From Library Journal: "Expanded from an essay in The New England Journal of Medicine, this beautifully written, heartwarming memoir centers on Oscar, a seemingly ordinary house cat with the ability to sense when nursing home patients are within hours of dying. Most of the patients under geriatrician Dosa's care are in the final stages of Alzheimer's disease, and depictions of Oscar's interactions with them take us into the difficult world faced by their families, friends, and caregivers. Verdict Told with profound insight and great respect for all involved, this is more than just a cat story." Check it out!

New from Patricia Cornwell!

Port Mortuary, the title of Patricia Cornwell's 18th Scarpetta novel, is literally a port for the dead. In this fast-paced story, a treacherous path from Scarpetta's past merges with the high tech highway she now finds herself on. We travel back to the beginning of her professional career, when she enlisted in the Air Force to pay off her medical school debt. Now, more than twenty years and many career successes later, her secret military ties have drawn her to Dover Air Force Base, where she has been immersed in a training fellowship.

As the chief of the new Cambridge Forensic Center in Massachusetts, a joint venture of the state and federal governments and MIT, Scarpetta is confronted with a case that could shut down her new facility and ruin her personally and professionally.

Holiday Book Sale & Storytime

Today from 4-6 in the library's Foot Room, the Friends of the Library will hold their annual holiday book sale. Also today (at 4), the Miss Red Wing royalty will conduct a childrens' story time. Come by on your way to the Holiday Stroll!

Holiday closing

The library will be closed on Thursday, November 25 for Thanksgiving but will be open regular hours on Friday, November 26 (10-6) and Saturday, November 27 (9-3).

From BookList: "Sybilla may have been born to wealthy parents, but her home life was never easy, and she ran away at 17. Ever since, Sybilla has been homeless and living off the grid. Her peaceful existence comes to a sudden end when she is accused of murder and goes on the run, too scared to go to the police and clear herself but frantic to regain her carefully built life. Both a mystery (Who is really doing the murders?) and a psychological study (Why did Sybilla run from her family?), Missing heralds the arrival in the U.S. of another outstanding Scandinavian crime writer. Winner of the Glass Key Award in Sweden, this is a taut, riveting, and impossible-to-put-down story of a young woman caught up in a bad situation."

From Booklist: "In 2009, Laura Ling, a reporter with Current TV, traveled with a film crew to the region of China that bordered on North Korea to report on defections. The crew momentarily crossed into North Korea, and Ling and Euna Lee, her editor and translator, were captured. Given the hostilities between North Korea and China and a recent critical documentary on North Korea by Laura’s sister, journalist Lisa Ling, the women knew they were in for an ordeal. Laura was beaten during the capture, and the women were held in isolation and faced meager meals, cold, and little medical treatment. In the U.S., Lisa and her family prayed and called on powerful contacts, including Al Gore and Bill Richardson, to win the women’s release. The women were eventually tried for attempting to overthrow the government and sentenced to 12 years in a labor camp, but through behind-the-scenes maneuvering and negotiations with prickly North Korea, they were finally released after five months in captivity. This memoir alternates between the sisters, with Laura recalling the escalating peril of her capture and imprisonment and Lisa recalling heightened worries as weeks dragged into months. A riveting story of captivity and the enduring faith, determination, and love of two sisters."

From Publishers Weekly: "The three central questions of philosophy and science: Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? Why this particular set of laws and not some other? No one can make a discussion of such matters as compulsively readable as the celebrated University of Cambridge cosmologist Hawking. Along with Caltech physicist Mlodinow, Hawking deftly mixes cutting-edge physics to answer those key questions. For instance, why do we exist? Earth occupies a "Goldilocks Zone" in space: just the perfect distance from a not-too-hot star, with just the right elements to allow life to evolve. On a larger scale, in order to explain the universe, the authors write, "we need to know not only how the universe behaves, but why." While no single theory exists yet, scientists are approaching that goal with what is called "M-theory," a collection of overlapping theories (including string theory) that fill in many (but not all) the blank spots in quantum physics; this collection is known as the "Grand Unified Field Theories." This may all finally explain the mystery of the universe's creation without recourse to a divine creator. This is an amazingly concise, clear, and intriguing overview of where we stand when it comes to divining the secrets of the universe." Check it out!

Between iPods, music-blasting restaurants, ear-splitting sports stadiums, and endless air and road traffic, the place for quiet in our lives grows smaller by the day. In Pursuit of Silence gives context to our increasingly desperate sense that noise pollution is, in a very real way, an environmental catastrophe. Listening to doctors, neuroscientists, acoustical engineers, monks, activists, educators, marketers, and aggrieved citizens, George Prochnik examines why we began to be so loud as a society, and what it is that gets lost when we can no longer find quiet. He shows us the benefits of decluttering our sonic world. And don't forget that our library is a great place for quiet reflection & study!

Diary of a Wimpy kid book 5 is here!

From Publishers Weekly: ""See, when you're a little kid, nobody ever warns you that you've got an expiration date. One day you're hot stuff and the next day you're a dirt sandwich," Greg Heffley tells readers partway into this fifth installment of Kinney's bestselling Wimpy Kid series. There's a noticeable feeling of transition in this outing as Greg negotiates a sour patch with longtime best friend Rowley, his mother's decision to go back to school, the imminence of puberty (and dreaded accompanying discussions at home and at school), and the fact that one can't stay a child forever-despite evidence to the contrary provided by Greg's Uncle Gary, who's embarking on his fourth marriage." Check it out!

New from the author of Seabiscuit!

From Publishers Weekly: "From the 1936 Olympics to WWII Japan's most brutal POW camps, Hillenbrand's heart-wrenching new book is thousands of miles and a world away from the racing circuit of her bestselling Seabiscuit. But it's just as much a page-turner, and its hero, Louie Zamperini, is just as loveable: a disciplined champion racer who ran in the Berlin Olympics, he's a wit, a prankster, and a reformed juvenile delinquent who put his thieving skills to good use in the POW camps. In May 1943 his B-24 crashed into the Pacific. After a record-breaking 47 days adrift on a shark-encircled life raft with his pal and pilot, Russell Allen "Phil" Phillips, they were captured by the Japanese. In the "theater of cruelty" that was the Japanese POW camp network, Louie landed in the cruelest theaters of all: Omori and Naoetsu, under the control of Corp. Mutsuhiro Watanabe, a pathologically brutal sadist (called the Bird by camp inmates). By war's end, Louie was near death. Hillenbrand's triumph is that in telling Louie's story (he's now in his 90s), she tells the stories of thousands whose suffering has been mostly forgotten. She restores to our collective memory this tale of heroism, cruelty, life, death, joy, suffering, remorselessness, and redemption." Check it out!

Author visit

Speaking at the library this Saturday morning at 10am will be writer and Korean War veteran Paul Grassley. He is the author of The Grass: A Young Man's Journey to the Korean War. Refreshments will be served. Sponsored by the Friends of the Red Wing Public Library, this program is free and open to the public.

Artist at work

This Friday and Saturday, mural artist Greg Preslicka will be working at the library. He is creating a permanent mural for the library and will also be leading a hands-on experience for children (preschool and elementary grades welcome) at 10:30am. Kids will work with him to create a paper mural (so they may want to wear old clothes!).

From 1:00 - 2:00pm, you can watch Mr. Preslicka as he works on the mural he designed for the library. Learn about concept, design and creation. Questions are welcome! This event is free and open to the public.

This project is funded in part or in whole with money from Minnesota's Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, sponsored by SELCO in cooperation with the Red Wing Public Library.

Closed for Veterans' Day

The Library will be closed on Thursday, November 11 in observance of Veterans Day.

After the Apocalypse

If you enjoy reading stories about the end of civilization (and the aftermath) check out our new booklist, After the Apocalypse. Something for everybody - nuclear war, environmental disasters and even zombies. Check it out!

Best picture books of 2010

The New York Times has come out with their list of the best childrens' picture books of 2010. Check it out and then check them out!

The Whale and the Supercomputer

Climate change isn't an abstraction in the far North. It is a reality that has already dramatically altered daily life, especially that of the native peoples who still live largely off the land and sea. Because nature shows her footprints so plainly here, the region is also a lure for scientists intent on comprehending the complexities of climate change. In this gripping account, Charles Wohlforth follows the two groups as they navigate a radically shifting landscape. The scientists attempt to decipher its smallest elements and to derive from them a set of abstract laws and models. The natives draw on uncannily accurate traditional knowledge, borne of long experience living close to the land. Even as they see the same things-a Native elder watches weather coming through too fast to predict; a climatologist notes an increased frequency of cyclonic systems-the two cultures struggle to reconcile their vastly different ways of comprehending the environment. With grace, clarity, and a sense of adventure, Wohlforth--a lifelong Alaskan--illuminates both ways of seeing a world in flux, and in the process, helps us to navigate a way forward as climate change reaches us all.

Great new fantasy series!

If you enjoy epic fantasy and have plenty of time on your hands (the first of a projected 10 volumes checks in at over 1,000 pages!) then you should read The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson. Widely acclaimed for his work completing Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time saga, Brandon Sanderson now begins a grand cycle of his own, one every bit as ambitious and immersive. Roshar is a world of stone and storms. Uncanny tempests of incredible power sweep across the rocky terrain so frequently that they have shaped ecology and civilization alike. Animals hide in shells, trees pull in branches, and grass retracts into the soilless ground. Cities are built only where the topography offers shelter. It has been centuries since the fall of the ten consecrated orders known as the Knights Radiant, but their Shardblades and Shardplate remain: mystical swords and suits of armor that transform ordinary men into near-invincible warriors. Men trade kingdoms for Shardblades. Wars were fought for them, and won by them. One such war rages on a ruined landscape called the Shattered Plains. There, Kaladin, who traded his medical apprenticeship for a spear to protect his little brother, has been reduced to slavery. In a war that makes no sense, where ten armies fight separately against a single foe, he struggles to save his men and to fathom the leaders who consider them expendable. Brightlord Dalinar Kholin commands one of those other armies. Like his brother, the late king, he is fascinated by an ancient text called The Way of Kings . Troubled by over-powering visions of ancient times and the Knights Radiant, he has begun to doubt his own sanity. Across the ocean, an untried young woman named Shallan seeks to train under an eminent scholar and notorious heretic, Dalinar's niece, Jasnah. Though she genuinely loves learning, Shallan's motives are less than pure. As she plans a daring theft, her research for Jasnah hints at secrets of the Knights Radiant and the true cause of the war. The result of over ten years of planning, writing, and world-building, The Way of Kings is but the opening movement of the Stormlight Archive, a bold masterpiece in the making.

From Library Journal: "Twelve travelers and three guides set off on a rafting trip down the Colorado River. Each comes to the trip expecting a life-altering experience, but none is prepared for the events as they unfold, least of all JT Maroney, their veteran guide. It is JT's 125th trip down the river, and he thinks he's seen it all; but a dog, a couple in their seventies, two dysfunctional marriages, and an overweight teenager provide him with challenges that have nothing to do with white-water rafting. Each traveler leaves the trip with much more than he or she expected."