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Health & Fitness

Recent Acquisitions at the Doylestown Library

Fall, with its cooler days and longer nights, is the perfect time to cozy up with a good book.

If you're looking for a new friend (or a new reading experience), a trip to the library can an introduction to a unlimited variety of characters  - from the gentle Jim Henson to the hardboiled gangsters of Donna Tartt. If you'd like to visit a faraway place on a limited budget, the library is your ticket. From Sesame Place to Paris to Iceland, the choices are limitless.

Here are some new additions to the shelves in the Doylestown Library:

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Jim Henson: The Biography by Brian Jay Jones - He is known around the world for the characters his fertile imagination wrought. Kermit, Bert and Ernie, Miss Piggy and Big Bird are household names. But little is known about their creator, a gentle, genial man who died unexpectedly at age 53 of a bacterial infection. The book was written with the full cooperation of the Henson family and friends, and Jones was granted unprecedented access to records and archives, including never before seen business documents, interviews and Henson’s private letters. The writing is clear throughout and the chronological approach allows Jones to clearly show cause and effect. The book’s most engrossing parts examine in detail the lengths Henson and his puppeteers went to when they had to create naturalistic scenes involving more than one puppet, long before the days of computer graphics. The book includes a large number of pictures, many of them never seen before.

 The Paris Architect by Charles Belfoure - The Indie pick for October is this debut novel by architect Belfoure. How far would you go to help a stranger? What would you risk? Set in Paris during the Nazi occupation, Belfoure explores these questions among others. Lucien Bernard, who, like the author in his chosen profession, is among the architects offered a large sum of money to design structures to hide Jews,outsmartingthe Gestapo hunting for them. Anyone caught helping the Jews will face certain torture and death. Danger is everywhere, from Lucien’s assistant to his mistress, Adele, and his thoughts turn from money to vengeance.  A spine-chilling page-turner.

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 Alex by Pierre Lemaitre (a popular author in Europe) - Alex is Lamaitre’s fourth Police Commandant Camille Verhoeven novel, the first to be translated into English. Alex is a peculiar tale of kidnapping that is anything but what it appears to be. The title character, Alex Prvost, is snatched, seemingly at random, from a Paris street.  She is trussed up and put in a cage that dangles from the ceiling of an abandoned warehouse. Commandant Verhoeven is just back on the job following a breakdown that he suffered after the murder of his wife and unborn son four year earlier. He throws himself into Alex’s disappearance as a way to deal with the guilt and pain he still feels over his loss. But his grief begins to fade with each burst of intuition he has about the case. With his wit and intelligence, Commandant Verhoeven is tolerated by his superiors and highly respected by his subordinates. A book for anyone who enjoys John Connolly, John Lutz and Kevin O’Brien.

 Burial Rites by Hannah Kent - Iceland in 1920: people lived on homesteads and survived only through endless toil, everything was dirty, it was chilly even in summer, and society was ruled by a joyless, punitive piety. The death penalty consisted of being beheaded by an order from the King of Denmark. Thus the stage is set  for this dark but humane first novel.

Based on a true story, Agnes Magnúsdóttir, a servant , was convicted of the brutal murder of two men. Two others were convicted with her, but she was sentenced to be beheaded.  The sentences required confirmation of Denmark’s Royal Government, and while waiting for confirmation, since there was not jail, Agnes was shipped off to a farmstead where a tubercular couple was forced by circumstances to accept her. Assistant Rev. Thorvarduris sent to "direct this murderess to the way of truth and repentance," but becomes instead, enamored of Agnes and obsessed by her life’s struggles.  As Agnes is forced to live and work in extremely close quarters with the family and her story unfolds, fear and loathing for Agnes begin to turn to sympathy and respect.  Reflecting  painstaking research, this novel unfolds against a background of 19th century primitive life in Iceland, and the community is shown as being both revenge minded and sympathetic. Kent won the 2011 Writing Australia Unpublished Manuscript Award for this work when she was a 26-year-old Ph.D. student in Australia.

Goldfinch by Donna Tartt - Although not a prolific writer, it has been more than a decade since Tartt’s second novel, The Little Friend, this newest effort was worth waiting for. Not for the faint of heart at almost eight hundred pages, it is reaping high praise and critical acclaim.

The narrator is Theo, who, when he was just a boy, survived a bizarre accident that killed his mother. Abandoned by his father and raised by friends in New York, Theo holds tight to a small painting called The Goldfinch that he has kept since the museum explosion; it is the only thing he has left to remind him of his mother.

Shootouts, gangsters, storage lockers and the art underworld all play parts in the life of the painting in Theo’s care. Tartt’s flair for suspense is showcased as she follows Theo’s teenage delinquency and his climb back, his passionate friendship with the very funny Boris and his obsession with Pippa, a girl he first met moments before the explosion that killed his mother, but the heart of the novel is the painting. The Dutch painting takes over Theo’s life and his fate hinges on it as it steers his life.

Happy reading! 

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