Complete New Yorker on DVD

A treasure-trove of American literature, humor, and social history from the famed weekly is now available for use in the Warrenton Branch reference collection.

Every cover, cartoon, illustration, article and advertisement in the New Yorker magazine from February 1925-February 2005 is included on 8 DVD-ROM discs (for computer use only), plus a booklet describing highlights of the magazine's history. That's over 4,000 issues and half a million pages.

James Thurber, E.B. White, Joseph Mitchell, Truman Capote, Roger Angell, James Baldwin, Woody Allen, Steve Martin, Garrison Keillor, John Updike, Vladamir Nabokov are just some of the names which appeared regularly over the years.

Searching for those obscure J. D. Salinger short stories that weren't in his published anthologies? You'll find them here, plus poems by Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Parker, Seamus Heaney, cartoons by Charles Addams, George Booth, columns from Calvin Trillin, and fifty years of letters from Paris by Janet Flanner.

Theatre, dance, and film reviews from 1925 onward; a horse-racing column, The Race Track, that ran from 1926-1978; and "Talk of the Town" gossip provide an overview of the
culture, sophisticated and popular, through the decades.

Quite a few books began as published articles in the pages of the New Yorker, including reportage from Jonathan Schell, Neil Sheehan, Rachel Carson, and Seymour Hersh.

The New Yorker's weekly slice of life from the Roaring 20's through the disco 80's into the 21st century is distinctive, distinguished, and entertaining.
Complete New Yorker

Safe Driving

If you have a teenager or student driver in your household, here are several new resources that address the more complex issues of driving in today's fast-paced, heavy commuting environment:


Crashproof your kids: making your teen a safer, smarter driver
This is a guide for parents, and discusses developing defensive driving skills, road emergencies, basic car maintenance and responsible driving habits.

Driving Survival: how to stay safe on the roads
Covers a wide variety of situations and how to handle them, such as coping with road rage, night driving, and avoiding crashes.

License to Drive
Prepared by the Alliance for Safe Driving, in addition to covering the usual basics, it has a section on "Challenging Driving", such as driving in bad weather, reduced visibility, road conditions and terrain.

Tales of Turkmenistan and Greek Legends

The travel section in Sunday's Washington Post (July 16) profiled the book Unknown Sands by John W. Kropf, who is a resident of Fauquier County.

Subtitled "Journeys around the world's most isolated country", it recounts his experiences in remote Turkmenistan.

Listed as a "hardship post", Mr. Kropf spent two years on a diplomatic mission there, traveling throughout the land which Alexander the Great, Marco Polo, Genghis Khan and few intrepid Western adventurers had passed.

Geographically, Turkmenistan is bordered on the south by Iran and Afghanistan, and to the north by Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and opens onto the Caspian Sea to the west. In the center of the country is the Kara Kum Desert, which covers 80% of the country.
It has been a route of the Silk Road, and part of the former Soviet Union.

A copy of his book is available at the Fauquier Library.
For more information:
Unknown Sands

Another local author, John Latka, has recently published a novel,
Staten Island Memoirs, a fantasy tale of lost love involving an elderly man named Paris Polanski, remembering a chance encounter 43 years earlier, with a beautiful woman he calls Helen after "Helen of Troy." Zeus intervenes to arrange a meeting.

Mr. Latka was born in Brooklyn, but currently resides in Warrenton.

Staten Island Memoirs

Baby Einstein DVD's expanded

Recent additions to the Children's collection includes more Baby Einstein on DVD.

Baby Monet playfully journeys through the four seasons in art work of Monet and the music of Vivaldi
Baby Newton presents concepts of shape through real objects, plus puppets and an animated clown
Baby Wordsworth explores language with words from around the house, plus a bonus feature with phrases in sign language from Marlee Matlin

For the 11 titles available, see Baby Einstein
All items may be requested at any branch location.