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.
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.
posted by Crawfordsville District Public Library Reader's Advisory | 11:18 AM
1 Comments:
It is undeniable that author Nancy Pickard has a flair for writing about murder mysteries that take place in small town settings. "The Scent of Rain & Lightning" is the second novel that I've read by Nancy Pickard, the first being "The Virgin of Small Plains" which went straight into the list of my favorite mystery novels of all time. Thus, when I picked up this book, I had a lot of expectations. And despite how pre-hyped (and over-hyped, I must add) the book had been in my mind, it came through on all my expectations.
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