Preview Shelf by Janice Clauser

Library News and Notable New Books

Everybody's Invited to Summer Reading Programs - At the Crawfordsville Library "the game is on" in the adult summer reading challenge, so "Take your Chances at the Library!" Roll dice to find out your reading categories, earn points, and reach the challenge goal by completing ten books in eight weeks. The circulation desk area is decked out in dice, and full of patrons finding out about the weekly prize drawings and one Grand Prize. You'll find room to be helped, even when the children's area is crowded with its own prize winners and craft makers. This is a great kind of cool community summer school, and you're very welcome there.

Regarding new fiction on the shelves, Phillip Margolin's "Supreme Justice" offers suspense; a woman on death row in Oregon has appealed her case just as a Supreme Court justice is attacked. One of three, newly requested novels is Australian author Pamela Freeman's "The Castings", a fantasy trilogy in one volume about what's right and what's wrong including lessons on how to live a good and decent life. Strong female characters and a story told through multiple points of view center around how one group dominates another group. "Skating around the Law" by Joelle Charbonneau is a look at a small town murder investigation that's laugh-out-loud funny. "Heart of Lies" by Jill Landis takes us to New Orleans where a girl who grew up in a tribe of street urchins moves to the bayou where she's forced to hide a kidnapped child.

New manuals about high tech objects begin with "Five-Star APPS" by Glenn Fleishman, promoting the best iPhone and iPad apps for work and play. "Facebook the Missing Manual" (that should have come with the site) has materials collected by Emily Vander Veer. "The Cellphone" contains Guy Klemens' "history and technology of the gadget that changed the world". "Cloud Computing Bible" is designed by Barrie Sosinsky for those who know about basic computer operations and theory and tells what cloud computing is and why you should be interested in it, then proceeds to "Using Platforms", "Exploring Cloud Infrastructures", and "Understanding Services and Applications."

More books about food appear all the time. This time "Blood, Bones & Butter" is Gabrielle Hamilton's "inadvertent education of a reluctant chef", during twenty years leading up to opening her New York restaurant "Prune". ”Rustic Fruit Desserts" (crumbles, buckles, cobblers, pandowdies, and more) by Cory Schreiber and Julie Richardson also feature slumps, grunts, dumplings, and fools. "Ethan Stowell's New Italian Kitchen" is another great adventure in soups, polenta, and risotto, made with unusual and appealing ingredients.

Serious stuff might be "She-Wolves" Helen Castor's research about the women who ruled England before Elizabeth I. "The Fires of Vesuvius" about Pompeii lost and found is presented by Mary Beard as the puzzling, intriguing, violent element from the sixth century BC to the present day. "An Exclusive Love" is a memoir by Johanna Adorjan about her grandparents, Hungarian Jews who survived the Holocaust, fled Budapest in 1956 to Denmark and later to Copenhagen where they took their own lives in 1991, a fascinating couple honored in print. Last on this list of four is Andrew McCarthy's "The Grand Jihad" in his view of "how Islam and the Left sabotage America".

"Betting the Earth: How We Can Still Win the Biggest Gamble of All Time" by John Kunich talks about our views pro and con, the term "global warming", and how we can draw rational, evidence-based conclusions about it. NBC's The Biggest Loser trainer Bob Harper's "Are You Ready!" is another compelling title about taking charge, losing weight, getting in shape and changing our lives. A nostalgic look back is Beckey Burgoyne's look at "Perfectly Amanda: Gunsmoke's Miss Kitty: To Dodge and Beyond" including photographs of Amanda Blake's other interests in her particular causes.