Library News: Be entertained, enriched - visit your local library

Today’s column selections reflect the wide range of interests and levels of seriousness covered by our non-fiction collection. Come check out our new title rack. At the library, you can entertain yourself and enrich your life for free.

Extreme pumpkins II, by Tom Nardone, is an outrageous follow-up to last Halloween’s surprise bestseller Extreme Pumpkins. The power-tool wielding author has come up with a new collection of even darker, creepier, and more outrageous do-it-yourself designs to impress friends and horrify neighbors. The demented designs include Projectile Sneeze Pumpkin, Baseball-in-the-Eye Pumpkin, Doll-Eating Pumpkin, along with cool gourd designs, practical jokes, and more. This gleefully gory guide reclaims Halloween from the cheerful, the cutesy, and the parent-sanctioned.
Culture Making: Recovering our Creative Calling, by Andy Crouch, explains his belief that the only way to change culture is to create culture. Crouch unleashes a stirring manifesto calling Christians to be culture makers. He explains the complexities of how culture works and gives us tools for cultivating and creating culture in partnership with God's own making and transforming of culture. While none of us can change the world, Crouch proposes that all of us are capable of creating culture within our own circle of influence. Crouch’s ideas are fresh and exciting.

Belle Weather: Mostly Sunny with a Chance of Scattered Hissy Fits, by Celia Rivenbark, Sun News columnist and bestselling author of We're Just Like You, Only Prettier and Bless Your Heart, Tramp, shows her to be in rare form. USA Today has said, "Think Dave Barry with a female point of view." With her incomparable style and sassy southern wit, you'll hear from Celia on the joys of remodeling Tara, how Harry Potter bitch-slaps Nancy Drew, Britney's To-Do list, the truth about nature deficit disorder and more. Rivenbark is laugh-out-loud funny.

Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why It Matters, by Bill Tancer, is a fascinating new and timely study. What time of year do teenage girls search for prom dresses online? How does the quick adoption of technology affect business success (and how is that related to corn farmers in Iowa)? How do time and money affect the gender of visitors to online dating sites? In Click, Bill Tancer takes us behind the scenes into the massive database of online intelligence to reveal the naked truth about how we use the Web, navigate to sites, and search for information, and what all of that says about who we are.

Anti-cancer: a new way of life, by David Servan-Schreiber, MD, has been recommended as it is a radical mixture of science and personal experience that promotes a complete reversal in the way we understand and confront cancer. When the author, a dedicated scientist and doctor, was diagnosed with brain cancer, it changed his life. Confronting what medicine knows about the illness, the little known workings of the body’s natural cancer-fighting capacities, and his own will to live, Servan-Schreiber found himself on a 15-year journey from disease and relapse into scientific exploration, and finally to health.

The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington, by Jennet Conant, tells an amazing true story that is probably unknown to most of us. When famous children’s book author Roald Dahl, a dashing young wounded RAF pilot, took up his post at the British Embassy in Washington in 1942, his assignment was to use his good looks, wit, and considerable charm to gain access to the most powerful figures in American political life. This secret campaign of propaganda and political subversion was meant to weaken American isolationist forces, bring the country into the war against Germany, and influence U.S. policy in favor of England.
Dahl and other audacious amateurs planted British propaganda in American newspapers and radio programs, covertly influenced leading journalists, harassed prominent isolationists and anti-New Dealers and plotted against American corporations that did business with the Third Reich. In an account better than spy fiction, Conant's compelling narrative draws on never-before-seen wartime letters, diaries, and interviews and provides a rare, and remarkably candid, insider's view of the counterintelligence game during the tumultuous days of World War II.

The Best Slow and Easy Recipes: More Than 250 Foolproof, Flavor-Packed Roasts, Stews, and Braises That Let the Oven Do the Work, by the editors of Cook’s Illustrated Magazine, shows that something magical happens with certain foods when you slow down the cooking: flavors deepen and become more complex, meat turns meltingly tender, and fruit and vegetables develop a rich, caramelized exterior. This fresh approach to classic slow cooking techniques gives you uncomplicated recipes that are worth the wait …

The Hemingses of Monticello: an American Family, by Annette Gordon-Reed, tells the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president had been systematically expunged from American history until very recently. Now, historian and legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed traces the Hemings family from its origins in Virginia in the 1700s to the family's dispersal after Jefferson's death in 1826. It brings to life not only Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, but also their children and Hemings's siblings, who shared a father with Jefferson's wife, Martha. "The Hemingses of Monticello" sets the family's compelling saga against the backdrop of Revolutionary America, Paris on the eve of its own revolution, 1790s Philadelphia, and plantation life at Monticello.