Preview Shelf -- Becoming Library Patrons

A recent episode attracts the question, "Why can we have the useful Crawfordsville District Public Library?" We can have our library because residents of Union Township pay library taxes, which afford them patron cards to use for all the services. Our county also has four outstanding outlying libraries in Darlington, Ladoga, Linden, and Waveland, affording their area taxpayers their services and, through CDPL cooperation, allowing them reciprocal cards to the Crawfordsville Library. This commitment by taxpayers is expensive and well worth the burdens of taxation. Thanks to our responsible taxpayers! Those who do not pay library taxes may buy annual cards. A yearly fee card for a family, covering all the Crawfordsville library services, amounts to $4.05 per month. Travel guides are fun to read even if we aren't contemplating a personal visit. New on the shelf are Rick Steves' "Great Britain 2007", "Europe Through the Back Door 2007" and "Best of Eastern Europe 2007" with good maps, information about museums, tours, transportation, and trip planning. Poetry comes from Anne Stevenson ("Poems 1955-2005") biographer of Sylvia Plath, winner of the Northern Rock Foundation Writer's Award 2002, and resident of Britain. John Betjeman's "Collected Poems" offer pleasure "as much to casual readers as to the literary establishment" (New York Times). Books about conflict appeal to writers as projects and to readers as history. "Kingfish' by Richard White, Jr. is about the "reign" of Louisiana Governor Huey Long whose story inspired the movie "All the King's Men". "Last Man Out" is Robert Charles' memoir of surviving the Burma-Thailand Death Railway (June 1942 to October 1943) through courage during unimaginable brutality while building the project immortalized in "Bridge Over the River Kwai". "Beyond Valor" is Patrick O'Donnell's story of World War II Rangers and Airborne veterans in the heart of combas told through 650 e-histories and interviews. (O'Donnell is the creator of The Drop Zone, the first online oral history project for WWII veterans.) "The Genome War" by James Shreave shows "the ups and downs of humanity's frantic quest for the Holy Grail of science" (Houston Chronicle). A new historical novel by Ken Follett called "World Without End" takes place in England in the 14th century, concerned with ambition, love, greed and revenge at the exquisite Gothic cathedral (built in "The Pillars of the Earth" by the same author). "Fellow Travelers" comes from Thomas Mallon about Washington, D.C. during the McCarthy era in the early 1950s. Robert Ludlum and Philip Shelby's "The Cassandra Compact" delves into the thinking of an under-cover Russian spy who is on the run, and the intricate plot expresses an attempt to steal Russia's store of smallpox virus. "The Septembers of Shiraz" by Dalia Sofer takes us to the aftermath of the Iranian revolution, when a rare-gem dealer is wrongly accused of being a spy and his wife goes to great lengths to help. Here comes Garrison Keillor with his newest novel of Lake Wobegon called "Pontoon"; his funny first episode is about the good lady who's prepared to die and wishes cremation and her ashes placed inside a bowling ball and dropped into the lake. It is a lake "as you've imagined it -- good loving people who drive each other slightly crazy". "Hartsburg, USA" by David Mizner offers an ideological turf war of opposites vying for a seat on the school board. "The Museum of Dr. Moxes" by Joyce Carol Oates contains ten stories about relations between women and men, children and parents, and strangers whose lives intersect.