Preview Shelf by Janice Clauser

Library News and Notable New Books

Come Shopping! - The final 2010 book sale offered by The Friends of the Library begins at 9 a.m., Saturday, December 11 in the lower level of the Crawfordsville District Public Library. The extensive collection makes holiday gifts available for the price of a donation to the cause, thanks to those in the community who donate books and other items. The project is an achievement of library wisdom, volunteer management, and community generosity, making it a perfect recycling project. You can also purchase good-looking book bags with Velcro envelopes for library cards.

"Democracy, Liberty, and Property" is a new volume donated by the Liberty Fund for the historical American Books collection, and it covers constitutional conventions convened in New York, Massachusetts, and Virginia in the 1820s to address policy issues like suffrage, legislative apportionment, governmental structures, and freedom of religion; the editor is Merrill D. Peterson. Two other additions to this special collection are "A Letter Concerning Toleration and Other Writings" by a writer at the dawn of the Enlightenment and Oxford academic John Locke (1632-1704) and Gordon Wood's "Empire of Liberty", part of The Oxford History of the United States series, a history of our early Republic, 1789-1815.

"Explorers": Great Tales of Adventure and Endurance" is a Smithsonian great-book " taking the reader into the worlds of some of the most intrepid people ever known." Their lives are captured in the context of their times. The smaller square-shaped book "Citizens of the Sea" showing the wondrous creatures from the "census" of marine life written by Nancy Knowlton is issued by National Geographic. "Forest Forensics" is Tom Wessels' field guide to "reading" the forested landscape.

"Abraham Lincoln" by James McPherson marks the two-hundredth anniversary of Lincoln's birth with a short biography, "the best concise introduction to Lincoln in print." "The Making of Hoosiers" is Gayle Johnson's work showing "how a small movie from the Heartland became one of America's favorite films."

Bob Woodward's "Obama's Wars" provides an intimate and sweeping portrait of the young president as commander in chief, drawing on internal memos, classified documents, meeting notes and interviews with many of the key players. Steven Rattner's "Overhaul" is an insider's account of the Obama administration's emergency rescue of the auto industry. Robert Reich's "After-Shock" is a new reading of the economic crisis, and a plan for dealing with the challenge of its aftermath. He thinks the situation is precarious. In "The Treatment Trap" Rosemary Gibson contends that the overuse of medical care is wrecking our health and suggests what we can do to prevent it.
"Shakedown" the continuing conspiracy against the American taxpayer, by Steven Malanga, says the bill is coming due for all our public spending and bigger government. "Bad Sports" is Dave Zirin's essay about how he thinks team owners are ruining the games we love.

Three books from Popular Mechanics editors are "The Boy Scientist: 160 extraordinary experiments & adventures", "The Boy Camper: 160 outdoor projects and activities", and "The Boy Mechanic: 200 classic things to build".