Jump Start Your Career in Library and Information Science or Mall Maker

Jump Start Your Career in Library and Information Science

Author: Priscilla K K Shontz

"Jump Start Your Career in Library and Information Science is designed to help new librarians manage a successful and satisfying career in the library and information science profession. Although the first years in a library career are often overwhelming, they can be the key to success. This book emphasizes the value of defining one's own idea of success and preparing to take advantage of opportunities that arise. Although aimed at students and new information professionals, much of the advice applies to librarians at any stage of their careers." Priscilla Shontz presents advice and anecdotes gathered from research and interviews with more than seventy information professionals in a variety of library-related careers. The modular format allows a reader to peruse any chapter on its own and to read the chapters in his or her preferred order. Seven broad topics are covered: career planning, job searching, gaining experience and education, developing interpersonal and leadership skills, networking, mentoring, and writing for publication. Related readings, as well as helpful Web sites, are included.

Booknews

For new librarians, Shontz's how-to guide stresses the value of defining one's own idea of success and positioning one's self to take advantage of opportunities as they arise. The guide covers career planning, job searching, experience and education, interpersonal skills, networking, leadership skills, mentoring, and writing for publication. It can be used by readers interested in public, academic, or special libraries. Shontz, a longtime librarian, is now a freelance writer and Web designer. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Book review: How Sweet It Is without the Sugar or Yoga of Sleep and Dreams

Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream

Author: M Jeffrey Hardwick

Despite their convenience, malls are routinely criticized for representing much that is wrong in America - sprawl, conspicuous consumption, the loss of regional character, and the decline of Mom and Pop stores. Malls are so ubiquitous that it would surprise most people that they are the brainchild of a single person, architect Victor Gruen.

An immigrant from Austria who fled the Nazis in 1938, Gruen based his idea for the mall on an idealized America: the dream of concentrated shops that would benefit the businessperson as well as the consumer and that would foster a sense of shared community. Modernist Philip Johnson applauded Gruen for creating a true civic art and architecture that enriched Americans' daily lives, and for decades he received praise from luminaries such as Lewis Mumford, Winthrop Rockefeller, and Lady Bird Johnson. Yet, in the end, Gruen returned to Europe, thoroughly disillusioned with his American dream.

The New York Times - Eric P. Nash

In lucid prose remarkably free of jargon, Hardwick, an editor at Smithsonian Books, concludes that malls did not transform the environment but simply created more sprawl. Gruen wrote bitterly of the United States as ''a 'clip joint,' where everybody is persuaded to buy what he doesn't need with money he doesn't own in order to impress people he actually can't stand.''

Table of Contents:

	Introduction: The Gruen Effect	1
1	Escaping from Vienna to Fifth Avenue	8
2	How Main Street Stole Fifth Avenue's Glitter	48
3	Wartime Planning for Postwar Posterity	72
4	Seducing the Suburban Autoist	91
5	A "Shoppers' Paradise" for Suburbia	118
6	Planning the New "Suburbscape"	142
7	Saving Our Cities	162
8	The Suburbanization of Downtown	193
	Conclusion: "Those Bastard Developments" and Gruen's Legacy	210
	Notes	225
	Index	269
	Acknowledgments	275