Welcome to your UCBA Library's New Book Guide. We've highlighted a few of our favorite new titles below and many more can be found by subject in the shelf to your left.
To most of us, it seems like recent developments in artificial intelligence emerged out of nowhere to pose unprecedented threats to humankind. But to Dr. Joy Buolamwini, who has been at the forefront of AI research, this moment has been a long time in the making. After tinkering with robotics as a high school student in Memphis and then developing mobile apps in Zambia as a Fulbright fellow, Buolamwini followed her lifelong passion for computer science, engineering, and art to MIT in 2015. As a graduate student at the "Future Factory," she did groundbreaking research that exposed widespread racial and gender bias in AI services from tech giants across the world. Unmasking AI goes beyond the headlines about existential risks produced by Big Tech. It is the remarkable story of how Buolamwini uncovered what she calls "the coded gaze"--the evidence of encoded discrimination and exclusion in tech products--and how she galvanized the movement to prevent AI harms by founding the Algorithmic Justice League. Applying an intersectional lens to both the tech industry and the research sector, she shows how racism, sexism, colorism, and ableism can overlap and render broad swaths of humanity "excoded" and therefore vulnerable in a world rapidly adopting AI tools. Computers, she reminds us, are reflections of both the aspirations and the limitations of the people who create them. – Spring 2024
In this refreshing approach to the history of color, Kelly Grovier takes readers on an exciting search for the intriguing and unusual. In Grovier's telling, a color's connotations are never fixed but are endlessly evolving. Knowledge of a pigment and its history can unlock meaning in the works that feature it. Grovier employs the term "artymology" to suggest that color is a linguistic device, where pigments stand in for syllables in art's language. Color is the site of invigorating conflict--a battleground where past and present, influence and originality, and superstition and science merge into meanings that complicate and intensify our appreciation of a given work. How might it change our understanding of a well-known masterpiece like Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night to know that the intense yellow moon in that painting was sculpted from clumps of dehydrated urine from cows that were fed nothing but mango leaves? Or that the cobalt blue pigment in Van Gogh's sky shares a material bloodline with the glaze of Ming Dynasty porcelain? Consisting of ten chapters, each presenting a biography of a family of colors, this volume mines a rich vein of pigmentation from prehistoric cave painting to art of the present day. The book also includes beautifully designed features exploring important milestones in the history of color theory from the Enlightenment to the twentieth century. – Spring 2024
James Bamford, the bestselling author of The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets, unveils a hidden cabal of foreign powers that have spied against America to reveal the incredible spygames, secrets, and cyberweapons they've hatched, unlocked, and stolen--and how U.S. intelligence has utterly failed to stop them. SPYFAIL is about the highly dangerous and growing capability of foreign countries to conduct large-scale espionage within the United States and how the FBI and other agencies have failed to prevent it. These covert operations involve a variety of foreign countries--North Korea, Russia, Israel, China, and others--and include cyberattacks, espionage, psychological warfare, the infiltration of presidential campaigns, the smuggling of nuclear weapons components, and other incredibly nefarious actions. With his trademark deep investigative style, James Bamford digs as deep as one can go into these clandestine invasions and attacks, uncovering who's involved, how these spygames were carried out, and why none of this was stopped. Full of revelations, SPYFAIL includes access to previously secret and withheld documents, such as never-before-seen parts of the Mueller Report, and interviews with confidential sources. Throughout this stunning, eye-opening account, SPYFAIL demonstrates again and again how large a role politics, special interests, and corruption play in allowing these shocking foreign intrusions to continue--leaving America and its secrets vulnerable and undefended. – Spring 2024
From schoolyard thug to Russian president: Putin's rise to power comes under the microscope Darryl Cunningham (Billionaires) returns with the riveting life story of Vladimir Putin, Russia's infamous autocrat. He traces Putin's development from schoolyard thug in Soviet-era Leningrad, to KGB officer, to corrupt commodities dealer, all the way to his presidency and beyond. In this educational and frank biography, Putin's journey is characterized by shifting loyalties, brutal treatment of detractors, and lawless financial dealings. Despite all of this, Putin has retained public support and tremendous importance in Russian society, due to his ever-tightening control over the media and harsh muzzling of critics. Born in 1952, Putin grew up idealizing the KGB, and he became a member of its ranks by early adulthood. Cunningham posits that the speed with which Putin advanced politically was a reflection of the KGB's need to cement their control of the Russian political system after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since Boris Yeltsin appointed him to the presidency in 2000, Putin has annexed Crimea, rolled back democratic reforms, and led a life of luxury, all the while fostering a cult of personality. In Putin's Russia, Cunningham situates the contentious leader in an analytical framework that is at times hilarious and always compelling. – Spring 2024
The essential guide that allows both sides to be heard Rabbi Professor Dan Cohn-Sherbok presents the Israeli perspective, while Dr Dawoud El-Alami presents the Palestinian perspective Updated to cover the most recent events, including the US recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and the May 2021 fighting in Gaza, this bestselling introduction explores the history, motivations and people behind the Palestine-Israel conflict - and assesses the prospects for peace after almost eighty years. – Spring 2024
