feb11b.indd


February 2011  113 C&RL News

Buffy in the Classroom: Essays on Teaching 
with the Vampire Slayer, edited by Jodie 
A. Kreider and Meghan K. Winchell (221 
pages, September 2010), brings together 17 
essays by teachers and scholars from both 
secondary schools and universities who use 
Joss Whedon’s TV series Buffy the Vampire 
Slayer as a text for lessons, seminars, or 
entire courses in media studies, literature, 
composition, religious studies, gender stud-
ies, and communication. Though the show 
ended nearly eight years ago (not counting 
its ongoing “eighth season” as a comic book 
series), it resonates with some academics 
who feel that its complex use of metaphor, 
history, myth, and ethics make it an ideal 
pedagogic tool. $35.00. McFarland. 978-0-
7864-6214-8.

In case you missed it, Buffy Meets the 
Academy, edited by Kevin J. Durand (224 
pages, May 2009), also explores using the 
series as text, though a bit more analytically, 
and it presents some themes that could be 
used in teaching—among them failed femi-
nism, the tragic hero, the quest for anti-self-
consciousness, and apocalyptic revisionism. 
$35.00. McFarland. 978-0-7864-4355-0.

Imagining Mars, by Robert Crossley (384 
pages, January 2011), examines the in-
terplay between speculative fiction and 

scientific knowl-
edge about Mars 
throughout history, 
from the age of the 
earliest telescopes 
to NASA’s recent 
orbiters and rovers. 
Crossley identifies 
several key eras in 
Martian literature: 
a spate of forgot-
ten romances in the 

George M. Eberhart is senior editor of American Libraries, 
e-mail: geberhart@ala.org

N e w  P u b l i c a t i o n sGeorge M. Eberhart

wake of Schiaparelli’s observation of canali 
in 1877; the Mars mania of the 1890s, cul-
minating in H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds 
and astronomer Percival Lowell’s pursuit of 
the “canals” as evidence of Martian life; uto-
pian reformist polemics, mediumistic fanta-
sies, and the masculinist adventure tales of 
Edgar Rice Burroughs in the early 20th cen-
tury; the emerging realism of science fiction 
at the dawn of the Space Age, exemplified 
by Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke; and 
Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy of the 
1990s, which blends all of the earlier themes 
into a hard-science saga of terraforming and 
colonization. $40.00. Wesleyan University. 
978-0-8195-6927-1.

A perfect companion to this literary his-
tory is Trailblazing Mars: NASA’s Next Giant 
Leap, by Pat Duggins (242 pages, September 
2010), which summarizes the history of Mars 
exploration from the Mariner and Viking mis-
sions to the surface explorations of the 21st 
century and looks at the risks and practical 
challenges that Martian astronauts (the new 
“right stuff”) will face during a manned ex-
pedition to the red planet. $24.95. University 
Press of Florida. 978-0-8130-3518-5.

The Murder of King Tut, a graphic novel 
based on the 2009 nonfiction book by James 
Patterson and Martin Dugard, adapted by Al-
exander Irvine with artwork by Ron Randall 
and Christopher Mitten (112 pages, Novem-
ber 2010), makes the case for the assassina-
tion of Pharaoh Tutankhamen by his succes-
sor, the Grand Vizier Ay. Although by 2010, 
the murder theory has been diluted by DNA 
evidence that Tut’s death was likely caused 
by infection from a broken leg, malaria, and 
even sickle-cell anemia, Patterson’s thesis 
has abundant historical precedent, includ-
ing Bob Brier’s The Murder of Tutankha-
men (Putnam, 1998) and Michael R. King 
and Gregory M. Cooper’s Who Killed King 
Tut? (Prometheus, 2004), not to mention the 
excellent 1945 novel by Mika Waltari, The 



C&RL News February 2011  114

Egyptian. This edition has the added value 
of luring undergraduates into historical fo-
rensics and archaeology through its graphi-
cal format. $24.99. IDW. 978-1-60010-780-1.

The Myth and Mystery of UFOs, by Thomas 
E. Bullard (417 pages, October 2010), tackles 
a complex and controversial subject from a 
scholarly, analytical, and cultural standpoint. 
Bullard admits at the outset that “enough 
threads of coherent experience exist [with-
in the UFO phenomenon] to reject cultural 
explanations as less than the whole story.” 
However, his academic training as a folklor-
ist enables him to treat the human experi-
ence with UFOs as a “mystery of mythic 
proportions,” with parallels in the motif of 
otherworldly journeys, religious experience, 
magical forces, Jungian archetypes, and even 
Indian captivity narratives (when compared 
to UFO abduction tales). Bullard outlines the 
history of UFOs with an emphasis on how 
a body of seemingly veridical testimony can 
evolve into a mythos. Then he examines the 
prehistory of strange sights in the sky; the 
tradition of otherworldly journeys and extra-
terrestrial visitation; the role of human chil-
dren as alien victims, hybrids, or harbingers 
of future harmony; the extremes of fear and 
hope that an alien invasion might inspire; the 
conflict between nature and apparently alien 
technology; the limitations of a psychosocial 
explanation for UFO reports; and the value of 
an experience-centered approach to under-
standing the anomalous claims of experienc-
ers. This is an extremely well-documented, 
cultural approach to a phenomenon that 
deserves to be embraced, rather than sum-
marily ignored, by at least a few branches of 
science. $34.95. University Press of Kansas. 
978-0-7006-1729-6.

For those who prefer their aliens remote 
and less mythical, The Eerie Silence: Review-
ing Our Search for Alien Intelligence, by Paul 
Davies (242 pages, April 2010), should do the 
trick. Davies evaluates the past 50 years of 
SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) 
projects and calls for a major rethink of the 
strategy proposed by Frank Drake in 1960—

looking for discrete alien signals—by shifting 
to a search for general footprints of ETI. One 
would think that UFO activity would consti-
tute such a footprint but, although he is much 
more sympathetic to the UFO phenomenon 
than most SETI researchers, Davies succumbs 
to the all noise–no signal approach decon-
structed by Bullard. Nevertheless, Davies 
provides a lucid, well-informed update on 
the search, including a section on the arse-
nic-based microbes of Mono Lake, California, 
that were the subject of a much-hyped De-
cember 2010 NASA press conference. $27.00. 
Houghton Mifflin. 978-0-547-13324-9.

The Northside: African Americans and the 
Creation of Atlantic City, by Nelson John-
son (337 pages, November 2010), offers an 
in-depth look at the flip side of Boardwalk 
Empire, the author’s 2002 history of Atlan-
tic City, New Jer-
sey, that was turned 
into a popular HBO 
television series. 
The vibrant African-
American enclave 
that developed on 
the north side of the 
railroad tracks was 
an essential part of 
the city’s heyday as 
a seaside resort in 
1885–1935, primar-
ily because it was the black workforce that 
provided the hotels with service laborers. 
The popular musical clubs that lined Ken-
tucky Avenue rivaled Harlem for entertain-
ment and drew many white visitors from 
the Boardwalk area. Johnson profiles more 
than a dozen of the Northside leaders who 
helped create this self-contained community 
and how they dealt with the rampant racism 
of the times. Ironically, it was the Civil Rights 
Movement of the 1960s and legalized casino 
gambling that caused the “unraveling of the 
black community’s tightly woven social struc-
ture,” as Johnson puts it, prompting many to 
move away from a city in decline. $24.95. 
Plexus Publishing. 978-0-937548-73-8.