Preview Shelf by Janice Clauser

Library News and Notable New Books

About Returning Borrowed Books and Giving Donations - The Crawfordsville District Public Library appreciates patrons' contributions of reading materials. Donated books, tapes, and/or videos can be brought to the Circulation Desk inside the doorway, where the staff will accept them gratefully. They will be used in the library collection if they are needed, or placed on the Friends of the Library's cart for monthly, Second Saturday sales down on the lower level. Donations from these sales sponsor special library events, especially the children's summer reading programs. This is an amazing kind of recycling.

Borrowed books and materials should be returned on time in the driveway's outside book deposit slot, the outside wall slot by the building's entrance, or the slot at the circulation desk. This assures fine-free borrowing.

New reading is offered weekly. The ghost story "What the Night Knows" by Dean Koontz begins with the story of a murderer of four families who was killed by the last survivor of the fourth family, a boy of 14. Two decades later and half a continent away another criminal is murdering families, and a detective is certain his own family members will be targets as when he was fourteen and killed their slayer. Mary Jane Clark's "To Have and To Kill" is a Wedding Cake Mystery where a struggling actress-baker agrees to accept an order from a daytime television star, whose friend is then suddenly murdered. Jayne Ann Krentz' 67th title "In Too Deep", an Arcane Society novel, introduces her new Looking Glass Trilogy about a woman who knows too much and the psychic detective who loves her.

"The Black Widows" is a novel by Indianapolis resident Doug Zipes; two elderly women in Chappaqua, New York who come from Afghanistan and Palestine, control a worldwide terrorist organization from a back room in a small used book store attached to their house. In "Déjà Vu" by Fern Michaels, The Sisterhood members need excitement, and so they give themselves the assignment to find a man wanted by the FBI, the CIA, and Homeland Security.

"The Imperfectionists" by Tom Rachman describes a 50-year-old international English-language newspaper struggling to stay afloat in Rome, when the staff stumbles onto the unsuspected intentions of the founder. "Lord of Misrule" by Jaimy Gordon is a National Book Award winner about the horseracing world of trainers, dreamers, and gamblers.

Now to describe non-fiction new on the shelves: After the Civil War, with wealthy and powerful businessmen like J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller, America was transformed into an industrial giant as floods of immigrants came and cities grew; H. W. Brands' "American Colossus" portrays "the years when the contest between capitalism and democracy was at its sharpest, and capitalism triumphed." "The Man Who Sold America" is the true tale of Albert Lasker and the creation of the advertising century told by Jeffrey Cruikshank. Robert Post examines the development of "Urban Mass Transit". Steven Johnson studies the natural history of innovation in "Where Good Ideas Come From"; his last paragraph is a plea for each of us to be in a creative mood in order to move forward with innovation. "The Tree" by John Fowles is an essay on what kind of a relationship we should have with nature. John Bogle's "Enough" explains why the worlds' poorest starve in an age of plenty. The author doesn't simply outline the problem, he points to practical solutions.