COLUMN: New titles available for gardeners and history fans

Gardening Essentials, by Barbara Pleasant, was created to give fundamental ideas, knowledge, lists, instructions and projects needed to make better gardening decisions and to meet one’s own personal goals. Whether large or small or somewhere in between, this is the “must have” gardening reference book filled with beautiful photos, tip boxes, plant lists, clear and concise instructions, new ideas, and helpful charts. 

The chapters include how to garden, how to design your site, soil and lawns, walkways, boundaries, flowers, fragrance, flavor, winter care, propagation, pests, and special features. 

There is also a list of resources for plants, seeds and supplies, and a helpful index of plants, in addition to the general index.

Miniature Roses, by Rayford Clayton Reddell, explains how to buy, plant, and maintain the best miniature rose bushes, as well as how to harvest the lovely blooms. Easier to grow than their full-sized cousins, miniature roses are big favorites among many rose lovers. Continuing the new A Passion for Roses series, Reddell shows how easy it is to grow these irresistible flowers in any garden, whether in the ground or in small pots.

Forty color photos are included.

The Great Bridge: the Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge, by David McCullough.  As the author himself says, “It is an extraordinary story, to say the least, not only in human terms, but in what it reveals about America in the late nineteenth century, a time that has not been altogether appreciated for what it was.”

This epic book is the engrossing story of one of the greatest events in our nation's history, during the Age of Optimism, a period when Americans were convinced in their hearts that all things were possible.

In the years around 1870, when the project was first undertaken, the concept of building an unprecedented bridge to span the East River between the great cities of Manhattan and Brooklyn required a vision and determination comparable to that which went into the building of the great cathedrals.

Throughout the 14 years of its construction, the odds against the successful completion of the bridge seemed staggering. Bodies were crushed and broken, lives lost, political empires fell, and surges of public emotion constantly threatened the project. This is not merely the saga of an engineering miracle; it is a sweeping narrative of the social climate of the time and of the heroes and rascals who had a hand in either constructing or exploiting the surpassing enterprise.

Rainbow’s End: the Crash of 1929, by Maury Klein, tells the story of the stock market collapse in a colorful, swift-moving narrative that blends a vivid portrait of the 1920s with an intensely gripping account of Wall Street's greatest catastrophe.

The book offers a vibrant picture of a world full of plungers, powerful bankers, corporate titans, millionaire brokers, and buoyantly optimistic stock market bulls. As Klein follows the careers of these men, he shows us how the financial house of cards gradually grew taller, as the irrational exuberance of an earlier age gripped America and convinced us that the market would continue to rise forever.

We relive Black Thursday, when police lined Wall Street, brokers grew hysterical, customers "bellowed like lunatics," and the ticker tape fell hours behind.  

This compelling history of the Crash, the first to follow the market closely for the two years leading up to the disaster, sheds light on a major turning point in our history.

Americans at War, by Stephen E. Ambrose, maintains that history is about people, leaders, and led. Collected here for the first time are 15 essays that span over 100 years of American history and the remarkable 30-year career of America's foremost historian.

From Grant's stunning Fourth of July victory at Vicksburg to Nixon's surprise Christmas bombing of Hanoi, Ambrose takes readers into the trenches of the home front, ground zero of the Atomic Bomb, and into the arsenals of the 21st century.

The First World War, by John Keegan, is a noted historian’s definitive account. The First World War created the modern world. A conflict of unprecedented ferocity, it abruptly ended the relative peace and prosperity of the Victorian era, unleashing such demons of the twentieth century as mechanized warfare and mass death. It also helped to usher in the ideas that have shaped our times--modernism in the arts, new approaches to psychology and medicine, radical thoughts about economics and society--and in so doing shattered the faith in rationalism and liberalism that had prevailed in Europe since the Enlightenment.

Castles of Steel, by Robert K. Massie, the predominant image of this First World War is of mud and trenches, barbed wire, machine guns, poison gas, and slaughter.

A generation of European manhood was massacred and a wound was inflicted on European civilization that required the remainder of the twentieth century to heal. 

With all its sacrifice, trench warfare did not win the war for one side or lose it for the other. Over the course of four years, the lines on the Western Front moved scarcely at all; attempts to break through led only to the lengthening of the already unbearably long casualty lists.
For the true story of military upheaval, we must look to the sea. On the eve of the war in August 1914, Great Britain and Germany possessed the two greatest navies the world had ever seen. When war came, these two fleets of dreadnoughts, gigantic floating castles of steel able to hurl massive shells at an enemy miles away, were ready to test their terrible power against each other.

Their struggles took place in the North Sea and the Pacific, at the Falkland Islands and the Dardanelles. They reached their climax when Germany, suffocated by a merciless naval blockade, decided to strike against the British ring of steel. The result was Jutland, a titanic clash of fifty-eight dreadnoughts, each the home of a thousand men. 

When the German High Seas Fleet retreated, the Kaiser unleashed unrestricted U-boat warfare, which, in its indiscriminate violence, brought a reluctant America into the war. In this way, the German effort to "seize the trident" by defeating the British navy led to the fall of the German empire.

These highlighted gift books from this column and last week’s column are on the display table in the Marion Library.  However, take some time to wander back in the stacks as well – you might be pleasantly surprised at what you find!