MarysLibrary

All the King's Men

I really should be re-reading more of those books I remember having enjoyed back, as they say, in the day. They so often prove to be even better than I realized at the time.

One of those books that excited me when I read it many years ago was All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren. The 22nd Avenue Book Club read it a couple of months ago, and it struck me this time as a quintessentially American sort of book, dealing as it does with corruption in southern politics and the dangers of populist movements.

The themes running through the story are so basic and important. What is the difference between right and wrong and who is to decide and on what basis. Does all good really come from evil? Are we born burdened with original sin and if so how do we relieve ourselves of it?

I'm making the novel sound as deep and slow-moving as the Mississippi at Baton Rouge, but it's not. It's a lively story with varied characters all of whom we identify with at some point in the story. The narrator, Jack Burden, is wandering, trying to find his way in the world and he wanders into the purview of Willie Stark, the Huey Long character who changes the face of the state with his public works projects. Willie does a lot to help the people of Louisiana, but he does it with rigged contracts and back room deals. Jack Burden does his dirty work, finding the weak points of his opponents so that Willie can blackmail and threaten and get men to do his bidding. When Jack is assigned to find something on his childhood father figure, Judge Irwin, he realizes he is dealing with life and death matters.

All of the characters are broken by the end of the book, and we are left with the question: can their lives be put back together again?

The book club went on to watch the 1949 movie and I also saw the re-make with Sean Penn and Jude Law, which was just as good, though in a different way. If you want to understand American politics All the King's Men, the book or either movie, is a good place to start.

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This Book Is Overdue

We librarians don't find many books and movies that glamorize our profession, though Desk Set and The Gun in Betty Lou's Handbag at least don't portray us frowning, with our grey hair in buns and a finger to our lips, shushing. The action figure of Nancy Pearl does and that's a crime as a librarian less likely to shush and with more of a sense of humor probably doesn't exist.

So it was a delight to discover This Book is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All by Marilyn Johnson, who a while back wrote that fascinating collection of obits,The Dead Beat. She said she got the idea to write this book because the obituaries of librarians she found depicted people who led such interesting lives.

And so they continue to do.

The librarians and archivists she interviewed for this book will be a surprise to those who haven't been keeping up with the clever world of cyber-librarianship. These young people (and a few oldsters) use the web to find the darndest things.

And the old "cite your source" rule still applies, even if the source is a web page posted by an author for a 4-hour period back in 2008. While many of us Google a topic and then wallow in pages of less than useful sites or rely on Wikipedia, which is not always as reliable as one might imagine, these librarians can link us to solid sources like Radical Reference. One of Johnson's discoveries is Second Life, a virtual world created, maintained, and peopled by librarians (you can join, too.) Librarian avatars go about with "Reference" signs over their heads and if you ask a question he/she will find you some dependable information.

Blogs are popular these days with hip librarians. Free Range Librarian, Annoyed Librarian, The Librarian's Rant, Effing Librarian, Miss Information, Infobabe, The Obnoxious Librarian from Hades, they all have a lot to say and say it in a most amusing way.

One librarian Johnson interviews who works in a public library creates signs to address specific behavior problems that have arisen at her library:

Iguanas are not allowed in the building.

You may not take the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue into the washroom.

While waiting for your ride home, do not set fire to your homework to keep warm.

It sounds like patrons, as we librarians patronizingly call library users, are up to the same sorts of tricks they were pulling when I was working in the juvenile room (shows how old I am) of The New Bedford Free Public Library, at left.

The stories go on and on and the profiles of remarkable librarians and archivists are many. We pass by Patience and Fortitude to visit the back rooms of the New York Public Library, where many and sometimes alarming changes are being made by the library board behind closed doors. That's Patience to the right. We learn some of the nitty-gritty about those on-line catalogs our local libraries have all migrated to. (We learn what it means to migrate in library lingo, and that it's never as easy as it sounds.) 

We travel with a Brooklyn archivist who is able to save the world's largest collection of books, clippings, and memorabilia about boxing that miraculously escaped destruction in a Florida hurricane. We hit the streets with blackberry- and portable printer-carrying librarians at a political demonstration who can provide maps to nearby restrooms, tell you what's happening where, and steer you away from the spots where the police are cracking down (sometimes literally.) We meet people who are struggling to save information that has been stored on media that is now obsolete.

Where do I stop? The book is crammed with anecdotes and sources like these.

I rate it five on a scale of one to five.

 

 

Reform

"In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, 'I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away.' To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: 'If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.'"

-- G.K. Chesterton, The Thing

All the King's Men

The 22nd Avenue Book Club read Robert Penn Warren's 1946 novel, All the King's Men, last month. At tonight's meeting we saw the 1949 movie starring Broderick Crawford as Willie Stark (and John Derek as Tom Stark!)

One of our members, Theresa, has a media room with a big wall screen, surround sound, and really comfortable seats and her house has become the unofficial movie palace for the book club. We read a book every other month. On off months we either have a party or watch a movie, often a movie adaption of the book we've just been reading.

This has been the most popular book we've read in the three and a half years the book club has existed.

 

Miss Georgianna Darcy

 

Testament

  Once in a while I read a book that interests me not only because of the subject and the characters and the use of language but also because of the narrative structure. And one narrative structure that I happen to like (some people hate it) is the past/present split.

Testament, written by Alis Hawkins and published in 2008, which I heard about from Cornflower who chose it for her reading club a few months ago, employs such a structure. It takes place both in 1385 when a secular liberal arts college is being built in a fictional third English university town, and in the present when that college is in financial trouble and is threatened with a takeover by a man who wants to make it, in effect, a business school.

The book is what we call a page turner and there is a structural reason for this. The episodes in the past alternate rapidly with those in the present, few of them in either time longer than 15 or 20 pages. And each of these short tableaux ends on a note of suspense. Sometimes it's mild - how will his patron respond to the master mason's blunt statement that he will not compromise his standards for anyone? And sometimes it's graphic and even frightening - what will the mason find at his building site when he hears loud noises and shouting?

The book is so carefully constructed that you almost always have that urge to read one more page as you grow more deeply involved with the brilliant fund raiser who in the present is trying to figure out the meaning of a recently discovered mural and how to exploit it to interest the alumni in the fate of their college, and you anguish with the 14th century woman master carpenter as she tries to convince the people of the city that her son is not cursed.

I give books a score in my database - 1 to 5, based on my enjoyment of the book and on it's literary worth. For example, Kafka usually gets a 3.5 from me because although it's great literature I don't enjoy it at all. Many novels of Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope get a full 5 because they meet both criteria. Testament, like the recent Wolf Hall, gets a 5. It's that good. Dont' miss it.

(Photo from Cornflower Books.)

What's the library worth to you?

The Massachusetts Library Association has created a calculator to determine the value of the library services you use. A reference question, for example, is worth $7. Borrowing a CD they estimate is worth $9.95, the iTunes average for buying an album.

I filled in the form and a conservative estimate of my library use in one year is $10,000.

This Is My Daughter

This Is My Daughter by Roxana Robinson (1998) is a book that I found hard to put down, but then I found it hard to pick up again. There is such an undertone of sadness that it's almost a relief when something dreadful happens at the end of Part II and the characters begin both to separate themselves from one another and to come together.

Here's what Library Journal had to say: In this emotionally rich and evocatively detailed novel, Robinson tells the story of a difficult second marriage. Emma is fiercely protective of her young daughter, Tess, while Peter is more detached from teenaged daughter Amanda, oblivious to her attitudes and activities. Put together, they form a household rife with tension. For although theirs is a world of spacious Manhattan apartments and summer houses, wealth does not insulate them from sorrow. Emma and Peter do their best for the girls, but Tess and Amanda have their own opinions about this new family, and it is their actions, as much as those of the grownups, that propel the novel forward. The book is beautifully written, with each burnished chapter exhibiting Robinson's understanding and compassion.

I Am Nujood

Sad though this recently published book is I’m glad I read I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced. It's a short, simple and gripping story told by Nujood Ali herself, with the help of a writer named Delphine Minoui.

Nujood, who is from Yemen, has become world famous for her brave demand at age 10 for a divorce. I read the book in part because I'm appalled at the forced marriage of girls as young as nine or ten years old, a practice that is widespread in the Islamic world. It’s justified because Muhammad married a child of nine.

In part because of his addiction to the amphetamine-like stimulant qat* her father was unable to support his family. So when she was about 10 years old he sold Nujood to a man three times her age. Her husband took her to an isolated village where she became a prisoner. He repeatedly raped and beat her and she got no help or even sympathy from his family.

On a visit to her parents in Sanaa Nujood ran away and found a sympathetic woman lawyer who helped her obtain a divorce. Courage and determination are words often thrown about casually but this is a child with extraordinary courage and stiff determination. Because of her fame she has been able to return to school and wants to be a lawyer.

 

* Qat is so popular in Yemen that its cultivation consumes much of the country's agricultural resources. It is estimated that 40% of the country's water supply goes towards irrigating it, with production increasing by about 10% to 15% every year. Water consumption is so high that groundwater levels in the Sanaa basin are diminishing; because of this, government officials have proposed relocating large portions of the population of Sanaa to the coast of the Red Sea. - Wikipedia

Dropping In

The president stopped by my sister's airport today. He was on his way from Portland to Framingham and because of the rain and flooding in New England the places where he could transfer from his helicopter to his limo were limited.

Since it was no big deal to close the airport (Marlborough Airport isn't exactly O'Hare) and since Marlborough is close to Framingham, Sandy's little airfield was chosen. Dogs sniffing the hangars and the aircraft, snipers on the roof, vehicles from the Massachusetts transportation department, Boston Police, Cambridge Police, Framingham Police, Marlborough Police, and the state police - well, it was quite the scene, as you can see in the video attached to this Metrowest news report.

Sandy is now on a first name basis with several Secret Service agents.