Preview Shelf by Janice Clauser

Library News and Notable Newer Books

A new project about old local schools needs your help. The Crawfordsville Library reference staff will display memorabilia of former county high schools in April. Since many schools were consolidated in the early 1970s, the project's aim is to preserve their histories along with material about staffs and students. The schools involved were Alamo, Bowers, Breaks, Coal Creek Central, Darlington, Ladoga, Linden, Mace, New Market, New Richmond, New Ross, Smartsburg, Waveland, Waynetown, and Wingate. There will always be interest in these earlier educational places. Have you any memorabilia, pictures, or items that you'd be willing to allow to be copied, scanned, or borrowed? Especially sought are yearbooks, photos, commencement programs, and sports memorabilia. Will you bring your treasures to the second floor reference desk? The staff will appreciate this help. There are also questionnaires there where you can write your memories and thus document them for our local history collection. Thank you.

History always attracts many readers. Peter Ackroyd's biography called "Thames" looks like a charming group of short, lively chapters connecting the river with its towns, personages and residences, bridges and docks, locks and weirs along its 215-mile run. "The Lost History of Christianity" is Philip Jenkins' study of the thousand-year golden age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia "and how it died". "We need to recover those memories, to restore that history...the chain of memory is resurrection."

The official biography of "The Queen Mother" by William Shawcross "is as well, a singular history of Britain in the twentieth century." DK Books has issued "War" from ancient Egypt to Iraq credited to editorial consultant Saul David, "with all its momentous, world-changing impact and extraordinary human stories." "Imperial" contains William T. Vollmann's photos of the Mexican-American border, its people and their struggles during its three great empires. "A Country of Vast Designs" by Robert Merry is about President Polk, the Mexican War, and the conquest of the American continent. In "The American Civil War" military history, John Keegan considers "its lingering conundrums: the continuation of fighting for four years between such vastly mismatched sides" and all the effects that have eluded earlier historiography. "The Remains of Company D" by James Nelson follows this part of the US First Division in World War II from enlistment to combat at Cantigny, Soisson, and the Meuse-Argonne and those battles' effects. Nicholas Weber's "The Bauhaus Group" is a study of the six masters of modernism in art during the 1920s and 1930s in Germany, (closed by the Gestapo).

"When Everything Changed" is the amazing journey of American women from 1960 to the present, presented by Gail Collins. She says change began when most had to get their husbands' permission to apply for a credit card.

Skipping on to today, here is nonfiction that serves our latest needs. "Facebook me!" is a guide to having fun with your friends and promoting your projects. Wei-Meng Lee helps us get "Windows 7: Up and Running". "Super Freakonomics" is Steven Levitt's book about global cooling and all the other crises of today; it challenges the way we think, exploring the "hidden side of everything". "The Tyranny of E-Mail" is John Freeman's look at the history of correspondence through the ages. "Highest Duty" is US Airways Captain Chesley Sullenberger's discussion about his search for what really matters.