Silent Spring - by Rachel Carson

If I believed in reincarnation, I would have good reason to think that I was Rachel Carson in a previous life. She died about six weeks before I was born which was, in fact, on the anniversary of her birth. Both of our births are celebrated today. I recently also learned that her iconic work, Silent Spring was originally published on the same day that my sister was born in 1962. Furthermore, Carson has ties both to my hometown of Baltimore, Maryland (where she studied at Johns Hopkins University and wrote about natural history and the Chesapeake Bay for the Baltimore Sun) and also to my adopted home state of Massachusetts where she worked at the Woods Hole Biological Laboratory. 

Carson wrote for the general public, not for the scientific community. My limited scientific education did not deter me from being able to access and discuss this work, and defend it to skeptics. Anyone who wants to know more about the consequences of the overuse of pesticides will find this work accessible.

When I was once asked to read from a book that changed my life I chose the Introduction to this work - "A Fable for tomorrow" - which describes a future in which there are no birds or insects. A future in which the landscape has been decimated by the use of insecticides. This book was integral to the banning of DDT and launched the modern environmental movement.

I know from my own research about Carson that this work was meticulously researched, and that she made good use of libraries while writing it. She names two librarians in particular in her Acknowlegements.

"Every writer of a book based on many diverse facts owes much to the skill and helpfulness of librarians. I owe such a debt to many, but especially Ida K. Johnston of the Department of the Interior Library and to Thelma Robinson of the Library of the National Institutes of Health".

Happy Birthday, Rachel!

Breakfast at Tiffany's - by Truman Capote

My husband, James, shares a birthday with Audrey Hepburn, and so we watched the movie based on this book earlier this month, about which James then wrote his own blog post. It was probably the third time we'd seen the film, but I had never read the book. The movie has a great library scene in which writer Paul Varjak (played by George Peppard) takes an uninitiated Holly Golightly (Hepburn) into the New York Public Library and shows her how to request a book. He requests a book from the closed stacks that he, himself authored, and then proceeds to inscribe it, much to the horror of the very stereotypical librarian on duty. What's more important though, is that after this first foray into the library Miss Golightly makes her way back there in order to do some research on South America. In the book Varjak is not so much an accomplished writer, and so has no published book to autograph at the NYPL. Furthermore, Golightly needs no initial guidance in the use of the library in order to find out what she needs. Varjak does, however, allow as how he did not immediately recognize the "girl who ran up the steps of the Forth-second Street public library...for Holly and libraries were not an easy association."

Yes Please - by Amy Poehler (the audiobook)

About a month after Christmas was over I found a copy of Poehler's audiobook "hidden" in a drawer in my living room. I asked my husband if he had put it there, and his response was "I wondered what I did with that." It was apparently intended to go in my stocking, but my absent-minded professor sometimes can't keep track of what he does with things. No matter, he and I listened to this together in the car mostly during trips back and forth to our daughter's boarding school (about 30 miles from our home). We wrapped it up yesterday while enjoying a ride on a beautiful spring day in our new-to-us car with the sunroof open.

This is a funny, and empowering book. Poehler tells of growing up in a Boston suburb; her college years; paying her dues working as a waitress while honing her comedic skills; her time on Saturday Night Live, and Parks & Recreation; and her insights into parenting. And, as if all this weren't enough to recommend it, in the final chapter (which Poehler recorded live at the Upright Citizen's Brigade Theater) the author explains a benefit to NOT having information at your fingertips (via cell phones) at all times. Back in the day when you had to go to the LIBRARY to do research, disturbing images would be part of a book or magazine and included "text" and more importantly "context". As an example she relates looking up the Boston Marathon bombing on her cell phone, and the first thing she saw was a photograph of a man who had had his legs blown off. She contrasts this with the image of the naked girl running from the napalm bombs in Vietnam in 1972 which at the time, one would have seen in print, as part of a news story.

This is the first audiobook I've written about in the four years that I've kept this blog. Well done, Amy.

Lagniappe:
There is plenty of librarian fun in Poehler's television series Parks & Recreation. Although she plays an evil librarian Megan Mullally as Tammy Swanson is so funny she is hard to hate.

Lagniappe 2:
Poehler's Facebook page Smart Girls is well worth "liking".

Notes From a Big Country - by Bill Bryson

This collection of essays was originally published as a series of columns about the United States for the U.K. publication the Mail on Sunday's Night and Day magazine in the late 1990s. Although some references are a bit dated now (e.g. floppy disks, woes of land-line telephones) the anecdotes were still laugh-out-loud funny. My husband and I read these together over the course of the long winter. The right-on-target observations about life in the USA in Bryson's inimitable style were the perfect antidote to the winter doldrums we experienced in New England this year. As a bonus, Bryson mentioned libraries in six of his essays

In "Well, Doctor, I was Just Trying to Lie Down" Bryson begins with some information from one of my all-time favorite reference books The Statistical Abstract of the United States. His discussion of the number of people injured (400,000) by beds, mattresses, and pillows segues into what he learned from the Abstract 's"Table No. 206: Injuries Associated with Consumer Products" which he specifically says he found in his local library while "looking up something else altogether". This is what is so great about the print version of the Abstract. It is an absolutely fabulous browsing book. Before there was FaceBook to waste time on, there was the Statistical Abstract.

Explaining American's penchant for rules in "Rule Number 1: Follow All Rules" he describes his frustration in the constant changing of rules without warning. The first time he found out about airline rules regarding showing a picture ID before boarding (and this was pre 9/11) he was at an airport checking in for a flight. He discovers that he has "all kinds of identification - a library card, credit card, Social Security card [remember when we used to carry those around with us?], health insurance card, airline ticket" all had his name, but none had his picture. He illustrates his priorities so well - here - 120 miles away from home, he did not bring a driver's license, but he did carry his library card.

American's love affair with cars is treated in "Why No One Walks". Like me, Bryson chose to live in a place "within walking distance of shops." He describes Hanover, New Hampshire as a "typical New England college town, pleasant, sedate, and compact. It has a broad green, an old-fashioned Main Street, nice college buildings with big lawns, and leafy residential streets. It is, in short, an agreeable place to stroll. Nearly everyone in town is within a level five-minute walk of the shops" yet, he explains, no one walks, except him. He walks "nearly every day...to the post office or the library or the local bookshop". Bryson and I are rare breeds here in the United States. Driving is something I know how to do, but will avoid whenever possible.

On informality in America (in "Help for the Nondesignated Individual") Bryson extols the wonders of living near the campus of Dartmouth College

one of the Ivy League colleges, like Harvard and Yale - but you would never guess it.

None of its grounds are off limits...Indeed much of it is open to the community. We can use the library attend its concerts, go to its commencement exercises if we want.

This, of course is how it should be. Living and working in a college town myself I know how contentious town/gown relations can be. Opening events, and the library, up to the local community is not only a good PR move, it is the right thing to do. One of the first papers I wrote in library school was on community use of academic libraries. I think any college or university, public or private, has an obligation to allow at least some use of its library facilities to the local community.  I am glad to say that the university library in which I work allows free borrowing privileges to anyone who lives in town.

There is little that gets my geographer husband and I more excited than reading something that entwines his passion for places and mine for books and libraries together. So you can only imagine the magical evening we had after reading "Where Scotland is and other Useful Tips" in which Bryson tells of going to the library in order to "look at the travel section." There he found "four books exclusively on Britain, plus another eight or so on Europe generally, with chapters on Britain". Ultimately he discovers that "what Americans know about Britain is pretty much nearly nothing..."

And, finally, in "The Fat of the Land" Bryson describes his misadventures in dieting and a trip to the library to find a book with a better diet than the bran and water diet one his wife invented for him. He settles on a work titled Don't Diet which he reads in "that reading area that libraries set aside for people who are strange and have nowhere else to go in the afternoons but none the less are not quite ready to be institutionalized..."

While there are no other libraries to write about, my reference librarian self would be remiss if I did not correct the mistake Bryson makes in his essay about our shared favorite holiday - Thanksgiving - in "The Best American Holiday." He provides some history of the pilgrims, and when President Lincoln declared it a national holiday in 1863 to be celebrated on the last Thursday of November, however; Bryson then goes on to say that "there it has stayed ever since." This is not quite true, in 1939 President Roosevelt moved it to the fourth Thursday of the month. While the fourth Thursday is often the last one, in years in which there are five Thursdays in the month Thanksgiving remains on the fourth. This ensures that there are always at least four full (shopping) weekends before Christmas.

While probably not what most would suggest for date night, I highly recommend reading this with a romantic partner. Laughing together is a wonderful aphrodisiac. My husband was happy to see that I found another of Bryson's books (A Short History of Nearly Everything) for us to read together. If there are any libraries in that one you will no doubt find out about it here. For more Bryson fun, I also recommend A Walk in the Woods. 

If I Stay - By Gayle Forman

An interesting premise for a book - much of the action in this young adult novel is the out-of-body experience of Mia, a young musician who, along with her parents and younger brother, is a victim of a devastating car accident. Out-of-Body Mia watches and listens as her relatives, friends, and boyfriend visit comatose Mia. She hears a nurse tell her grandparents that she (Mia) is in charge of everything that is happening, and Mia then understands that she must decide whether to live or die. The story alternates between what is going on in the hospital's ICU, and memories of Mia's life before the accident. It is a good book which almost didn't made the cut for this blog; however, one library metaphor in which Mia describes the hospital chapel as "hushed...a library kind of quiet" is all that is needed for its inclusion here. It was then just icing on the cake when we learn that cousin Heather "has decided she wants to become a librarian". This by way of Mia's grandmother who "twitters on for...five minutes, filling [Mia] in on mundane news" along with tidbits of information on gardening and cooking.

Clara and the Bookwagon - by Nancy Smiler Levinson (In honor of National Bookmobile Day)

This easy-to-read book for children is based on the story of the first bookmobile, a horse-drawn wagon that served rural Maryland (my home state) at the turn of the 20th century.

Young Clara very much wants to learn to read, but her parents tell her they have no money for books, and are too busy running the farm to read in any case. When the bookwagon comes to her farm she and the librarian convince her parents that learning to read with the books she can borrow free of charge, will not only add to the quality of her life, but may also help her learn new things that will benefit the farm.

Midnight Library - by Kazuno Kohara (In Honor of National Library Worker's Day)

Number One on this list of Twelve Children's Picture Books with Non-Princess Female Protagonists is this empowering, and sweet, tale about a little librarian who runs a nighttime library for animals with the help of three owl assistants. She clearly has book knowledge as she helps Miss Wolf find a book that is not too sad, and also provides community space for a band of squirrels to practice their music, and finally assists a tortoise with getting his first library card and checking out a book. I was glad to find it on the shelf of the library in which I work. Definitely a "feel good" book for librarians of all ages.