Ford Library

Our second movie title in the series is the 1991 British release Enchanted April.  Movies are rarely charming anymore, but this one is both sweet and amusing.  Rose and Lottie, two depressed English women (played by Miranda Richardson and Josie Lawrence) decide to rent an Italian villa. A crochety Mrs. Fisher (Joan Plowright) and bored aristocrat Lady Caroline (Polly Walker) make up the foursome who share the summer rental.

Plowright, her character by turns funny and touching, was nominated for Best Supporting Actress.  At one point Lottie asks, after Mrs. Fisher name drops several literary figures, if she knew Keats.  Plowright’s indignant, “No, I didn’t, and I didn’t know Shakespeare and Chaucer either!” is one of the best scenes in the movie.

The opening shots the morning after the women arrive at the villa make one want to buy a ticket for Italy immediately.  It’s filmed on location, and the cinematography is stunning.  The  atmosphere has a restorative effect on the villa’s inhabitants, and when Lottie and Rose decide to invite their husbands (played by Alfred Molina and Jim Broadbent) even these less sympathetic characters fall under the its idyllic spell.  The film showcases some fine acting and lovely cinematography.

The latest movies have arrived and are out on the shelves.

Paul Blart : Mall Cop
The Sixth Sense
Taken
True Blood, season 1
The Uninvited
Valkyrie
Wild China
Defiance
Revolutionary Road

We offer our alumni a selection of databases for remote use.  You will need your NetID and password for access.  If your password doesn’t work, please see our help page. Our databases include:

• Business Monitor Online–daily macroeconomic, financial and company news and analysis on emerging and key global markets.
• Business Source: Alumni Edition–More than 1,350 full text business magazines and journals, of which more than 350 are peer-reviewed. Includes publications in nearly every area of business including marketing, management, MIS, POM, accounting, finance, econometrics, economics and more.
• Reference USA–database of directory information for 12 million US businesses that is searchable by SIC code, geographic location, Yellow Page heading, company, etc. It includes some names of corporate officers as well as contact information.
• GoingGlobal–an excellent resource for information on international job searches, life and study abroad, international internships, and much more.

We also provide links to free or low cost databases in our alumni e-library.

Thornton, Sarah. Seven days in the art world. W. W. Norton, 2008.

The contemporary art world is characterized by six roles: artist, dealer, curator, critic, collector and auction-house expert. In this “symbolic economy,” creativity is commercialized and cultural worth is debated rather than determined by wealth. There is an overriding principle that nothing is more important than the art itself, yet there are contradictory hierarchies based on qualities such as fame, credibility, institutional affiliation, education and wealth.

Seven Days in the Art World describes this world through seven narratives set in six cities in five countries. Each chapter is a day-in-the-life account of the art world’s players and institutions. It begins with a Christie’s auction in New York. Among the people profiled is a Duke alumna who consigned 99 works from her parents’ collection of 600. Read more …

I’m going to highlight a few movies from our DVD collection over the next couple of months that you may have missed when they first came out.  Some are older and some are just more obscure.  File this first title under horror with a smidge of science fiction.

Silk is a Taiwanese film originally released under the title Gui Si.  A group of researchers, led by paranormal scientist Hashimoto, have managed to capture the ghost of a little boy.  The scientists see the ghost talking to itself, but its speech is inaudible.  In a sublimely creepy scene, one of the researchers does manage to capture the spirit’s attention, and the ghost shifts from mysterious to menacing.

The group enlists the help of a special agent who has superior eyesight and lip reading skills to help uncover the circumstances behind the child’s death. Not a strictly plot driven narrative, the film provides the viewer with far more character motivation than the average horror flick.  Any fan of horror films or mysteries should check this one out.  It was an official selection at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006.

I came across a new blog from the Wall Street Journal this morning that may be useful for recent grads still in the job search.

Laid Off and Looking follows eight out-of-work professionals as they look for new jobs in a post-meltdown world. Each writes about his or her own personal experiences with all of the ups and downs that go into a job search in a difficult market.

Hat tip for the discovery to another interesting business blog: BizDeansTalk. Both blogs have been added to our blog roll. Enjoy!

Szaky, Tom. Revolution in a bottle : how TerraCycle is redefining green business. Portfolio, 2008.

Once I carried some bags of semi-composted leaf litter from our neighbor’s curb to mulch a new garden bed in front of our house. The neighbor was furious. “I paid good money for those bags,” he shouted.
So when I read in Tom Szaky’s Revolution in a Bottle, that his neighbors called the police because he took plastic bottles out of their recycling bins on the curb, I was totally sympathetic. But I was already hooked on this account of the first product in the world that was made entirely from and packaged entirely in waste.

Author Szaky dropped out of Princeton in 2002 and founded a company that makes products from waste. Szaky’s company TerraCycle uses worms to recycle garbage into fertilizer, which is bottled into used plastic liters found in the trash. This is the story about a green entrepreneur and his company — how it started, overcame many challenges and grew to a successful venture. A company that began with garbage from Princeton Univ.dining halls grew to a company that produced 100 products in 15,000 big box stores. Read more …

If you have seen the documentary The Corporation you may remember Ray Anderson, owner of the carpet company Interface.  He retooled the company to take advantage of sustainable business practices after reading Paul Hawken’s book The Ecology of Commerce.

He has a new TED talk up on the business logic of sustainability.

Ford Library is pleased to announce the addition of Guidestar Premium to its suite of database resources available to all current Duke University students, faculty, & staff.

GuideStar is a leading source of financial, contact, and leadership information for U.S. nonprofit organizations. The database covers 1.8 million IRS-recognized organizations and enables users to find a charity, benchmark a nonprofit’s performance, research a particular nonprofit sector, and more.

Duke users can connect to Guidestar Premium directly, or via its link on our database page.

NOTE: After connecting to the site using one of the links above, you can start using the Guidestar site search box right away. You do not need to register or login after you connect to the Guidestar site.

Your comments and questions are welcome!

Investment company analysts’ research reports for companies and industries have been added to our Thomson ONE Banker subscription.

Ford Library has replaced the research report content lost when our subscription to Reuters Research On Demand expired by adding the Investext collection to Thomson ONE.

Duke users can now access these reports by taking the following steps:

1. Connect to Thomson ONE Banker.
2. Enter a company ticker in the top left search box, and click Go.
3. Click the “Research” link in the left-hand menu to view the most recent reports.
4. Click the “Conduct a search ..” link for more detailed searches.

Click the image at the top of this post or HERE for screenshot of this search strategy.