Tempting Titles - Nonfiction 000s - 100s

Here, in usual Dewey Decimal system order from your librarian book selectors, are some Tempting Titles of recent nonfiction books the library has either ordered or received in the past few months. Click on any title or image link to go to the online catalog and place a request for the book to be held for you when it becomes available.

000s – Computer Software, Generalities, Journalism

Charts and Graphs for Microsoft Excel 2007 by Bill Jelen

While Excel does charts and graphs quite well, deciding when and how to create the best chart for your purposes needs a little more attention. Enter this book, which goes through the new Excel 2007 charting interface, discusses creating different types of charts, and covers the new SmartArt business graphics. Case study sidebars highlight techniques discussed, while "Designing Charts Like the Pros" sidebars show how to use Excel to duplicate the fancier features of charts created in other applications. (Library Journal)

The Official Ubuntu Book by Benjamin Mako Hill and Jono Bacon

Ubuntu focuses on the desktop, aiming to be a user-friendly version of Linux. Its growing popularity is reflected in the increasing number of available guides. A good place to start learning about Ubuntu, this second edition of the official guide also features chapters on spin-offs such as Kubuntu, Edubuntu, and other distributions. It clearly walks beginners from installation through troubleshooting, including a useful chapter on the Ubuntu community and how readers can join in. (Library Journal)

The It Girl’s Guide to Blogging with Moxie by Joelle Reeder and Katherine Scoleri

Want to break into blogging but don’t know where to start? Dynamic duo Joelle Reeder and Katherine Scoleri of “The Moxie Girls™” show you how to start your first blog, polish your prose, get involved in blogging communities, make sense of RSS feeds, podcasts, photos and more — all with fun, humor and attitude! (Book Jacket)

How to do Everything with Google Tools by Donna L. Baker

Google is so much more than a search engine, offering other features such as shopping, mapping, blogging, advertising, and much more. You'll also learn to use the email, communication, document, and spreadsheet tools that make up Google Apps. This book shows you how to maximize the Google tools. (Book Jacket)

30: the collapse of the great American newspaper by Charles M. Madigan

If you have ever loved a newspaper, this book will provide a gut-churning mix of joy and nostalgia, amazement and disgust, and no small sense of fatalism. Award-winning Chicago Tribune editor and reporter Madigan collects a powerful array of commentary from journalists and observers, who enumerate the varied forces driving the decline of newspaper readership: the Internet, the consolidation of department stores (and their advertising), metro sprawl, decades of job cutting and the demise of family ownership; the idea that chain papers have “slowly carved out the soul of local papers” is repeated throughout. (Publishers Weekly)

Gonzo: the life of Hunter S. Thompson by Jann Wenner and Corey Seymour; introduction by Johnny Depp.

Uproarious and unpredictable, this oral biography is a fitting look at the turbulent life of Gonzo journalism pioneer Hunter S. Thompson, a life surrounded by many but understood by few. This fine, fond biography amuses, inspires, outrages and haunts at all the right moments—and sometimes all at once. (Publishers Weekly)

100s Philosophy, Occult, Psychology

The Power of Body Language: how to succeed in every business and social encounter by Reiman, Tonya

An expert in the field of nonverbal communication explains how to interpret others' gestures and expressions and understand the nonverbal messages that they are sending to others, with explanations of specific gestures, facial cues, body positions, and body movements. (Book Jacket)

House Lust: America's obsession with our homes by Mcginn, Daniel
Despite the current downturn in the housing market, the country's mania for homes that exploded during the last half-decade is still alive and well, according to Newsweek writer McGinn. The fascination with homes—talking about, valuing, scheming over, envying, shopping for, refinancing, or just plain ogling homes—has continued even after the market has cooled, McGinn argues, and can be seen in the ongoing popularity of HGTV, the 24-7 real estate and home improvement cable channel and its flagship show, House Hunters. To prove his thesis, McGinn entertainingly explores the gamut of housing obsessions, from buying personally designed and oversized trophy homes, attempting large-scale renovations and spending obscene amounts of time on real estate Web sites such as Zillow and PropertyShark to actually going out and getting a real estate license, which McGinn himself does after only minimal training. (Publishers Weekly)

Why Mars & Venus Collide: improving relationships by understanding how men and women cope differently with stress by Gray, John

When a man, after a stressful day, wants to veg out in front of the TV, he is not rejecting his wife. Rather, he is replenishing his depleted testosterone. And when a woman wants to talk about her day, she is not being a nag. It's just her way of replenishing her cuddle hormone, oxytocin. According to Gray, the fact that women have more body fat means they burn more energy than men, which makes their minds create endless to-do lists. Gray does not consider cultural differences figuring in the stress mix. If anything, Gray seems to come down hard—or focus more—on women, perhaps because women are his most likely audience. Thus, he discusses Why Women Never Forget a Quarrel; and Making a Man Happier Is Easier than You Think (in which he uses a devoted dog as an example). It's simplistic but easy to digest and no doubt headed for the bestseller lists. (Publishers Weekly)

"What's this about 'devoted dogs'?" asks Taz, the Blog Dog, naturally. "How about the devotion of a blog poster who hasn't put me up in months?"

"Taz. you're never very far from our hearts. You're always in the catalog link."

Medical Apartheid: the dark history of medical experimentation on black Americans from colonial times to the present by Harriet Washington

Medical ethicist and journalist Washington details the abusive medical practices to which African-Americans have been subjected. She begins her shocking history in the colonial period, when owners would hire out or sell slaves to physicians for use as guinea pigs in medical experiments. Into the 19th century, black cadavers were routinely exploited for profit by whites who shipped them to medical schools for dissection and to museums and traveling shows for casual public display. The most notorious case here may be the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which about 600 syphilitic men were left untreated by the U.S. Public Health Service so it could study the progression of the disease, but Washington asserts that it was the forerunner to a host of similar medical abuses. Among her numerous examples is the radical brain surgery performed by a University of Mississippi neurosurgeon on African-American boys as young as six who were deemed aggressive or hyperactive, a procedure he recommended for urban rioters after Watts. ... African-Americans' reproductive rights have been trampled on; soldiers, prisoners and children have been coerced into becoming subjects of experiments without therapeutic value to themselves; the federal government and private companies have utilized unwitting blacks in large-scale experiments with radiation and biological weapons, she asserts. While the worst abuses have been eliminated, Washington concludes, African-American skepticism about the medical establishment and reluctance to participate in medical research is an unfortunate result. .. Sweeping and powerful. (Kirkus Reviews)

This Week in Reading July 22 - 28

There are a few big name authors this week, two of them with the same very big name for adventure lovers, in fact. But the biggest Los Angeles name of all was born this week, Raymond Chandler, the creator of hardboiled detective Phillip Marlowe. Marlowe first appeared in stories, then novels by Chandler, and was played on screen in several famous movies, some of them scripted by Chandler.

From Contemporary Authors Online, available to Glendale Library cardholders through our Online Resources database called Biography Resource Center: Like Gardner and Hammett before him, Chandler drew on the irony of California's status as the Golden State and used the setting to suggest the beguiling and corruptive power of money in American life. Ultimately, Chandler presented a more provocative Los Angeles than had any of his predecessors. Nation contributor Thomas S. Reck called Chandler "the Los Angeles laureate," adding that "no city lends itself more to metaphor than Los Angeles, and no writer has risen to the implicit challenge better."

This Week's Question: What is the name of the of the substance or process that provides happiness in Aldous Huxley's 1932 classic Brave New World. To whom does it really provide happiness and how close are we to it today?

Answer to Last Week's Question: Hunter S. Thompson used factual interviews and personal experiences in a fictional setting thus driving his version of the truth wildly but insistently in a stronger fashion which was dubbed "gonzo journalism" by others. He later titled some of his own works The Gonzo Papers.