A Few of Our Favorite Things: More Staff Picks

	Name and department: Matt, Security Coordinator Staff Pick: Horse soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of U.S. Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan by Doug Stanton What’s an alternative title you would give the book? Real American Heroes Summarize the book in one sentence: Chronicles the beginning of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan—the first cavalry invasion since the Civil War. I would not recommend this book to my father because... He’s had his own chronicles of war in Vietnam.
	Name and department: Rebecca, Youth Services Staff Pick: Deaf Sentence by David Lodge What’s an alternative title you would give the book? No alternative, it's the perfect title--a humorous play on words, poignant, and says everything about the main character's mindset. Summarize the book in one sentence: A middle aged professor struggles with encroaching deafness that isolates him and lands him in hot water with an unhinged graduate student. I would not recommend this book to my mother because... It's too funny for her and she wouldn't appreciate the relationship between the professor and the student.
	Name and department: Ransom, Adult Services Staff Pick: I Am Not Myself These Days: A Memoir by Josh Kilmer-Purcell What’s an alternative title you would give the book? Dude Looks Like a Lady and Smells Like a Distillery Summarize the book in one sentence: A New York City drag queen drinks an inordinate amount of vodka while maintaining a day job in advertising. I would not recommend this book to my mother because... Who do you think recommended it to me?

A Few of Our Favorite Things: Staff Picks

Over in adult services, we've set up a display staff favorites. A number of nonfiction, novels, graphic novels and audiobooks will be featured there throughout the month. Next time you're in, be sure to check them out--but in the meantime, we'll be sharing some here on the blog all month too!

Name and department: Lynn, Adult Services Coordinator Staff Pick Safe Haven by Nicholas Sparks What's an alternative title you'd give the book? Second Chances Summarize the book in one sentence: A woman leaves a bad situation to start over. I would recommend this book to my mother because... ...it shows that no matter how bad things get, you can always get through it.

Name and department: Dan, Collection Development Staff Pick: Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 by Tony Judt What's an alternative title you'd give the book? How the European Union Came to Be Summarize the book in one sentence: The book discusses how Europe rebuilt itself from the rubble after World War 2, with a lot of help from the U.S. I would recommend this book to my father because... ...he was very in to history. I thought a lot about him while I was reading this book.

Pose Prose

Enlightenment for idiots:  a novel. 
By Anne Cushman

I am a student of yoga (a perpetual beginner) and am always looking for good fiction on this subject.  This novel is one of my favorites:  light but not silly; intelligent but not ponderous.  The protagonist, Amanda, is a young yoga teacher who also freelances as a writer for a 'dummies' book series. She is charged with traveling to India to research the 'simple' project of reaching enlightenment.  Her editor suggests she research it and write it in a few months:  it's a hot topic and she needs it finished soon!

Amanda, is self-deprecating and witty, but is having serious problems with a boyfriend who won't commit.  In India she encounters many crazy and interesting people and meets and becomes close to an American traveler, Devi Das.  Devi is a true enlightment seeker but is also a sweet and supportive friend to Amanda.  Local interest note:  the author characterizes him as having been a religious studies student at KU! Amanda and Devi travel through India, from one guru and ashram to another in order to investigate various paths to enlightenment.  (All of the adventures are entertaining, but the tantric yoga episode is especially funny.)

The author, Anne Cushman is a contributing editor to Yoga Journal and Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, and is the author of From here to Nirvana:  the Yoga Journal Guide to spiritual India, so she knows her stuff.

How Amanda manages travel in chaotic India, comes to terms with her confused personal relationships, and finds her own version of enlightenment makes for an easy, but rewarding read.

Tricia - Tech Services

Staff Pick: The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll

The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright by Jean Nathan

Dare Wright was a photographer and author of a series of highly successful children’s picture books chronicling the life of a doll named Edith and her teddy bear companions. In her Lonely Doll series, which made its debut in 1957 and was a staple in the early reading life of millions of baby boomers, Wright pioneered the use of photography in books published for children.

Jean Nathan’s biography, The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright, unearths Wright’s personal story. Separated from her brother and father at an early age, Wright formed an unusually close relationship with her mother, a Cleveland portrait painter. Nathan investigates Wright’s frequent retreats into imaginary childhood worlds, as well as her adult attempts to distinguish her own personality from that of her mother. Wright’s subconscious struggle revealed itself in her popular children’s books, for which she staged and photographed elaborate scenes of a doll who shares her mother’s name, looks eerily like Wright herself, and regains a lost brother and father in the form of two teddy bear companions.

This book would be a fascinating read for anyone who grew up with the Lonely Doll books, but fans of gothic fiction, Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological explorations, or movies in the vein of Grey Gardens will also find it equally gripping. The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll can also be read as the story of how one artist’s unresolved issues repeatedly emerged in her work, only to resonate with a generation of children who knew nothing of Wright’s problematic relationships with her family. Nathan frames her biography by sharing with readers her own youthful love of the Lonely Doll books, as well as her journey to meet Wright, whom she tracked down in obscurity near the end of life, and later came to know via a trove of personal photographs, manuscripts, and letters. Nathan’s research, and Wright’s life, were also the subject of a segment on NPR’s “This American Life” in 2000.

Dan - Collection Development

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Staff Pick: Get Me Out

Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank by Randi Hutter Epstien

Science meets snark in Randi Hutter Epstien’s Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank, an irreverent look at the often misguided struggle of humans to understand how we are conceived and born. Hutter, a physician and science writer who has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, and Daily Telegraph, blends humor with wonder as she recounts the history of pregnancy and childbirth in a conversational style.

Hutter’s tales hit a range of topics, from the mysterious secret of forceps deliveries (their closely guarded design was not known to the public, even after over 100 years of use, until the 1813 discovery of a set hidden in the attic of a home in England), to the migration of the birthing process from home to hospital during the 20th century. Along the way Hutter chronicles the origins of the use of anesthesia in childbirth, as well as the growth of the natural childbirth movement—interestingly pointing out that both methods, in different eras, have symbolized the empowerment of women giving birth. Epstein’s light tone takes a tender tack in the book’s tragic chapters; for instance, in describing early gynecological experiments on slaves in the antebellum United States, the author calls on readers to remember the ethical travesty of this research, and a chapter on the widespread use of drugs such as DES and Thalidomide illuminates, at times disturbingly, the fallibility of modern medicine in recent decades. The book’s final chapters address the rise in popularity of sonograms, sperm banks, and the C-section.

Get Me Out is an enlightening and amusing read, especially for those interested in past methods of childbirth. Among its many revelations is the extent to which the views of the medical establishment have varied over the years, and how different the standard procedures of today are from those employed just 50 or 100 years ago. The book provides a rich historical context for anyone who has experienced childbirth, either as a parent or a baby, which, by my calculations, includes just about everyone.

Dan - Collection Development

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Staff Pick: On Cats

On Cats by Doris Lessing

I feel kind of weird giving my highest accolades to a book about, well, cats, but this was a pretty special book. Squeamish cat-lovers beware ~ Doris Lessing starts out by telling of her girlhood growing up on a farm in South Africa, shooting baby kittens with her father because they simply couldn't manage to keep them all. I actually love her for refusing to be sentimental. Yet somehow there is an acute tenderness in her writing about her cats, especially as she grows older, despite wry tales of guns & whiskey & too many kittens. Remarkably like her darker works on the terrors of motherhood, failures of communism, etc., Lessing really zeroes in on the personalities and nuances of her characters. It's just that, this time, they happen to be cats! This was one of those especially good ones that I had to read really slow at the last chapter because I didn't want it to end.

Rachel - Adult Services

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Staff Pick: Remainder

Remainder by Tom McCarthy

It’s a shame that it has been almost a year since anyone checked out this book. Tom McCarthy’s Remainder is a wonderfully and weirdly mesmerizing book. If I kept a list of favorite novels, it would be near the top.

Remainder’s plot is fairly simple. An unnamed narrator awakes from a coma and is given a large settlement in exchange for never discussing the events that led to his injuries. It is easy for him to uphold his part of the agreement because he does not remember those events, and suspects that there is much more that he cannot recall. In an effort to understand and reclaim his own humanity, he uses his unexpected wealth to stage detailed, constantly repeating reenactments of his memories and visions.

The book was highly praised when it was published in 2007. The New York Times called it “a work of novelistic philosophy, as disturbing as it is funny," while praising McCarthy’s “superb stylistic control and uncanny imagination.” Kirkus Reviews called it “an assured work of existential horror.” Believer Magazine, in bestowing its book-of-the-year award, described it as “an art installation disguised as a brilliant novel.”

If these reviews sound strange, and maybe even a little contradictory, it is probably because the book itself was somewhat unusual. Remainder intentionally lacks emotion, symbolism, and highly developed characters. Instead, it is almost entirely concerned with actions and objects. Despite, or becasue ofthis, it asks some large and rather abstract questions. How does one define and understand reality? What is authenticity? What does it mean to be authentically human?

Remainder will stay with you long after you have finished reading it.

Jacob - Adult Services

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Staff Pick: I.O.U.

I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay by John Lanchester

John Lanchester’s I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay is a smart, bitingly funny book that is very successful at it stated goal: making the causes and consequences of the 2008 crash comprehensible to the average reader. Given the dry, if not depressing, nature of its subject matter, it is also remarkably entertaining.

Early in the book Lanchester states, "Many bright, literate people have no idea about all sorts of economic basics." I would count myself among those bright, literate people and thank Lanchester for making me feel better about my ignorance while, in the end, enlightening me. Before reading I.O.U. I could recognize much of the terminology used to describe the financial crisis--“credit default swaps”, “zombie banks”, “toxic assets”, etc.--but would have been hard pressed to define it, let alone use it to construct an explanation. After reading I.O.U., I could begin to do both.

Lanchester is the author of three novels including Fragrant Harbor. His skills as a novelist are evident in the pacing and plotting of I.O.U. You want to keep reading to find out what happens next, and all of the book’s narrative strands come together in the end. He is also a deft and witty creator of metaphors and cultural references—good at making a point clear while making the reader laugh.

If this hasn’t convinced you to read it, check out Dwight Garner’s excellent review in the New York Times.

Jacob - Adult Services

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Staff Pick: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

The protagonist of this charming debut novel set in postwar Britain is Flavia de Luce, a precocious eleven year old girl who loves chemistry and loathes her older sisters. When a dead body turns up in the cucumber patch at her family's English manor house, Flavia turns to amateur sleuthing to solve the crime and clear her father's name. As Flavia rides her trusty bike named Gladys around the sleepy village of Bishop's Lacey, the reader takes a ride with her -- learning a bit about chemistry, poison, British stamp collecting, de Luce family history, and more. While the mystery at the heart of this book has all of the trapping of a classic, "Golden Age" British mystery, Flavia is a totally original and utterly fresh voice -- and she's surrounded by a great cast of characters to boot. If you loved Harriet the Spy as a young reader, you'll love Flavia de Luce. A second installment in this promising new series is due out this March.

Susan - Adult Services

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Staff Pick: Sharp Objects

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

The main character of this dark debut thriller is Camille Preaker, a newspaper reporter in suburban Chicago who has worked hard to leave her troubled past and dysfunctional family behind her in southern Missouri. She is forced to revisit her old life, however, when her editor sends her back to her hometown to get a personal angle on the story of two murdered girls found there, the victims of a suspected serial killer. She returns to her childhood home and reunites with her distant, cold mother, her ghostly/ghastly stepfather, and her half sister, who is at thirteen, the ultimate mean girl. As the murder investigation unfolds, the reader peers into both Camille's troubled past as well as the small town's darkest corners. Flynn does an excellent job at conveying an impending sense of doom as well as misdirecting the reader right up until the last page. An original and satisfying literary mystery.

Gillian Flynn was born in Kansas City, graduated from KU with degrees in English and journalism, and went on to be the chief TV critic at Entertainment Weekly. Sharp Objects was a finalist for an Edgar Award and the winner of several Dagger Awards. The author is currently working on the screenplay adaptation of this book. Her second book, Dark Places, was also a critically acclaimed best seller.

Susan - Adult Services

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Staff Pick: Out of Sheer Rage

Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence by Geoff Dyer

Out of Sheer Rage takes its title and epigraph from a letter penned by D.H. Lawrence in 1914. “Out of sheer rage,” he wrote, “I've begun my book on Thomas Hardy. It will be about anything but Thomas Hardy I am afraid -- queer stuff -- but not bad.''

Like his subject before him, Geoff Dyer wrote a book on Lawrence that is not really about Lawrence. If anything, it is a book about Dyer’s inability to write a book about Lawrence. Not only is it not bad, it’s very smart and very funny.

Out of Sheer Rage seamlessly and quite discursively mixes travelogue, literary criticism, biography, memoir, and cultural commentary. As Dyer and his “almost wife” Laura embark on a series of trips to former homes and haunts of Lawrence, he holds forth on topics as diverse as the limits of contemporary fiction and his own bad knees. In the end, the book offers some well-earned lessons about the practice of daily life and the roles and possibilities of art. The reader will also learn a little about D. H. Lawrence.

Jacob - Adult Services

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Staff Pick: Darling Jim

Darling Jim by Christian Moerk

This debut novel opens with the discovery of a grisly murder scene and quickly unfolds into the story of three Irish sisters and their aunt who all fall for the same man -- a darkly seductive lothario who travels the countryside telling mesmerizing tales. Wherever he goes, dead bodies soon follow, yet few seem to notice, blinded as they are by his charming ways. Part folktale, part gothic romance, part supernatural thriller, this complex story-within-a-story is a satisfying, genre-bending read.

Susan - Adult Services

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Staff Pick: Wild Douglas County

Wild Douglas County by Ken Lassman

Ken Lassman's book, Wild Douglas County, encourages us to bring the outdoors into our social conscience. Ken wants to reconnect each of us to our bioregion with a greater sense of place. Ken's book may also be used as a reference guide to become more familiar with nature in our own backyards and the whole region. Read Wild Douglas County to learn how valuable and important our local ecology is and how we can help create justice for this piece of the earth.

Ken writes: "Today... we have a landscape that has shrinking islands of native habitat surrounded by agricultural and urban landscapes." How can wild animals that do not fly travel from one natural area to the next? Every summer I witness several turtles attempting to cross our roads; unfortunately, I can't always help them across. We must find a way to help wildlife survive. Ken offers these practical solutions: connect areas of nearby native habitats with natural corridors, "nature's highways", transform your yard to native habitat, control invasive species, get actively involved in local restoration and preservation efforts, and cultivate ecological literacy.

This thorough guide makes the seasons more accessible with descriptions of happenings throughout the year in the cycles and rhythms of various organisms. An annotated list of recommended local organizations to join or contact for more information is also provided. Recommended native habitats to visit are highlighted, including access pointes to the Kaw and Wakarusa Rivers, and where to see healthy examples of native prairies and woodlands.

Also note that Ken offers an invitation, if you would like to ask him to give a presentation and/or lead a nature walk, his contact information is inside the front of the book.

Shirley - Adult Services

Staff Pick: Shah of Shahs

Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuściński

Published in 1985, this book is a pithy, revelatory reconstruction of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 by an eyewitness. The book, which the original New York Times book review called “insightful and important” is remarkable as both an historical document and allegory for revolution anywhere, but is especially gripping because of the insight it offers into the Iran of today.

Ryszard Kapuściński’s (Rish-ard Kap-ush-chin-ski) writing can be a marvel of selection and condensation. Anything non-essential is seemingly left out, but his prose hardly becomes dry or journalistic. If anything, the brevity of the writing adds to its odd lyricism. Shah of Shahs, like many of Kapuściński’s other books, reads more like a novel than a work of nonfiction. Lasting only 152 pages, it is a short novel at that.

Kapuściński was a Polish journalist. Over the course of his career reporting from Asia, Africa, and Latin America he was jailed forty times, witnessed twenty-seven coups or revolutions, and survived four death sentences. Though sometimes criticized for straying from the strictly factual, his books are widely praised and have been translated into thirty languages. The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat and The Soccer War are also highly recommended.

Jacob - Adult Services

Staff Pick: Bringing Nature Home

Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in our Gardens by Douglas W. Tallamy

A very informative nonfiction book for anyone interested in nature and the environment. The review on the back cover describes it well: “We all hear that insects and animals depend on plants, but in Bringing Nature Home, Douglas Tallamy presents a powerful and compelling illustration of how the choices we make as gardeners can profoundly impact the diversity of life in our yards, towns and on our planet. This important work should be required reading for anyone who every put shovel to earth.” – William Cullina, Director of Horticultural Research for the New England Wild Flower Society.

Shirley - Adult Services

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Staff Pick: Before I Forget

Before I Forget by Leonard Pitts, Jr

Shortly after Moses Johnson, a former singing sensation still living on his past accomplishments, discovers that he has early-onset Alzheimer's disease, he receives a call telling him that his estranged father is close to death. At the same time, his nineteen-year-old son, Trey, is arrested for participating in a robbery that resulted in a store clerk's murder. Moses and Trey set off on a coast-to-coast trip, during which Moses learns about his past and works through his troubled relationship with his son. A subplot concerns the brother of one of Trey's co-defendants, who is torn between his mother and brother, who want him to eliminate Trey so he can't testify, and his girlfriend and new baby, for whom he has pledged to stay in school and out of trouble.

This powerful and compelling first novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist provides a nuanced and feeling look at the lives of African-American men today. Although it is, of course, part social commentary, Pitts has written a story that rings true, with an ending both tragic and hopeful.

Maria - Community Relations

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Staff Pick: Among the Mad

Among the Mad by Jacqueline Winspear

The latest in the Maisie Dobbs mystery series set in post World War I London. This title focuses on the psychological trauma of former soldiers coping with shell shock and unemployment in the early 1930s. It’s very well written. Read the whole Maisie Dobbs series! Titles in order: Maisie Dobbs, Birds of a Feather, Pardonable Lies, Messenger of Truth, Incomplete Revenge, and Among the Mad.

Shirley - Adult Services

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Staff Pick: Crazy Love

Crazy Love: A Memoir by Leslie Morgan Steiner

This memoir focuses on an abusive relationship between Steiner and her husband. Acting as almost a warning guide for those in potentially volatile relationships, Steiner provides a vivid chronological account of her situation and also of how she prevailed. A fast-paced account with vivid moments, Steiner gives an in-depth look at her relationship in drastic moments and events.

Sam - Adult Services

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Staff Pick: Callisto

Callisto by Torsten Krol

In this fun farce, Odell Deefus is on his way to Callisto, Kansas to enlist in the Army when his car breaks down on a country road. Deefus wanders into the nearest house and begins an odyssey of lies and misunderstanding that sinks him into deeper trouble at every turn. With his own slightly skewed brand of common sense, the hapless hero finds himself juggling a drug ring, dead bodies (literally), a televangelist, the FBI, and Homeland Security. Despite Odell's shortcomings and inability to get himself out of the ever-worsening situation, he is a sympathetic character, a sort of country Forrest Gump, but with a taste for liquor and a mad crush on Condoleeza Rice.

Author Torsten Krol, according to the book cover, "is a writer. Nothing further is known about him." He is reputedly Australian and speculatively a famous author writing under a pseudonym. Although he does occasionally allow a Britishism to slip into the text, for the most part the Kansas setting, dialogue and characters are well-written. A great read!

Maria - Community Relations

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Staff Pick: Suburban Safari

Suburban Safari: A Year on the Lawn by Hannah Holmes

A nonfiction book about the flora and fauna living in a Maine backyard. The author has a great writing style and a lot of the information applies to nature here in the Midwest.

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-Shirley, Adult Services