Bliss, remembered

 by Frank Deford. When American swimmer Sydney Stringfellow arrives at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, she never expects to fall in love with a handsome young German, but she does. When politics separate them, she goes home to nurse her broken heart and meets Jimmy, a kind young American who restores her faith in love and marries her before being shipped off to the Pacific theater of WWII. When Horst shows up on her doorstep, though, Sydney is torn and must decide what she is willing to do for love. Told as a memoir, Deford's newest is entertaining and thought provoking. He has a superb sense of character and period, and readers will at once feel drawn into the turbulent times. The memoir device, while overused in many books, is put to excellent effect, allowing readers to easily identify with Sydney's son and interviewer, Teddy. The surprising twist will catch readers off guard but not leave them feeling cheated. This is a poignant story, utterly charming and enjoyable. --Publishers Weekly. (Check Catalog)

Crime and punishment in America

 by David B. Wolcott. In this fascinating glimpse into the history and development of the American criminal justice system and the social contexts that contributed to its evolution from 1500 to now, the authors suggest that "narratives involving crime-both fictional and real-become focal points for understanding the issues of the day." The chronologically arranged chapters include narrative text describing the crimes and punishments of the period followed by a two- to three-page chronicle of events and selections from relevant primary documents. The text is liberally illustrated with black-and-white photos, paintings, and drawings that are representative of the crime-related events under discussion, the social context in which they occurred, and their impact on society. Appendixes include primary-source documents; biographies of "major personalities" such as criminals, gangsters, social workers, politicians, and law officers; national crime statistics are portrayed on maps and in graphs and tables. A regrettably short glossary of terms is included, plus a bibliography of criminal cases and primary and secondary sources for further information. Wolcott and Head are both scholars of U.S. history, social history, and the histories of criminal justice and ideas. BOTTOM LINE An absorbing volume that will draw in casual readers as well as provide a starting point for high school and undergraduate research. Recommended for public and high school libraries and academic libraries that support an undergraduate curriculum in criminal justice. --Library Journal. (Check Catalog)

61 hours : a Reacher novel

 by Lee Child. Coming off Gone Tomorrow (2009), one of the very best among his 13 high-octane thrillers, Child keeps his foot hard on the throttle. There's always a ticking clock in the background whenever our off-the-grid hero, Jack Reacher, finds a wrong that needs righting, but this time the clock drives the narrative. When a lawyer arrives at a South Dakota prison to visit a client, we're told that it's five minutes to three in the afternoon, exactly 61 hours before it happened. Meanwhile, Reacher wakes up from a nap to discover that the tour bus on which he's cadged a ride is spinning out of control on an icy bridge. By the time he helps the injured senior citizens aboard the bus, there are 59 hours left. But we still don't know what we're waiting for. The clock continues to tick as Reacher, now without a ride, lands in Boulton, South Dakota, and finds himself helping out the local police as they attempt to protect a key witness in an upcoming drug trial. Then there's the matter of the peculiar underground installation outside of town, formerly a military outpost but now apparently housing a meth lab. As the hours fall away and the tension builds, we learn more about the installation, the local cops, and a Mexican drug lord whose own clock is ticking in sync with Reacher's, but we're still not prepared for what happens when the sixty-first hour arrives. One expects a novel organized around a clock to be plot driven, and that's certainly true here. But, as always, Child delivers enough juicy details about the landscape, the characters, and Reacher's idiosyncrasies to give the story texture and to lower our pulse rates, if only momentarily. Even without the apparently game-changing finale, this is Child in top form, but isn't he always? --Booklist (Check Catalog)

Last call : the rise and fall of Prohibition

 by Daniel Okrent. While the story of Prohibition (1919-33) is not suspenseful, since we know how this social experiment turned out, Okrent (former public editor, New York Times) helpfully fills in details, explanations, and lessons to be learned while supplementing the familiar story of how legislated temperance did not succeed. He mines archival and published sources and adds memories acquired through interviews and reference to previously unavailable private papers. Okrent emphasizes that the 18th Amendment was a long time coming, passed by the efforts of progressives, populists, nativists, and other morally motivated reformers. Temporarily ending the fifth-largest industry in America, Prohibition transformed the alcoholic beverage business as well as American culture generally. Okrent admits that, although Prohibition promoted criminality and hypocrisy, it did cut the rate of alcohol consumption. He book-ends his work with historical explications of Prohibition's enactment and its eventual demise owing to lack of both sufficient political will and enforcement funds. VERDICT While there are other Prohibition narratives, e.g., Michael Lerner's ably done Dry Manhattan, acknowledged by Okrent, this sprightly written and thoroughly annotated work is recommended for both the general reader, to whom it is directed, and the scholar. --Library Journal. (Check Catalog)

A fierce radiance : a novel

 Lauren Belfer. Thirty-six-year-old Claire Shipley is a most modern woman in 1941. A gifted, focused photographer for LIFE magazine, a divorced single mother, and fearless in the pursuit of her career, she stumbles upon an enormous story when she is sent to cover the use of an experimental, hard-to-produce drug, penicillin, on infections. Having lost one child to septicemia, she is fiercely protective of her son. When her original story is killed, she is asked by the U.S. government to pursue it as a patriot, keeping an eye on the big pharmaceutical companies who are supposed to be mass-producing patent-free penicillin for use on the battlefield but are really working on the much more profitable cousin drugs. VERDICT With an exquisite artist's eye for detail that puts readers right in the middle of New York City and the World War II fronts and incorporating all the elements of a hot, sprawling, page-turning romance-not to mention espionage, murder, crime-scene deceptions, big business intrigue, and family estrangements-Belfer (City of Light) once again blends fiction and facts with riveting results. --Library Journal (Check Catalog)

The shadow effect : illuminating the hidden power of your true self

 by Deepak Chopra. This coproduction of the star spiritual-writing team of Chopra, Marianne Williamson, and Debbie Ford is a component of a larger project, the documentary film of the same name, which features these authors plus several other famous faces, including Verdine White of the R&B group Earth, Wind, and Fire. The shadow is the name they give to the fears, inhibitions, and unspoken impulses that impede us and lead to self-destructive behaviors. Their essays here deal with the history of the shadow, methods for dealing with it, and the relations between the shadow and the soul. VERDICT By virtue of its authors alone, this title will command a wide readership among spiritual seekers; its concerns, too, are real and timely. --Library Journal (Check Catalog)

Walks with men

 by Anne Beatie. It's 1980, and the New York press actually cares about the caustic remarks made by Harvard's pretty valedictorian. Jane promptly moves to Vermont to live off the land with her hippie boyfriend, until a trip to New York brings her within the gravitational pull of a highly opinionated yet cryptic and mysteriously wealthy writer named Neil who is nearly twice her age. Jane knows that Neil is a Svengali and willingly submits, only to discover that he's also a brazen liar. Nonetheless, they move into a Chelsea brownstone, where Jane voyeuristically enjoys downtown's cavalier exhibitionism. She has her moment of fame as the screenwriter for a documentary about runaways that wins an Academy Award, but bizarre circumstances conspire to leave her alone and bereft. This is a stark tale even for Beattie, the master of terseness and angst. But it is also an oddly beautiful distillation of a specific moment both in one fledgling writer's life and in New York's celebrity-driven culture, when creative forces gather like a held breath or the sea before a tsunami. --Booklist. (Check Catalog)

On dialogue

 by David Bohm. Never before has there been a greater need for deeper listening and more open communication to cope with the complex problems facing our organizations, businesses, and societies. Renowned scientist David Bohm, 'one of the most searching thinkers in modern physics' (Nature), believed there was a better way for humanity to discover meaning and to achieve harmony. He identified creative dialogue, a sharing of assumptions and understanding, as a means by which the individual, and society as a whole, can learn more about themselves and others, and achieve a renewed sense of purpose. --Publisher (Check Catalog)

Deliver us from evil

 by David Baldacci. Ostensibly, Baldacci's latest is another novel (after The Whole Truth, 2008) about Shaw, the enigmatic agent working for an enigmatic organization. But it feels a lot more like the launch of a brand-new series, as though Baldacci is using a familiar character, Shaw, to segue to a new series lead: Regina Reggie Campion, a beautiful and deadly woman who works for an even-more-enigmatic group dedicated to ridding the world of evil. Both Shaw and Reggie are after the same man, Evan Waller, although each of them is unaware of it. To Shaw, Waller is a dealer in black-market nuclear materials; to Reggie, he's the former Fedir Kuchin, a Ukrainian mass murderer. Reggie and Shaw both arrive in Provence, where Waller/Kuchin is vacationing. This is a very clever novel, and full marks go to Baldacci for pulling off an especially difficult type of story one in which neither of the central characters knows entirely what's going on, while the reader is omniscient. It's a lot of fun watching the two scope each other out, trying to determine whether the other is a threat (even as their mutual attraction grows). We become intensely involved in the story, wishing we could step inside the book and clue its two protagonists into what's going on. The only problem for fans of Shaw, anyway is that, in Reggie, Baldacci has created such an interesting and engaging character that he might have made Shaw redundant. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

The River Cottage bread handbook

by Daniel Stevens
For this Americanized edition, only a few changes have been made, and, as in The River Cottage Preserves Handbook, the tone of the original has been preserved. Stevens, a chef at River Cottage, begins with recommended equipment and ingredients, then quickly moves on to detailed instructions on making bread by hand, with step-by-step photographs. Over 40 recipes follow, including sourdough from homemade starter, bagels and doughnuts, and traditional English fare such as scones, shortbread, crumpets, and oatcakes. A short chapter on what to do with leftover bread concludes the recipes. Recipes are given in weight and volume, and a warning that all temperatures are for convection ovens is repeated throughout. The final pages are somewhat less practical-Stevens provides directions for making a clay oven, a challenge only the most devoted baker will likely attempt. VERDICT This slim volume is an affordable introduction to bread making, geared toward the dedicated novice.

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The new good life : living better than ever in an age of less

by John RobbinsRobbins, best-selling author and heir to the Baskin Robbins family, walked away from a fortune only to lose most of his own money in Bernie Madoff's ponzi scheme. As the author of the bestselling Diet for a New America, Robbins championed planet-friendly food and became a popular lecturer, talk-show guest, and feature of the hit documentary, Supersize Me. Now he taps his razor sharp insights and social consciousness to argue that, when it comes to not just our food but also our bank accounts, homes, and other aspects of our lives, bigger is not always best. Chapters like "Eating Better, Spending Less" and "Choosing Where to Live" combine research and case studies with Robbins' own personal experience, redefining our notions of a successful life and lending credibility to his own claims of enlightenment.
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Being wrong: Adventures in the margin of error

by Kathryn Schultz
Here's a fascinating counterpoint to the notion that making a mistake somehow diminishes you as a person. We shouldn't fear error, the author says; rather, we should embrace it because it's our capacity for making mistakes that makes us who we are. ( To err is human isn't just an empty cliché.) Schulz explores the nature of error: are big mistakes fundamentally different from small mistakes, or are they all essentially the same? How much does peer pressure, or crowd response, affect our capacity to blunder? How and why do we remember relatively insignificant mistakes for the rest of our lives, long after they have ceased to be relevant to anything? And what role does error-blindness our inability to know when we are in the process of making a mistake play in our daily lives? Schulz writes in a lively style, asks lots of compelling questions, and uses plenty of examples to illustrate her points. Put this one in the same general category as Gladwell's Blink (2005), LeGault's Think! (2006), and Shore's Blunder (2008): user-friendly, entertaining looks at the way our minds work.

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The Overton window

by Glen Beck
An unprecedented attack on U.S. soil shakes the country to the core and puts into motion a frightening plan, decades in the making, to transform America and demonize all those who stand in the way. Exposing the plan and revealing the conspirators behind it, PR executive Noah Gardner hatches his own plan to save both the woman he loves and the individual freedoms he once took for granted.

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The Jesus Wars

by Philip Jenkins
*Starred Review* The fifth-century Christian church faced a doctrinal issue, now largely forgotten, that precipitated intramural Christian savagery unparalleled until the 11-centuries-later Thirty Years' War. The bone of contention was the nature of Jesus Christ. That he wasn't a mere man was indisputable. But was he a human-divine cross-breed, so to speak, or was he purely divine and his human body an illusion?

Jenkins tells the fascinating, violent story of the Church's fifth century battles over right belief that had a far greater impact on the future of Christianity and the world than the much-touted Council of Nicea convened a century before.

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