4/22: New at the library this week

DVDs:

• Much ado about nothing
• The interpreter

Books:

• Turning angel / Greg Iles — marks the long-awaited return of Penn Cage, the lawyer hero of The Quiet Game, and introduces Drew Elliott, the highly respected doctor who saved Penn's life in a hiking accident when they were boys. As two of the most prominent citizens of Natchez, Drew and Penn sit on the school board of their alma mater, St. Stephen's Prep. When the nude body of a young female student is found near the Mississippi River, the entire community is shocked — but no one more than Penn, who discovers that his best friend was entangled in a passionate relationship with the girl and may be accused of her murder.
• Better homes and gardens step-by-step basic plumbing / Larry Clayton — Demystifies the most common home plumbing projects step by step.
• Working on the edge / Spike Walker — In a breathtaking, action-packed account that combines his personal story with the stories of survivors of the industry's most harrowing disasters, Spike Walker re-creates the boom years of Alaskan crab fishing--a modern-day gold rush that drew hundreds of fortune-and adventure-hunters to Alaska's dangerous waters--and the crash that followed.
• Quilted memories : celebrations of life / Mary Lou Weidman — Turn your life's stories into a quilted journal that you, your children, and your grandchildren will cherish forever. Mary Lou Weidman's story quilts are beloved by quilters everywhere, and now she shows you how to do it yourself. 9 easy projects teach you the techniques so you can apply them to your own story quilts.
• Diabetes type 2 and what to do / Virginia Valentine — Completely updated, explaining the basics and addressing the issues of emotions and finances that usually arise from type II diabetes.
• Mary Emmerling's American country details / Mary Ellisor — Mary Emmerling demystifies the art of decorating and shows how to create a style detail by detail. Includes a source directory of retail and wholesale outlets for the items pictured. 350 full-color photos.
• One particular harbor / Janet Lee James — Janet Lee James was just twenty-three years old and just beginning a career as a rock 'n' roll disc-jockey when she was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. Hoping she'd part of the vast majority who are able to lead full, productive lives relatively undisturbed by the disease, she took off alone for the wilds of Alaska, leaving home, work and family behind to live out her dream of a life filled with excitement and adventure.

Free books!

The Seldovia Public Library has been inundated with your kind donations. And as we make room on the shelves for the new books you've said you want to read, we have lots of older books that are still good but not circulating. Please help us find these great books loving homes. We have books for children, classics, adult fiction and nonfiction, once-popular novels that everyone has read and some of you still love, paperbacks, beautiful old editions, videos, guidebooks, magazines, and lots lots more. And they are all absolutely free! Help yourself: they're all in the upstairs hall of the multipurpose building, just outside the library doors. You may browse and help yourself to however many you want whenever the library is open or the city is holding meetings in the multipurpose room. Stock your boat! Get your guestroom or cabin ready for the visitor season! Cut them up for art projects! Build furniture with them! Send them away! Just please help us find them new homes where they can get the love and use they deserve before we have to take them on a one-way drive up Rocky Street.

4/15: New at the library this week

DVDs:

• Rick Steve's Italy--8 episodes from the public television series Rick Steve's Europe
• Off the map
• Lady and the Tramp

Books:

• Chiefs / Stuart Woods —spans fifty years of racial tension, politics, and murder in the small Southern town of Delano, Georgia, where a depraved killer claims his innocent victims even as three very different generations of policemen seek to stop him.
• She's come undone / Wally Lamb —Meet Dolores Price. She's 13, wise-mouthed but wounded, having bid her childhood goodbye. Stranded in front of her bedroom TV, she spends the next few years nourishing herself with the Mallomars, potato chips, and Pepsi her anxious mother supplies. When she finally orbits into young womanhood at 257 pounds, Dolores is no stronger and life is no kinder. But this time she's determined to rise to the occasion and give herself one more chance before she really goes under.
• The human stain / Philip Roth —It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist.
• Reader's digest complete do-it-yourself manual
• Mr. Darwin's shooter / Roger McDonald —As a boy, Syms Covington was watched over by the beckoning image of Christian, John Bunyan's pilgrim, in the stained-glass window of his Bedford chapel - and at thirteen he left home and went to sea with the evangelical sailor John Phipps. Aboard the HMS Beagle, he entered Darwin's service, an energetic and precocious fifteen-year-old.
• Naked came the phoenix : a serial novel / Nevada Barr (and 12 other female mystery writers) —The promise of discretion and pampering - and a long-overdue reconciliation with her mother - draws Caroline Blessing, the young wife of a newly elected congressman, to the fancy Phoenix Spa. But after her first night in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains, Caroline wakes to find the rich and famous guests in turmoil and under suspicion: the spa's flamboyant and ambitious owner has been murdered.
• Monday's child / L. L. Chaikin —A woman faces incredible odds as she searches to understand God's plan for her, in this involving a beautiful model, an international banking scandal, family guilt, and a tragic accident.

Publishers' synopses are quoted from the linked sites.

4/8: New at the library this week

DVDs:

• The upside of anger
• Coach Carter

Books:

• Saving the world / Julia Alvarez —takes us into the worlds of two women swept up in campaigns against the scourges of their day. Alma Huebner, a Latin American novelist transplanted to the United States, is writing another of her bestselling family sagas. Her husband works for a humanitarian organization dedicated to health and prosperity in developing countries. He wants her to go with him, but she demurs. She must finish her newest novel.
• Gone / Jonathan Kellerman —The incomparable team of psychologist Alex Delaware and homicide cop Milo Sturgis embark on their most dangerous excursion yet, into the dark places where risk runs high and blood runs cold. It's a story tailor-made for the nightly news: Dylan Meserve and Michaela Brand, young lovers and fellow acting students, vanish on the way home from a rehearsal. Three days later, the two of them are found in the remote mountains of Malibu -battered and terrified after a harrowing ordeal at the hands of a sadistic abductor.
• Lost / Michael Robotham —On a cold London night, Detective Ruiz is fished out of the Thames with a bullet in his leg and no memory of the circumstances surrounding the shooting. In his pocket is a photograph of Mickey Carlyle, a seven-year-old girl kidnapped three years before and presumed dead.
• The gift of techaya : Beyond the Tenfeather / Stephen Gese —Third in the series by this Seldovian author
• Beaches / Lena Lencek —Color photographs of beaches around the world accompanied by selections from literary, scientific and historical sources.
• A good life : newspapering and other adventures / Benjamin C. Bradlee —This is the witty, candid story of a daring young man who made his own way to the heights of American journalism and public life, of the great adventure that took him at only twenty years old straight from Harvard to almost four years in the shooting war in the South Pacific, and back, from a maverick New Hampshire weekly to an apprenticeship for Newsweek in postwar Paris, then to the Washington Bureau chief's desk, and finally to the apex of his career at The Washington Post.
• Living the country life / Better Homes and Gardens
• The legacy : continuing traditions of Canadian northwest coast Indian art / Peter L. Macnair
• Architectural details and measured drawings of houses of the twenties /William A. Radford —Excellent reproduction of now-rare book provides details for frame houses, houses of brick, brick veneer, stucco, etc., as well as plans for barns, silos, ice houses, and other farm structures. Also includes plans for such interior features as built-in buffets and sideboards, kitchen cabinets, wardrobes, window seats, breakfast nooks, fireplaces with decorative mantels, and bookcases for the living room and library.
• Alaska's parklands, the complete guide / Nancy Simmerman —
• The dishonorable Dr. Cook : debunking the notorious MountMcKinley hoax / Bradford Washburn —The captivating story of Dr. Frederick Cook and his famous discredited claim to have been the first atop Mount McKinley.

4/1: New at the library this week

Books:

• Prior bad acts / Tami Hoag —It was a crime so brutal, it changed the lives of even the most hardened homicide cops. The Haas family murders left a scar on the community nothing can erase, but everyone agrees that convicting the killer, Karl Dahl, is a start. Only Judge Carey Moore seems to be standing in the way. Her ruling that Dahl's prior criminal record is inadmissible raises a public outcry- and puts the judge in grave danger.
• Chill factor / Sandra Brown —Cleary, North Carolina, is a sleepy mountain town — the kind of place where criminal activity is usually limited to parking violations. Not so, lately. Four women have disappeared from Cleary over the past two years. And there's always a blue ribbon left near the spot where each of the women was last seen.
• Our fifty states / Mark H. Bockenhauer —The richness of America, in all its grandeur and diversity, is captured here in the pages of Our Fifty States. (Age Range: 10)
• The Eyre affair / Jasper Fforde —Welcome to a surreal version of Great Britain, circa 1985, where time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously. England is a virtual police state where an aunt can get lost (literally) in a Wordsworth poem, militant Baconians heckle performances of Hamlet, and forging Byronic verse is a punishable offense. All this is business as usual for Thursday Next, renowned Special Operative in literary detection, until someone begins kidnapping charactersfrom works of literature. When Jane Eyre is plucked from the pages of Bronte's novel, Thursday must track down the villain and enter the novel herself to avert a heinous act of literary homicide.
• Lost in a good book / Jasper Fforde —When Landen, the love of her life, is eradicated by the corrupt multinational Goliath Corporation, Thursday must moonlight as a Prose Resource Operative of Jurisfiction—the police force inside books. She is apprenticed to the man-hating Miss Havisham from Dickens's Great Expectations, who grudgingly shows Thursday the ropes.
• The well of lost plots / Jasper Fforde —Resourceful literary detective Thursday Next definitely needs some downtime. And what better place for a respite than in the hidden depths of the Well of Lost Plots, where all unpublished books reside? But peace and quiet remain elusive for Thursday, who soon discovers that the Well is a veritable linguistic free-for-all, where grammasites run rampant, plot devices are hawked on the black market, and lousy books—like the one she has taken up residence in—are scrapped for salvage.
• Something rotten / Jasper Fforde —The resourceful literary detective Thursday Next returns to Swindon from the BookWorld accompanied by her son Friday and none other than the dithering Hamlet. But returning to SpecOps is no snap-as outlaw fictioner Yorrick Kaine plots for absolute power, the return of Swindon's patron saint foretells doom, and, if that isn't bad enough, The Merry Wives of Windsor is becoming entangled with Hamlet.
• Country fabric style : creative projects for the home / Julia Bird
• Mary Engelbreit's home companion : the Mary Engelbreit look and how to get it / Mary Engelbreit —This book contains fifteen chapters on everything from Kitchens, Tabletops, and Entries, to Cozy Corners, Cheap Tricks, and Odd Sports.
• Mary Engelbreit's outdoor companion : the Mary Engelbreit look and how to get it / Mary Engelbreit —With the help of her friends, Mary presents new inspirational ideas for readers to carry across the threshold of their homes, and into the great outdoors.

Descriptions are as provided by the publisher on the linked sites.