Preview Shelf by Janice Clauser

Library News and Notable Newer Books

How a Book Can Inspire a Program - On February 18th, the Crawfordsville Library's Youth Services area was alive with creativity as 39 elementary, high school, and adult "students" fashioned designer wallets, sandals, visors, basketball hoops, and cup and ball games using colorful duct tape. Karen Record created this program based on Ellie Schiedermayer's book "Got Tape?". Karen commented, "From this huge response I see we need to do this again."

New books about our state offer up-dated learning and/or entertainment. "Trees of Indiana" a field guide by Stan Tekiela, is compact, colorful and most useful when we're "on foot". "Journey's End: Relics and Ruins of Indiana's Transportation Legacy" by John Bower refers to our thousands of miles of roads, rails, bridges, lake frontage, rivers and signs. Each photograph shows an element of our own special outdoors. "Weird Indiana: a Travel Guide to Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets" by Mark Sceurman and Mark Marimen reviews our Old Jail Museum on pages125-7, and Shades (of Death) State Park on page 13. "A History of the Diocese of Lafayette-in-Indiana" by Anthony Prosen includes St. Bernard's Church and the Newman Center at Wabash College on page 93. "Steel Shavings" or "Life in the Calumet Region During the 1930s" is filled with essays and pictures of Depression Decade family histories written by Indiana University Northwest students in 1988. "My Indiana: 101 Places to See" by Earl Conn includes the Lew Wallace Study, pages 128-9, and is a good test-read to see if we've visited all the enticing places available right here in our own state. The final local book is "Homer E. Capehart, A Senator's Life 1897-1979"; he was "an energetic campaigner for the values of his Hoosier constituents" and author William Pickett makes his era come alive.

"Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer" by Novella Carpenter is a funny memoir about one woman living on a farm in downtown Oakland, California. "Weapons of Mass Instruction" is John Gatto's "journey through the dark world of compulsory schooling". He taught for 30 years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and …became an expert in boredom."

Books about food attract most of us. "Martha Stewart's Cupcakes" is visually irresistible. Jillian Michaels' "Master Your Metabolism" offers three diets to naturally balance hormones for a healthy body. "The Food of a Younger Land" researches old WPA files on eating and eateries before the national highway system, when food was seasonal, regional, and traditional; page 252 offers southern Indiana Persimmon Pudding. "Essential Herbal Wisdom" holds Nancy Arrowsmith's "exploration of 50 remarkable herbs", with 12 pages on basil, 15 on parsley, 11 on rosemary, etc. and interesting ideas for their use.

Man Booker Prize winner Alice Monro has just issued ten stories about unpredictable events that require accommodation in families; this collection is called “Too Much Happiness". Barbara Kingsolver's "The Lacuna" finds a man pulled between Mexico, home of his favorite artists Rivera and Kahlo, and America, location of his concerns, Pearl Harbor, FDR and J. Edgar Hoover. "The Dewey Deception" by Ralph Raab is his First Adventure from the Biblio Files, a puzzle-solving adventure about a code in the Dewey Decimal System and clues hidden within web sites. Barbara Bradford's "Breaking the Rules" is a gripping story of courage and revenge in the fashion capitals New York, Paris and London, even Hong Kong and Istanbul. Sue Grafton's "U is for Undertow" is a surprise-filled thriller moving between the 1980s and 1960s and changing points of view. "Breathless" by Dean Koontz pursues a mystery high up in the Colorado Rocky Mountains.