Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service - edited by Michael Lewis

Each essay in this collection features an unsung federal government employee. People we've never heard of who go to work daily and keep the government going. These profiles of humble yet remarkable workers include number crunchers, data keepers, and health workers. Of special interest to me was Sarah Vowell's essay on one of her fellow Montanans Pamela Wright of the National Archives aka "The Equalizer". Wright intends to digitize all documents available in the National Archives so that anyone can access them online no matter where they are in the world, and so that they are preserved for future generations. Presidential records, maps, censuses as well as original documents including the United States Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are all part of what is preserved in the National Archives. That is unless a convicted felon steals them and puts them in a private bathroom. 

It is noteworthy that this book was published in 2024, before Trump's second term and before the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was established. Since its writing Trump has fired Dr. Colleen Shogan, the National Archivist without cause.

I recommend this worthwhile and accessible read to all.

The Paris Library - by Janet Skeslien Charles

Numbers floated round my head like stars. 823. The numbers were the key to new life. 822. Constellations of hope. 841. In my bedroom late at night, in the morning on the way to get croissants, series after series - 810,840,890-formed in front of my eyes. They represented freedom, the future.

So begins the story of Odile Souchet who thinks in Dewey Decimal numbers. She is thrilled to get a job at the American Library in Paris in 1939 where she can put both her library degree and her ability to speak English to good use. She has always loved books and the library, a place she frequented with her aunt as a child.  

Her job becomes a lot more challenging when Nazi's occupy her beloved "city of readers". The subversive librarians (including the aptly named Miss Reeder) find ways to continue to provide books and services to their Jewish patrons, even after the library is closed to them. Nazi's also looted libraries as well as the private collection of "prominent Jewish families" Additionally, censors regularly blacked out news from the daily papers making the sharing of knowledge that much more difficult. "Fake news" in the form of rumors also shakes up the library as a "sanctuary of facts" as patrons share misinformation with each other. 

Shushing is of course a time-honored tradition in libraries (at least as far as popular culture is concerned). While I will admit to having shushed a few exceptionally loud library users (usually university administrators) I have also, ironically, been shushed myself by people trying to study in the library, just as librarian Odile was shushed when she "screamed with joy" after returning to the library after 10 days of being away and seeing her brother's girlfriend Bitsi (who was also the children's librarian). In one passage Bitsi is described as "holding an open book over her head, like it's a roof" as if she is telling "the children that books are a sanctuary".

The story oscillates between Paris during World War II and Froid, Montana in the 1980s. Virtually all of the passages I marked while reading this are in the sections that take place in France. The only exception comes very late in the book. Lily, Odile's young neighbor storms "Dad's wife took away Forever!...She said Judy Blume writes 'smut'.' Censorship is wrong!" To which Odile responds "So is throwing a fit instead of sitting down to have a conversation...You should ask Ellie what she fears." She goes on to explain that "Ellie's scared the book will put ideas in your head, scared you'll want to experiment with sex." Lily retorts "I read Out of Africa and disn't establish a coffee plantation in Kenya!" I of course agree that censorship is wrong. I also agree that having a conversation is better than throwing a fit.

The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet - by Reif Larsen

A novel about grief, youth, and science, with some history, some travel, and a bit of magic realism thrown in.

Twelve-year old T.S. (Tecumseh Sparrow) Spivet is surprised to receive a call from the Smithsonian Institution informing him he has been awarded the Baird fellowship, a prize he has never heard of, for his exceptional illustrations and maps. Sure that his parents will not allow him to go to Washington, and knowing that the Smithsonian has no idea that he is a child, he packs his bag and leaves his ranch one morning in order to hop a train from his hometown in Montana and head east and claim his prize. The novel is divided into three parts. The first tells of his preparations for going east. The second is about the journey, which turned out to be really more of an odyessey, complete with a "cyclops" attack in the form of an over-zealous preacher with a lazy eye who stabs our young hero when he reaches Chicago. The final part tells of T.S.'s time in the nation's capital. Throughout the work readers are drawn to the marginalia which are drawings, or sometimes sidebars that provide more insight into the prodigy's world.

For someone who must do a lot of research, T.S. doesn't talk much about going to the library. It probably isn't easy for him though, as he lives on a ranch, and  can't just ride his bike to the public library after school. However, he does acknowledge sometimes riding with his father into town on Saturdays to go to the Butte Archives which were "crammed inside the upper story of an old converted firehouse...[and] could barely contain the haphazard array of historical detritus...[It] smelled of mildewed newspaper and a very particular, slightly acrid lavender perfume that the old woman who tended the stacks, Mrs. Tathertum, wore quite liberally." T.S. describes a "Pavlovian" reaction to the smell of the perfume which "instantly transported back that feeling of discovery, the sensation of fingertips against old paper, whose surface was powdery and fragile, like the membrane of a moth's wing." This passage really celebrates what archives are - true places of discovery, where any researcher may uncover some unknown artifact and experience a real sense of wonder in its age, and ponder who saved it in the first place, and why.

There are two side bar entries about books he checked out from the Butte Public Library. One of them mentions the classic children's book From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. I can't remember where else I heard that book mentioned recently, but seeing it here made me think it has achieved some sort of legendary status. Even those who haven't read it, have probably at least heard of it.

While T.S. is on the train he passes some of the time reading a journal his mother wrote - a fictionalized account of his ancestry. It is in this journal that we learn that his great-great grandmother, Emma Osterville, completed her dissertation using the "libraries down at Yale".

While libraries are not heavily commented upon in this work, it is clear that T.S. recognizes their importance, and enjoys them when he can.