Library News and Notable New Books

The Crawfordsville Library’s Newest Facility - Sometime soon, drive through the Crawfordsville Library’s western-most parking lot to Pike Street. You’ll see work going on to build the new library pavilion planned for youth department activity, book club gatherings, an art class venue, a gracious spot made possible by Friends of the Library and Montgomery County Community Foundation generosity, some available funds, and individual donors. There’s an opportunity for us as library patrons, computer customers, daily readers, and meeting attendees to help complete the funding. Contributions are tax deductible when signed to the Crawfordsville District Public Library and marked "Pavilion project". Think of all the enjoyment ahead when this new place will be one of our habitual destinations.

Now to list the new books available to us. What could appeal more than the beautiful roasted chicken on the "Blue Ribbon Cookbook" cover? Bruce and Eric Bromberg opened their first Blue Ribbon restaurant in 1992 in downtown Manhattan, and are now feeding people at nine locations. Designed for home cooks, this book can help with any meal any day. "Cooking in the Moment" by Andrea Reusing offers ideas by seasons. "Voyager" is Stephen Pyne's history of exploration as Magellan, Cortes, Columbus, Cook, Lewis and Clark, Byrd and Stanley kept studying our earth; finally we're brought up to date as Voyager is described moving to the edge of the solar system.

"Moby-Duck" by Donovan Hohn is a narrative of whimsy and curiosity; many bath toys, lost in our lakes and oceans, are being found, enticing beachcombers, oceanographers, and environmentalists to make a hobby of collecting them.

The memoir, "A Stolen Life" by Jaycee Dugard reveals her eighteen years as a prisoner right in her own neighborhood; now safe at home, she thinks of herself as a survivor, not a victim, with her symbol, a pinecone, representing the seed of a new beginning. What a girl!

"The Triple Agent" by Joby Warrick tells about the al-Qaeda mole who infiltrated the CIA and of the war that pits robot planes and laser-guided missiles against a cunning enemy bent on carnage in American cities. "Playing with Fire" by Pamela Constable shows Pakistan at war with itself, exploring the fears and frustrations, dreams and beliefs that animate the lives of citizens in this nuclear-armed nation of 170 million. Eric Greitens describes his education as a humanitarian and as a Navy SEAL in "The Heart and the Fist" which shows his paradox to be strong to do good, and to do good to be strong. "David Crockett: The Lion of the West" by Michael Wallis enlarges our folk image of him, balancing his extraordinary exploits with his election to Congress in 1826.

On to fiction. Debbie Macomber's "A Turn in the Road" follows three friends driving across America with their individual maps and goals. In Dorothea Frank's "Lowcountry Summer" a 46-year-old daughter wants to fill the shoes of her late mother, but dealing with all the episodes on the Tall Pines Plantation in South Carolina’s Lowcountry becomes tricky. Two Berkley Sensation romantic suspense novels are Maya Banks' "Hidden Away" and "No Place to Run".

In Karen Moning's "Shadowfever" two young children were given up for adoption and banished from Ireland; two decades later one is dead and the other has returned to hunt her sister's murderer. Finding that she herself descends from a gifted and cursed bloodline, the plot takes a fantastical turn. In Marcia Clark’s "Guilt by Association" this lead prosecutor on the O.J. Simpson case combines the new voice of her heroine with her own experienced expertise in L.A. courts and criminal law.