Library Reading Room Displays Wide Variety of Current Periodicals by Janice Clauser

The Crawfordsville Library’s reading room offers 159 magazines and comfortable seating for perusing them. Non-current issues may be taken out for a week.

There are also 14 newspapers: Barron’s, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times plus its Book Review and its Large Print Weekly, Human Events, The Indianapolis Business Journal, The Indianapolis Star, The Lafayette Journal & Courier, The Wall Street Journal, U.S.A. Today, The Wabash (College) Bachelor, The Crawfordsville Journal Review, and The Paper of Montgomery County.

Here are new choices of fiction and nonfiction about the 20^th century. The beauty of the Italian Alps is the setting in 1900 for a story, continued in America, presenting a young man drafted into World War I and a girl who becomes a seamstress involved in the life of singer Enrico Caruso. The couple meets, separates, and joins again with “operatic scope” in “The Shoemaker’s Wife” by Adriana Trigiani. Ford Madox Ford’s masterpiece “Parade’s End” about England during the same era, is four novels bound together, exploring the ruling class as it descends into the chaos of war.

“Princess Elizabeth’s Spy” by Susan MacNeal tackles WW II as England steels itself against German attack, and as the former secretary to Winston Churchill becomes a spy for MI-5. The royal family is in danger, and with great wit and smallest clues, big secrets are unraveled. “Road to Valor” by Aili McConnon is the true story of World War II Italy, the Nazis, and the cyclist who inspired a nation (Gino Bartali, who won the Tour de France twice, ten years apart.)

“The Valley of Unknowing” by Philip Sington takes place during the twilight  years of Communist East Germany when an author finds that a cocky scriptwriter has satirized his work and proving it will be hard in the Workers’ and Peasants’ State. “The Round House” by Louise Erdrich begins when a Ojibwe squaw on a reservation in North Dakota is attacked, puzzling her son and tribal judge husband. The harsh realities of life, where tribal and white live together with all kinds of injustice, are handled with literary skill. Fast forward to 9/11 and the Afghanistan and Iraq era when a scientist has developed a virus that can infect the fuel supply of the entire world; the plot moves fast in “Slow Apocalypse” by John Varley.

  

In Clive Cussler’s “Poseidon’s Arrow” Dirk Pitt faces an international crisis because a missing element in the U.S. Navy’s latest attack submarine technology causes ships to vanish in mid-ocean. There is also a Large Print edition and an 11-disc audio version available.

            Last are two impressive biographies. “Zumwalt” by Larry Berman describes the life and times of Admiral Elmo Russell “Bud” Zumwalt, Jr., chief of naval operations and “the navy’s most popular leader since WW II”. In his career spanning forty years, he served during the Soviets’ challenge to the US, became commander of all Navy forces in Vietnam and endured Watergate and an admirals’ spy ring. Later helping thousands of Vietnam veterans secure reparations brought him the Presidential Medal of Honor. Jean Edward Smith’s “Eisenhower in War and Peace” reintroduces us to the young dreamer with a maddening apprenticeship under Douglas MacArthur, his dilemmas in World War II, and the sudden 1952 Republican National Convention which catapulted him to the White House as our 34^th President.