Good morning!
As the Collection Development Manager of Evanston Public Library, it’s my job to buy the books for the library. Along the way, I notice some pretty interesting titles that folks might want to know about. So hold onto your hats while I promote some of the most interesting books coming out in the next few months. From goat exoskeletons to wax women you can dissect to penis thieves, we’ve some really interesting titles coming into the library soon. Be sure to check them out!
Description: The definitive practical guide to public speaking, by Chris J. Anderson, the heralded curator of TED Talks, offering pragmatic tips and advice to anyone who wants to develop, polish, and refine their ability to deliver a powerful presentation. The work is based upon the author’s longtime association with the world’s most popular TED speakers, and will feature inside stories and anecdotes.
Description: An uproarious behind-the-scenes account of the creation of the hit television series describes how comedians Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld dreamed up the idea for an unconventional sitcom over coffee and how, despite network skepticism and minimal plotlines, achieved mainstream success.
Description: Thinking about trying a brand-new look, but without the commitment? Here’s all the info you need to design and create personalized temporary tattoos! Try out a design for a permanent tattoo, create a unique look for a special night out, design buzz-worthy wedding favors, or incentivize your kids to eat their veggies with a reward scheme. Comprehensive practical information explains how to draw patterns to express your individual style or adapt designs from the web, and shows you how to print your creation onto temporary tattoo paper. Plus, inspirational galleries cover a range of classic and contemporary tattoo themes, including Celtic symbols, animals and flowers, lettering, ships and mermaids, stars, and holiday motifs.DIY Temporary Tattoos has all the know-how you need to completely transform your look (even if it’s just for one night!).
Description: A modern and energetically designed encyclopedia of DIY with everything you need to know to roll up your sleeves and cook it, build it, sew it, clean it, or repair it yourself. In other words, everything you would have learned from your shop and home ec teachers, if you’d had them. Home Ec and Shop features 138 practical projects and how-tos, with step-by-step instructions and illustrations, relevant charts, sidebars, lists, and handy toolboxes. There’s a kitchen crash course, including the must-haves for a well-stocked pantry; how to boil an egg (and peel it frustration-free); how to grill, steam, sauté, and roast vegetables. There’s Sewing 101, plus how to fold a fitted sheet, tie a tie, mop a floor, make a bed, and set the table for a formal dinner.
Description: The Geography of Madness is an investigation of “culture-bound” syndromes, which are far stranger than they sound. Why is it, for example, that some men believe, against all reason, that vandals stole their penises, even though they’re in good physical shape? In The Geography of Madness, acclaimed magazine writer Frank Bures travels around the world to trace culture-bound syndromes to their sources—and in the process, tells a remarkable story about the strange things all of us believe.
Description: Like humans, cities are mortal-they are born, they thrive, and they eventually die. InAtlas of Lost Cities, Aude de Tocqueville tells the compelling narrative of the rise and fall of such notable places as Pompeii, Teotihuacán, and Angkor. She also details the less well known, including Centralia, an abandoned Pennsylvania town consumed by unquenchable underground fire; Nova Citas de Kilamba in Angola, where housing, schools, and stores were built for 500,000 people that never came; and Epecuen, a tourist town in Argentina now swallowed up by water. Original artwork shows the location of the lost cities, as well as a depiction of how they looked when they thrived.
Description: Of all the artifacts from the history of medicine, the Anatomical Venus―with its heady mixture of beauty, eroticism and death―is the most seductive. These life-sized dissectible wax women reclining on moth-eaten velvet cushions―with glass eyes, strings of pearls, and golden tiaras crowning their real human hair―were created in eighteenth-century Florence as the centerpiece of the first truly public science museum. Conceived as a means to teach human anatomy, the Venus also tacitly communicated the relationship between the human body and a divinely created cosmos; between art and science, nature and mankind. Today, she both intrigues and confounds, troubling our neat categorical divides between life and death, body and soul, effigy and pedagogy, entertainment and education, kitsch and art. The first book of its kind, The Anatomical Venus, by Morbid Anatomy Museum cofounder Joanna Ebenstein, features over 250 images―many never before published―gathered by its author from around the world. Its extensively researched text explores the Anatomical Venus within her historical and cultural context in order to reveal the shifting attitudes toward death and the body that today render such spectacles strange.
Description: From Vogue contributor and Guardian columnist Hadley Freeman, a personalized guide to eighties movies that describes why they changed movie-making forever—featuring exclusive interviews with the producers, directors, writers and stars of the best cult classics. For Hadley Freeman, movies of the 1980s have simply got it all. Comedy in Three Men and a Baby,Hannah and Her Sisters, Ghostbusters, and Back to the Future; all a teenager needs to know inPretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Say Anything, The Breakfast Club, andMystic Pizza; the ultimate in action from Top Gun, Die Hard,Beverly Hills Cop, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom; love and sex in9 1/2 Weeks, Splash, About Last Night,The Big Chill, andBull Durham; and family fun in The Little Mermaid, ET, Big,Parenthood, and Lean On Me. In Life Moves Pretty Fast, Hadley puts her obsessive movie geekery to good use, detailing the decade’s key players, genres, and tropes. She looks back on a cinematic world in which bankers are invariably evil, where children are always wiser than adults, where science is embraced with an intense enthusiasm, and the future viewed with giddy excitement. And, she considers how the changes between movies then and movies today say so much about society’s changing expectations of women, young people, and art—and explains why Pretty in Pink should be put on school syllabuses immediately.
Description: An exciting and in-depth follow up to One Zentangle A Day, Beckah Krahula guides you along with her sure-footed instruction and beautiful examples as she shows you how to take tangle drawing to the next level. From florals and organics to journal drawings and cityscapes, all kinds of experimentation are explored. Gain deeper insights into how tangles can be combined to create more complex and realistic forms, how to use contour and shading, how to work with midtoned papers by adding highlights and shadows, how to use introduce color-based media, how to integrate mixed-media techniques, and how to work on various surfaces.
Description: The dazzling success of The Toaster Project, including TV appearances and an international book tour, leaves Thomas Thwaites in a slump. His friends increasingly behave like adults, while Thwaites still lives at home, “stuck in a big, dark hole.” Luckily, a research grant offers the perfect out: a chance to take a holiday from the complications of being human—by transforming himself into a goat. What ensues is a hilarious and surreal journey through engineering, design, and psychology, as Thwaites interviews neuroscientists, animal behaviorists, prosthetists, goat sanctuary workers, and goatherds. From this, he builds a goat exoskeleton—artificial legs, helmet, chest protector, raincoat from his mum, and a prosthetic goat stomach to digest grass (with help from a pressure cooker and campfire)—before setting off across the Alps on four legs with a herd of his fellow creatures. Will he make it? Do Thwaites and his readers discover what it truly means to be human?
