Top Choices
New Book Alerts is a free online service that showcases the newest titles purchased by your local library. You can select to receive alerts via email and/or RSS feeds. If you see a new title that you are interested in, just click "check catalog" to place a hold on the item right away.
Previous | Last 14 days
-
And the Mountains Echoed
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Khaled Hosseini
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover (2013, May 21st).
Pages: 416
An unforgettable novel about finding a lost piece of yourself in someone else. Khaled Hosseini, the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, has written a new novel about how we love, how we take care of one another, and how the choices we make resonate through generations. In this tale revolving around not just parents and children but brothers and sisters, cousins and caretakers, Hosseini explores the many ways in which families nurture, wound, betray, honor, and sacrifice for one another; and how often we are surprised by the actions of those closest to us, at the times that matter most. Following its characters and the ramifications of their lives and choices and loves around the globe—from Kabul to Paris to San Francisco to the Greek island of Tinos—the story expands gradually outward, becoming more emotionally complex and powerful with each turning page. more
More Info | Google Books | Check Availability
-
Control: Exposing the Truth About Guns
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Glenn Beck
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Threshold Editions; Original edition (2013, Apr 30th).
Pages: 176
When our founding fathers secured the Constitutional “right of the people to keep and bear arms,” they also added the admonition that this right SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED. It is the only time this phrase appears in the Bill of Rights. So why aren’t more people listening? History has proven that guns are essential to self-defense and liberty—but tragedy is a powerful force and has led many to believe that guns are the enemy, that the Second Amendment is outdated, and that more restrictions or outright bans on firearms will somehow solve everything. They are wrong. In CONTROL, Glenn Beck presents a passionate, fact-based case for guns that reveals why gun control isn’t really about controlling guns at all; it’s about controlling us. more
More Info | Google Books | Check Availability
-
Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: William Dalrymple
Format: Deckle Edge]
Publisher: Knopf (2013, Apr 16th).
Pages:
From William Dalrymple—award-winning historian, journalist and travel writer—a masterly retelling of what was perhaps the West’s greatest imperial disaster in the East, and an important parable of neocolonial ambition, folly and hubris that has striking relevance to our own time. With access to newly discovered primary sources from archives in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russia and India—including a series of previously untranslated Afghan epic poems and biographies—the author gives us the most immediate and comprehensive account yet of the spectacular first battle for Afghanistan: the British invasion of the remote kingdom in 1839. Led by lancers in scarlet cloaks and plumed helmets, and facing little resistance, nearly 20,000 British and East India Company troops poured through the mountain passes from India into Afghanistan in order to reestablish Shah Shuja ul-Mulk on the throne, and as their puppet. more
More Info | Google Books | Check Availability
-
Relish: An Adventure in Food, Style, and Everyday Fun
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Daphne Oz
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: William Morrow (2013, Apr 16th).
Pages: 272
Relish by Daphne Oz – bestselling author of The Dorm Room Diet, cohost of the hit daytime talk show The Chew, and daughter of Dr. Mehmet Oz – offers simple, practical, and personal advice to help you live your better life right now.Daphne Oz made a splash by sharing her secrets for avoiding the dreaded Freshman Fifteen in the perennial bestseller The Dorm Room Diet. Now, this lifestyle guru shares essential advice on how to relish your food, your home, and your life in order to maximize health and happiness.Illustrated in full color with beautiful food and recipe photos, images of real-world and aspirational decor examples, and lots of creative lifestyle ideas, Relish: An Adventure in Food, Style, and Everyday Fun will help you envision a life that’s highly desirable and eminently achievable. more
More Info | Google Books | Check Availability
-
Impossible Odds: The Kidnapping of Jessica Buchanan and Her Dramatic Rescue by SEAL Team Six
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Anthony Flacco
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Atria Books (2013, May 14th).
Pages: 320
In 2006, twenty-seven-year-old Jessica Buchanan stepped off a plane in Nairobi, Kenya, with a teaching degree and long-held dreams of helping to educate African children. By 2009, she had met and married a native Swede named Erik Landemalm, who worked to coordinate humanitarian aid with authorities in Africa. Together the two moved from Nairobi to Somalia, and with hopes of starting a family, their future couldn’t have been brighter. . . . But on October 25, 2011, Jessica and a colleague were kidnapped at gunpoint and held for ransom by a band of Somali pirates. For the next three months, Jessica was terrorized by more than two dozen gangsters, held outdoors in filthy conditions, and kept on a starvation diet while her health steadily deteriorated. more
More Info | Google Books | Check Availability
-
Zero Hour (The Numa Files)
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Graham Brown
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Putnam Adult (2013, May 28th).
Pages: 416
The dazzling new novel in the #1 New York Times–bestselling series from the grand master of adventure. It is called zero point energy, and it really exists—a state of energy contained in all matter everywhere, and thus all but unlimited. Nobody has ever found a way to tap into it, however—until one scientist discovers a way. Or at least he thinks he has. The problem is, his machines also cause great earthquakes, even fissures in tectonic plates. One machine is buried deep underground; the other is submerged in a vast ocean trench. If Kurt Austin and Joe Zavala and the rest of the NUMA team aren’t able to find and destroy them, and soon, the world will be on the threshold of a new era of earth tremors and unchecked volcanism. more
More Info | Google Books | Check Availability
-
The Flower Recipe Book
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Alethea Harampolis
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Artisan (2013, Apr 2nd).
Pages: 272
Flower arranging has never been simpler or more enticing. The women behind Studio Choo, the hottest floral design studio in the country, have created a flower-arranging bible for today's aesthetic. Filled with an array of stunning, easy-to-find flowers, it features 400 high-resolution photos,more than 40 step-by-step slideshows,and tappable pop-tips throughout. The arrangements run the gamut of styles and techniques: some are wild and some are structured; some are time-intensive and some are astonishingly simple. Each one is paired with a "flower recipe"; ingredients lists specify the type and quantity of blooms needed; clear instructions detail each step; and hundreds of photos show how to place every stem. Readers will learn how to work with a single variety of flower to great effect, and to create vases overflowing with layered blooms. more
More Info | Google Books | Check Availability
-
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Michelle Alexander
Format: Paperback
Publisher: New Press, The; Reprint edition (2012, Jan 16th).
Pages: 336
Once in a great while a book comes along that changes the way we see the world and helps to fuel a nationwide social movement. The New Jim Crow is such a book. Praised by Harvard Law professor Lani Guinier as "brave and bold," this book directly challenges the notion that the election of Barack Obama signals a new era of colorblindness. With dazzling candor, legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." By targeting black men through the War on Drugs and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control—relegating millions to a permanent second-class status—even as it formally adheres to the principle of colorblindness. more
More Info | Google Books | Check Availability
-
Smoke and Pickles: Recipes and Stories from a New Southern Kitchen
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Edward Lee
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Artisan (2013, May 1st).
Pages: 304
Chef Edward Lee's story and his food could only happen in America. Raised in Brooklyn by a family of Korean immigrants, he eventually settled down in his adopted hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, where he owns the acclaimed restaurant 610 Magnolia. A multiple James Beard Award nominee for his unique patchwork cuisine, Edward creates recipes--filled with pickling, fermenting, frying, curing, and smoking--that reflect the overlapping flavors and techniques that led this Korean-American boy to feel right at home in the South. Dishes like Chicken-Fried Pork Steak with Ramen Crust and Buttermilk Pepper Gravy; Collards and Kimchi; Braised Beef Kalbi with Soft Grits and Scallions; and Miso-Smothered Chicken all share a place on his table. Born with the storytelling gene of a true Southerner, Lee fills his debut cookbook with tales of the restaurant world, New York City, Kentucky, and his time competing on Top Chef, plus more than 130 exceptional recipes for food with Korean roots and Southern soul. more
More Info | Google Books | Check Availability
-
Gettysburg: The Last Invasion
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Allen C. Guelzo
Format: Deckle Edge]
Publisher: Knopf (2013, May 14th).
Pages:
From the acclaimed Civil War historian, a brilliant new history—the most intimate and richly readable account we have had—of the climactic three-day battle of Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863), which draws the reader into the heat, smoke, and grime of Gettysburg alongside the ordinary soldier, and depicts the combination of personalities and circumstances that produced the greatest battle of the Civil War, and one of the greatest in human history. Of the half-dozen full-length histories of the battle of Gettysburg written over the last century, none dives down so closely to the experience of the individual soldier, or looks so closely at the sway of politics over military decisions, or places the battle so firmly in the context of nineteenth-century military practice. more
More Info | Google Books | Check Availability