Indiana has an abundance of great authors and this month we wanted to feature some of our favorites. There’s something for everyone, classics and newly published novels, fiction, non-fiction, and even a webcomic!
Fiction
Kitsune-Tsuki
Laura VanArendonk Baugh
FIC Bau
How does one find a shapeshifter who may not even exist?
The onmyouji Tsurugu no Kiyomori, a practitioner of the mystic arts, has been engaged to protect the warlord's new bride from the fox spirit rumored to be near. Tsurugu and the shadow-warrior Shishio Hitoshi face an impossible challenge in teasing out a kitsune shapeshifter from the samurai and servants –- if such a creature is even present at all.
The handsome mute twin servants belonging to Lady Kaede are certainly suspicious, but it is the beautiful and strong-willed lady herself who draws Shishio’s mistrust. Tsurugu and Shishio must move carefully, for accusing the warlord’s bride falsely would be death. But failing to identify the kitsune to the warlord is equally perilous, and there is more to discover. For an onmyouji knows secrets even the shadows do not….
Size Matters
Alison Bliss
FIC Bli
The rules of (fake) engagement . . .
Leah Martin has spent her life trying to avoid temptation. But she's sick of low-fat snacks, counting calories, and her hyper-critical mom. Fortunately, her popular new bakery keeps her good and distracted. But there aren't enough éclairs in the world to distract Leah from the hotness that is Sam Cooper - or the fact that he just told her mother that they're engaged . . . which is a big, fat lie.
Sam sometime speaks before he thinks. So what started out as defending Leah's date-ability to her judgmental mother soon turned into having a fiancee! Now the plan is to keep up the fake engagement, stay "just friends," and make Leah's family loathe him enough to just call the whole thing off . But Sam has an insatiable sweet tooth, not only for Leah's decadent desserts but her decadent curves. Her full lips. Her bright green eyes. Yep, things aren't going quite according to plan. Now Sam has to convince Leah that he's for real . . . before their little lie turns into one big, sweet disaster.
Pimp My Airship
Maurice Broaddus
FIC Bro
Warning: Don’t Believe the Hype!
All the poet called Sleepy wants to do is spit his verses, smoke chiba, and stay off the COP’s radar—all of which becomes impossible once he encounters a professional protestor known as (120 Degrees of) Knowledge Allah. They soon find themselves on the wrong side of local authorities and have to elude the powers that be.
When young heiress Sophine Jefferson’s father is murdered, the careful life she’d been constructing for herself tumbles around her. She’s quickly drawn into a web of intrigue, politics and airships, joining with Sleepy and Knowledge Allah in a fight for their freedom. Chased from one end of a retro-fitted Indianapolis to the other, they encounter outlaws, the occasional circus, possibly a medium, and more outlaws. They find themselves in a battle much larger than they imagined: a battle for control of the country and the soul of their people.
The revolution will not be televised!
Stormsinger
Stephanie Cain
FIC Cai
Captain Arama Dzornaea thought she was just supposed to transport Crown Prince Vistaren Doth'Mara to meet his contracted bride. As the king's top privateer, she thinks she can handle anything. What Arama doesn't anticipate is storms out of season, an unruly stormwitch, and a strange witchery echo that puts Arama, her ship the Dawn Star, and everyone aboard smack in the middle of a mystery.
Shades of Circle City
Stephanie Cain
FIC Cai
Chloe is Catholic, a cop, and conventional, not necessarily in that order. But when a run-of-the-mill burglary arrest goes bad, she ends up dead. Turns out there are worse things than having a bra that doesn’t fit right.
When she wakes up alive–yeah, she’s as surprised as you are–she keeps seeing people her friends can’t see. She can’t get those people to talk to her, though, and one of them looks hauntingly familiar, even though it’s no one Chloe actually knows.
A handsome Indiana State Trooper with secrets of his own tells her that her would-be killer is tied to an open robbery case. While they work together to bring a relentless killer to justice, Chloe has increasingly disturbing encounters with the shades only she can see.
She finally realizes her death (and subsequent resurrection) has given her a connection to the restless dead of Indianapolis, and with a recent homicide rate over a hundred a year, there are a lot of restless dead in Indianapolis. What’s a conventional, Catholic cop to do?
Catch the crook, get the guy, and say a few Hail Marys just to be safe.
Opioid Indiana
Brian Allen Carr
FIC Car
During a week-long suspension from school, a teenage transplant to impoverished rural Indiana searches for a job, the whereabouts of his vanished drug-addicted guardian, and meaning in the America of the Trump years.
Seventeen-year-old Riggle is living in rural Indiana with his uncle and uncle’s girlfriend after the death of both of his parents. Now his uncle has gone missing, probably on a drug binge. It’s Monday, and $800 in rent is due Friday. Riggle, who’s been suspended from school, has to either find his uncle or get the money together himself. His mission exposes him to a motley group of Opioid locals—encounters by turns perplexing, harrowing, and heartening. Meanwhile, Riggle marks each day by remembering the mythology his late mother invented for him about how the days got their names.
With amazing directness and insight, Carr explores what it’s like to be a high school kid in in the age of Trump, a time of economic inequality, addiction, confederate flags, and mass shootings. A work of empathy and insight that pierces to the heart of our moment through an unforgettable protagonist.
Whistling Past The Graveyard
Susan Crandall
FIC Cra
The summer of 1963 begins like any other for nine-year-old Starla Claudelle. Born to teenage parents in Mississippi, Starla is being raised by a strict paternal grandmother, Mamie, whose worst fear is that Starla will turn out like her mother. Starla hasn’t seen her momma since she was three, but is convinced that her mother will keep her promise to take Starla and her daddy to Nashville, where her mother hopes to become a famous singer—and that one day her family will be whole and perfect.
When Starla is grounded on the Fourth of July, she sneaks out to see the parade. After getting caught, Starla’s fear that Mamie will make good on her threats and send her to reform school cause her to panic and run away from home. Once out in the country, Starla is offered a ride by a black woman, Eula, who is traveling with a white baby. She happily accepts a ride, with the ultimate goal of reaching her mother in Nashville.
As the two unlikely companions make their long and sometimes dangerous journey, Starla’s eyes are opened to the harsh realities of 1963 southern segregation. Through talks with Eula, reconnecting with her parents, and encountering a series of surprising misadventures, Starla learns to let go of long-held dreams and realizes family is forged from those who will sacrifice all for you, no matter if bound by blood or by the heart.
The Flying Circus
Susan Crandall
FIC CRA (LP)
From the bestselling and award-winning author of Whistling Past the Graveyard comes an adventure tale about two daredevils and a farm boy who embark on the journey of a lifetime across America’s heartland in the Roaring Twenties.
Set in the rapidly changing world of 1920s America, this is a story of three people from very different backgrounds: Henry “Schuler” Jefferson, son of German immigrants from Midwestern farm country; Cora Rose Haviland, a young woman of privilege whose family has lost their fortune; and Charles “Gil” Gilchrist, an emotionally damaged WWI veteran pilot. Set adrift by life-altering circumstances, they find themselves bound together by need and torn apart by blind obsessions and conflicting goals. Each one holds a secret that, if exposed, would destroy their friendship. But their journey of adventure and self-discovery has a price—and one of them won’t be able to survive it.
As they crisscross the heartland, exploring the rapidly expanding role of aviation from barnstorming to bootlegging, from a flying circus to the dangerous sport of air racing, the three companions form a makeshift family. It’s a one-of-a-kind family, with members as adventurous as they are vulnerable, and as fascinating as they are flawed. But whatever adventure—worldly or private—they find themselves on, they’re guaranteed to be a family you won’t forget.
Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, and Twelve men
Theodore Dreiser
FIC Dre
Theodore Dreiser was arguably the most important figure in the development of fiction in the twentieth century. In this Library of America volume are presented the first two novels and a little-known collection of biographical sketches by the man about whom H. L. Mencken said, “American writing, before and after his time, differed almost as much as biology before and after Darwin.”
Dreiser grew up poor in a series of small Indiana towns, in a large German Catholic family dominated by his father’s religious fervor. At seventeen he moved to Chicago and eventually became a newspaper reporter there and in St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and New York. Reaction to his first book, Sister Carrie (1900), was not encouraging, and after suffering a nervous breakdown, he went on to a successful career editing magazines. In 1910 he resumed writing, and over the next fifteen years published fourteen volumes of fiction, drama, travel, autobiography, and essays.
“Dreiser’s first great novel, Sister Carrie …came to housebound and airless America like a great free Western wind, and to our stuffy domesticity gave us the first fresh air since Mark Twain and Whitman,” Sinclair Lewis declared in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1930. Carrie Meeber, an eighteen-year-old small-town girl drawn to bustling Chicago, becomes the passionless mistress of a good-humored traveling salesman and then of an infatuated saloon manager who leaves his family and elopes with her to New York. Dreiser’s brilliant, panoramic rendering of the two cities’ fashionable theaters and restaurants, luxurious hotels and houses of commerce, alongside their unemployment, labor violence, homelessness, degradation, and despair makes this the first urban novel on a grand scale.
In a 1911 review, H. L. Mencken wrote, “Jennie Gerhardt is the best American novel I have ever read, with the lonesome but Himalayan exception of Huckleberry Finn.” Beautiful, vital, generous, but morally naïve and unconscious of social conventions, Jennie is a working-class woman who emerges superior to the succession of men who exploit her. There are no villains in this novel; in Dreiser’s view, everyone is victimized by the desires that the world excites but can never satisfy.
Dreiser’s embracing compassion is felt in Twelve Men (1919), a collection of portraits of men he knew and admired. They range from “My Brother Paul” (Paul Dresser, vaudeville musical comedian and composer of “On the Banks of the Wabash” and “My Gal Sal”) to “Culhane, the Solid Man,” a sanatorium owner and former wrestler. Without sentiment but with honest emotion and respect for the bleak and unvarnished truth, Dreiser recalls these anomalous individuals and the twists of fate that shaped their lives.
An American Tragedy
Theodore Dreiser
FIC Dre
'An American Tragedy' is the story of Clyde Griffiths, who spends his life in the desperate pursuit of success. On a deeper, more profound level, it is the masterful portrayal of the society whose values both shape Clyde's ambitions and seal his fate; it is an unsurpassed depiction of the harsh realities of American life and of the dark side of the American dream. Extraordinary in scope and power, vivid in its sense of wholesale human waste, unceasing in its rich compassion, 'An American Tragedy' stands as Theodore Dreiser's supreme achievement.
Based on an actual criminal case, 'An American Tragedy' was the inspiration for the film 'A Place in the Sun', which won six Academy Awards and starred Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Cliff.
The Hoosier School-Master
Edward Eggleston
FIC Egg
This cherished classic of rural American life was a popular success when it first appeared in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. By the early twentieth century, it was nationally acclaimed by critics for its realistic portrayal of a vanishing phase of American life. Today it is considered a milestone in American literature, a monument to regional writing. Edward Eggleston's account of the adventures of a young schoolmaster in a nineteenth-century school system presents a vivid and readable chapter in the history of America and American education.
First and foremost, however, The Hoosier School-Master is a charming yet realistic novel in the manner of Tom Sawyer. Set in Flat Creek, Indiana, in the 1850s, the story relates the encounters of the new schoolteacher, Ralph Hartsook, with such lovable characters as Bud, Hannah, and Shocky. This marvelous tale contains all the elements of a good, old-fashioned melodrama--the bully, star-crossed lovers, the poorhouse, and the one-room schoolhouse. Written with Hoosier humor and candor, Eggleston's delightful portraits of heroes and villains are a bit sentimental, but they are also perceptive--full of life and truth.
Do Not Go On
Bryan Furuness
FIC Fur
The witness protection program is supposed to be a fresh start, but for the newly inducted Easterday family, it's more like a personal apocalypse. The mother refuses to leave their home in Baltimore, the father sinks into paranoia, and seventeen-year-old Ana gets stuck caring for him in the forsaken town of Morocco, Indiana, wondering if she's lost her future as well as her past. When a former hitman named Zeeshan offers them a way to come back home, Ana has to determine whether she would get her life back or lose it entirely. Over the course of a few months, she'll make her way through an underground world of reformed gangsters, hungry politicians, and teenagers smuggled in from the villages of Kashmir, all of them trying to find the line between secret and identity.
DO NOT GO ON is a story about secrets, second chances, and the ways that storytelling can save your skin and soul. In this book that is part crime confessional, part coming-of-age tale, the Witness Protection Program and college application process are two different ways of getting at the same question: Who are you, and who will you become?
The Poisonwood Bible
Barbara Kingsolver
FIC Kin
The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.
So Cold The River
Michael Koryta
FIC Kor
It started with a beautiful woman and a challenge. As a gift for her husband, Alyssa Bradford approaches Eric Shaw to make a documentary about her father-in-law, Campbell Bradford, a 95-year-old billionaire whose past is wrapped in mystery. Eric grabs the job even though there are few clues to the man's past -- just the name of his hometown and an antique water bottle he's kept his entire life.
In Bradford's hometown, Eric discovers an extraordinary history -- a glorious domed hotel where movie stars, presidents, athletes, and mobsters once mingled, and hot springs whose miraculous mineral water cured everything from insomnia to malaria. Neglected for years, the resort has been restored to its former grandeur just in time for Eric's stay.
Just hours after his arrival, Eric experiences a frighteningly vivid vision. As the days pass, the frequency and intensity of his hallucinations increase and draw Eric deeper into the town's dark history. He discovers that something besides the hotel has been restored -- a long-forgotten evil that will stop at nothing to regain its lost glory. Brilliantly imagined and terrifyingly real, So Cold the River is a tale of irresistible suspense with a racing, unstoppable current.
The House of a Thousand Candles
Meredith Nicholson
FIC Nic
1905. Nicholson lived and traveled extensively in Indiana and it was a rich resource for his writing. The House of a Thousand Candles provides readers with the view of an outsider coming to Indiana. The book begins: Pickering's letter bringing news of my grandfather's death found me at Naples early in October. John Marshall Glenarm had died in June. He had left a will which gave me his property conditionally, Pickering wrote, and it was necessary for me to return immediately to qualify as legatee. It was the merest luck that the letter came to my hands at all, for it had been sent to Constantinople, in care of the consul-general instead of my banker there.
What This River Keeps
Greg Schwipps
FIC Sch
In the rolling hills of southern Indiana, an elderly couple copes with the fear that their river bottom farm—the only home they've ever known—will be taken from them through an act of eminent domain. The river flowing through their land, where the old man has fished nearly every day of his life, may be dammed to form a reservoir. Their son, meanwhile, sinks deeper into troubles of his own, struggling to determine his place in a new romantic relationship and the duty he owes to his family’s legacy. What This River Keeps is a beautiful and heartfelt novel that reflects upon what it means to love a place and a family, and the sometimes staggering cost of that love.
A Girl of the Limberlost
Gene Stratton-Porter
FIC Str
Set amid Indiana's vast Limberlost Swamp, this treasured children's classic mixes astute observations on nature with the struggles of growing up in the early 20th century. Harassed by her mother and scorned by her peers, Elnora Comstock finds solace in natural beauty along with friendship, independence, and romance.
The Magnificent Ambersons
Booth Tarkington
FIC Tar
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize when it was first published in 1918, The Magnificent Ambersons chronicles the changing fortunes of three generations of an American dynasty. The protagonist of Booth Tarkington's great historical drama is George Amberson Minafer, the spoiled and arrogant grandson of the founder of the family's magnificence. Eclipsed by a new breed of developers, financiers, and manufacturers, this pampered scion begins his gradual descent from the midwestern aristocracy to the working class. Today The Magnificent Ambersons is best known through the 1942 Orson Welles movie, but as the critic Stanley Kauffmann noted, "It is high time that [the novel] appear again, to stand outside the force of Welles's genius, confident in its own right." "The Magnificent Ambersons is perhaps Tarkington's best novel," judged Van Wyck Brooks. "[It is] a typical story of an American family and town--the great family that locally ruled the roost and vanished virtually in a day as the town spread and darkened into a city. This novel no doubt was a permanent page in the social history of the United States, so admirably conceived and written was the tale of the Amber-sons, their house, their fate and the growth of the community in which they were submerged in the end."
Follow the River
James Alexander Thom
FIC Tho
Mary Ingles was twenty-three, married, and pregnant, when Shawnee Indians invaded her peaceful Virginia settlement, killed the men and women, then took her captive. For months, she lived with them, unbroken, until she escaped, and followed a thousand mile trail to freedom--an extraordinary story of a pioneer woman who risked her life to return to her people.
Alice of Old Vincennes
Maurice Thompson
Fic Tho
et against the backdrop of the American Revolution Alice of Old Vincennes is the story of the orphan girl Alice Roussillon. In 1778 the French outpost of Vincennes, Indiana revolts against the British and swears allegiance to the American cause. Hoisting her hand-made American flag over the fort Alice provides the rallying symbol of the cause of liberty. The handsome Virginian Lt. Fitzhugh Beverly proves to be both a noble companion in arms as well as of the heart. When the British retake Vincennes the rallying cry Viva la banniere d'Alice Roussillon is heard throughout the land. The true battle for liberty and love has begun.
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut
FIC Von
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time, Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world's great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous firebombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we fear most.
Ben-Hur A Tale of the Christ
Lew Wallace
FIC Wal
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880) by Lew Wallace is one of the most popular and beloved 19th century American novels. This faithful New Testament tale combines the events of the life of Jesus with grand historical spectacle in the exciting story of Judah of the House of Hur, a man who finds extraordinary redemption for himself and his family.A classic of faith, fortitude, and inspiration.
The Friendly Persuasion
Jessamyn West
FIC Wes
A quintessential American heroine, Eliza Birdwell is a wonderful blend of would-be austerity, practicality, and gentle humor when it comes to keeping her faith and caring for her family and community. Her husband, Jess, shares Eliza's love of people and peaceful ways but, unlike Eliza, also displays a fondness for a fast horse and a lively tune. With their children, they must negotiate their way through a world that constantly confronts them—sometimes with candor, sometimes with violence—and tests the strength of their beliefs. Whether it's a gift parcel arriving on their doorstep or Confederate soldiers approaching their land, the Birdwells embrace life with emotion, conviction, and a love for one another that seems to conquer all.
The Friendly Persuasion has charmed generations of readers as one of our classic tales of the American Midwest.
The Massacre at Fall Creek
Jessamyn West
FIC Wes
Five white men stand accused of the murder of innocent, peaceful Indians - among them women and children. It is 1824, and Indiana is the Western frontier of a new nation where Seneca warriors stand ready to fall on fledgling settlements should white men's justice fail. In a powerful American saga fashioned from the sparse historical record, Jessamyn West creates characters - an appealing heroine, her lover, the attorney for the defense, an extraordinary Indian seer - who stand at the center of a maelstrom of human emotions: hate, devotion, revenge, compassion, and, above all, love. As the narrative sweeps from the crimes to the tension-packed trial and its strangely moving aftermath, the novel carries the reader to an awareness of undeniably modern implications of our historical past.
The Life List of Adrian Mandrick
Chris White
FIC Whi
H Is for Hawk meets Grief Is the Thing with Feathers in this evocative debut novel about a pill-popping anesthesiologist and avid birder who embarks on a quest to find one of the world’s rarest species, allowing nothing to get in his way—until he’s forced to confront his obsessions and what they’ve cost him.
Anesthesiologist Adrian Mandrick is filled with contradictory impulses. He wants to be a good husband to his wife and a good father to his children; he wants to forgive his once-beloved mother for the crime she committed and the long lost father who accused her. But when he receives a call from his mother after years of silence, he takes solace in the very pain medication he prescribes, spiraling downward into addiction.
His sole source of true comfort is his “life list”—the all-encompassing record of the 863 bird species he’s spotted and identified. His is the third longest list in all of North America. But when Henry Lassiter, the legendary birder who held the region’s second longest list, dies suddenly, Adrian seizes the opportunity to make his way to the very top. A desperate search for the extremely rare Ivory-billed Woodpecker eventually leaves him stranded in the thick swamplands of Florida’s panhandle, where he is forced to confront his past and present failures, to reflect on what his obsessions and addictions have cost him, and to question what is truly important in his life.
Combining wry humor and mystery with environmental adventure, The Life List of Adrian Mandrick is a fast-paced, engaging story that heralds the arrival of a new literary talent.
The Fault in Our Stars
John Green
YA FIC Gre
Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel's story is about to be completely rewritten.
Insightful, bold, irreverent, and raw, The Fault in Our Stars is award-winning author John Green's most ambitious and heartbreaking work yet, brilliantly exploring the funny, thrilling, and tragic business of being alive and in love.
All The Things We Do in the Dark
Saundra Mitchell
YA FIC Mit
Something happened to Ava. The curving scar on her face is proof. Ava would rather keep that something hidden—buried deep in her heart and her soul.
But in the woods on the outskirts of town, the traces of someone else’s secrets lie frozen, awaiting Ava’s discovery—and what Ava finds threatens to topple the carefully constructed wall of normalcy that she’s spent years building around her.
Secrets leave scars. But when the secret in question is not your own—do you ignore the truth and walk away? Or do you uncover it from its shallow grave and let it reopen old wounds—wounds that have finally begun to heal?
Graphic Novel (Webcomic)
How To Be A Werewolf
Shawn Lenore
Since being bitten by a strange wolf as a child, Malaya Walters has attempted to live a quiet life…hopefully a life free of attempting to eat her family or the customers at her family’s coffee shop. Being the only werewolf she’s ever known, Malaya has managed her condition by keeping tight control on herself and the world around her, with lackluster results. That is, until a strange guy wanders into her shop one day and introduces her to a whole world she never knew existed…
How to be a Werewolf is a long form, ongoing story, started in February 2015. It's a story featuring complex characters who are all figuring themselves out (and sometimes each other out) and trying to learn to not be afraid of whatever comes next.
Non-Fiction
Somebody's Daughter
Ashley Ford
305.48 For New
One of the most prominent voices of her generation debuts with an extraordinarily powerful memoir: the story of a childhood defined by the ever looming absence of her incarcerated father and the path we must take to both honor and overcome our origins.
For as long as she could remember, Ashley has put her father on a pedestal. Despite having only vague memories of seeing him face-to-face, she believes he's the only person in the entire world who understands her. She thinks she understands him too. He's sensitive like her, an artist, and maybe even just as afraid of the dark. She's certain that one day they'll be reunited again, and she'll finally feel complete. There are just a few problems: he's in prison, and she doesn't know what he did to end up there.
Through poverty, puberty, and a fraught relationship with her mother, Ashley returns to her image of her father for hope and encouragement. She doesn't know how to deal with the incessant worries that keep her up at night, or how to handle the changes in her body that draw unwanted attention from men. In her search for unconditional love, Ashley begins dating a boy her mother hates; when the relationship turns sour, he assaults her. Still reeling from the rape, which she keeps secret from her family, Ashley finally finds out why her father is in prison. And that's where the story really begins.
Somebody’s Daughter steps into the world of growing up a poor Black girl, exploring how isolating and complex such a childhood can be. As Ashley battles her body and her environment, she provides a poignant coming-of-age recollection that speaks to finding the threads between who you are and what you were born into, and the complicated familial love that often binds them.
The History of the Indiana State Forest
Glory-June Greiff
333.78 His
The History of Indiana State Forests presents the story of the development and mission of state forests as a whole, followed by in-depth chapters on each forest property. Readers who visit state forests tend to discover them property by property, rather than considering them as an administrative whole. Thus the individual chapters allow the reader to visit vicariously forests that are old friends and to consider investigating forests they have not yet discovered. The multiple authors did massive research into the evolving Indiana conservation movement and forestry industry. Beginning in many cases with native Americans at time of first European contact, the history of the state forests is examined through forest inception, the Great Depression, World War II and the subsequent baby boom, the Cold War, deindustrialization, and up to the present. Authors examined context, people, and locations as the state forests were created and developed, subject to the demands of the public from the beginning through today. The History of Indiana State Forests explores the interaction with and the effect of human activity and state forest land. Its analysis draws upon interdisciplinary material from cultural geography, natural resources, and history.
Where Am I Wearing?
A Global Tour to the Countries, Factories, and People Who Make Our Clothes
Kelsey Timmerman
338.4768 Tim
Globalization makes it difficult to know where the things you buy come from. Journalist and travel writer Kelsey Timmerman wanted to know where his clothes came from and who made them, so he traveled from Honduras to Bangladesh to Cambodia to China and back. Along the way, he met the people who made his favorite clothes and learned as much about them as he did about globalization itself. Enlightening and controversial at once, this book puts a human face on globalization.
Pleased to Meet Me
Genes, Germs, and the Curious Forces That Make Us Who We Are
Bill Sullivan
572.865 Sul
Why are you attracted to a certain "type?" Why are you a morning person? Why do you vote the way you do? From a witty new voice in popular science comes a clever, life-changing look at what makes you you.
"I can't believe I just said that." "What possessed me to do that?" "What's wrong with me?" We're constantly seeking answers to these fundamental human questions, and now, science has the answers. The foods we enjoy, the people we love, the emotions we feel, and the beliefs we hold can all be traced back to our DNA, germs, and environment. This witty, colloquial book is popular science at its best, describing in everyday language how genetics, epigenetics, microbiology, and psychology work together to influence our personality and actions. Mixing cutting-edge research and relatable humor, Pleased to Meet Me is filled with fascinating insights that shine a light on who we really are--and how we might become our best selves.
Blue Blood
The History of the Indianapolis Colts
Nate Dunlevy
796.332 Dun
The Colts came to basketball country in 1984. For the past quarter century, the team has laid claim to the hearts of sports fans all over the Hoosier state. With controversial stars like Dickerson and George and Hall of Famers in waiting like Manning and Harrison, the Indianapolis Colts have built a fan base that bleeds blue. From Bob Irsay to Jim Irsay, from Jason Belser to Bob Sanders, from Bill Brooks to Reggie Wayne, this is the story of the love affair between Indianapolis Colts and their fans. Perfect for the die-hard tailgater and the casual fan alike, Blue Blood covers the history of the Colts from the Midnight Move to Super Bowl glory.
Sailing the Inland Sea
On Writing, Literature, and Land
Susan Neville
810.9 Nev
Calling on the image of the Midwest's vanished inland sea, Susan Neville has written a compelling collection of essays that ponder writing and the "landlocked imagination." The essays range from interviews with Indiana writers Kurt Vonnegut, Scott Sanders, Marguerite Young, and others, to discussions on techniques grounded in a Midwestern sensibility. As director of Butler University's Visiting Writers Series, Neville has had the rare opportunity to converse with such literary giants as Salman Rushdie, Ray Bradbury, and Toni Morrison, and some of those exchanges have been incorporated into this exciting new collection.
Twenty-Five Years in Jackville
A Romance in the days of "The Golden Circle" and Selected Poems
James Buchanan Elmore
811 Elm
I Am a Black Woman
Mari Evans
811.5 Eva
Sightseer In This Killing City
Eugene Gloria
811.6 Glo
Eugene Gloria’s fourth collection of poetry captures the surreal and unreal feelings of the present. Through the voice of Nacirema, the central persona of the collection, who is a Filipina American woman with an ambiguous sexual identity, we are introduced to a character who chooses mystery and inhabits landscapes fraught with brutality and beauty. Flawed like America, Nacirema embodies ideas of wanderlust and self-discovery. In poems that recount her journey, Gloria invokes the spirit of 1970s soul music and of jazz, blending the urban lament of Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane with the idiom of Stevie Wonder and Fela Kuti. Sightseer in This Killing City argues for grace and perseverance in these strange times.
The Storied Sea
Susan Wallace
814 Wal
In 1881 Susan Elston Wallace of Indiana traveled with her husband Lew Wallace, U.S. Minister to the Ottoman Empire. This is a record of her journey.
The Book of Delights
Ross Gay
814.6 Gay
Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights is a genre-defying book of essays—some as short as a paragraph; some as long as five pages—that record the small joys that occurred in one year, from birthday to birthday, and that we often overlook in our busy lives. His is a meditation on delight that takes a clear-eyed view of the complexities, even the terrors, in his life, including living in America as a black man; the ecological and psychic violence of our consumer culture; the loss of those he loves. Among Gay’s funny, poetic, philosophical delights: the way Botan Rice Candy wrappers melt in your mouth, the volunteer crossing guard with a pronounced tremor whom he imagines as a kind of boat-woman escorting pedestrians across the River Styx, a friend’s unabashed use of air quotes, pickup basketball games, the silent nod of acknowledgment between black people. And more than any other subject, Gay celebrates the beauty of the natural world—his garden, the flowers in the sidewalk, the birds, the bees, the mushrooms, the trees.
This is not a book of how-to or inspiration, though it could be read that way. Fans of Roxane Gay, Maggie Nelson, and Kiese Laymon will revel in Gay’s voice, and his insights. The Book of Delights is about our connection to the world, to each other, and the rewards that come from a life closely observed. Gay’s pieces serve as a powerful and necessary reminder that we can, and should, stake out a space in our lives for delight.
The Anthropocene Reviewed
Essays from a Human-Centered Planet
John Green
814.6 Gre
The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. In this remarkable symphony of essays adapted and expanded from his ground-breaking, critically acclaimed podcast, John Green reviews different facets of the human-centered planet - from the QWERTY keyboard and Halley's Comet to Penguins of Madagascar - on a five-star scale.
Ernie's America
The Best of Ernie Pyle's 1930's Travel Dispatches
Ernie Pyle
917.304 Pyl
During his travels throughout America, Pyle wrote thousands of columns. Here, Nichols has culled the best of what he wrote and organized it by sections of the country.
100 Things To Do in Indianapolis Before You Die
Ashley Petry
917.72 Pet
Indianapolis is best known for auto racing, but this diverse Midwestern city offers surprises at every turn. Whether you’re a first-time visitor or a lifelong local, this guide points you toward some of Indy’s most popular destinations—and some of its best-kept secrets. Ride an old-school carousel at the world’s largest children’s museum. Sample a shrimp cocktail that will actually take your breath away. Brave the “suicide seats” at a jam-packed bout of roller derby. This guide highlights Indy’s best food and drink, cultural attractions, and shopping districts, as well as options for live music and outdoor recreation. Best of all, the book is packed with insider tips that can save you time and money—and help you make the most of your time in the Circle City.
Divided Paths, Common Ground
The Story of Mary Matthews and Lella Gaddis, Pioneering Purdue Women Who Introduced Science into the Home
Angie Klink
920 Kli
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Bento Box In The Heartland
My Japanese Girlhood in Whitebread America
Linda Furiya
921 Furiya, L.
While growing up in Versailles, an Indiana farm community, Linda Furiya tried to balance the outside world of Midwestern America with the Japanese traditions of her home life. As the only Asian family in a tiny township, Furiya's life revolved around Japanese food and the extraordinary lengths her parents went to in order to gather the ingredients needed to prepare it.
As immigrants, her parents approached the challenges of living in America, and maintaining their Japanese diets, with optimism and gusto. Furiva, meanwhile, was acutely aware of how food set her apart from her peers: She spent her first day of school hiding in the girls' restroom, examining her rice balls and chopsticks, and longing for a Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich.
Bento Box in the Heartland is an insightful and reflective coming-of-age tale. Beautifully written, each chapter is accompanied by a family recipe of mouth-watering Japanese comfort food.
On Her Own Grounds
The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker
A’Lelia Bundles
921 Walker, C.J.
Oprah Winfrey is renowned for her media savvy, marketing sense, philanthropic efforts, and accumulated wealth (and the power that accompanies it). She's earned her rep, of course, and her path to stardom and influence couldn't have been easy. Imagine, then, how difficult it must have been a century ago for Madam C. J. Walker, America's first female African-American millionaire. The daughter of slaves, married and divorced by the age of 20, Madam Walker spent nearly two decades as a lowly scrubwoman before concocting (or, as she claimed, being presented in a dream) the formula for a much needed hair care product for African-American women. After making her hair care business a resounding success, Walker devoted much of her time and resources to social causes and philanthropy.
In On Her Own Ground, A'Lelia Bundles, Walker's great-great-grandaughter and a woman of no small accomplishment herself (she's spent many years as a television news producer for NBC and ABC), offers an affectionate but unblinking portrait of Madam Walker. (Bundles' mother urged her daughter from her deathbed not to worry about promoting a particular image of their famous forebear, to simply tell the truth.) Bundles also explores the complicated relationship between Madam Walker and her only slightly less renowned daughter (and the author's namesake), A'Lelia Walker, a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, and the elder Walker's interactions with such other seminal African-American figures as W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington.
Dr. Mary Holloway Wilhite
Shannon Hudson
921 Wilhite, M.
Written by our own Shannon Hudson (President of the Genealogy Club of Montgomery County), this book details the life and times of Dr. Wilhite. Dr. Mary Wilhite was the first woman doctor in Montgomery County, Indiana. She entered Penn Medical College in 1854 at the age of 23. She was also active in the Woman's Suffrage movement.
Brave Men
Ernie Pyle
940.54 Pyl
Europe was in the throes of World War II, and when America joined the fighting, Ernie Pyle went along. Long before television beamed daily images of combat into our living rooms, Pyle’s on-the-spot reporting gave the American public a firsthand view of what war was like for the boys on the front. Pyle followed the soldiers into the trenches, battlefields, field hospitals, and beleaguered cities of Europe. What he witnessed he described with a clarity, sympathy, and grit that gave the public back home an immediate sense of the foot soldier’s experience. There were really two wars, John Steinbeck wrote in Time magazine: one of maps and logistics, campaigns, ballistics, divisions, and regiments and the other a "war of the homesick, weary, funny, violent, common men who wash their socks in their helmets, complain about the food, whistle at Arab girls, or any girls for that matter, and bring themselves through as dirty a business as the world has ever seen and do it with humor and dignity and courage—and that is Ernie Pyle’s war." This collection of Pyle’s columns detailing the fighting in Europe in 1943–44 brings that war—and the living, and dying, moments of history—home to us once again.
Indiana Originals
Hoosier Heroes & Heroines
Ray Boomhower
977.2 Boo
Hoosier history overflows with bold visionaries, noble heroes and lovable rogues. May Wright Sewall struggled to uplift womankind and unflinchingly called for peace in a world sleepwalking toward conflict. In the guise of Abe Martin, Kin Hubbard graced the Indianapolis News's back page for twenty-six years with folksy humor. Combat photographer John A. Bushemi bravely faced the terrors of war and perished capturing its violence. Audacious automotive pioneer Carl G. Fisher went to any length to promote himself, even flying a car via a hot-air balloon. Drawing on more than thirty years of experience, author Ray E. Boomhower, the dean of Hoosier biographers, brings together forty of the most notable figures from the nineteenth state.
Stories of Indiana
Maurice Thompson
977.2 Tho
Hidden History of Montgomery County, Indiana
Emily Griffin Winfrey, Rebecca McDole, Jodie Steelman Wilson
977.248 Wil
Written by some amazing local authors including our own CDPL Assistant Director, Jodie Wilson!
Montgomery County never fails to surprise the visitor with its unique and varied history. Even local residents are often unaware of some of their county heritage. Anyone who spends some time in Crawfordsville will eventually know about General Lew Wallace, author of the one-time bestseller Ben-Hur, as well as Senator Henry Lane, who helped found the Republican Party and get Abraham Lincoln nominated for the presidency. Wabash College was founded here in 1832 and is one of the two remaining all-male colleges in the nation -- with the dubious honor of having fired Ezra Pound before he went on to fame as a poet. The Hidden History of Montgomery County will touch upon such topics but will also bring to light many of the area's other deserving stories.
Urban Tapestry: Indianapolis Stories
Sandy Eisenberg Sasso
977.252 Urb
This collection of personal narratives takes the pulse of the city of Indianapolis through the everyday experiences of its people. By listening to the voices of the individuals who make their home in the city, Urban Tapestry captures a part of the soul that animates this Midwestern community. The vignettes collected by writers, journalists, and folklorists present the view from the office and the front porch, the park bench and the kitchen table, the racetrack and the city street. They include reports from prominent leaders and tales from the homeless. The stories are organized into four groups: "Justice and Kindness and Giving to Kinsfolk," "The Place Where You Stand Is Holy," "Why Then Do We Deal Treacherously?" and "A New Life Has Come among You." Although they represent a diverse population, these are people who give voice to common concerns: race, education, crime, alienation, and community. Urban Tapestry invites readers to meet the stranger and to understand the "other" as the face in the mirror.
DVDs
Chicago (Play)
Maurine Dallas Watkins
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Chicago (Musical)
Maurine Dallas Watkins
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