Book Talk

The sun will shine again!

Money is certainly on everyone’s minds these days, including the publishing industry, and several new books on the subject have arrived, including an updated edition of The Return of Depression Economics by Nobel Prize winner, Paul Krugman. Originally published in 1999, he warned that deregulation of an increasingly out-of-control financial industry was setting the United States up for the biggest economic crisis since the 1930s. He also quotes fellow Nobel Prize winner Robert Lucas, who in 2003 claimed, ”the central problem of depression-prevention has been solved.”

So what should we individuals be doing? Jonathan Pond contributes Safe Money in Tough Times: Everything you need to know to Survive the Financial Crisis. He deals with most areas of financial concern, including managing debt, cutting expenses, protecting your retirement savings and dealing with unemployment.

The Cure for Money Madness: Break your bad Money Habits, Live without Financial Stress – and Make more Money! by Spencer Sherman is for those whose personal finances had already gotten a little out of control. Sherman feels that many of us deal irrationally with money, and if we can confront these behaviors we will be richer in the long run.

But, spring will come, gardening season will start, and we can enjoy nature for free.  I read recently that vegetable seed sales were up; a positive act to lessen food costs, improve our diets - and get some healthy exercise…. Rodale Organic Gardening Books has released Gardener to Gardener Seed-Starting Primer and Almanac. For you purists who start from seed instead of plants, the authors give you a month by month to-do list.

And fortunately, flowers gardens benefit greatly from money free sweat-equity. Beautiful by Design: Stunning Blueprints for Harmonious Gardens will help you decide where to relocate the plants you have or glean from friends and neighbors. Tara Dillard also gives hints for the types of plants that suit the style of your house.

But it is still winter in Rochester so to stay in the mood our first fiction title will be Blood and Ice by Robert Masello. Hoping to recover from a personal tragedy, journalist Michael Wilde takes an assignment in the South Pole. On a routine dive he finds a young man and woman, chained together, frozen in a block of ice.

If you haven’t met Kate Shugak yet, you’re in for a treat. She is the heroine of a series by Dana Stabenow, and an Aleut private detective in Alaska. In Whisper to the Blood, conflict between locals and a gold mining company seem to be the cause of two murders. Kate, as both private detective and chairman of the Niniltna Native Association assists in the investigation.

People thought it was a joke when the message was first received. “We are an alien race you may call the Atoners. Ten thousand years ago we wronged humanity.” It is up to humans to discover what the wrong is and they must do it by traveling to distant planets colonized by humans. Read Steal Across the Sky by Rochester author, Nancy Kress.

Frank Lloyd Wright is a fascinating character, and now he is brought back to life by another fascinating character, author T.C. Boyle. The Women: a Novel, goes beyond Nancy Horan’s Loving Frank which focuses on Mamah Cheney to include the whole of Wright’s life and the women who accompanied him.
    
And my award for the best title of the month goes to Tom Davis for Thirty-nine Years of Short-Term Memory Loss: the Early Days of SNL from Someone who was There.

Virginia Cooper
Adult Services Librarian