Genealogy Club meeting

The Genealogy Club of Montgomery County, IN, has an event scheduled for Tuesday, May 9, at 7:00 p.m. in Community Room A. Karen Zach will present "Scrapbooking Your Family Tales." Members and visitors may bring a copy of a picture or photocopy for this program. Vistors are always welcome! For more information, contact: Ph: 765-362-2242 Weekdays 9am to 5pm Dian Moore, Local History Librarian, Ex.119 or Dellie Craig, Activities Director, Ex. 118. Email: gen@cdpl.lib.in.us.

Preview Shelf -- Library Offers Leisure-Hour Comfort

The new Crawfordsville District Public Library has been planned to provide a variety of restful places for reading. Try the spacious periodicals room inside the entrance, the useful small-meeting capsules, the private carrels, and the soft upholstered chairs along the upper windows, all designed to offer profitable experiences whether or not you have a borrower's card.

Here are the most recently requested books of information. Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness is Joshua Shenk's documentation of how the 16th President harnessed his problem to fuel his success. American Vertigo by Bernard-Henri Levy tells about his travels through our country following in the footsteps of Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America (found at 320.973 Toc) was such an influential study of our country. Andy Rathbone's Windows XP for Dummies now contains expanded e-mail, security, and upgrading instructions. The AARP Guide to Pills is essential information on 1,200 medications including generics. Mean Girls Grown Up by Cheryl Dellasega describes adult women bullies and females who are still victims. Gail Sheehy's Sex and the Seasoned Woman concerns her findings about those between forty and death. Two pet books are Don't Shoot the Dog!: The New Art of Teaching and Training by Karen Pryor, and ThinkDog an owner's guide to canine psychology by John Fisher.

Next comes new Young Adult reading. I Am The Messenger is Australian Markus Zusak's story about an underage cabdriver whose life is routine until he inadvertently stops a bank robbery. German-born Josef Holub's An Innocent Soldier tells of a young farmhand trying to survive after being drafted into Napoleon's army. The Cup of the World by John Dickinson describes itself as a book that hides within itself a secret amidst a battle between good and evil. Cheap. Fast. Good! by Beverly Mills & Alicia Ross shows ways to eat well for less dollars and tells how to plan smart, shop smart, and cook smart. The Complete Book of Raw Food, compiled by editor Lori Baird, explains vegetarian cuisine made with living foods. Denise Vivaldo's How to Start a Home-Based Catering Business makes the complex task easier with organized facts. New science fiction includes Pretender by C. J. Cherryh, her 2nd book of the third Foreigner sequence, Jack McDevitt's Seeker, a galaxy-spanning adventure, and Douglas Preston's Tyrannosaur Canyon that travels from the moon to an eerie area of New Mexico. A trio of westerns begins with Night Hawk by Stephen Overholser about a skinny youngster hired as a wrangler on the frontier. Elmer Kelton's Six Bits a Day is his prequel about Hewey Calloway as he leaves the family farm in 1889 to find work in the West Texas cow country. A Sudden Country by Karen Fisher is based on the actual events of Oregon migration in 1847 emphasizing two characters' survival. Authors often offer their personal experiences. The Story of My Life: An Afghan Girl on the Other Side of the Sky by Farah Ahmedi interweaves her childhood in Afghanistan with her adolescence and life as a senior in a Chicago high school. A different kind of history is Dante's Cure, psychotherapist Daniel Dorman's work bringing a nineteen-year-old out of schizophrenia through a healing process dealing with her family history over seven years. Still another experience was Norah Vincent's experiment told in Self-Made Man. After hearing women's convincing comments that men have always had it better, she uses makeup, a trainer, and a voice coach to infiltrate the male world for 18 months learning how hard it is to be a man, even in a man's world.

Beginning & Advanced Scrapbooking

Beginning & Advanced Scrapbooking classes wil lbe held starting Saturday, May 6, from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. The fee of $15 includes lunch. You are invited to come and join others who are working on their scrapbooks. Whether you are brand new or have been scrapbooking for years, you will enjoy the day of preserving you photos and memories. Beginners will learn the four steps to completing their albums and everyone will learn tips and be inspired with examples of borders and page layouts with chances of winning prizes. Bring your photos, albums and scrapbook materials and have a day to start or finish your projects. Supplies will be available for purchase if needed. Please reserve your space by May 4, 2006 (765-362-2242 ext 2). Payment is required the day of registration.

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.

Preview Shelf -- Library Adds Another Feature, Invites Volunteers

At the entrance to The Crawfordsville District Public Library is a new meeting announcement case, which lists daily events and their locations on the lower level. If you'd like to deliver materials to homebound patrons, please call 362-2242 extension 2. Volunteers are making books available to more readers all the time.

Recently, three requested books about Presidents have arrived. H. W. Brands' Andrew Jackson: His isHLife and Times is a biography of our colorful, dynamic, and forceful seventh President, the first common man to rise to this office. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln centers on Lincoln's mastery of communications. Our 16th President won over rivals William Seward, Salmon Chase, and Edward Bates because he could put himself in the place of other men, experience what they felt, and understand their motives and desires. The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House by John Harris shows him (our 42nd) becoming more commanding in his presidential image and more skilled at using the powerful White House platform crafting a new brand of centrist politics.

The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century by Steven Watts brings to life this outsized genius who was also a bundle of contradictions. She Got Up Off the Couch and Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana by Haven Kimmel is a sequel to A Girl Named Zippy and fastens on her mother's efforts to earn self-respect. Cure for the Common Life: Living in Your Sweet Spot by Max Lucado holds practical tools for finding one's uniqueness in society. A new children's story is the Newbery Medal winner (for the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children) called Criss Cross by Lynne Perkins. A new Young Adult book is Pam Ryan's Becoming Naomi Leon about a shy, retiring girl who needs positive thinking to add to her unique soap-carving talent and to her problems dealing with a mother who reappears seven years after leaving her with her Gram. A new mystery is Blaize Clement's first Dixie Hemingway story called Curiosity Killed the Cat Sitter who likes animals better than people. A Dark & Deadly Deception by Eleanor Bland is a Marti MacAlister plot finding an actress dead along the shores of the Chicago area Des Plaines River. Jacquot and the Waterman by Martin O'Brien profiles a French rugby player turned detective in Marseilles, where an elusive killer does away with three young women. Joanne Harris' Gentlemen & Players takes place at a British boys' grammar school where a veteran teacher must investigate a new instructor's goal to destroy the school ever so cleverly. 7 Deadly Wonders by Matthew Reilly is a treasure hunt for the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. It happens in the very year that the Great Pyramid at Giza is expected to provide absolute power over Earth for whoever replaces its lost capstone at the moment when a super-hot sunspot hits it.

The Novelist by Angela Hunt finds a community college teacher writing a story for a fiction-writing class that strikes home more than she expects. In The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch a young boy explores the tidal flats of Puget Sound and finds a rare deep-sea creature stranded in the mud. This becomes a metaphor for his passage out of childhood. W. E. B. Griffin's The Hostage follows By Order of the President in his Presidential Agent series, and shows his harrowing work in Homeland Security when an American diplomat's wife is kidnapped in Argentina. Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Scarborough's Changelings is Book One of the Twins of Petaybee science-fiction saga. The setting is a sentient planet with humans who must protect it from a nasty interstellar corporation.