Ideas for Before or After Easter by Janice Clauser

The Crawfordsville Library will be closed Sunday for Easter.

           

 

 

 

 

 

 

            Some new biographies bring us a variety of information. Chris DeRose brings us “Congressman Lincoln” subtitled The Making of America’s Greatest President. Each book about Lincoln has its own mission, and this one explains his “ambitious and controversial early political career, and his surprising ascendancy that was both historic and far from inevitable.” “Wave” by Sonali Deraniyagala is her documentation of the morning of December 26, 2004 and her subsequent life since only she survived the Sri Lanka tsunami which claimed her husband and two young sons. Her journey’s goal is to learn balance between her loss and her need to keep her family, somehow, still alive within her. “In the House of the Interpreter” by Ngugi-wa Thiong’o  is a memoir of his life and times at boarding school, the first secondary institution in British-ruled Kenya in the 1950s, recalling the tumultuous Mau Mau uprising for independence and Kenyan sovereignty.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A country girl from Henrietta, Tennessee grew up driving fast and playing hard, learning basketball while working in tobacco fields under her father’s demands. Going on to set records for victories, earning an Olympic medal, becoming head coach of the University of Tennessee Lady Vols, winning more games than anyone in NCAA Division I history, finally receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom–all these are included in Pat Summitt’s “Sum It Up.” Next, in “The Ordinary Acrobat” Duncan Wall recalls his life as a college student in Paris, his application to the Ecole Nationale des Arts du Cirque and his success in that fascinating organization.

            “Finding Florida” is “the true history of the Sunshine State” by T. D. Allman. Also new is Fodor’s “New England: Travel Intelligence” of historic towns, fall foliage, and hiking and skiing information. 

            L.E. Modesitt, Jr.’s “Imager’s Battalion” features Quaeryt, commander in the Telaryn army leading history’s first imager fighting forces against the hostile nation of Bovaria, teaching men to control the dangerous imaging skills at their command.

           

 

 

 

 

 

 

            Family stories include Lisa Gardner’s fiction “Touch & Go,” looking at what lurks behind the façade of a perfect family, vanished without a trace. “The Prophet” by Michael Koryta shows ordinary people caught in the middle of an extraordinary nightmare, this time a horrible crime blamed on the wrong people. “Schroder” by Amity Gaige creates a seven day period a father spends on the road with his daughter after kidnapping her during a parental visit. “Indiscretion” by Charles Dubow starts with an envied and admired couple, and their changed life that begins when they meet a quiet young girl drawn into their inscrutable magnetism.

 

           

           

 

 

 

 

 

            Andre Brink’s “Philida” is the story of a female slave and her fierce determination to survive and to be free in 1832’s South Africa. “Canada” by Richard Ford finds a 15-year-old helped by a friend on the Saskatchewan prairie where an American fugitive with a violent past presents danger; he is there because his life in North Dakota was altered when his parents were put in jail for robbing a bank, and the friend took him away to a new environment. “The Missing Manuscript of Jane Austen” by Syrie James begins when our heroine finds what she believes is a letter alluding to an Austen manuscript that “went missing at Greenbriar in Devonshire.” The clever story “offers a deeper understanding of what Austen’s unreported life might have been like.” - The Los Angeles Times.