News Blog @ Wellington City Libraries

This month our history recent picks feature: the story of the Union Jack, Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 (involving 335 ships and 40,000 men), India after Gandhi (the history of the world’s largest democracy), and more. Check out ‘Bankrolling Basra’, Andrew Alderson’s account of his time as an officer in Britain’s Territorial Army in charge of Basra’s Central Bank. Given authority for over one fifth of Iraq’s finances, he decides that the route to stability is to get the cash flowing again. What follows is a series of frequent, hair-raising adventures delivering suitcases, crates and binbags stuffed with millions of dollars wherever needed and by whatever means – in helicopters, speedboats, planes and landrovers…

Amongst our travel recent picks this month: William Black explores the highways and byways of French cooking with his mind (and his mouth) firmly open. In the process he samples such delights as tete de veau and fried cow’s udder, and has a mixed bag of gastronomic experiences… Also included this month are a solo journey by bicycle through South America, the official travel guide for the Rugby World Cup 2007, one hundred and one beautiful towns in Italy, and the true tales of an American Nanny in Paris.

Vampires, Venice Beach, the 19th Amos Walker mystery from Loren D. Estleman, wisecracking sisters on a shocking pink motorbike, a detective with synesthesia who sees coloured shapes when he listens to suspects talk, an Irish noir thriller featuring Private Eye Ed Loy, and a murder-mystery speculative-history Jewish-identity noir chess thriller. All this (and more) in this month’s mysteries recent picks.

Human-grizzly bear interactions, a natural history of the atmosphere, and profiles of 120 amazing, terrifying and bizarre prehistoric monsters that strode the land, terrorised the seas and patrolled the air – all in our science recent picks this month. Plus, take stock of the universe in 2007, become a historical tourist in the world of weights and measures, and re-discover your sense of wonder in the natural world through Darwin. Factoid: hapless 1920s inventor Thomas Midgley was responsible for both the process of adding lead to petrol, and the development of CFCs. Solving a refrigeration problem, he inadvertently created chemicals that punched a hole in the sky…

We were very excited this morning to receive our 50 normal lending copies of ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’. Eager library staff rushed out on Saturday to pick up 10 interim copies to fill early reserves but we now have our full complement – so make sure to put your name down on the waiting list for one of the library’s copies!You can click here to go straight to the catalogue record and place a reserve.

Check out our suspense/thriller recent picks for, amongst other things, ‘Mr. Allbones’ ferrets : an historical pastoral satirical scientifical romance, with mustelids’ by New Zealand author Fiona Farrell. Other suspense/thriller recent picks include: a personal story of a family’s history in Southern Italy, a smart comedy of manners and obsession, an illicit relationship in the summer of 1953, and an eco-thriller with ruthless fishing industrialists.

Our health recent picks this month feature the art of learning (highly-ranked chess player Josh Waitzkin muses on his personal experience mastering chess and his discovery that the mindset and learning techniques he’d applied to chess were actually transferable to other skillsets…), dramatherapy (the power of drama as a therapeutic medium because of its foundations in metaphor), history’s first pandemia plague which occurred seven centuries before the Black Death, and the true-life story of Dr. Jayant Patel, better known as Doctor Death, who shocked Australia when the truth came to light that he may have killed as many as 87 people under his care.

This month our craft recent picks feature beaded beads, perfect pearl jewelry, goldsmithing, silver work, sketchbooks for embroiderers and textile artists and inspiring craft projects to recycle your old possessions and make something out of nothing. (Make a notebook out of a record cover, knit an i-Pod cosy, fold beautiful origami fairy-lights, recycle your old T-shirts into bathmats or placemats, customise your own clothes, make your own jewelry, decorate your house…)

Would you believe Cleopatra’s lipstick was crushed beetles? Check out our children’s non-fiction recent picks this month for the next instalment of the ‘Would you believe’ series of books, complete with awesome (and sometimes gruesome!) photographs of weird fashion trends. Also included this month: books on global warming, dogs, how to draw animals, World War I, railway stations, rubbish, comets, asteroids, meteors, and ear-invading creepy crawlies…

A baby rabbit who goes to nursery school and can’t come to terms with the fact that he’s not human, the Trojan War, life after World War II in Japan through the eyes of a woman in 1955, and a 10,000-mile road trip on a greyhound bus. For these and many more (’Arabian Nights’ in the Fables series, Frank Miller’s ‘Sin City: family values’…), check out our graphic novel recent picks.