Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2025 -

Libraries of the Mind, written by French literary critic and historian William Marx (College de France), is that rare volume on libraries and classification systems that reads simultaneously as an erudite philosophical treatise and a page-turning thriller. Readers will find that they cannot stop until they reach the end of an elegantly constructed celebration of reading, libraries (visible, material ones, certainly, but mostly invisible, mental ones), and the literary work--a mental representation comprising impressions and memories, not to be confused with an actual book or text. This is a volume for those who unapologetically agree that "art objects and literary works ... possess a unique power ... a capacity to imprint themselves on the psyche in a stable, recurrent, and lasting way" (p. 23). It is for those who are willing to conceive of a library of the mind that incorporates "the dark matter of literature"--works that are lost, exist in fragments only, were subsequently transformed, were never realized, were never written, or were neglected, forbidden, or otherwise censored. The writing is in the best traditions of Western philosophical thought and literary criticism--simultaneously scholarly, convincing, and immensely enjoyable.Summing Up: Essential. All readership levels.

Occupied Words is a remarkable and dynamic examination and evocation of how the Yiddish language came to reflect and express the catastrophic experiences of millions of East European Jews who attempted to endure the German conquest of Poland and adjacent lands. The author fluently presents and analyzes how spoken and written Yiddish mirrored harsh physical and social realities of Jewish life in Nazi-imposed ghettos, forced labor camps, and the death camps. Holocaust Yiddish slang was a fluent medium to express painfully novel relationships and concepts imposed by Nazi Germans and their henchmen. Amid the immediate postwar ruins, Jewish linguists sought to collect and explicate the many words and concepts in Holocaust Yiddish that survivor authors and poets employed to evoke what had happened. This book also focuses attention on contrasting, gendered Yiddish usages found in the concentration camp novels of K. Tsetnik and Chava Rosenfarb's masterly Lodz ghetto trilogy, The Tree of Life. This is an outstanding work of scholarship and memory.Summing Up: Essential. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.