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.