Preview Shelf -- How the Library is Governed

The Crawfordville District Public Library is directed by Larry Hathaway, who is also Executive Officer of the Library Board of Trustees. The Trustees meet monthly and as necessary, and right now besides all the business they conduct, they also plan tours of the various departments and visit the gallery exhibits. Serving the Board are Robert Burgess, President, appointed by the County Council, Isobel Arvin, Vice President, appointed by the City Council, Secretary & Assistant Treasurer Susie Hildebrand appointed by the Union Township Board, Treasurer John Culley appointed by the North Montgomery and South Montgomery School Boards, Pat Stull and Linda Petrie appointed by Crawfordsville Schools, Dwayne Rater appointed by the County Commissioners, and James Ayers, library Attorney. Inspiration, information, and entertainment, all are available through the CDPL. First, inspiration. "Chicken Soup for Every Mom's Soul" and "Chicken Soup for the Christian Teenage Soul" come from writers Jack Canfield and Mark Hansen and their staffs. There's Rabbi Shmuley Boteach's "Shalom in the Home" with "smart advice for a peaceful life". There's "Hearts and Minds Uplifted: The Power of Falun Dafa" originating in China but with benefits for all races, ethnic groups, professions and age groups everywhere. "Daily Life Strategies for Teens" by Jay McGraw is designed to boost self-confidence, build friendships, resist peer pressure, and achieve goals. Richard Rybolt's "75 Ways to Beat Depression" contains "words of hope & solutions that work". "Fires in the Bathroom" is advice for teachers from high school students by Kathleen Cushman. The experience of ultra-Orthodox Jews opening a kosher slaughterhouse in 1987 Iowa, led to conflict and conflict resolution on the cutting edge of cooperation, in "Postville" by Stephen Bloom. Next comes information in the form of biography. "John Donne The Reformed Soul" by John Stubbs shows how he embarked on a personal reformation searching for a God who could unite everyone instead of trying to save the Roman Church from being exterminated by Queen Elizabeth's Protestant regime. "Boone" by Robert Morgan is billed as the story of America and its destiny, because the author reveals the complex character of frontiersman Daniel Boone whose heroic life was stranger and more fascinating than the myths that surround him. Scott Donaldson's "Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet's Life" revives appreciation of the leading American poet at the time of his death in 1935, one who regarded writing poems as nothing less than his calling. "Nixon and Kissinger" Partners in Power by Robert Dallek is a joint biography, a provocative, groundbreaking portrait of a pair of outsize leaders whose unlikely partnerships dominated the world stage and changed the course of history. A personal story by Mary Gordon called "Circling My Mother" gives a rich, bittersweet memoir of their relationship, and her role as daughter. Her "single" mother died in 2002 at 94, and lived a life colored by immigration, world war, the Great Depression, and physical affliction.Entertainment (this is so individual) might come in the form of special ideas. "The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature" by Joseph Lau and Howard Goldblatt is the first to include representative works from the three principal areas (China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong) for the entire modern period. "Wildly Romantic" is Catherine Andronik's story of the English Romantic poets like Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and John Keats. These rebels believed poetry should express strong feelings in ordinary language; in their years, the early 1800s, poetry could land a person in jail.