What's New for February 2012

FICTION

The Art of Fielding - Chad Harbach

A baseball star at a small college near Lake Michigan launches a routine throw that goes disastrously off course and inadvertently changes the lives of five people, including the college president, a gay teammate, and the president's daughter.

The 13th Apostle - Raina C. Smith

When a wager is placed between a beguiling visitor from the underworld and an angel from one of the highest orders of heaven, it becomes a race to covet the soul of mankind. Realizing his own destiny, one mere mortal here on earth discovers the burden of saving man has fallen to him. A test he learns he's been preparing for his entire life. With the guiding principles of love, honor, courage and faith illuminating his path, Father Joseph leaves the Vatican and embarks on a quest to prove that man still possesses purity of heart as the end of days nears. With time running out the Archfiend sends one who will put the chosen one to tests a hero would beg to be spared.

The Chalk Girl by Carol O'Connell

The little girl appeared in Central Park: red-haired, blue-eyed, smiling, perfect-except for the blood on her shoulder. It fell from the sky, she said, while she was looking for her uncle, who turned into a tree. Poor child, people thought. And then they found the body in the tree. For Mallory, newly returned to the Special Crimes Unit after three months' lost time, there is something about the girl that she understands. Mallory is damaged, they say, but she can tell a kindred spirit. And this one will lead her to a story of extraordinary crimes: murders stretching back fifteen years, blackmail and complicity and a particular cruelty that only someone with Mallory's history could fully recognize. In the next few weeks, she will deal with them all . . . in her own way.

Death Comes to Pemberley- P.D. James

The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides

It's the early 1980s--the country is in a deep recession, and life after college is harder than ever. In the cafés on College Hill, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels. As Madeleine tries to understand why "it became laughable to read writers like Cheever and Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about deflowering virgins in eighteenth-century France," real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes.

Locked On - Tom Clancy

Coming out of retirement to run for president, Jack Ryan finds himself in the middle of a high-stakes attack from his opponent as his close comrade, John Clark, is the subject of treacherous charges, at the same time Jack Ryan, Jr. and other members of Campus struggle to stop terrorists.

Love in a Nutshell - Janet Evanovich and Dorien Kelly

No One Is Here Except All of Us - Ramona Ausubel

In 1939, the families in a remote Jewish village in Romania feel the war close in on them. Their tribe has moved and escaped for thousands of years- across oceans, deserts, and mountains-but now, it seems, there is nowhere else to go. Danger is imminent in every direction, yet the territory of imagination and belief is limitless. At the suggestion of an eleven-year-old girl and a mysterious stranger who has washed up on the riverbank, the villagers decide to reinvent the world: deny any relationship with the known and start over from scratch. Destiny is unwritten. Time and history are forgotten. Jobs, husbands, a child, are reassigned. But the real world continues to unfold alongside the imagined one, eventually overtaking it, and soon our narrator-the girl, grown into a young mother-must flee her village, move from one world to the next, to find her husband and save her children, and propel them toward a real and hopeful future.

Raylan - Elmore Leonard

NONFICTION

Arguably - Essays by Christopher Hitchens

Essayist Christopher Hitchens ruminates on why Charles Dickens was among the best of writers and the worst of men, the haunting science fiction of J.G. Ballard, the enduring legacies of Thomas Jefferson and George Orwell, the persistent agonies of anti-Semitism and jihad, the enduring relevance of Karl Marx, and how politics justifies itself by culture--and how the latter prompts the former.

Elizabeth The Queen - Sally Bedell Smith

A History of the World in 100 Objects - Neil MacGregor

From the renowned director of the British Museum, a kaleidoscopic history of humanity told through things we have made. When did people first start to wear jewelry or play music? When were cows domesticated and why do we feed their milk to our children? Where were the first cities and what made them succeed? Who invented math-or came up with money? The history of humanity is a history of invention and innovation, as we have continually created new items to use, to admire, or to leave our mark on the world.

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? And Other Concerns - Mindy Kaling

Kaling shares her observations, fears, and opinions about a wide-ranging list of the topics she thinks about the most. From her favorite types of guys to life in the "The Office" writers' room, her book is full of personal stories and laugh-out-loud philosophies.

Tiverton and Little Compton, Volume 2 - Nancy J. Devin, Richard V. Simpson

The Transition Companion: Making Your Community More Resilient in Uncertain Times - Rob Hopkins

Worth Fighting For: Love, Loss and Moving Forward- Lisa Niemi Swayze

MUSIC

50 Words for Snow - Kate Bush

Bad As Me - Tom Waits

El Camino - The Black Keys

Undun - The Roots

The Harrow and the Harvest - Gillian Welch

Let England Shake - PJ Harvey

 DVD

50/50

Inspired by personal experiences, an original story about friendship, love, survival, and finding humor in unlikely places. Two best friends' lives change when one of them is diagnosed with cancer.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Contagion

A thriller centered on the threat posed by a deadly disease and an international team of doctors contracted by the CDC to deal with the outbreak.

Drive

Driver is a Hollywood stunt driver by day, and moonlights as a top-notch getaway driver for hire in the criminal underworld. He finds himself a target for some of LA's most dangerous men after agreeing to aid the husband of his beautiful neighbor, Irene. When the job goes dangerously awry, the only way he can keep Irene and her son alive is to do what he does best, Drive!

The Ides of March

Midnight in Paris

Owen Wilson, Marion Cotillard, Rachel McAdams, Kathy Bates, and Carla Bruni star in Woody Allen's romantic comedy about a family on a business trip in the City of Light. As a young couple engaged to be married experiences a profound transformation during their visit to Paris, an idealistic man with a romanticized view of the city finds that there's plenty of truth to that old adage about the grass being greener on the other side.

Moneyball

The story of Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane's successful attempt to put together a baseball club on a budget by employing computer-generated analysis to draft his players.

Warrior

An ex-Marine haunted by a tragic past, Tommy Riordan returns to his hometown of Pittsburgh and enlists his father, to train him for an MMA tournament awarding the biggest purse in the history of the sport. As Tommy blazes a violent path towards the title prize, his brother, Brendan, returns to the amateur ring to provide for his family. The two brothers must finally confront the forces that tore them apart, all the while waging the most intense, winner-takes-all battle of their lives.

Fright Night

Senior Charley Brewster finally has it all. He's running with the cool kids and dating the hottest girl in high school. But all hell breaks loose when charming Jerry Dandrige moves in next door. Charlie thinks there's something odd about him, although no one, including his mom seems to notice. But after too many of his classmates vanish under bizarre circumstances, Charley comes to an unmistakable conclusion: Jerry is a vampire preying on his neighborhood!