Brooklyn Law School Library’s April 2017 New Book List is now available at this link. There are 65 new entries, 45 print titles and 20 eBook titles. The subject areas cover a broad range of topics including both law, history and social aspects of American life, e.g., Women lawyers — United States – Biography; Law clerks — United States; Criminal procedure (International law); Extradition; Solitary confinement — United States; Trial practice — United States; Drone aircraft — Law and legislation — United States; Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.) – History; Law teachers — United States; Law reviews — Competitions — United States; Commercial crimes; Global Financial Crisis, 2008-2009; Police shootings — United States; Self-defense (Law) — Social aspects — United States. Among the titles related to law and legal education are the following:
- Fish Raincoats: A Woman Lawyer’s Life by Barbara Babcock
- Behind the Bench: The Guide to Judicial Clerkships by Debra M. Strauss
- Bringing International Fugitives to Justice: Extradition and Its Alternatives by David A. Sadoff
- 23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and The Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement by Keramet Reiter
- How to Succeed as a Trial Lawyer by Stewart Edelstein
- The New Brooklyn: What It Takes to Bring a City Back by Kay S. Hymowitz
- Law Professors: Three Centuries of Shaping American Law by Stephen B. Presser
- Making Law Review: A Guide to the Write-On Competition by Wes Henriksen
- The Case for The Corporate Death Penalty: Restoring Law and Order on Wall Street by Mary Kreiner Ramirez and Steven A. Ramirez
- When Police Kill by Franklin E. Zimring
- Stand Your Ground: A History of America’s Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense by Caroline E. Light
The BLS Library collection includes titles related to social aspects of American life. One such title from the New Book List that stands out is White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg (Call No. HN90.S6 I84 2016). The author, an American historian and Professor of History at Louisiana State University, tells a rarely recounted story about a race, namely so-called “white trash”, a derogatory American English racial slur referring to poor white people, especially in the rural southern United States. The 460-page book has twelve chapters divided into three parts: Part I – To Begin the World Anew; Part II – Degeneration of the American Breed; and Part III – The White Trash Makeover. The chapters in Part I include Taking out the Trash: Waste People in the New World; Benjamin Franklin’s American Breed: The Demographics of Mediocrity; Thomas Jefferson’s Rubbish: A Curious topography of Class; and Andrew Jackson’s Cracker Country: The Squatter as Common Man. Later chapters include Pedigree and Poor White Trash: Bad Blood, Half-Breeds and Clay-Eaters; Cowards, Poltroons, and Mudsills: Civil War as Class Warfare; Thoroughbreds and Scalawags: Bloodlines and Bastard Stock in the Age of Eugenics; Forgotten Men and Poor Folk: Downward Mobility and the Great Depression; The Cult of the Country Boy: Elvis Presley, Andy Griffith, and LBJ’s Great Society; Redneck Roots: Deliverance, Billy Beer, and Tammy Faye; Outing Rednecks: Slumming, Slick Willie, and Sarah Palin; and lastly, America’s Strange Breed: The Long Legacy of White Trash.
The BLS Library has ordered for its collection a related title, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (Call No. HD8073.V37 A3 2016) by J. D. Vance, a graduate of Yale Law School who grew up in the Rust Belt and the Appalachian town of Jackson, Kentucky. Vance offers a look at the struggles of America’s white working class and tells his own story of upward mobility with a discussion about the loss of the American dream for a large segment of the country. The books by Isenberg and Vance are reviewed in Fanfares for the Common Man by Phil Christman, Volume 19, Issue 1 of The Hedgehog Review. 19.1 (Spring 2017 available via OneSearch to the BLS community.
