12/13: New at the library this week

Audiobooks:

A prairie home companion 20th anniversary collection / Garrison Keillor
To mark the anniversary, here are 15 of Garrison Keillor’s finest, funniest “News from Lake Wobegon” monologues (11 of them previously unreleased) — “O Captain, My Captain,” “The Pastors on the Pontoon Boat,” “Buddy Holly and the Pharaohs of Rhythm,” “Thanksgiving,” “Commencement Day,” “The Protestant Dog,” “The Lake Superior Canyon project,” and more — along with songs and comedy. (cassette)

Gospel birds and other stories of Lake Wobegon / Garrison Keillor
Originally released in 1985, Gospel Birds is a collection of nine classic and very funny monologues from the early years of A Prairie Home Companion. (cassette)

News from Lake Wobegon / Garrison Keillor
This is the original collection of Garrison Keillor monologues. Funny and touching, these 20 stories from original live broadcasts of A Prairie Home Companion follow the seasons in Lake Wobegon. (cassette)

More news from Lake Wobegon / Garrison Keillor
this collection of Garrison Keillor monologues includes 16 stories, grouped by theme: Love, Faith, Hope, and Humor. All are from original live broadcasts of A Prairie Home Companion. (cassette)

Lake Wobegon USA / Garrison Keillor
A portrait of small-town life emerges in a novel of humor, sadness and tenderness, songs and poems. (cassette)

Movies:

The assassination of Jesse James (dvd)
Rendition (dvd)
The great debaters (dvd)
Darfur : A 21st century genocide (dvd)
Good boy! (dvd)
Shotgun Slade : Mercenary of the Old West (8 episodes) (dvd)
The cutting edge (dvd)
Outlaws and Angels / Willie Nelson & Friends (dvd)
Patch Adams (videotape)

Books:

Cruel intent / Judith A. Jance
On a dating site, singleatheart.com, bored housewives can find romance with married men looking for sex without strings. But these “married singles” are flirting with more than just their vows. At the heart of this seemingly innocent service, a vengeful computer hacker is playing games with people’s lives…and deaths. (Ali Reynolds Series, #4)

The private patient / P. D. James
Cheverell Manor is a lovely old house in deepest Dorset, now a private clinic belonging to the famous plastic surgeon George Chandler-Powell. When investigative journalist Rhoda Gradwyn arrived there one late autumn afternoon, scheduled to have a disfiguring and long-standing facial scar removed, she had every expectation of a successful operation and a pleasant week recuperating. Two days later she was dead, the victim of murder. (Adam Dalgliesh Series, #14)

Hot, flat, and crowded : why we need a green revolution– and how it can renew America / Thomas L. Friedman
A rousing manifesto for our climate-challenged future (read an exerpt)

Hot mahogany / Stuart Woods
One night at Elaine’s, Stone Barrington—back in Manhattan after chasing down the bad guys in the Caribbean—meets Barton Cabot, older brother of his sometime ally, CIA boss Lance Cabot. Barton’s career in army intelligence is even more top secret than his brother’s, but he’s suffering from amnesia following a random act of violence. Amnesia is a dangerous thing in a man whose memory is chockfull of state secrets, so Lance hires Stone to watch Barton’s back. As Stone discovers, Barton is a spy with a rather unusual hobby: building and restoring antique furniture. The genteel world of antiques and coin dealers at first seems a far cry from Stone’s usual underworld of mobsters, murderers, and spies. But Barton also is a man with a past, and one event in particular— in the jungles of Vietnam more than thirty years earlier— is coming back to haunt his present in ways he’d never expected. Stone soon finds out that Barton, and some shady characters of his acquaintance, may be hiding a lot more than just a few forged antiques. (Stone Barrington Series, #15)

Supreme courtship / Christopher Buckley
President of the United States Donald Vanderdamp is having a hell of a time getting his nominees appointed to the Supreme Court. After one nominee is rejected for insufficiently appreciating To Kill A Mockingbird, the president chooses someone so beloved by voters that the Senate won’t have the guts to reject her — Judge Pepper Cartwright, the star of the nation’s most popular reality show, Courtroom Six.

Will Pepper, a straight-talking Texan, survive a confirmation battle in the Senate? Will becoming one of the most powerful women in the world ruin her love life? And even if she can make it to the Supreme Court, how will she get along with her eight highly skeptical colleagues, including a floundering Chief Justice who, after legalizing gay marriage, learns that his wife has left him for another woman?

Penguins and Antarctica : a nonfiction companion to Eve of the Emperor penguins / Mary Pope Osborne
How do penguins survive in frigid conditions? What happens at a research station in Antarctica? How long can an emperor penguin go without food? What other creatures live in the Antarctic? Find out the answers to these questions and more. (Magic Tree House Research Guide Series #18; Age Range: 6 to 9)

Eve of the Emperor penguins / Mary Pope Osborne
Jack and Annie continue their quest for the secrets of happiness—secrets they need to save Merlin. This time, the Magic Tree House takes them to the one continent they haven’t visited before: Antarctica! What can they hope to learn about happiness in such a barren place? Only the penguins know for sure . . . Jack and Annie are about to find out! (Magic Tree House Series #40; Age Range: 6 to 9)

Testimony / Anita Shreve
At a New England boarding school, a sex scandal is about to break. Even more shocking than the sexual acts themselves is the fact that they were caught on videotape. A Pandora’s box of revelations, the tape triggers a chorus of voices–those of the men, women, teenagers, and parents involved in the scandal–that details the ways in which lives can be derailed or destroyed in one foolish moment.

Annual Recipes 2008 / Better Homes and Gardens

Being caribou : five months on foot with a caribou herd / Karsten Heuer
For eons, female members of the Porcupine caribou herd have made the 2,800-mile journey from their winter feeding grounds to their summer calving grounds. They once roamed borderless wilderness; now they trek from Canada, where they’re protected, to the United States, where they are not. What’s more, beneath the calving grounds lay vast reserves of oil. Determined to convey both the enormity of the caribous’ migration and the delicacy of their habitat, Karsten Heuer and his wife spent their honeymoon following the herd. For five months, they traveled an uncharted course on foot over mountains, through snow, and across frozen rivers, with only three semi-scheduled food drops for support. As with the caribou, Heuer and his wife faced dwindling fat reserves and stalking by ravenous grizzlies and wolves just awakened from hibernation.

Lost illusions / Honoré de Balzac
Among the best known of Balzac’s novels, Lost Illusions chronicles the rise and fall of Lucien Chardon, a vain but naive young poet who leaves his provincial home to seek success and fortune in Parisian society. Paralleling Lucien’s disastrously ambitious journey is the story of his friend and brother-in-law, hard-working inventor David Séchard, whois beset by unscrupulous competitors and cheated in his printing business by his own father.

[Note: All synopses are provided by the publisher unless otherwise noted and do not constitute reviews by the Seldovia Public Library.]