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.