Preview Shelf by Janice Clauser

Library News and Notable New Books

Theodore Roosevelt’s “Letters to His Children” brings the reader joy and laughter at his affection for his four sons and the care he took in writing them about what he was doing, whether hunting, hiking, or waging war with Spain. “How to Hike the A.T.: the nitty-gritty details of a long-distance trek” by Michelle Ray would have delighted T.R. as she helps the neophyte or experienced hiker with all the details to make a long-distance hike on the Appalachian Trail pleasant. Tom Brokaw’s “The Time of Our Lives: A Conversation about America” discusses “who we are, where we’ve been and where we need to go to recapture the American dream”. Simon Winchester tells all about the “Atlantic”, its great sea battles, heroic discoveries, titanic storms, and a million stories. “This is a biography of a tremendous space that has been central to the ambitions of explorers, scientists, and warriors, and continues profoundly to affect our character, attitudes, and dreams.”

“Coach Wooden” by Pat Williams, lists the seven principles that shaped this outstanding man’s life, and they will happily influence yours. This is a book we can all benefit from. From that small volume we move on to Zara Steiner’s “The Triumph of the Dark” which is European international history from 1933-1939; she shows that the era of Hitler’s rise to power, an ascent bent on war, was founded on ideologies which democratic perceptions could neither penetrate nor arrest. It’s a powerful1200 pages. “Socrates: A Man for Our Times” by Paul Johnson explores fifth-century B.C. Athens, the geopolitics of the time, the wars, and Socrates’ service as a soldier, his family, and his wide range of acquaintances. “Gluten-Free Makeovers” has 175 recipes by Beth Hillson; she admonishes, “Substitute boldly and eat well!

The novel “Count to a Trillion” by John Wright is the kind of “space opera” to fill our minds with intriguing possibilities, ideas that blend mythology, machine and human evolution, mathematics, space travel, and theories of human survival and potential. A novel of the near future by Will McIntosh is “Soft Apocalypse” about a group of ordinary people confronted by the fall of their own civilization. Dean Koontz’ “77 Shadow Street” harbors nightmare visions in The Pendleton, at the highest point of an old city, a Gilded Age palace built as a tycoon’s dream home. Rechristened in the 1970s as a luxury apartment building and a place of peace, later mysterious things happen like elevators plunging into unknown depths, and not-quite-humans in the basement.

The brutal realities and grinding poverty of life on the isolated archipelago of St. Kilda in the 1830s comes back as a powerful story in Karin Altenberg’s “Island of Wings”. “Death Benefit” by Robin Cook is a medical thriller of cutting edge research that will absorb you.

Novels requested by patrons begin with “The Dead Witness”, a collection of Victorian detective stories edited by Michael Sims, gathering together adventures of private investigators and police detectives from the 19th and early 20th centuries. ”Kill Shot” by Vince Flynn features the Arc de Triomphe on the cover; a CIA trained hotshot is killing the monsters responsible for the Pan Am Lockerbie attack one by one.