Recent Acquisitions

The museum of mysteries: art's best-kept secrets, Éléa Baucheron, Gift of Steve Shirley

Call Number: 709/B337

Art and mystery collide in this fascinating look at the secrets behind some of the world’s most important masterpieces and their creators. Who was the model for Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring? How were the Nazca Lines, the giant drawings scrawled across Peru’s desert coast, created? Why is Botticelli’s Birth of Venus an ingenious example of mathematic computation? Traveling across centuries and continents, this collection of 40 enigmatic artworks and artists examines secrets that have confounded experts and amateurs alike. Presented in beautiful color spreads, each work or artist is profiled in an absorbing and accessible commentary that draws on the latest research. While some of these mysteries have been solved, many others continue to stump even the most learned scholars. Find out what they know—and what they don’t—in this compelling collection that will deepen readers’ appreciation of some of the world’s most recognizable masterpieces.

Dangerous melodies: classical music in America from the Great War through the Cold War, Jonathan Rosenberg

Call number: 780.973/R813

A Juilliard-trained musician and professor of history explores the fascinating entanglement of classical music with American foreign relations. Dangerous Melodies vividly evokes a time when classical music stood at the center of American life, occupying a prominent place in the nation's culture and politics. The work of renowned conductors, instrumentalists, and singers—and the activities of orchestras and opera companies-were intertwined with momentous international events: two world wars, the rise of fascism, and the Cold War. Jonathan Rosenberg recovers the politics behind classical music, showing how German musicians were dismissed or imprisoned as the country's music was swept from American auditoriums during World War I—yet, twenty years later, those same compositions could inspire Americans in the fight against Nazism while Russian music was deployed to strengthen the U.S.-Soviet alliance. During the Cold War, Van Cliburn's triumph in the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow became cause for America to celebrate. In Dangerous Melodies, Rosenberg delves into the singular decades-long relationship of classical music and political ideology in America.

Blue moon, Richard Linklater

Call number: DVD 791.43/Blue mo

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Scott, Patrick Kennedy, Jonah Lees, Simon Delaney.

On the evening of March 31, 1943, legendary lyricist Lorenz Hart confronts his shattered self-confidence in Sardi's bar as his former collaborator, Richard Rodgers, celebrates the opening night of his ground-breaking hit musical Oklahoma!