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Kern County Library Staff Suggests...: July 2010


Thursday, July 1, 2010

Look What's New for Kids

Palazzo Inverso by D.B. Johnson - A young apprentice to a master builder does some mischief that causes a palace to be built upside-down, which creates all sorts of trouble--and fun. Inspired by the work of M.C. Escher and intended to be read front-to-back, then turned over and read back-to-front.

Look What's New for Teens

D. Gray-Man vol 16 by Katsura Hoshino - "Lenalee is determined to confront a Level Four Akuma that's out to kill Komui, but her only chance is to reclaim her Innocence and synchronize with it. The Level Four is not inclined to wait around and pursues its mission even against the best efforts of Lavi and Kanda. It's left to Allen to hold the line, but it soon becomes obvious he has no hope of doing it all by himself!"-- from publisher's web site.

July Recommendations for Kids

Fiction

Ten-Gallon Bart Beats the Heat by Susan Stevens Crummel - It was hot, hot, hot in Dog City! Sound like a Bakersfield summer? Bart the dog decides to beat the heat by going to Alaska where it’s cool. Bart samples many of the local attractions, but digging for gold proves to be nearly the end of him!

Shark Vs. Train by Chris Barton - Shark and train face off- who will win? They compete eating pies, having a burping contest, running lemonade stands, performing in a piano recital and playing extreme zombie-squirrel motocross. Great fun!

Little Boat by Thomas Docherty - The ocean is a big place, but still Little Boat sails on past giant waves and sea monsters.

The Story of Cirrus Flux by Matthew Skelton - Cirrus Flux, who lives in a foundling hospital in 1783 London, has suddenly become an object of interest to several menacing characters in pursuit of his mysterious pendant which holds the breath of God. Hair raising chases and hot air balloon rides mark this swiftly moving story. Peppered with flashbacks to Cirrus’s seafaring father, this adventure careens from a chilling mesmerist to a villain who dabbles in electrical experiments, to a wheelchair bound man who maintains an intricate telescopic citywide spy system.


Nonfiction

Chess in Action by Paul Mantell - The long, hot days of summer are the perfect time to learn or increase your chess playing skills. Become the mighty commander battling a worthy opponent, and learn to make sacrifices to achieve final victory. This book covers the basics to winning strategies and everything in between. Included is a list of Internets sites for online battles.

World of the Weird by Tracey Turner - A bicycle riding frog, bog snorkeling, how to make a chocolate insect snack, Northern Lights, how to make a fossil, star jelly, raining frogs, and plants which supposedly grab cows! All this and more weird facts await you inside this fascinating book!

Sparky by Beverly Gherman - A glimpse into the life of Charles Schulz, the beloved creator of the comic strip, "Peanuts". This provides insight into the origin of some of his most popular characters.

An Egret’s Day by Jane Yolen - Brief facts and spectacular photos accompany Yolen’s beautiful poetry about the majestic egret.

Kid Made Modern by Todd Oldham - 52 kid friendly handmade projects with easy to follow steps for both kids and parents. From paper light cubes to fold and place over twinkle light to a brown bag book cover painted using bubble wrap, it’s all fun for a long summer day!

A Thousand Years of Pirates by William Gilkerson - Read about the pirate queen of Ireland, Granuaile, a dark haired beauty who married at sixteen. Her third son was born at sea, and the following day, while caring for her new infant, she stayed below deck until Saracen pirates attacked her ship. As they gained the upper hand, she rallied her men, by yelling, "Can’t you do with out me for even a day!" which caused her crew to rally and triumph over their attackers. At age 61 she sailed brashly to London, requesting an audience with Queen Elizabeth. Many other pirates swashbuckling adventures fill this fascinating book.

July Recommendations for Teens

Fiction

Fire: Tales of Elemental Spirits by Robin McKinley and Peter Dickinson - Fire rages hot, gives life and takes life. This series of five tales encompass ancient to modern life and five creatures who live and die by fire. There is the Phoenix who allows people to live their lives backwards, and "First Flight" features a reluctant first son destined to become a dragonrider, yet is afraid of heights. Turn up the heat this summer with these imaginative tales.

The Girl with the Mermaid Hair by Delia Ephron - Beautiful, rich fifteen-year-old Sukie is obsessed with beauty and perfection and is thrilled when her mother gives hers an antique mirror which belonged to her grandmother. As her mirrored life becomes addictingly more real than reality, and her family life splinters, Sukie’s lonely life spirals downward. Sukie’s father’s infidelity and her mother’s facelift are a backdrop to Sukie’s alienation with life. Senor, the dog, provides comic relief, and when Sukie reconnects with old friends, she discovers that reality is superior to her life in the mirror.

The Sweetheart of Prosper County by Jill S. Alexander - Why would a fourteen-year–old want a rooster for Christmas? Austin Gray’s plan is to raise a banty rooster, enter him in the Prosper County Fair poultry competition, and become the next Future Farmers of America Sweetheart. Along with her feisty rooster, she makes entertaining new friends and comes to terms with the bully of her small Texas farm town.


Nonfiction

Drawing Manga Animals, Chibis, and Other Adorable Creatures by J.C. Amberlyn - This title is brimming with instructions and tips to create manga style characters. Included are the basics from eyes, heads, faces and expressions, down to their feet, legs and claws. It also covers manga creatures based on real animals, and how to use the computer to create manga art!

July Recommendations for Adults

Fiction

So Cold the River by Michael Kortya - It started with a beautiful woman and a challenge. As a gift for her husband, Alyssa Bradford approaches Eric Shaw to make a documentary about her father-in-law, Campbell Bradford, a 95-year-old billionaire whose past is wrapped in mystery. Eric grabs the job even though there are few clues to the man's past--just the name of his hometown and an antique water bottle he's kept his entire life. In Bradford's hometown, Eric discovers an extraordinary history--a glorious domed hotel where movie stars, presidents, athletes, and mobsters once mingled, and hot springs whose miraculous mineral water cured everything from insomnia to malaria. Neglected for years, the resort has been restored to its former grandeur just in time for Eric's stay. Just hours after his arrival, Eric experiences a frighteningly vivid vision. As the days pass, the frequency and intensity of his hallucinations increase and draw Eric deeper into the town's dark history. He discovers that something besides the hotel has been restored--a long-forgotten evil that will stop at nothing to regain its lost glory. Brilliantly imagined and terrifyingly real, So Cold the River is a tale of irresistible suspense with a racing, unstoppable current. (review from Publisher’s Weekly)

The Taken by Inger Ash Wolfe - Lovers of twisty but plausible plotting and an out-of-the-ordinary lead will embrace Wolfe's standout second police procedural featuring Canadian Det. Insp. Hazel Micallef (after 2009's The Calling). A bizarre case brings Micallef, who depends on her ex-husband and his new wife as she recovers from a serious back injury suffered in the line of duty, back into action sooner than planned. A body fishermen dredge up from the bottom of a lake in Port Dundas, Ont., turns out just to be a mannequin, but numbers on the dummy lead Micallef to a Web site streaming video that appears to show a man being tortured by his abductor. In a frantic search for clues, Micallef concludes that the kidnapping is somehow linked to a fictional story being run in installments in the local newspaper. It's a testament to Wolfe's storytelling gifts that her reveal of the criminal's identity about midway through heightens rather than diminishes the tension.

Alice I Have Been by Melanie Benjamin - Alice Liddell Hargreaves’s life has been a richly woven tapestry: As a young woman, wife, mother, and widow, she’s experienced intense passion, great privilege, and greater tragedy. But as she nears her eighty-first birthday, she knows that, to the world around her, she is and will always be only "Alice." Her life was permanently dog-eared at one fateful moment in her tenth year–the golden summer day she urged a grown-up friend to write down one of his fanciful stories. That story, a wild tale of rabbits, queens, and a precocious young child, becomes a sensation the world over. Its author, a shy, stuttering Oxford professor, does more than immortalize Alice–he changes her life forever. But even he cannot stop time, as much as he might like to. And as Alice’s childhood slips away, a peacetime of glittering balls and royal romances gives way to the urgent tide of war. For Alice, the stakes could not be higher, for she is the mother of three grown sons, soldiers all. Yet even as she stands to lose everything she treasures, one part of her will always be the determined, undaunted Alice of the story, who discovered that life beyond the rabbit hole was an astonishing journey.

A love story and a literary mystery, "Alice I Have Been" brilliantly blends fact and fiction to capture the passionate spirit of a woman who was truly worthy of her fictional alter ego, in a world as captivating as the Wonderland only she could inspire.

The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman - If any contemporary author deserves to wear the mantel of Jane Austen, it's Goodman, whose subtle, astute social comedies perfectly capture the quirks of human nature. This dazzling novel is Austen updated for the dot-com era, played out between 1999 and 2001 among a group of brilliant risk takers and truth seekers. Still in her 20s, Emily Bach is the CEO of Veritech, a Web-based data-storage startup in trendy Berkeley. Her boyfriend, charismatic Jonathan Tilghman, is in a race to catch up at his data-security company, ISIS, in Cambridge, Mass. Emily is low-key, pragmatic, kind, serene—the polar opposite of her beloved younger sister, Jess, a crazed postgrad who works at an antiquarian bookstore owned by a retired Microsoft millionaire. When Emily confides her company's new secret project to Jonathan as a proof of her love, the stage is set for issues of loyalty and trust, greed, and the allure of power. What is actually valuable, Goodman's characters ponder: a company's stock, a person's promise, a forest of redwoods, a collection of rare cookbooks? Goodman creates a bubble of suspense as both Veritech and ISIS issue IPOs, career paths collide, social values clash, ironies multiply, and misjudgments threaten to destroy romantic desire. Enjoyable and satisfying, this is Goodman's (Intuition) most robust, fully realized and trenchantly meaningful work yet. review from Publisher’s Weekly)


Nonfiction

Role Models by John Waters - Waters's role models range from icons like Johnny Mathis and Tennessee Williams to a gay reality-porn auteur, a lesbian stripper called Lady Zorro, and ex-Charles Manson groupie and murderer Leslie Van Houten. When he pays attention to them, Waters produces vivid portraits of his subjects, especially those with really lurid backstories, but he's happier when the spotlight is on him and his studied outrageousness. He discusses celebrity (I've...gone out drinking with Clint Eastwood, and spent several New Year's Eve parties in Valentino's chalet in Gstaad, but what I like best is staying home and reading), regales readers with scatological scandals, disdaining religious beliefs while graciously tolerating people who hold them. (review from Publisher’s Weekly)
"John Waters has a great gift for appreciation—whether for toothless lesbian strippers in Baltimore or the most rarefied painters and writers of our day. He is a dandy who has done away with everyone else’s hierarchies and created a new world that conforms only to his own taste for trash and the sublime. He is frank, funny, and (strangely enough) both sensible and outrageous." —Edmund White, author of City Boy

Scout, Atticus, and Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of "To Kill A Mockingbird" by Mary McDonagh Murphy - To mark the fiftieth anniversary of To Kill a Mockingbird, Mary McDonagh Murphy reviews its history and examines how the novel has left its mark on a broad range of novelists, historians, journalists, and artists. In compelling interviews, Anna Quindlen, Tom Brokaw, Oprah Winfrey, James Patterson, James McBride, Scott Turow, Wally Lamb, Andrew Young, Richard Russo, Adriana Trigiani, Rick Bragg, Jon Meacham, Allan Gurganus, Diane McWhorter, Lee Smith, Rosanne Cash, and others reflect on when they first read the novel, what it means to them—then and now—and how it has affected their lives and careers. Scout, Atticus, and Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of "To Kill a Mockingbird" is a lively appreciation of the many ways in which the novel has made—and continues to make—a difference to generations of readers. Harper Lee has not given an interview since 1964, but Murphy's reporting, research, and rare interviews with the author's sister and friends stitch together a brief history of how the novel, as well as the acclaimed 1962 movie, came to be.

How Did You Get This Number? by Sloane Crosley - Crosley still lives and works in New York City, but she's no longer the newcomer for whom a trip beyond the Upper West Side is a big adventure. She can pack up her sensibility and takes us with her to Paris, to Portugal (having picked it by spinning a globe and putting down her finger, and finally falling in with a group of Portuguese clowns), and even to Alaska, where the "bear bells" on her fellow bridesmaids' ponytails seemed silly until a grizzly cub dramatically intrudes. Meanwhile, back in New York, where new apartments beckon and taxi rides go awry, her sense of the city has become more layered, her relationships with friends and family more complicated. As always, Crosley's voice is fueled by the perfect witticism, buoyant optimism, flair for drama, and easy charm in the face of minor suffering or potential drudgery. But in How Did You Get This Number it has also become increasingly sophisticated, quicker and sharper to the point, more complex and lasting in the emotions it explores. And yet, Crosley remains the unfailingly hilarious young Everywoman, healthily equipped with intelligence and poise to fend off any potential mundanity in maturity.

The Golden Gate, the Life and Times of America’s Greatest Bridge by Kevin Starr - The Golden Gate Bridge links the urbanity of San Francisco with the wild headlands of Marin County, as if to suggest the paradox of California and America itself—the place that Fitzgerald saw as the last spot commensurate with the human capacity for wonder. The bridge, completed in 1937, also announced to the world America's engineering prowess and full assumption of its destined continental dominance. The Golden Gate is a counterpart to the Statue of Liberty, pronouncing American achievement in an unmistakable American fashion. The nation's very history is expressed in the bridge's art deco style and stark verticality.

Kevin Starr's Golden Gateis a brilliant and passionate telling of the history of the bridge, and the rich and peculiar history of the California experience. The Golden Gate is a grand public work, a symbol and a very real bridge, a magnet for both postcard photographs and suicides. In this compact but comprehensive narrative, Starr unfolds the hidden-in-plain-sight meaning of the Golden Gate, putting it in its place among classic works of art.
 
   
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