Preview Shelf: Notable New Books by CDPL volunteer Janice Clauser

Indiana history receives distinctive treatment in Erin Hamilton’s Bonds as Strong as Steel, published by the Indiana Jewish Historical Society. This is a history of Indiana scrap metal dealers and their families, most of whom began as street peddlers and built extraordinary successful enterprises throughout the state. Moreover, befitting their Jewish heritage, they gave generously to their communities. Many of these businesses are multi-generational and exist today.

            Sincerity by Jay Magill presents a fascinating inquiry into the origins of the concept of "sincerity" and the practices surrounding its guarantee and compromise. Divine Alignment: How GodWink Moments Guide Your Journey comes from Squire Rushnell, and is defined as “the arrangement of coincidences into a pattern so astonishing it could have come only from a higher source.” Why Catholicism Matters: How Catholic Virtues Can Reshape Society in the 21st Century comes from Bill Donohue who states that “its teachings…are as well suited to answering today’s social problems as they were two thousand years ago.”

            In The Seed Underground by Janisse Ray, fellow author Barry Estabrook writes, “This is an important book that should be required reading for everyone who eats.” He remarks how “big companies are patenting seeds, making it illegal for farmers to retain their own crops for replanting,” so by saving seeds we can wrest our food system from corporate control. Three books about money are Anna Leider’s Don’t Miss Out: The Ambitious Student’s Guide to Financial Aid, The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto by Tavis Smiley, and Howard Dayton’s Your Money Counts (Now More Than Ever), which is a biblical guide to managing earnings and getting out of debt.  Edited by Brendan Miniter, The 4%Solution encourages free enterprise; 21 economists, some Nobel Prize winners, offer a blueprint to restore America’s economic health. Mathematician Jason Rosenhouse discusses Darwinism and creationism in Among the Creationists: Dispatches from the Anti-Evolutionist Front Line.  Political offerings are The Oath by Jeffrey Toobin, about the Obama White House and the Supreme Court, Ann Coulter’s Mugged, addressing racial demagoguery from the seventies to Obama, and Subversives, Seth Rosenfeld’s study of the FBI’s war on student radicals and Reagan’s rise to power.

            On to fiction. In Mary Daheim’s Bed-and-Breakfast Mystery The Wurst is Yet to Come the hostess of a B&B who habitually finds a corpse but keeps trying to avoid getting involved, finds the authorities again asking for her help.  The Uninvited Guests by Sadie Jones presents scenes of preparations for an elegant birthday party in 1912, while nearby a dreadful accident propels its victims to interrupt, asking for help. In The Mirrored World Debra Dean sets the scene in 18^th century St. Petersburg where a mother devoted to helping the poor disappears.

            The haunting novel San Miguel by T.C. Boyle combines struggles of two families, one in the 1880s and one in the 1930s, starting new lives of freedom on a desolate island off the coast of Southern California. Fine dining and murder go hand in hand in a story inspired by recent real-life events in Linda Fairstein’s Night Watch. A detective is asked to answer why the platinum credit card of a very wealthy and long dead steel tycoon is found where a young woman on drugs and her six-year-old daughter are both found murdered; this question starts Harry Bingham’s Talking to the Dead.