Book Talk

Gimme Shelter!

While we wait impatiently for our 2010 deliveries to start arriving we still have enough new books to keep you busy. 

Theresienstadt Interment Camp was a way station for many Jews on their way to Auschwitz. Realizing that young people were the most likely to survive this ordeal, the prisoners made care of their young people a priority. They were housed separately to avoid illness, given the best of the food and supervised by former teachers. In the mid-1990s Hannelore Brenner met with ten of these survivors to learn the details of their lives in the camp and what it took to survive. The result is The Girls of Room 28: Friendship, Hope and Survival in Theresienstadt. 

Best Friends Animal Society in Kanab, Utah  is the largest no-kill animal shelter in the world. It is supported by volunteers and community partners. A home to an assortment of approximately 1700 animals, they can roam freely in their own breeds’ enclosure. Every animal comes to them with a story and Stefan Bechtel  shares them in Dogtown: Tales of Rescue, Rehabilitation, and Redemption. 

If you are still trying to cope with all those instructions that came with Christmas gifts, you might want to take a look at Remove Child Before Folding: the 101 Stupidest, Silliest, and Wackiest Warning Labels Ever, by Bob Dorigo Jones. The title refers, of course, to a folding stroller. A Duraflame log reads”Caution- Risk of Fire”. A home barber set warns, “Never use while sleeping”. The sad part is that I actually know some people who have done the things being warned against! 

Fiction 

In I, Sniper by Stephen Hunter, four 60’s radicals are gunned down by a sniper. The FBI investigation leads to a Marine Corps marksman with 93 kills. Everything fits and the sniper commits suicide before he can be arrested. It all looks a little too perfect for Special Agent Nick Mephis who asks a friend, a retired Marine to look into the evidence. He alone is able to spot the flaws and reveal a sophisticated conspiracy.

Popular author Douglas Preston has written Impact. Mix an unknown source of otherworldly jewels, a meteor strike in Maine, inexplicable gamma rays whose discoverer is murdered, and NASA images that reveal a strange object in a crater on Mars that looks like it has been activated, and you have one great read!

If bounty hunter Evan Maitland is your kind of guy, rejoice, he’s back in Maitland’s Reply by James Patrick Hunt. He generally makes it a rule not to get mixed up with organized crime but when his friend Bianca is threatened by a Chicago-based Chinese triad, that rule is quickly broken. Caught between two deadly triad gangs, Maitland must form uneasy alliances to survive. 

Virginia Cooper
Adult Services Librarian