Preview Shelf by Janice Clauser

Library News and Notable New Books

The library will be closed Wednesday, November 23rd and Thursday, November 24th for the Thanksgiving Holiday.

Here are gift ideas. At the Crawfordsville Library, Assistant Director Bill Helling’s book in the Images of America series, a unique and informative photographic history of "Crawfordsville" is available at the circulation desk. Other local items for sale are the Friends of the Library’s book bag, the Carnegie Library’s bookmark, ornament, and mug, and two studies by Dick Monroe: "Abraham Lincoln’s Funeral Train" and "Who the Heck was Jim Davis?"

Commentaries about our world lead the new book list this week. "The Terrorist Next Door: How the Government is Deceiving You about the Islamist Threat" has been issued by Erick Stakelbeck who's been inside America's radical mosques and has seen how radicals have established separatist compounds throughout rural America, and how mosques are being built in the heart of the Bible Belt as part of a plan for Islamic domination. Ann Coulter's "Demonic" is her take on how the liberal mob is endangering America, practicing groupthink, slavishly following intellectual fashions and busting into violence. Jeff Madrick's "Age of Greed" is about the triumph of finance and the decline of America, 1970 to the present. "Rollback" is Thomas Woods Jr.'s concept of repealing big government before the coming fiscal collapse (copyrighted 2011). Rebecca Traister calls a book about the election, which changed everything for American women in 2008, "Big Girls Don't Cry". Dominic Tierney's "How We Fight" is about crusades, quagmires, and the American way of war. ("We've never run from a fight. Our triumphs from the American Revolution to World War II define who we are as a nation and as a people.")

New "How To" books from Dale Carnegie Training are "Stand and Deliver" teaching the reader how to become a masterful communicator and public speaker, and "Make Yourself Unforgettable" how to become the person everyone remembers and no one can resist. Tim Parks' "Teach Us to Sit Still" is a skeptic's search for health and healing and how he found relief in a breathing exercise that led him to take up meditation. The three essential principles needed to become an extraordinary leader are shared in Rajeev Peshawaria's "Too Many Bosses, Too Few Leaders".

Thomas McGuane's fiction "Driving on the Rim" "hilariously takes the pulse of our times in a character who treads various paths to medical school, and states his reactions to his clinic, small-town living, and being accused of social ills.
Ann Patchett's "State of Wonder" is set deep in the Amazon jungle, where a research scientist is assigned to Brazil to track down her mentor, lost while working on a valuable new drug. "White Shotgun" is April Smith's study of times in London and in Siena, Italy where she witnesses crimes. "The Astral" by Kate Christensen describes a huge apartment building in Brooklyn's Green point neighborhood where a resident family, like the building, comes apart, leading the father/husband to make a desperate search for a change.

Preview Shelf by Janice Clauser

Library News and Notable New Books

Nine new biographies at the Crawfordsville Library cover several centuries. First, Richard Brookhiser gives a portrait of America’s "smartest, toughest, and wiliest founding father", fourth president "James Madison". Jim Newton recalls the White House Years of our 34th president entitled "Eisenhower". In "Towers of Gold" Frances Dinkelspiel writes how one Jewish immigrant, her great-great-grandfather Isaias Hellman, created California (as the financier who helped develop banking, oil, transportation, education, water and wine industries). "Death in the City of Light" is David King’s story of the serial killer (a handsome, charming physician Dr. Marcel Petiot) of Nazi-occupied Paris. Painting a picture of Old Order Amish life in Ontario, Ira Wagler composed "Growing up Amish" after removing himself at 17 to become a Pennsylvania businessman. A boy’s coming into manhood at sea titled "The Voyage of the Rose City" relates John Moynihan’s adventure as a Merchant Marine between his college years, never telling that his father was Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. William Shatner offers his guide to understanding the Shatnerverse and the world at large in "Shatner Rules".

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s memoir as Africa’s first woman President (Liberia) is called "This Child Will Be Great"; a presidential candidate’s own book is "This is Herman Cain!"

Daniel Silva’s "Portrait of a Spy" is fiction about a "gifted deceiver", once a CIA worker and mastermind plotting terrorist attacks, whose work must be destroyed from the inside. Lee Child’s "The Affair" (a Jack Reacher novel) recounts a crime scene from 1997 in Mississippi where a woman’s death points to a scheme at a nearby military base. As Reacher tries to solve the case others work to bury it forever. In Paradise, Massachusetts, a string of car thefts leads to a complicated plot named "Killing the Blues" by Robert Parker. The Chief Inspector Gamache novel "A Trick of the Light" by Louise Penny is a case for homicide detectives in a Quebec village. Danielle Steel’s "Hotel Vendome" invites readers to a glamorous New York hotel; after his wife runs away, the builder rears his daughter there and we are brought into its upstairs-downstairs world. "Zero Day" by David Baldacci tells about a military investigator in the US Army’s Criminal Investigative Division who is challenged by a crime in West Virginia where nothing is as it’s billed to be.

"The Wedding Quilt" is an Elm Creek Quilts Novel by Jennifer Chiaverini where friends gather to make a "last minute quilt" for a bride, and memories of the past spill forth within the group. Neal Stephenson returns to the terrain of his past novels in the high-stakes, action-packed adventure thriller "Reamde"; a tech entrepreneur gets involved in the crossfire of his own online war game called T’Rain, a multibillion-dollar, online role-playing game popular around the world.

Preview Shelf by Janice Clauser

Library News and Notable New Books

How to Write a Novel This Month - Did you know that November is National Novel Writers’ Month? The site nanowrimo.com invites authors to write 50,000 words during 30 days and join a free regional group for consultation.

Jean Auel's "The Land of Painted Caves" brings her ice-age epic Earth's Children series to a conclusion. Shana Abe's "The Time Weaver" tells of the drakon, a supersensual race of shapeshifters whose world exists side by side with our own.
A good wife/mother vanishes in "Now You See Her" by James Patterson. Marta Perry's "Murder in Plain Sight" focuses on secrets buried in Amish country (this is a large print version with its yellow dot on the cover). Learning to love again after heartbreak and loss is the basic subject in David Baldacci's "One Summer". "Carte Blanche: 007" is the title of the new James Bond novel by Jeffery Deaver; our hero is asked to protect the British Realm by any means necessary for an organization that operates independent of MI5 and MI6.

University of Indianapolis retired professor of English and creative writer Alice Friman's "Vinculum" is a small volume of poetry giving her ideas on religion, humor, science, and history "with precision".

November might lure you to mysteries. Nancy Rosenberg's "My Lost Daughter" depicts a judge torn between helping her daughter who is ill and tending to an important murder trial. Janet Evanovich's "Smokin' Seventeen", a Stephanie Plum novel, brings out a lady New Jersey bounty hunter's struggle; her name is on a killer's list just when she needs to choose between a good boyfriend and a bad boyfriend or dump them both. "No Rest for the Dead" "by" Jeff Abbott was actually written by a committee (26 writers taking turns writing chapters.) "Mr. Monk on the Couch" by Lee Goldberg presents the character we've known on TV along with his assistant who investigates a case because Monk doesn't see any reason to get involved. Iris Johansen's "Quinn" presents a plot with a former Navy SEAL and a CIA agent looking for a young girl together. Three of Kaki Warner's novels have arrived together; they are "Pieces of Sky", "Open Country", and "Heartbreak Creek" set on our western American frontier. The first in Rachael Herron's new knitting romance series is "How to Knit a Love Song", turning an inherited cottage into a knitshop. Three, new Eternity Springs novels by Emily March are "Heartache Falls", "Hummingbird Lake", and "Angel's Rest". Three family oriented stories are Jerry Eicher's "Ella's Wish" in the Little Valley series, "The Protector" by Shelley Gray from the Families of Honor series, and "The Way to a Man's Heart" by Mary Ellis in the Miller Family series.

A new history of World War II is "The Storm of War" from "Britain's finest military historian" Andrew Roberts, vividly noting the war's 2,174 days, $1.5 trillion cost, and 50 million deaths. Showing our country in peril from outlandish acts, the sharp-witted, comic plot gives a guided tour of "ten levels of cultural hell" in Laura Ingraham's "Of Thee I Zing". In "The Red Market" author Scott Carney tells about his five years tracing the lucrative and secretive trade in human bodies and body parts with all its implications making up a $6 billion annual business. "The King's Speech" by Mark Logue, from which the movie script was adapted, is the diaries of the Australian who taught British King George V how to speak to his subjects by treating his crippling speech defect. In "My Life in France" famous cook Julia Child tells that she didn't know a thing about food when she landed in France in 1948; this writing reveals her endearing personality.