April Bestsellers are found @ your library

Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture by Peggy Orenstein

Publishers Weekly

Orenstein, who has written about girls for nearly two decades (Schoolgirls), finds today's pink and princess-obsessed girl culture grating when it threatens to lure her own young daughter, Daisy. In her quest to determine whether princess mania is merely a passing phase or a more sinister marketing plot with long-term negative impact, Orenstein travels to Disneyland, American Girl Place, the American International Toy Fair; visits a children's beauty pageant; attends a Miley Cyrus concert; tools around the Internet; and interviews parents, historians, psychologists, marketers, and others. While she uncovers some disturbing news (such as the American Psychological Association's assertion that the "girlie-girl" culture's emphasis on beauty and play-sexiness can increase girls' susceptibility to depression, eating disorders, distorted body image, and risky sexual behavior), she also finds that locking one's daughter away in a tower like a modern-day Rapunzel may not be necessary. Orenstein concludes that parents who think through their values early on and set reasonable limits, encourage dialogue and skepticism, and are canny about the consumer culture can combat the 24/7 "media machine" aimed at girls and hold off the focus on beauty, materialism, and the color pink somewhat. With insight and biting humor, the author explores her own conflicting feelings as a mother as she protects her offspring and probes the roots and tendrils of the girlie-girl movement.

The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos by Brian Greene

Publishers Weekly

"There was a time when ‘universe' meant ‘all there is,'" writes Greene, but soon we may have to redefine that word, along with our own meager understanding of the cosmos. A theoretical physicist and celebrated author, Greene offers intrepid readers another in-depth yet marvelously accessible look inside the perplexing world of modern theoretical physics and cosmology. Greene's book The Elegant Universe explained late 20th-century efforts to find a unified theory of everything, culminating with string theory. But string theory opened up a new can of worms, hinting at the possible existence of multiple universes and other strange entities. The possibility of other universes existing alongside our own like holes in "a gigantic block of Swiss cheese" seems more likely every day. Beginning with relativity theory, the Big Bang, and our expanding universe, Greene introduces first the mind-blowing multiplicity of forms those parallel universes might take, from patchwork quilts or stretchy "branes" to landscapes and holograms riddled with black holes. With his inspired analogies starring everyone from South Park's Eric Cartman to Ms. Pac-Man and a can of Pringles, Greene presents a lucid, intriguing, and triumphantly understandable state-of-the-art look at the universe. Illus.

Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal by James D. Hornfischer

Publishers Weekly

Hornfischer (Ship of Ghosts) understands the human dynamics of the U.S. Navy in the Pacific war as well as any student of the subject. Here he focuses on the period when the Navy underwent its sternest test. The struggle for Guadalcanal, he writes, was "the most sustained and vicious fight of the Pacific war." It featured seven major naval actions and required the Navy to master a new kind of war: it was the first of the amphibious expeditionary campaigns charcteristic of the Pacific theater, combining air, land, and sea forces,and the U.S. was spectacularly unprepared to cope with its demands. Nor did the U.S. understand as yet how effective its Japanese opponent was—eventually, this knowledge was purchased with blood, and Hornfischer gives an empathetic but balanced account of that process. He reconstructs the fighting in a masterful synthesis of technical analysis, operational narrative, and tales of courage. His listing of one set of commendations submitted by one ship after one action stands in particular for all "the men without rank" who made up for the shortcomings of ship designers, admirals, and captains in the waters of Ironbottom Sound. 16 pages of b&w photos, 9 maps.