Friday, April 14, 2006

Preview Shelf -- The Public Library Can Still Furnish Tax Forms

The reference department (upstairs in the Crawfordsville District Public Library) still offers needed income tax forms for April 17th, and also has a stock of automatic extension forms as well as amendment forms for correcting a previous report. Some of these papers will be available indefinitely.

New Young Adult books begin with Jane Harrington's new novel called Four Things My Geeky-Jock-of-a-Best-Friend Must Do in Europe. Twin witches inhabit Destiny's Twins by H.B. Gilmour and Randi Reisfeld. Hulk Incredible is a graphic (cartoon) superhero action story. Crunch Time by Mariah Fredericks weaves a plot about students and SATs. Young Warriors: Stories of Strength collects15 original short stories with diverse settings like fantasy realms, medieval England, the African plain, ancient Greece and Egypt, all thrillers collected by Tamora Pierce and Josepha Sherman. In The Cannibals by Iain Lawrence young convicts escape into Pacific islands. Zap is a whodunit play by Paul Fleischman where the audience is the culprit.

Here are some biographies. Although many people recognize the famous painting by Edvard Munch called The Scream, few know much about the artist, so Sue Prideaux' biography brings his turbulent life to words, using his own letters and diaries. Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt is the personal history of a daughter and mother in the Gilded Age who struggled to break free from the materialistic world into which they were born, and to fight for female equality. Melville by Andrew Delbanco, hailed by Time as America's best social critic, gives his life story celebrating his literary friends, bouts of feverish writing, financial pressures, and the creation of his symbols Ahab and the White Whale. Candice Millard's The River of Doubt tells of President Theodore Roosevelt's journey changing the map of the Western Hemisphere through his descent of the rapids-choked tributary of the Amazon with its life-challenging hardships. The multifaceted woman Lee Miller is Carolyn Burke's study of the model, photographer, reporter, mother, and gourmet cook, part of the glamorous circle in New York and Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. Dean & Me is Jerry Lewis' review of their famous partnership, as he terms it, of the handsome crooner and a skinny monkey.

Some guidebooks give us new ideas. Landscape Makeovers with 50 projects for a picture-perfect yard comes from Meredith Books. Quilt and Embellish in One Step! is Linda Potter's technique she calls Needle Magic, inspired by the Japanese art of sashiko with embellishments from Victorian quilts. Mastering Judo contains history, philosophy, techniques, tactics, and training furnished by Masao Takahashi and family. Charles Walters offers Weeds: Control Without Poisons. In Installation Art: A Critical History Clare Bishop explains that its size and public placement requires its audience to enter and experience it, so its theory needs to be understood. Angel and Apostle by Deborah Noyes reinvents the life of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Pearl, daughter of Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter. A novel It's Superman describes the early years of the Man of Steel from 1930s Kansas to Hollywood in its golden age, and then to NYC and his newspaper career. The Protégé by Stephen Frey involves blackmail that tempts an executive to play ball with a shadowy government agency guarding a possibly deadly weapon, in order to gain information about a mother he never knew. Queen of the Underworld by Gail Godwin presents the writing activities of a young reporter in Miami in 1959 as Castro clamps down on Cuba and exiles flee to the States.

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