Preview Shelf -- Periodicals Are Plentiful

Three new magazine subscriptions due soon at the Crawfordsville District Public Library are "Bookmarks" offering recent book reviews along with ratings, "Diabetes Self-Management", and the bimonthly "Rural Heritage" for those who believe in old fashioned values, common sense problem solving, and preserving traditions for future generations. Total publications upstairs and downstairs are listed on the library's website, http://www.cdpl.lib.in.us. There are 169 magazines in the reading room along with 17 newspapers. In the youth department are 21 children's magazines and 10 for young adults. Upstairs, the building also offers 12 professional journals, 33 called "reference", and 36 more that concern local organizations and local history. Biographical writings have arrived en masse. One of them might tempt you. First comes the collected poems of "W. H. Auden" introduced and edited by Edward Mendelson for the Modern Library's commemoration of the poet's centennial. Auden wrote as if he were addressing an individual reader, and he said, "All the poems I have written were written for love" with a wide conception of that word. There's "In Search of Bill Clinton" by John D. Gartner. "Reagan: The Hollywood Years" by Marc Eliot and "The Age of Reagan: A History 1974-2008" by Sean Wilentz are also new. There's "The Snowball", Alice Schroeder's portrait of Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, and "Call Me Ted", Ted Turner's own explanation of what makes him tick and what ticks him off. Roger Ebert's "Scorsese" is the first record by the film critic about that director's massive works. The book includes Ebert's reviews of Scorsese's individual films. Pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim argues for music's importance in our everyday lives in his "Music Quickens Time". Adam Nimoy's "anti-memoir" is "My Incredibly Wonderful, Miserable Life". "The Road of Lost Innocence" is a true story by a Cambodian heroine, a rescuer named Somaly Mam. (Arthur) "Rimbaud" by Edmund White is the biographer's historical look at the accomplished poet's brief, dramatic life. "India" is a large new DK book about its landscape, history, people, culture, architecture, and travel, with excellent photography and text accomplished by Abraham Eraly, Yasmin Khan, George Michell, and Mitali Saran. Its back cover quotes Mark Twain in 1897, "So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds. Nothing (about India) seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked." Four special new books about nature start with "Reef Fish Identification" by Paul Humann and Ned Deloach highlighting Florida, the Caribbean, and the Bahamas. Next is "The Seventy Great Mysteries of the Natural World" edited by Michael Benton. "Stalking the Plumed Serpent and Other Adventures in Herpetology" by Bruce Means aims at more appreciation of animals without fur or feathers. "Extreme Birds" is a large book about the world's most extraordinary and bizarre warm-blooded vertebrates by Dominic Couzens. It would fascinate children with its large portraits and categories like "most tireless singer", "biggest colony", "strongest stomach".