there are times when it is useful to simply (and confidently) read that Theodore Roosevelt was the 26th President, who began his term of office on September 14, 1901, at the age of 42 years and 322 days.

Sadly, the concepts of expertise, authority and facts are held in diminished esteem in 2022. We live in an era of “alternative facts,” a phrase coined by White House Press Secretary Kellyanne Conway in 2017, in contrast to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s earlier observation that “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” When it comes to recent presidential history, “to each his or her own” is part of the political landscape.

Positioned as an authoritative source, Facts About the Presidents does not directly attach evidence to factual statements: there are no footnotes. It is assumed that librarians and readers can and will rely on the expertise and integrity of editors and publishers. For contested topics, after all, a footnote merely begs the question: any cited source itself can be challenged, and also the source behind that source, ad infinitum … “turtles all the way down” in the words of the well-known phrase (for which Wikipedia does supply footnotes, by the way). Kane (founding editor for the series) carefully mined primary sources even if he did not put them on the printed page: his 2002 Newsday obituary credits him with saying, “I’m stupid enough not to believe anything until I see the proof” — and so a vast project of notetaking preceded his publications. Chapters do end with suggested lists for further reading, largely biographies.

When Facts About the Presidents presents those facts, it does so without noting contested matters. Barack Obama’s place of birth is stated to be Honolulu (page 697), without reference to derogatory and unfounded rumors or his birth taking place outside of the United States. We find the estimated attendance at Barack Obama’s inauguration on page 708, and at Donald Trump’s inauguration on page 733, without reference to arguments about which event drew a bigger crowd. Reporting on Electoral College voting in 2016, there is a careful tabulation of “faithless electors” without comment (page 732). On page 736, one can identify three cabinet officers who resigned from the Trump administration prior to the end of the term, but those dates of resignation are not explicitly linked to dismay after the Capitol Hill Riot of January 6th, 2020. Facts About the Presidents is willing to identify “the most contested election in history” (page 266) but is speaking not about 2020 but about 1876, when a special electoral commission had to step in after a deadlock in Congress. Reporting on events during 2020 and 2021, Facts About the Presidents does not shirk from describing January 6, 2021, as the “Capitol Hill Riot” (pages 747-748); among the entries for Important Dates in the Trump presidency we read that “Pro-Trump rioters storm the U.S. Capitol…” (page 743). The delayed Electoral College vote that day is recorded without comment.

In library work and reference publishing, there is an underlying assumption that facts exist, and that accuracy is available to us with due diligence. That assumption is rarely obvious, but it is an obvious issue today about aspects of the presidency. Facts About the Presidents speaks to that situation.

ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this in my library. (I want to be able to get up from my desk and grab this book off the shelf, if it’s not checked out.)

Guide to the ATG Reviewer Ratings

The ATG Reviewer Rating is being included for each book reviewed. Corey came up with this rating to reflect our collaborative collections and resource sharing means and thinks it will help to classify the importance of these books.

• I need this book on my nightstand. (This book is so good, that I want a copy close at hand when I am in bed.)

• I need this on my desk. (This book is so valuable, that I want my own copy at my desk that I will share with no one.)

• I need this in my library. (I want to be able to get up from my desk and grab this book off the shelf, if it’s not checked out.)

• I need this available somewhere in my shared network. (I probably do not need this book, but it would be nice to get it within three to five days via my network catalog.)

• I’ll use my money elsewhere. (Just not sure this is a useful book for my library or my network.)