Check It Out!

During March we added more than 550 new items to our collection.  Here is just a sample:

Fiction
William Bernhardt, Nemesis:  The Final Case of Eliot Ness
Andrea Camilleri, August Heat
Ray Bradbury, We’ll Always Have Paris:  Stories
Mary Gaitskill, Don’t Cry:  Stories
Barbara Hall, The Music Teacher
Todd Johnson, The Sweet By and By
Jim Lehrer, Oh, Johnny
Walter Mosley, The Long Fall
James Patterson, Max
Malcolm Shuman, The Levee
Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone
A. N. Wilson, Winnie and Wolf:  A Novel

Non-Fiction
Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance
Tom Aitken, One Hundred & One Beautiful Towns in Great Britain
Mark Caro, The Foie Gras Wars
Simon Daley with Roshan Hirani, Cooking With My Indian Mother-in-Law
Nicky Epstein, Knitting on Top of the World
David Grann, The Lost City of Z
Joseph T. Hallinan, Why We Make Mistakes
Stephen Hinshaw, The Triple Bind
Nancy Harmon Jenkins, The New Mediterranean Diet Cookbook
Gerard Koeppel, Bond of Union:  Building the Erie Canal and the American Empire
Paul Krugman, The Return of Depression Economics
David McGonigal, Antarctica
Dev Patnaik, Wired To Care
David E. Sanger, The Inheritance:  The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power
Kimberly K. Smith, Powering Our Future

Biography
Blake Bailey, Cheever:  A Life
Allen Barra, Yogi Berra:  Eternal Yankee
Peter S. Canellos, ed., The Last Lion:  The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy
Cari Beauchamp, Joseph P. Kennedy Presents:  His Hollywood Years
Robert Crawford, The Bard: Robert Burns

Poetry
Pablo Neruda, World’s End
Cole Swensen and David St. John, American Hybrid:  Norton Anthology of New Poetry

Books on CD
John Grisham, The Associate
Conn Iggulden, Genghis:  Bones of the Hills
Robert Parker, Night and Day
Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care

Teen
Melissa de la Cruz, Blue Bloods
Margarita Engle, The Surrender Tree
Alison Goodman, Eon:  Dragonfly Reborn
Sherri Smith, Flygirl

DVDs
Cadillac Records
Elegy
Milk
Rachel Getting Married
Synecdoche, New York
 

It's Opening Day, baseball fans!  It's looking like it might be a washout for a lot of games, though, thanks to the soggy weather (the Red Sox, for one, have already postponed tonight's game to tomorrow afternoon).  While you're waiting for your favorite teams to play, why not check out some new books about the great American pasttime?

There have been a number of new baseball biographies released lately.   Perhaps the one with the biggest buzz was Joe Torre's The Yankee Years, in which the former manager reflects on what it took for the Yankees of the 1990s to regain the glory of years past.   And speaking of the Yankees' glory years, check out Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee by Allen Barra and Yankee for Life: My 40-Year Journey in Pinstripes by Bobby Murcer.  Of course, we can't leave out Connecticut's other favorite team - so why not try Deep Drive: A Long Journey to Finding the Champion Within by Mike Lowell of the Red Sox.

New stadiums are on everyone's mind, what with the Yankees moving into their new park this year, not to mention the perennial debate about whether the Sox should build a larger stadium.  Revisit some great moments from the Bronx in Memories of Yankee Stadium by Scott Pitoniak, or read about the Green Monster in Faithful to Fenway: believing in Boston, baseball, and America's most beloved ballpark by Michael Ian Borer.

And for a different take on the game, view the plays from behind the mask in As They See 'Em: a fan's travels in the land of umpires by Bruce Weber.  The players and the managers get all the attention, and for good reason, but where would the game be without the umpires?

This is just a small sampling of what we have available -- check out our baseball books in the stacks, under call number 796.357.

I love April Fools' Day.  I'm not one to play jokes myself (mainly because I can't keep a straight face!) but there's something about a well-played prank that just appeals to me.  Some of my favorite April Fools' stories:

* Possibly the best-known April Fools' joke of all was a 1957 BBC report about the spaghetti harvest in southern Switzerland. (You can view the original clip at the BBC website.)  At the time, pasta was far from being an everyday food in Britain, and this unfamiliarity with spaghetti, coupled with the report being shown on a serious news program, led to the BBC receiving hundreds of calls from confused viewers.  (The BBC loves April Fools' Day.)

* In 1996, Taco Bell announced that it was buying the Liberty Bell and renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell.

* Google has a tradition of announcing a new product or service each April 1.  However, some of these annoucements -- like Gmail -- have been real.  (Also real?  The news on April 1, 2007 that a ball python was loose in Google's New York offices.)

* National Public Radio always has a joke news story on April 1.  My personal favorite was from 2005, when Robert Siegel of All Things Considered interviewed  Vermont maple syrup makers about the dangers of untapped maple trees.