Preview Shelf: Notable New Books by CDPL Volunteer, Janice Clauser

This column features large manuals useful to students looking ahead in their studies. Barron’s PSAT/NMSQT offers help before taking the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test, which also serves as the National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test. Barron’s SAT prepares students for the Scholastic Aptitude Test for college. Barron’s ACT serves as a college-prep exam assistant. The Princeton Review’s AP Calculus AB & BC Exams prepares students for advanced placement math tests. The 2013 edition of McGraw-Hill’s GRE is practice for the Graduate Record Examination General Test. These large workbooks have been designed for review and for brushing up on skills needed on different levels of education. All are the latest editions. The library has also received the new edition of the Fiske Guide to Colleges, which introduces readers to schools in many categories.

Everyday Activities to Help Your Young Child with Autism Live Life to the Full by Debra Jacobs offers simple exercises to boost functional skills, sensory processing, coordination, and self-care. John Graves’ The 7% Solution shows how to afford a comfortable retirement. Writing for Others, Writing for Ourselves by Jerry Lanson teaches how to tell stories in the age of blogging. Busy Mom’s Guide to Parenting Teens is Paul Reisser’s advice about social media, the healthy self-image, eating disorders, and drug problems. Finding freedom from a hurtful past is part of the text of authors Cloud, Carder, Townsend, and Henslin’s Unlocking Your Family Patterns. Healing Your Church Hurt by Stephen Mansfield explains what to do when you still love God but have been wounded by His people. African-American Healthy by Richard Walker tells how to protect health, especially how Vitamin D and other smart choices can dramatically improve well-being.

Is That a Fish in Your Ear? David Bellos shows why translation is at the heart of what we do and who we are. For instance, what is the difference between translating unprepared natural speech and translating a novel? What’s the difference between a native tongue and a learned one? Can you translate between any pair of languages or only between some? Can machines ever replace human translators, and if not, why?

Larry Swedroe’s Investment Mistakes Even Smart Investors Make and How to Avoid Them, Karl Meyer’s Pax Ethnica: Where and How Diversity Succeeds, and Pogo Through the Wild Blue Yonder by Walt Kelly (the complete syndicated comic strips, volume one) might attract interest, too.

Fiction collections are the Library of America’s Crime Novels of the 1930s & 1940s and Crime novels of the 1950s. The first volume includes “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”, “Thieves Like Us,” “The Big Clock,” “Nightmare Alley,” and “I Married a Dead Man.” The second volume includes “The Killer Inside Me,” “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” “Pick-Up,” “Down There,” and “The Real Cool Killers.”

New requested novels are Trouble at High Tide in the Murder, She Wrote series by Jessica Fletcher and Donald Bain. A former Marine’s search for the perfect woman is the story in Robyn Carr’s Sunrise Point. Carla Negger’s Secrets of a Lost Summer is a romance about a woman transforming a historic home and the absentee owner of the eyesore next door. The mystery Wicked Autumn by G.M. Mallet serves up “an irresistible English village—deliciously skewered—a flawed but likable protagonist, and a modern version of the traditional drawing room mystery.”