Preview Shelf by Janice Clauser

Library News and Notable New Books

Weekly Winners in the Summer Reading Challenge - Winners in Weeks 2 through 6 of the "Take Your Chances in the Library" summer reading program at Crawfordsville Library are (2) Alissa L., Cheryl M., and Tanya H.; (3) Jane W., Margaret L. and Cathy M.; (4) Joyce B., Charlotte D., and Mark A., (5) Bev S., Krystal N. and Kristol V., and (6) Rhonda N., Karen L., and Dee B..

Come visit special places where new stories are set. First, come to the Amish town of Sugarcreek, Ohio where Shelley Gray offers two stories within that society called "Winter's Awakening" and "Spring's Renewal". Over in Charm, Ohio an Amish widow caregiver finds romance in Wanda Brunstetter's "Lydia's Charm". In the Red Bud Indian Reservation in 1904 South Dakota, a Christian helps to heal an epidemic in Bethany House's "A Heart for Home" by Lauraine Snelling. The plot of "Bitter in the Mouth" by Monique Truong begins in the 1970s in North Carolina when a young girl is cruelly labeled naughty by her grandmother, so even when she grows into a New York lawyer she knows her past is scary; later she has to return to her roots and face being connected and disconnected at the same time.

"Beneath the Lion's Gaze" by Maaza Mengiste takes us to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1974 on the eve of revolution when a family works for freedom against almost all odds. "How to Read the Air" by Dinaw Mengestu captures two generations, an Ethiopian family traveling from Peoria to Nashville searching for a new identity as an American couple, then the son's desire 30 years later to repeat his parents' adventure. "The Tiger's Wife" by Tea Obreht is a family legend in a Balkan country mending from years of conflict where a young doctor encounters public and private secrets, which she unravels through reminiscences of her grandfather’s stories. "The Informationist" is Steven Taylor's thriller about an informant helping clients learn to face dangerous men in lawless central Africa; later a billionaire hires that informant to find his daughter who vanished in Africa.

Nancy Pickard's "The Scent of Rain and Lightning" forces a family in Kansas to deal with the return of a man who murdered their head of house. The clever "Swamplandia!" by Karen Russell takes on a Florida Everglades' gator-wrestling theme park that is about to "go under" because of a competitor called the World of Darkness.

In Patrick McManus' eyes, a western lawman uses cunning and guile on the ladies, so he uses that technique for his cases when he's led into a haunted swamp to catch a mass murderer in "The Huckleberry Murders". American history is treated personally in the novel "Parrot & Olivier in America" by Peter Carey. The funny story is an improvisation on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville who was a child of aristocratic survivors of the French Revolution, and the life of a motherless son of an itinerant English printer who's a spy for the marquis. A political thriller about terrorists, Supreme Court personnel and the press is "The Confirmation" by Ralph Reed. The deep woods of Hungary and the streets of New York figure in the tale of government cover-ups while one man searches for truth in "Saint" by Ted Dekker.

Damon Galgut's "In a Strange Room" could be labeled a compelling travelogue-novel, as a young loner travels across the eastern hemisphere with adventurous episodes in a life on the road. Monica Ali's "Untold Story" is the imagined creation of Princess Diana's life at fifty in 2011, had she not perished at 37 years old. An "unselfish, helpful" woman's life is changed in "South of Superior" by Ellen Airgood, when she moves to a hardscrabble town on the southern edge of Lake Superior in Michigan's Upper Peninsula where there's joy in simple things, and a tradition of caring for each other.

Library News and Notable New Books

Local Businesses Support Library Summer Programs - Crawfordsville Library's adult summer reading program "Take Your Chances at the Library" has many sponsors, and their generosity is enhancing the challenges being accepted by 86 patrons who have signed up to take those chances through July 29th. The 19 sponsors include Country Hearts and Flowers, Cornett's Comfort Gallery, Vanity Theatre, Creek Jewelers, Arni's Restaurant, Little Mexico, La Rose on Main, China Inn, Milligan's Flowers and Gifts, Pace Dairy, heathcliff, The Craft House, Arthur's Café, Krogers South, French Lick Resorts, The Sewing Guild of Montgomery County, Fall Creek Farm, Friends of the Library, and Bob "the Beeman" Congleton.

Lloyd Hunter's "For Duty and Destiny" tells William Taylor Stott's Civil War diary and life story as Hoosier soldier and educator. Stott was an 1861 graduate of Franklin College who, as President of Franklin College, took it from virtual bankruptcy in 1872 to its place, by the turn of the century, as a leading liberal arts institution in Indiana.

Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger) has written "Jesus of Nazareth" about the text of Holy Week, from the entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection. "Nostradamus Bibliomancere: the Man, the Myth, the Truth" by Peter Lemesurier (CD included) shows he was an ordinary man using an ordinary technique: he believed that history repeats itself, so he projected known past events into the future.

"Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness" by Nicholas Humphrey says consciousness is nothing less than a magical-mystery show we stage for ourselves inside our heads; it lights up the world for us and makes us feel special and transcendent. "An Improvised Life" is Alan Arkin's memoir. Tina Fey writes "Bossypants"; she wanted to be a comedian and she comments that you're not one until someone calls you bossy.

New cookbooks abound. "Bobby Flay's Throwdown" offers over 100 recipes from Food Network's Ultimate Cooking Challenge show. He's written this with his assistants Stephanie Banyas and Miriam Garron. "The Southern Italian Table" by Arthur Schwartz offers eggplant balls or patties, sausage canapes, bean and greens soup for the Feast of Saint Joseph, Lemony Egg Pasta Souffle, all sorts of rather exotic fare. "The SoNo Baking Company Cookbook" with "best sweet and savory recipes for every occasion" comes from John Barricelli. "The Lee Bros. Simple Fresh Southern: Knockout Dishes with Down-Home Flavor" by Matt and Ted Lee feature tasty ideas like carrot and turnip slaw with dill, snow pea and carrot salad with ginger dressing, radish butter, cherry tomato and soybean salad and roasted parsnips with mint. Kaye and Liv Hansen offer The Whimsical Bakehouse" with fun-to-make cakes that taste as good as they look!" Last but not least is Lysa Terkeurst's "Made to Crave" which is a lesson to crave God instead of food and to learn how weight loss struggles aren't a curse but a blessing in the making.

"Hitman" by Howie Carr tells why Johnny Martorano is called the Enforcer and the Most Feared Gangster in the Underworld; in this book we get to read all about crime in America. Michael Burleigh's "Moral Combat" is about good and evil in World War II, the author exposing factors shaping choices that were life-and-death decisions, giving a moral content to the war that shaped it as decisively as any of its battles.

Preview Shelf by Janice Clauser

Library News and Notable New Books

Tippecanoe Author's Novel Memoir of a Coach" - "The Coach" is the new novel from author Tom Speaker, retired teacher and coach living in West Lafayette. His story follows a lad through eight years of playing elementary, middle school, and high school basketball, four Army years during World War II, four years of playing in college, and 41 years of coaching. The adventure shows the ecstasy of winning, lessons learned from losing, and his joy seeing young kids grow to success in sports and in life.

Here's other new fiction. In Sandra Hill's "Dark Viking" a female Navy SEAL is transported back in time to the eleventh-century Norselands where she encounters a Viking warlord. Alexandra Ivy's "Devoured by Darkness" shows a half human, half demon jinn being chased by a Charon, sworn to hunt and kill rogue vampires. Beatrice Small's "The Border Vixen" portrays a vixen known as Mad Maggie, on the Scottish Borders in the year 1536, who has the right to exact tolls at a famous safe passage through the border hills.

On to nonfiction, Paul Theroux's celebration of his 50 years of wandering the globe is "The Tao of Travel" subtitled "Enlightenments from Lives on the Road." It's full of quotes about travel, then quotes by authors on their travels, also chapters like "Everything is Edible Somewhere", and he concludes with "The Essential Tao of Travel", a read well worth the 277 pages. Sarah Vowell's "Unfamiliar Fishes" makes Hawaii her study destination after thinking about America in 1898 when in an "orgy of imperialism" the U.S. annexed Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Guam, and invaded Cuba and then the Philippines, "becoming a meddling, self-serving, militaristic superpower practically overnight." The book then tells about the Americanization of Hawaii starting in 1820 with New England missionaries and ending with our first Hawaiian-born President. A new Time Out travel guide to "Los Angeles" lists how to eat, drink, shop, sleep, explore, and enjoy L.A. A story that takes us to love, terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin is "In the Garden of Beasts" by Erik Larson, a master of narrative nonfiction.

Another personal journey is Alice Ozma's "The Reading Promise" telling about the daily reading aloud her dad did each evening from fourth grade until the year she entered college, an unusual and lovely story of their enjoyable relationship.

People's crafts figure in much nonfiction. "Knitting Noro" by Jane Ellison features the "magic of knitting with hand-dyed yarns". "Twinkle's Weekend Knits" shows "20 fast designs for fun getaways" in Wenlan Chia's well-explained and personally-created garments. "Knitting Plus" is Lisa Shroyer's fifteen projects for plus-size style with good fits.

Religion is the subject of lots of recent books too. "Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire" by Jim Cymbala, pastor at Brooklyn Tabernacle, discusses the good that happens when God's spirit invades the hearts of his people. "Clouds of Witnesses" by Mark Noll tells about Christian voices from Africa and Asia: a tattered Hindu pilgrim girl later one of India's most influential Christians, an African herder boy grown into archbishop of a large Anglican flock in Uganda, a brilliant Chinese pastor's kid who emerges as a powerful figure in Chinese revivalism of the 1930s. "The Convert" is a tale of exile and extremism by Deborah Baker following a suburban New Yorker's conversion from being a Jew in America to a trenchant voice of Islam, perhaps because of an adoptive father who laid the intellectual foundations for militant political Islam.