Check out what’s happening at the Library
County Library is open from 9 AM to 6 PM Monday through Friday, the computer room closes at 5:30 PM. You may reach us at (432) 264-2260 and our fax number is (432) 264-2263. Please visit our website at http:// howard-county.ploud.net and our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/howardcolibrary for more information about our services and any updates.
Tax forms for tax year 2023 are now available first come first served. We have 1040 and 1040-SR instruction booklet and 1040 and 1040SR forms. You can request a booklet at the circulation desk. Any other instructions or schedules can be found at the Internal Revenue Servies's website at https://www.irs.gov/. You can come to the library and use a computer to print out tax forms directly from the IRS website. You do not need a library card to use library computers. We also have The League of Women Voters of Texas, Nonpartisan Voter Guide available. Early voting is February 20-March 1, and Election Day is March 5, voter guides are by the circulation desk.
This week's reviews are biography and nonfiction titles.
Acclaimed author Jonathan Rosen's haunting investigation of the forces that led his closest childhood friend, Michael Laudor, from the heights of brilliant promise to the forensic psychiatric hospital where he has lived since killing the woman he loved in The Best Minds: A story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions (B LAU M) by Jonathan Rosen. When the Rosens moved to New Rochelle in 1973, Jonathan Rosen and Michael Laudor became inseparable. Both children of college professors, the boys were best friends and keen competitors, and, when they both got into Yale University, seemed set to join the American meritocratic elite. Michael blazed through college in three years, graduating summa cum laude and landing a top-flight consulting job. But all wasn't as it seemed. One day, Jonathan received word that Michael had suffered a serious psychotic break and was in the locked ward of a psychiatric hospital. Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, Michael was still in the hospital when he learned he'd been accepted to
Yale Law School, and still battling delusions when he decided to trade his halfway house for the top law school in the country. He not only managed to graduate, but after his extraordinary story was featured in The New York Times, sold a memoir for a large sum. Ron Howard bought film rights, completing the dream for Michael and his tirelessly supportive girlfriend Carrie. But then Michael, in the grip of an unshakeable paranoid fantasy, stabbed Carrie to death with a kitchen knife and became a front-page story of an entirely different sort.
On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil in The Wager: A tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder (910.916 GRA D) by David Grann. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty's Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as "the prize of all the oceans," it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes. But then... six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death for whomever the court found guilty could hang.
The remarkable and inspiring life story of Corrie ten Boom a groundbreaking, female Dutch watchmaker, whose family unselfishly transformed their house into a hiding place