Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio of France has been awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel Committee in their annoucement stated that the ”author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization.” We are trying not to let the negative statements about Americans made by Horace Engdahl of the Swedish Academy (which selects the recipient of the prize each year) tarnish our view of Clezio, who has had an amazing career.  Enghal commented on why an American has not won the prize since Toni Morrison in 1993.  He said,

The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining. (read more about these comments here.)

So, the Swedish Academy is giving us restrained and ignorant Americans a chance to learn more about a great French novelist. If you’d like to read more about Le Clezio, you may want to visit his author page in our LION database (click on the criticism link for articles and reference link for biographical info, a MVCC ID is required to access this from off campus).

Four new DVDs on Green-related topics that have just been added to the library collection. We hope that you’ll drop by to check them out.

• The Fragile Reef: This program travels to Chumbe Island Coral Park, Zanzibar ; Mafia Island Marine Park, Tanzania ; and Ras Mohammed National Park, Egypt, to study the fragile ecology and amazing biodiversity of coral reefs and the impacts of tourism, pollution, overfishing, sedimentation, and climate change. Commentary provided by Mark Spalding and Ed Green, coauthors of the World atlas of coral reefs, and experts from the World Wildlife Fund, the Zoological Society of London, and Zanzibar’s Institute of Marine Sciences
• Rachel Carson: Natures Guardian: In this program, Bill Moyers pays tribute to environmental crusader Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring. Grim footage of ecological degradation from the pre-Carson era is combined with generous excerpts from actress Kaiulani Lee’s one-woman play about Carson’s life called A Sense of Wonder to honor the legacy of an individual who, heedless of personal cost, sounded the alarm that launched the environmental movement. Moyers also talks with photographic artist Chris Jordan, who turns the statistics of consumerism into indelible images of consumption and waste–Container
• Boiling Point: This program spotlights three trouble spots that epitomize the intensifying competition for freshwater and efforts being made to manage it: the Okavango River which flows through Angola, Namibia and Botswana, the Rio Grande, a source of agricultural irrigation for both the U.S. and Mexico and rainwater reservoirs in the West Bank
• Blue Vinyl: With humor, chutzpah, and a piece of vinyl siding in hand, Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Judith Helfand and co-director and award-winning cinematographer Daniel B. Gold travel to America’s vinyl manufacturing capital and beyond in search of the truth about vinyl.