Archive for January, 2017

Book Review: Hillbilly Elegy

Monday, January 30th, 2017

book cover imageVance, J.D. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. Harper, 2016.

When I came to interview at Duke 35 years ago, a finance faculty member told me she pinched herself every morning while driving to work on 15-501. But it was not by luck that she landed a tenure track position at an elite university. She was a product of upper class culture. She inherited attitudes and habits about work, education and relationships that put her on the road to success.

As J.D. Vance explains in his childhood memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, the upper class and working class are different and the customs and values of each group determine their children’s chances for a prosperous future or a grim one. Vance was born to a dysfunctional family originally from the hills of Eastern Kentucky who moved to the Rust Belt, taking their chaotic and violent culture with them.

Vance begins his story by describing the lives of his forebears. In the 1940’s after his maternal grandparents move to Ohio, their lives improve financially, yet their marriage is a war zone. A generation later, Vance’s mother is a teenager with two children, already divorced. Vance is raised in a turbulent environment with a new stepfather and new stepsiblings every year. They move from home to home. His mother becomes a drug addict. In high school Vance moves to his grandmother’s peaceful house, and his life begins to turn around. After a stint in the Marines and a degree from Ohio State, he attends Law School at Yale and discovers how the other half lives.

Vance calls himself a cultural emigrant and he is acutely aware of the differences between social classes. On one hand is a self-reliant, hardworking and optimistic culture that invests in education and the future. The other is a consumer-oriented and cynical culture that blames social problems on the government. Vance’s grandmother and later the Marines teach him to expect more from himself. His years at Yale expose him to opportunities and to mentors. To Vance, these advantages separate the successful from the unsuccessful. This best seller is recommended.

Also available on Business Best Seller Kindles at the Ford Library and as an audiobook on OverDrive.

© Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.

New Business Expert Press eBooks!

Wednesday, January 25th, 2017

bep_logo

Duke students and alumni now have access to the latest Business Expert Press eBook titles. We’ve expanded our collection to include the 2015 and 2016 Digital Libraries. These new titles focus on applied business topics covering fields such as finance, accounting, marketing, and management.

Choose the link(s) that matches your current status or affiliation to browse or search the collections.

Current students:

Browse all subscribed BEP Digital Libraries

Browse the 2015 Digital Library

Browse the 2016 Digital Library

Fuqua alumni:

Connect to BEP Digital Libraries

Duke alumni:

Connect to BEP Digital Libraries

Business Expert Press eBooks are available online 24/7 via the ebrary platform and may be read by multiple users simultaneously.

New Movies for January

Thursday, January 19th, 2017

Here are our latest DVD titles:

American HoneyMiss Peregrine DVD Cover
Bridget Jones’s Baby
Denial
Don’t Think Twice
The Dressmaker
Florence Foster Jenkins
The great Gilly Hopkins
The Hollars
Kicks
Little Men
The Magnificent Seven
A Man Called Ove
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
Morgan
Ordinary World
Other People
Southside with You
Storks
Suicide Squad
Sully
Equity

You may browse the entire DVD collection via the library catalog.

Book Review: Designing Your Life

Tuesday, January 17th, 2017

book cover imageBurnett, Bill. Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life. Alfred A. Knopf, 2016.

During my last year of college, I woke up one afternoon and realized that I would be graduating soon. I had no job and no idea how to get a good one. I had no life plan. This is not unusual. Millions of recent graduates do not know how to find a meaningful job or how to design a purposeful life. For those already mid-career, 66% are unhappy with their jobs. And many successful professionals at the end of their careers want to downshift into a position with social impact, but lack the skills to make the transition.

In Designing Your Life, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans of the Stanford University Design Program advise using the principles of design thinking to create a life that is creative, productive and constantly evolving. They explain that design is a process of experimentation. As they explore, designers create prototypes, building on them when successful and discarding them when not. As designers try new things, they build their way forward.

To create your own ideal life, Burnett and Evans recommend “starting where you are,” improving the life that you are already living, without making disruptive structural changes like resigning your job or moving to another city. Assessment tools included in the book help clarify current work/life situations, then show how to customize existing jobs or careers to make them more engaging. For those who feel stuck, options can be developed by reframing problems and finding fresh solutions. There is more than one answer to creating a good life.

Burnett and Evans include an avalanche of examples from students who have taken their class at Stanford. Their writing style is informal; some illustrations are scribbles. I recommend this book despite these style elements. A second key book about personal wayfinding is Clayton Christensen’s excellent How Will You Measure Your Life?

Designing Your Life is also available as an eBook on OverDrive, an audiobook on OverDrive, and on Business Bestsellers Kindles at the Ford Library.

© Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.

Martin Luther King Day at Ford Library

Friday, January 13th, 2017

dr. martin luther king

The Ford Library will be open for our normal hours on the Martin Luther King holiday, Monday, January 16th.

Due to the University holiday on Monday, in-person reference and research assistance services will not be available until Tuesday, January 17th.

Our hours on Monday, January 16th will be 7:30am – midnight.

 

Library Closed This Weekend

Thursday, January 5th, 2017

snow_shoesFord Library will be closed this weekend, January 7th – 8th, due to predicted winter weather.

Please follow our Twitter feed for the latest updates on the Library’s operating hours during winter weather conditions.

Feel free to direct any questions or concerns to us at reference-librarians@fuqua.duke.edu.

Bill Gates’ Must-Reads

Monday, January 2nd, 2017

Bill Gates imageBillionaire Bill Gates reads every day, finishing off at least one book a week. “Even when my schedule is out of control, I carve out a lot of time for reading.” Here are Gates’ must-reads for 2016.

The Grid by Gretchen Bakke.
Says Gates: “The electrical grid is one of the greatest engineering wonders of the modern world.” Yet it stands in the way of an alternate energy future of solar or wind.

Shoe Dog by Phil Knight.
Nike founder Phil Knight tells the story of building his company into a global athletic success but his path is “messy, precarious and riddled with mistakes,” Gates says.

The Myth of the Strong Leader by Archie Brown.
Successful leaders “tend to be the ones who collaborate, delegate and negotiate – and recognize that no one person can or should have all the answers.”

The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee.
“The new genome technologies are at the cusp of affecting us all in profound ways,” Gates says, influencing our lives, personalities, identities, fates and choices.

String Theory by David Foster Wallace.
In this collection of essays about tennis, the author “found mind-blowing ways of bending language like a metal spoon.”

Thanks to Fuqua’s Gwen Barclay-Toy for bringing the Fortune article to our attention.

© Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.