Your Business Needs Are Our Business

Are you looking for a few good leads to increase your sales? Trying to figure out what's the best mutual fund for you? Or maybe you're doing some market research and want to know how Kibbles 'n Bits stacks up against Purina in terms of annual sales? Well, we've been working hard to get you those answers & to make them available for you in the comfort of your home!

So how about them Kibbles? For market statistics, RDS Business Suite has some of the best answers--it uses Tablebase, a search engine that brings together statistical research on over 90 industries world-wide.

Need some great investment tips? In addition to Morningstar, we've just picked up Standard & Poor's NetAdvantage, which gives ratings & reports for almost thousands of stocks and mutual funds.


Looking for some new sales leads? Check out Hoover's, a resource of first resort for businesspeople looking for a head start on their sales.


And of course there's many more business-oriented online resources made available to you that might become one of those "must see" sites for your day-to-day operations --for a full list go to http://www.wellesleyfreelibrary.org/Online%20Resources/subject.html#business

MW

More New Books for November

A few more titles coming out in November:

Port Mortuary by Patricia Cornwell

Edge by Jeffery Deaver

Cross Fire by James Patterson

maf

Fiction National Book Award Finalists Announced

On Wednesday, October 13, Pat Conroy announced the fiction finalists for the 2010 National Book Award. Stay tuned for the winner to be announced on November 16.

Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America--Olivier is the traumatized child of aristocratic survivors of the French Revolution. Parrot is the motherless son of an itinerant English printer. They are born on different sides of history, but their lives will be connected in the United States by an enigmatic one-armed marquis.

Jaimy Gordon, Lord of Misrule--Lord of Misrule is a darkly realistic novel about a young woman living through a year of horse racing at a half-mile track in West Virginia, while everyone's best laid schemes keep going brutally wrong.

Nicole Krauss, Great House--The lives of four strangers are thrown into chaos over an enormous, stolen desk, including an antique dealer in Jerusalem, a man in London, and an American novelist who inherited it from a poet and victim of Pinochet's secret police.

Lionel Shriver, So Much for That--From the author of The Post-Birthday World and A Perfectly Good Family comes this deeply resonant novel that looks at a failing marriage and America's healthcare system, and poses the disturbing moral question that affects more people every day: How much is one life worth?

Karen Tei Yamashita, I Hotel--Dazzling and ambitious, this hip, multi-voiced fusion of prose, playwriting, graphic art, and philosophy spins an epic tale of America's struggle for civil rights as it played out in San Francisco's Chinatown. Divided into ten novellas, one for each year, I Hotel begins in 1968, when Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, students took to the streets, the Vietnam War raged, and cities burned. (Publisher's Description) SH

Get your Crystal Ball Out : Authors Predict the Future

The world is an uncertain place, which is why the future fascinates us. See what these recent Nostradamus’s have to say.



The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century
by George Friedman

Friedman explains where and why future wars will erupt (and how they will be fought), which nations will gain and lose economic and political power, and how new technologies and cultural trends will alter the way we live in the new century.




Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years
by Vaclav Smil

Smil argues that understanding change will help us reverse negative trends and minimize the risk of catastrophe.








The Way We Will Be 50 Years from Today: 60 of the World's Greatest Minds Share Their Visions of the Next Half-Century
by Mike Wallace (Editor)

Journalist Mike Wallace asks the question "What will life be like 50 years from now?" to sixty of the world's greatest minds. Their responses offer a fascinating glimpse into the cultural, scientific, political, and spiritual moods of the times.





Future Files: The 5 Trends That Will Shape the Next 50 Years
by Richard Watson

Watson looks at influential developments including aging, global connectivity, global political shifts and emerging new technologies that will radically alter human life by the year 2050.






This Will Change Everything : Ideas That Will Shape the Future
by John Brockman

Ian McEwan, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and 150 other intellectuals reveal the next big ideas that have the potential to change the world.

TB

How much? How many?

How many carpet installers are there in Massachusetts and what's their median wage? Compare the wages and numbers of carpenters and electricians. Find these occupational statistics and more at Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram Alpha is the go-to site for computations of all sorts. Input your birthday and you won't just find some random anniversaries. Oh no--You'll know immediately how many days you've been alive, what your birthday looks like on the Mayan Haab calendar, the shape of the moon on that day and lots more useful information. Enter a food and get the complete nutritional breakdown. You can even cheat at scrabble by entering "scrabble" with 7 letters. There are thousands of other numbers that can be crunched. Include among these comparing two colleges, finding historical weather, translating words or numbers into barcodes or calculating the exchange rate of your favorite currency.
Try it; it's definitely got bookmark potential.
--RL

New Books for November

Lots of titles coming out in November. Take a look at few:

Hell's Corner by David Baldacci

Moonlight Mile by Dennis Lehane

Rescue by Anita Shreve

World and Town by Gish Jen

October's WFL Online Resource of the Month

When you want more information on any book, give our Online Resource of the Month for October a try. It's called Literature Resources from Gale. This service searches literature criticism, biographies, work and topic overviews, reviews, and full text of many literary works including novels, short stories, drama, and poetry. It includes some of the most important literary reference works available, including:

• Contemporary Authors
• Dictionary of Literary Biography
• Contemporary Literary Criticism

plus 850,000+ full text articles, critical essays and reviews from over 390 academic journals and literary magazines, 8500+ interviews and 6,000+ links to credible websites.

Whether you are a student, a member of a book group, or simply a literature lover, this resource has something for you!

(You will need your Minuteman Library Card number to sign in from home.) SH

Your Library Card--Never Leave Home Without It

With the new RFID self-checkout at Wellesley Free Library, patrons need to remember to bring their library cards. The ALA came up with 52 ways to use your library card, thus making it even more important than ever to carry it with you at all times. SH

look at your grades, now look at mine!

Ok, here's the setup: you've seen the hilarious Old Spice commercials, right? Whaddya mean you haven't seen them? Okay, then take a minute to watch the video below and then keep reading. . . . .



Now there might be some of you so tuned in to libraryland that you've already seen this hilarious video, a riff on the Old Spice Guy, produced for the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University. Enjoy the laughs while learning a little--because you'll know 8 out of 5 dentists say that studying in a library is 6 BAJILION time more effective than studying in your shower!



MW