New Non-Fiction

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Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare by James Shapiro

From Publishers Weekly: Starred Review. Shapiro, author of the much admired A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599, achieves another major success in the field of Shakespeare research by exploring why the Bard's authorship of his works has been so much challenged. Step-by step, Shapiro describes how criticism of Shakespeare frequently evolved into attacks on his literacy and character. Actual challenges to the authorship of the Shakespeare canon originated with an outright fraud perpetrated by William-Henry Ireland in the 1790s and continued through the years with an almost religious fervor.

Shapiro exposes one such forgery: the earliest known document, dating from 1805, challenging Shakespeare's authorship and proposing instead Francis Bacon. Shapiro mines previously unexamined documents to probe why brilliant men and women denied Shakespeare's authorship. For Mark Twain, Shapiro finds that the notion resonated with his belief that John Milton, not John Bunyan, wrote The Pilgrim's Progress. Sigmund Freud's support of the earl of Oxford as the author of Shakespeare appears to have involved a challenge to his Oedipus theory, which was based partly on his reading of Hamlet. As Shapiro admirably demonstrates, William Shakespeare emerges with his name and reputation intact. 16 pages of b&w photos. (Apr.)

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Call Number: 822.33 S22C

Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy by Melissa Milgrom

From Amazon.com: For many, taxidermy summons images of wildlife frozen in menacing poses, teeth bared in an eternal rictus; or maybe it's the lamented family cat, forever curled in purr-less slumber. With Still Life, Melissa Milgrom peels the skin back on Norman Bates's favorite pastime, dutifully tracking taxidermy from its 19th-century heyday (the beneficiary of a natural history boom), to its nadir as a reviled predilection in the age of PETA and conservation.

It will tell most readers as much as they need to know about erosion-molded rats and replacement lips, ears, and eyelids, but it's the culture of iron-stomached men (and occasionally, women) that practice the art of skinned carcasses and stretched hides--those who wield "the calipers and the brain spoons"--that Milgrom's after. Beginning as a wide-eyed visitor to a third-generation stuff shop, she moves through an underworld of auctions, artisans, scientists, and the ultra competitive (albeit insular) World Taxidermy Championships, ultimately trying a queasy hand at squirrel-stuffing herself. Still Life an entertaining and illuminating adventure. --Jon Foro

Call Number: 590.752 M598S

New Biography

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Confession of a Buddhist Atheist by Stephen Batchelor

From Booklist: Former Tibetan and Zen monk Batchelor approaches Buddhism idiosyncratically. He sketches the historical Buddha to clear up numerous misconceptions, discover who the man Siddhattha Gotama was, and learn what is distinctive and original in his teachings, especially the Pali Canon attributed to him. But Batchelor also offers his own story: his decision to become a monk when he was still a teenaged London hippie during the countercultural 1960s, and his return to the secular world a decade later.

Although the historical background is important and crucial to the book, the personal story really shines out, entraining the reader in Batchelor’s often complicated life as a seeker who never stops searching, as he discusses his long fascination with Buddhism and his struggle to accept, or at least come to terms with, some doctrines, such as reincarnation, that were alien to his former belief system. He concludes with his reflections as a 56-year-old secular, nondenominational, lay Buddhist now living in rural France. --June Sawyers

Call Number: B B310

The Ticking is the Bomb: A Memoir by Nick Flynn

From Booklist: Flynn continues the saga of his battle with the demons he inherited from his mother, who committed suicide, and his alcoholic, ex-con, sometimes homeless father, the focus of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (2004). In this finely crafted mosaic of edgy beauty, ambushing drama, and unsparing reflections, Flynn wrestles with the questions of how and why we hurt each other and ourselves, and what pain does to us.

Flynn examines his struggles with addiction, his problematic relationships with women, his father’s last days, his experiences as an “itinerant poet” in New York City’s public schools, and the impending arrival of his first child within the maelstrom of horrors, grotesquely documented, rising out of Abu Ghraib. When he travels to Istanbul to help collect testimonies of the Iraqi men detained for dubious reasons, tortured, and photographed, he is forced to confront the mystery of brutality. Haunted, compassionate, fearful of failing as a parent, Flynn pursues the deeply disturbing subject of torture into unexpected spheres, seeking understanding of our obsession with power, acceptance of suffering, and transcendent resilience. --Donna Seaman

Call Number: B F677