Friday, October 12th, 2012

Fiction Friday: A City of Broken Glass

Journalist Hannah Vogel is in Poland covering the 1938 St. Martin festival when it comes to her attention that thousands of Polish Jews are being deported from Germany. Her reporter instincts kick in and while investigating the death of a deportee she finds herself abducted by SS agents and taken across the border to Berlin. [...]

Tuesday, September 25th, 2012

Featured Fiction: Keeping the Castle

Ready for some fun, light reading? Fans of Jane Austen or Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle may have a new favorite in Patrice Kindl’s Keeping the Castle. Like Elizabeth Bennett and Cassandra Mortmain before her, Althea Crowley is a young, attractive gentlewoman in reduced circumstances looking to marry well in order to secure her [...]

Saturday, September 8th, 2012

(Non-fiction) Friday: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind

“Before I discovered the miracles of science, magic ruled the world.” Imagine living in a place where you are utterly dependent on rain to grow food or having a 7-kilometer walk to buy kerosene just to light your house after dark. That is the world of William Kamkwamba as well as most of the African [...]

Tuesday, June 19th, 2012

Beach Reads 2012

Looking for something to read by the pool or on the sand? The John Tyler libraries have got you covered. Kick back with these recent releases: 11th Hour: The Women’s Murder club back for the –you guessed it – 11th installment. Art of Fielding: Not just a baseball novel but also a coming-of-age story about [...]

Friday, June 15th, 2012

(Non) Fiction Friday: The Story of English in 100 Words

Ever wonder why lawyers use two words such as “have and hold” or “cease and desist” when one word would do? Or why there is a “b” in debt and a “p” in receipt? Those and other strange quirks of English are explained in The Story of English in 100 Words. From roe (a deer) [...]

Thursday, April 26th, 2012

Fiction Friday: The Orphan Master’s Son

Hopefully, Pak Jun Do (phonetically, John Doe) is not the North Korean everyman. From his start in a North Korean orphanage selecting which orphans get food to his stint in the tunnels beneath the DMZ fighting in the dark to kidnapping Japanese citizens to mining uranium in Prison 33 Jun Do manages to survive the [...]

Saturday, February 11th, 2012

Fiction Fridays: The Time In Between

The Time In Between Abandoned and pregnant in a foreign country by her swindler lover, seamstress Sira Quiroga reinvents herself as an haute couturier in 1930s Morocco. Her clients are the wives and girlfriends of the political elite—a situation not lost on the British military secret service. Recruited by MI6, Sira undertakes the dangerous work [...]

Friday, December 2nd, 2011

Damned by Chuck Palahniuk

Poor Madison Spencer! Daughter of Hollywood legends she is now dead at 13 from marijuana overdose. Always good and upright…how could Maddy be stuck in hell with the underworld version of The Breakfast Club? Traversing a Hell containing mountains of toenail clippings, rivers of hot vomit and valleys of used disposable diapers Madison goes straight [...]

Monday, August 22nd, 2011

Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen

Think history is boring?  Think again.  In Lies My Teacher Told Me, the author explores American history textbooks for the omissions, myths, and inaccuracies taught to school children every year…including YOU!  Columbus discovered the new world right?  Wrong!  Many expeditions had landed in the Americas before his 1492 “discovery.” Three times as many tons of [...]

Monday, August 8th, 2011

Flipbacks: the book that reads like a eReader

Flipbacks are: Full length novel…the size of an iPhone. All the fun and feel of print in a tiny package. Called “The Next Little Thing” Could Flipbacks be the Kindle killer? Details All You Want to Know About Flipbacks Could this book kill the Kindle? Guardian UK Flipbacks What do you think?