Preview Shelf by Janice Clauser

Library News and Notable New Books

Books to Consider for Memorial Day Reading - Happy Memorial Day, Indiana. Two new books at the Crawfordsville Library discuss current United States challenges. In "American Empire before the Fall" Bruce Fein cites our birth as a Republic, how it has changed, and how it can be regained. "The Rights of the People" by David Shippler discusses how our search for safety invades our liberties. "The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It" by Angelo Codevilla introduces bipartisan political elites he says run America, thinking they know what's best for the rest of us; he praises the newfound popularity of quoting the Constitution and new activities by political parties asserting self-rule and the freedoms so hard-sought in America's founding. Jeffrey Gitomer's "Little Book of Leadership" offers "the 12.5 strengths of responsible, reliable, remarkable leaders that create results, rewards, and resilience, a compact manual practical for any reader."

"Making Jack Falcone" is Joaquin Garcia's story as one of few FBI agents dedicated solely to undercover work. He used a series of aliases to shadow the world of La Cosa Nostra. "A Rope and A Prayer" by David Rohde is based on his New York Times series "Held by the Taliban." In November 2008 he and two others traveled to meet a Taliban commander outside Kabul; the interview was a trap, and kidnapped by militants they were taken deep into the tribal areas of Pakistan, where for seven months they saw many strongholds as the abductors avoided American drone attacks. The memoir describes many sides of our involvement in Afghanistan.

The novel "Chasing Fire" by Nora Roberts delves into the world of the Missoula smoke jumpers, elite firefighters who thrive on danger and wouldn't know how to live life if it weren't on the edge. Kurt Vonnegut's "While Mortals Sleep" is previously unpublished short fiction recalling the unique landscape of factories, trailers, and bars, and characters with dreams and fears of the indifferent world. "The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg" is a work lauded by The MacArthur Foundation for her "exquisitely distilled stories, a distinctive portrait of contemporary American life." "A Field Guide to the North American Family" is an "illustrated fiction" from Garth Hallberg that actually looks and reads like a field guide, creative and intriguing. Alan Orloff's "Killer Routine" offers us a comedian who survived a tragic auto accident that claimed the life of his fiancee, and who subsequently must help her sister who is threatened by death. "When Tito Loved Clara" by Jon Michaud shows a Dominican Republic native raised in grim circumstances in Manhattan who must get along with relatives who don't understand her assimilation.

How about some new meal ideas! "Wood-Fired Cooking" by Mary Karlin shows techniques and recipes for the grill, backyard oven, fireplace, and campfire. Celerie Kemble's "To Your Taste" is about creating modern rooms with a traditional twist. This book is enhanced by lovely photographs. "The Art of Gift Wrapping" is Wanda Wen's well-photographed, unusual ideas that can spur us on.

Rick Steves' "France 2011" with its foldout color map will entertain any armchair traveler as well as any of us with a ticket. "Cruises & Ports of Call" from U. S. and Canadian home ports to the Caribbean, Alaska, Hawaii and more are covered in Frommer's new guidebook. The "Berlitz Complete Guide to Cruising & Cruise Ships 2011" by Douglas Ward is also available.

Preview Shelf by Janice Clauser

Library News and Notable New Books

Speaking as we do this month of the Indianapolis 500, a new book at the Crawfordsville Library tells exactly what's going on; with a preface by Helio Castroneves and a forward by David Letterman, "Indianapolis 500: A Century of Excitement" by Ralph Kramer "captures the thrill of the race…in unparalleled beauty." With a chapter devoted to each of its decades, from the birth of the brickyard to the fate of the winning cars, this book is a pleasure to pursue.

"The Clockwork Universe" by Edward Dolnick tells about the band of men, including Isaac Newton, who saw a world of perfect order, intricate and regulated, and who actually invented science, revamping our understanding of the world. Philosopher Anthony Appiah's "Honor Code" tells how societies can repudiate immoral customs they have accepted by harnessing the ancient power of honor from within. "The Innovator's Way" gives Peter Denning's 8 essential practices for successful innovation, sensing, envisioning, offering, adopting, sustaining, executing, leading, and embodying. "What Good is God?" is Philip Yancey's search. He shares his thoughts after ten experiences around the world, finding faith makes a difference even when belief is severely tested.

"Network Nation" is Richard John's explanation of the first electrical communications
networks in the decades between the Civil War and the First World War when Western Union and the Bell System emerged as the dominant providers for the telegraph and telephones. The invisible alliance that undermines America's interests in the Middle East is explained in "The Arab Lobby" by Mitchell Bard, authority on U.S. Israel relations. How Brad Stevens and the Butler Bulldogs marched their way to the brink of college basketball's national championship is the subject of David Woods' "Underdawgs"; it's a David versus Goliath tale, though losing to Duke, the Bulldogs proved they belonged in the game and won the respect of people who were not even sports fans.

A book designed to make us all kind of jealous is "The 100 Thing Challenge" because Dave Bruno got rid of almost everything he owned, remade his life, and regained his soul. "365 Ways to Live Cheap!" by Trent Hamm, founder of thesimpledollar.com, shares his ten biggest tips for living cheap, which include taking little steps, not big ones, recording every penny you spend for a month, and calculating how much money you really make.

"A Murder of Crows" by P.F. Chisholm is a Sir Robert Carey story of the year 1592 when the son of Mary Boleyn and Henry VIII desires the solution to the identity of a badly decomposed corpse that's washed up from the Thames River. Next, the world of identity thieves, methamphetamine dealers, and mentally unstable characters in Boston, fill "Moonlight Mile" by Dennis Lehane. "Hypothermia" a Nordic crime fiction by Arnaldur Indridason features an inspector's unsolved case of two young people who went missing years ago under circumstances tied to his past. Dawn Shiller's "The Road through Wonderland" is the true tale of an infamous public figure and a young girl's struggle to survive unthinkable abuse. Annie Proulx' memoir "Bird Cloud" describes building her home on 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands near the North Platte River.

Preview Shelf by Janice Clauser

Library News and Notable New Books

The May Book Sale is Saturday - Saturday, May 14 is the date for another Friends of the Library book sale on the Crawfordsville Library's lower level. It opens at 9 a.m. with all kinds of books available for the price of a donation. Just going through the shelves can be a great adventure.

A new short book on human action, free markets, and political economy donated to the Crawfordsville Library by the Liberty Fund is the economic analysis "Interventionism" by Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973). Another study is "The Planet in a Pebble" a journey into earth's deep history by Jan Zalasiewicz, with "grand stories that reach back to long dead stars, into the depths of the Earth, to vanished continents, and quiet ocean beds above which strange creatures swam. There is much history there, if you know how to unlock it." From a much later period is "Defending Constantine" telling about the twilight of an empire and the dawn of Christendom, composed by Peter Leithart.

In our present world, "Cultures of War" by John Dower includes a comparison between 9/11 and Pearl Harbor, and he includes Hiroshima and the invasion of Iraq in his "four powerful events". "God and Globalization Volume 4" by Max Stackhouse, is the study of today's religions. "Black Mass" by John Gray studies "apocalyptic religion and the death of utopia". Roger Pearman's title is "I'm Not Crazy I'm Just Not You" with "secrets to how we can be so alike when we're so different: the real meaning of the sixteen personality types". "Workarounds that Work" or "How to Conquer Anything That Stands in Your Way at Work" is designed by Russell Bishop to lead to the simplifying of jobs. "First the Broccoli Then the Ice Cream" is a parent's guide to "deliberate discipline" by Tim Riley. "Get a Life, Not a Job" with the subtitle "Do What You Love and Let Your Talents Work for You" comes from Paula Caligiuri.

"The Tenth Parallel" by Eliza Griswold includes "dispatches from the fault line between Christianity and Islam". She notes that more than half the world's Muslims live along the tenth parallel as do 60 percent of Christians, where their encounter is shaping the future of each faith and of whole societies as well.

Four political books have come at once. "How Obama's Gender Policies Undermine America" by Diana Furchtgott-Roth; "Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America" by John Avlon; "Dupes: How America's Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century" by Paul Kengor; and "Toxic Talk: How the Radical Right has Poisoned America's Airwaves" by Bill Press; all state their standpoints.

There's "The History of Photography" from 1839 to the present by Beaumont Newhall, and "Office 2010, the Missing Manual (the book that should have been in the box)" by Nancy Conner, and "2011 Poet's Market" of which Robert Brewer is the editor.

The autobiography of a former Planned Parenthood leader Abby Johnson is "UnPlanned". Bob Taylor tells about his life journey turning passion into business in "Guitar Lessons". Amy Chua's now famous story about how Chinese parents raise smart student-children is "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother".

"Between War and Peace: How America Ends Its Wars" contains 15 writings from the Revolution to the first Gulf War, and leading historians comment on the ramifications of the wars' ends for the nation's future; the editor is Matthew Moten, Professor of History at West Point.

Preview Shelf by Janice Clauser

Library News and Notable New Books

The Library Welcomes New Mothers - Mothers of newborns are invited to sign the Crawfordsville Library's Baby Registration Book. Each new mother will be the recipient of a lovely gift and the new leaflet of library services designed for mothers of infants; besides that, older siblings will receive "big sister" or "big brother" badges.

Marshall McLuhan, the celebrated social theorist who defined the culture of the 1960's, is remembered for "The medium is the message". In Douglas Coupland's "Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work" McLuhan predicted the end of print culture and the rise of "electronic inter-dependence", the approaching reality of our time.

"J. D. Salinger" the man who eluded fans and journalists during much of his lifetime (which was most of the entire twentieth century) was a privileged youth; the new biography by Kenneth Slawenski praises his heroism after being drafted in World War II when he was involved in the heaviest European fighting. His triumphant "The Catcher in the Rye", expressed his lifelong commitment to Eastern religion.

On Wednesday, April 7, 1926, a woman stepped out of the crowd in Rome and in front of her stood Benito Mussolini. As he raised his arm to give the Fascist salute, the woman raised hers and shot him at point-blank range. He survived, and the book "The Woman Who Shot Mussolini" is about the shooter, Violet Gibson, (profiled by Frances Saunders), who grasped the moral atmosphere of her world and sought to forestall catastrophe with her deed.

In "Radical" Saul Alinsky is studied by Nicholas Hoffman as the American Machiavelli, who is to community-organizing what Freud is to psychoanalysis. He made a career of arming the powerless and enraging the powerful. Vikram Akula's "A Fistful of Rice" tells about himself and "my unexpected quest to end poverty through profitability." He explains his view of how traditional business principles can help solve one of the world's biggest societal problems.

In "Sonia Sotomayor" Antonia Felix profiles her as the True American Dream. The Puerto Rican girl from the South Bronx became one of the greatest legal minds in the country and America's first Hispanic Supreme Court justice. Andrew Young's "Walk in My Shoes" is his conversations as a Civil Rights legend with his godson Kabir Sehgal about the Journey Ahead.

"Autobiography of Mark Twain", edited by Harriet Smith, Volume 1 marks the 100th anniversary of Twain's death and shows his authentic and unsuppressed voice, brimming with humor, ideas, and opinions, and speaking clearly from the grave as he intended, "to talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment". In "Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses" by Claire Dederer who achieved hard yoga positions that pushed her toward a life that was less tidy, she discovered that what she needed most of all was less goodness and more joy. Goodness was what she'd tried for as a daughter of mothers in the '70s who ran away to find themselves.

"Sweet Sister Moon" by Norbert Krapf, Indiana Poet Laureate, expresses the feminine spirit in the natural world, in history and in memory, in poems that encompass that spirit. Philip Gulley's "If the Church Were Christian" is about rediscovering the values of Jesus. "Fed Up!" is Governor of Texas Rick Perry's fight to save America from Washington (and economic collapse). A kind of biography-history is the Peace Corp's story of its first fifty years "When the World Calls" by Stanley Meisler.

Preview Shelf by Janice Clauser

Library News and Notable New Books

If You Like Books, Try These! - Here is a group of miscellaneous new books with rather intriguing titles, first "Burying the Dead but Not the Past: Ladies' Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause". Author Caroline Janney writes about how white, southern women formed the LMAs to retrieve and rebury Confederate soldiers scattered throughout the region immediately following the Civil War. These women relocated and re-interred the remains of 72,000 soldiers, nearly 28 percent of the 260,000 lost in the war. They prepared elaborate burials and held Memorial Days even as the region was still occupied by northern soldiers. The result was to craft a sympathetic Confederate position that northerners and in some cases southern African Americans could find palatable.

Second on the list, Allan Metcalf's "OK" is "the improbable story of America's greatest word, said to be the most frequently spoken or typed word on the planet". Metcalf describes how OK was born in a 1839 newspaper article as a humorous abbreviation for "oll korrect" (all correct), used through "Okey-Dokey" of the '20s through "I'm OK You're OK" of the 1970s and the absurd "Okeley Dokeley" on The Simpsons. "The Battery" is Henry Schlesinger's first popular history of the technology that harnessed electricity and powered the greatest scientific and technological advances of our time. He says, "As an author, I'd like to believe this is the first book in which Wolfman Jack, Michael Faraday, Lord Byron, and the band Metallica appear between the same covers."

"Cathedrals of Science" is Patrick Coffey's study of the personalities and rivalries that made modern chemistry. He notes that early scientists were the first to be seen by their countries as military assets, for poison gas in World War I, and the Manhattan Project in World War II. Anti-Semitism was also a force in American chemistry, after the Nazis pushed Jewish scientists from their posts in the 1930s. There was sexism: Linus Pauling seeing that his rival Dorothy Wrinch's funding was blocked. The author chooses 13 chemists who built modern chemistry.

"Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life" where Karen Armstrong uses teachings of the great world religions, notes Love Your Enemies as the final step. Sarah Palin's "America by Heart" contains her reflections on family, faith, and the flag, inspired by encounters with ordinary men and women as she has traveled throughout the country. She also includes brief readings from classic and contemporary texts that have inspired her, as well as portraits of Americans whom she admires.

"Neoconservatism" by Justin Vaisse, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, finds three distinct stages: the New York intellectuals who reacted against the 1960 leftists; the Scoop Jackson Democrats who tried to preserve a mix of hawkish anticommunism abroad and social progress at home, and the Neocons of the 1990s and 2000s who are no longer either liberals or Democrats. It's the biography of a movement. Lucinda Bassett offers "the Solution" for each of us to conquer fear and control our future, a 21-day emotional makeover she has presented to major corporations, professional associations, and educational institutions, on radio and television programs, and in high-profile publications.

A large book "The Making of the Empire Strikes Back" is the 30th anniversary tribute to the blockbuster film Star Wars, Episode 5, presented as an all-inclusive anthology by J. W. Rinzler with a forward by Ridley Scott.