Preview Shelf by Janice Clauser

Library News and Notable New Books

"Readopoly" Roundup Time - Here's an "Alert"! The Adult Summer Reading Program at the Crawfordsville Library concludes August 31st. The Grand Prize for "Readopoly" will be drawn on September 1st and the winner will be notified by phone. This year 74 men and women signed up for the program to read fourteen books in eleven weeks. The south wall is full of their achievements.

An historical novel by Edward Cline called "Sparrowhawk: Jack Frake" is Book One of his American Revolution series. It establishes the war's first stage as rumblings of discontent in England lead certain noble smugglers to board ship for Virginia. Isabel Allende's new "Island Beneath the Sea" profiles African slaves in 1770 as a plantation owner's son purchases a young native for his bride, and finds himself dependent on the services of his teenaged slave. They later flee the land later called Haiti to New Orleans, so the book has rich and contrasting atmosphere. "A Visit from the Goon Squad" by Jennifer Egan is a spellbinding narrative about an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and the passionate troubled young woman he employs in an "undertow of self-destruction we must all master or succumb to". "The Pregnant Widow" comes from Martin Amis and tells about 1970, when the youth of Europe are in the chaotic, ecstatic throes of the sexual revolution. "Strip" by Thomas Perry starts out with gang warfare when an aging strip club owner has been robbed by a masked gunman while he's placing his cash receipts in a bank's night-deposit box. A contrast is "The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake" by Aimee Bender about a nine-year-old daughter who finds she can taste her mother's emotions in a slice of her baked goods, and as this "talent" grows she experiences the heartbreak of loving those whom she knows too much about. In "Backseat Saints" by Joshilyn Jackson the "perfect Texas housewife" finds out her husband will kill her unless she kills him first.

Nonfiction offers history too. "Revolutionaries" by Pulitzer Prize winner Jack Rakove is a new write up of the "invention of America" showing how ordinary men became extraordinary patriots with richly drawn portraits deepening our appreciation of that cast of heroes. In "The Ohio Frontier" Douglas Hurt shows the Old Northwest from 1720-1830, from the arrival of the first Native American settlers to the end of the frontier period, featuring the Indians' culture and adaption to white society, the military expeditions that determined who'd control the land north of the Ohio River, and the agricultural communities developing in the state. "The Icarus Syndrome" is Peter Beinart's history of American hubris, the seductions of success through three generations from progressives before World War I through post-cold war neoconservatives, quite a powerful review of "imperial temptations".

Four new books discuss the Middle East. "Quicksand" by Geoffrey Wawro tells about America's pursuit of power there; "War" by Sebastian Junger digs into soldiers' lives while fighting there; "Nomad" by Ayaanb Ali records her personal journey through the clash of civilizations; last, "Jihad in Saudi Arabia" is Thomas Hegghammer's document of violence and Pan-Islamism since 1979.

Last are biographies. "T. S. Eliot" by Craig Raine is sixth in the series Lives and Legacies from Oxford University Press. "Wolf" is James Haley's study of the life of writer and adventurer Jack London "a man bristling with ideas, whose passion for …social justice roared until the day he died." "The Men Who Would Be King" is "an almost epic tale of moguls, movies, and the company called Dreamworks" by Nicole LaPorte starring Steven Spielberg, David Geffen, and Jeffrey Katzenberg.