On the shelves
The following books are available at the Portales Public Library:
Reaching the Animal Mind: Clicker Training and What It Teaches Us About All Animals
By: Karen Pryor
As a celebrated pioneer in the field of no-punishment animal training, Karen Pryor has improved the lives of millions of animals. With her all-positive clicker-training system, Karen can teach anyone to train animals with a cheap, plastic, handheld clicker, rewarding wanted behaviors-click!-and ignoring the unwanted. Animals quickly learn that undesirable behavior gets them nothing and good behavior gets them a reinforcing click and a bit of food. Given the choice, animals quickly abandon what doesn't work and focus on what does. Pryor provides Web addresses throughout the book where the reader can access video of the actual training session that she describes and entertains with stories of a pony taught to surf, gloomy birds learning to play and even a rhino that will lean against the fence for a pedicure. Using clear, accessible language, Reaching the Animal Mind will allow anyone to master Pryor's unique clicker training system.
The Fate of Katherine Carr
By: Thomas H. Cook
Once a travel writer, George Gates was fascinated by places where people disappeared-the ghostly bramble of the Lost Colony or the busy New York City corner where Judge Crater was last seen. However, Gates lost his taste for things that disappear when his then eight-year-old son vanished on a rainy afternoon. His body was later found, but his killer never. Now Gates writes trivial stories about local celebrities and flower festivals and spends his evenings haunted by the image of his son's last day. Enter retired missing-persons detective, Arlo McBride, who still ponders the case of Katherine Carr who vanished twenty years before leaving a short story she had written about an eerie stranger who had opened her to love and a dark pursuit. Compelled to reconstruct the last days of Katherine Carr's life, Gates is drawn ever more deeply into her story and with his inquiry into the fate of Katherine, Gates inexorably leads to the exploration of his own.
Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town
By: Nick Reding
Nowhere is it more apparent than the small towns of America's heartland that crystal meth is considered to be the most dangerous drug in the world. Journalist, Nick Reding introduces us to one such town: Oelwein, Iowa, population of 6,126 in Methland. Left in the dust by the consolidation of the agricultural industry, a depressed local economy, and an out-migration of people, Oelwein is like thousands of other rural communities across the country. Now a highly effective drug has taken its hold. Reding brings us into the heart of rural America by way of a cast of intimately drawn characters through four years of reporting. Methland is small-town America on the brink, not just a portrait of a small town. It reveals the connection between the real-life people touched by the drug epidemic and the global forces behind it by centering on one community battling for a brighter future. Providing a vital perspective on a contemporary tragedy, Methland ultimately offers the very thing that meth once took from Oelwein: hope.
