Up From Bleed, Blister and Purge

Frontier Medicine
By David Dary
(Knopf, 381 pages, $30)

To think that I wince when I get a needle; reading just the review is ... er, incredible? Awe-inspiring? Gruesome?

In December 1809, Jane Crawford, 45 years old and living in a small log cabin in backwoods Kentucky, thought she was pregnant. Her belly was so enlarged that local doctors agreed that she was set to deliver her long-overdue twins. These physicians enlisted the aid of Ephraim McDowell, a highly regarded general practitioner from nearby Danville, who determined that Crawford was not pregnant but suffering from a massive ovarian tumor. "I gave to the unhappy woman information of her dangerous situation," McDowell would later write. "She'd appeared willing to undergo an experiment."

1809. Imagine how primitive medicine was then; I know that in the Civil War, a half century later, it was rudimentary.

Up until that point in medical history, before anesthesia or antisepsis, a fatality was the most likely outcome of abdominal surgery. McDowell knew as much, but insisted that the procedure was essential for Jane Crawford's survival.

No anesthesia for surgery. I get anesthesia for dental work.

McDowell made a nine-inch vertical cut into his patient's abdomen. For 25 minutes, Crawford endured unbearable pain while singing hymns and repeating Psalms. First, McDowell scooped out 15 pounds of a "dirty, gelatinous looking substance," then he excised 7.5 pounds of actual tumor, including the ovary and a portion of the Fallopian tube. Once all the tumorous material had been removed, McDowell turned his patient on her left side to allow the accumulated blood to escape, then he carefully replaced Crawford's intestines, which had spilled out during the operation, and finally closed the incision with sutures and adhesive plaster.

Oy.

As Ms. Dary explains, the surgery itself was unremarkable in its simplicity but memorable for what happened afterward. Crawford received no pain medicines, no antibiotics, no intravenous fluids, no formal post-operative care, but she rode her horse home after three weeks and suffered no complications. She lived to age 78, the world's first known survivor of an elective exploration of the abdomen and removal of an ovary.

Amazing.

Mr. Dary is masterly in his telling of the Crawford-McDowell tale, but he shows less facility when he discusses how this triumph fits into the larger universe of 19th-century medicine. In a recurring pattern, Mr. Dary uses his excellent research for compelling dramatic effect, as when he describes how Dr. William Beaumont, treating a Michigan fur trapper who had been shot in the abdomen in 1822, was unable to close the wound entirely. The doctor, afforded this window on the man's stomach, went on to make groundbreaking observations about the digestive process. With the Beaumont story, as with many others, Mr. Dary shows his customary brio but then seems to lose interest – as did this reader – when he ponders the meaning of it all.

Resourcefulness on the part of Dr. Beaumont, indeed. As for Mr. Dary, it seems that great research and narrative are not accompanied by equally gifted analysis.

Occasional inaccuracies, however, do not discredit the overall thrust of "Frontier Medicine" or the depth of Mr. Dary's research. He does an admirable job of pulling together stories about health care as practiced by Native Americans, Lewis and Clark, Civil War doctors and even 20th-century quacks. Moving briskly from one episode to the next, Mr. Dary is particularly effective at showing us the strengths and foibles of early American doctors, an often suspect class of professionals who now and again did more harm than healing. It is entertaining, enlightening material, but more analysis – of how these unrelated medical vignettes contributed to the process of professionalization that affected the education, training and personal lives of physicians – would have greatly enhanced "Frontier Medicine." History, medical or otherwise, is most useful when it strives to be more than a chronicle of tales – however diverting they might be – spun by a seasoned raconteur.

Wimp? Me? Nah!

For the second day running, a trouble patron was in the Library. The responses of the library staff, my own response among them, are matters of consideration, of reflection, of thought.

At precisely 9am on Tuesday, 25 November, a man walked into the computer area in the Reference Department of my Library. After two years of working in a, in this, public library setting, following my twenty five year business career, having been parent to two children, after a lifetime of experience, I could, and did, immediately determine and know that this patron was going to be a handful.

How did I know? How do I presume to say I knew?

He wore layers of pants. Flip-up sunglasses left on tortoise-shell frames. A flippancy that was not flippant but clearly a mental illness. Rambling that never stopped. Intuition. Knowledge. I knew.

He asked me to type in an URL that he claimed he could not see well enough to try it himself. It seemed, sorta, a reasonable request. It was a Medline Plus page. The URL was duly complex and convoluted. Quickly I noticed the top of the page: Results 1-10 of 17 for schizophrenic drugs. That caught my attention, alerted me, and told me much.

In the next few minutes it became clear that this was one handful of a patron. Needy, every five minutes he was asking for assistance, for information, for attention. Naturally wanting to help, I told him about our database machines, which could be used to access verified health websites.

Nothing suited him, satisfied his needs, nor pleased him enough to render his need for incessant attention and endless complaining fulfilled. It took not very long to begin to understand that this patron, a visitor to my Library, was not so much interested in results as in verbalizing, complaining, making a spectacle of himself and his desires, needs and wonts. He was in the Library from exactly 9am until exactly 9pm. He had to be told that the Library was closed in order for him to be made to leave. And he was back this morning at precisely 9am, still as needy, as demanding, as frustrating, as exasperating, as the prior day.

And he was allowed to stay. No one in authority on the Library staff threw him out. He was allowed to exploit the system, to game it, to do as he wished.

I took him aside when I went on to work the Reference Desk at 2 this afternoon, into the art gallery, away from everyone, in relative privacy, and told him: we are librarians; we are not your personal assistants. We will help you to get going, but we will not be at your beck and call every five minutes. We have other work to do.

He was not really listening. He did not bother to try to make eye contact. I saw that, yet I still though that I needed to make a point. We went back inside. He was back at the Reference Desk within one minute, begging for attention. I ignored him, but, to my chagrin, one of my colleagues went over to help him.

Wimp librarian.

The guy's question was rudimentary. He was looking at a PDF, and it was showing on the screen rotated 90 degrees from portrait mode. Figuring out how to deal with it would be very simple. Print one page (between yesterday morning at 2pm this afternoon he, easily, had already printed out a couple of hundred pages, accessed a few dozen websites), see what results, then act accordingly. But he needed the attention. Just as a teen, a pre-teen, a child needs attention, obsessively; ignore the question, force him to deal with it himself, and he would figure it out.

But he was not ignored, and he did not need to figure it out himself. THIS IS THE VERY ESSENCE OF LIBRARIAN WIMPISHNESS.

This guy should have been thrown out of the Library yesterday. He was disruptive, he abused his privileges, and he disturbed the rhythm and flow of the Library. Yet he was allowed to stay. He was allowed to control the flow of events.

Same today. He was in at 9am, got on the computer, and aggravated everyone for hours. He operated on the premise that using the computer and acting out is his right, and no one bothered to point out to him that using the library, and its resources, is a privilege. Not put in his place, he acted out, did as he wanted, and stayed around all day long.

I took him into the privacy of the art gallery and gave him my lecture, but he ignored it, and soon received the attention that reinforced his licentiousness. Another patron told him to "shut up" twice. I got into his face and told him that I would throw him out of the library if he did not exercise restraint, and he parried with me, goading me, clearly smart and savvy enough to know just what what going on. I felt restrained, for the senior librarian, and, as it turned out, the director, were aware of his shenanigans. I was ready and willing to toss him, but did not because of my (perhaps misplaced) regard for protocol and procedure.

The questions are clear, obvious, and beg answering:

* what is a public library's obligations to its patrons?

* where is the line between a right and a privilege to library services?

* how much crap do librarians have to take?

* who is right: a patron who pushes, or a librarian who insists on respect?

I have very definite ideas about these questions, the topics touched thereon, and related issues. I had strong opinions on such topics when I started Library and Information Science School, and I was soon in trouble with LIS instructors: don't rock the boat; don't make waves; who the hell do you think you are? were merely three of the questions I faced as a first-year student who just happened to have already worked for twenty five years in "the private sector" and knew a thing or two about "things".

First, and foremost, librarians needs to insist on respect. We do not get respect. "You need a degree to be a librarian?" was a question I got, which verbalized the public perception of what being a librarian is and entails: dang, guy, all you have to do is look up books; what's the big deal?

We do not insist on being treated with respect. Library taxes are too high is a common refrain that only some people verbalize, but which is clearly commonly held.

Can I get one piece of paper for every tax dollar I pay is another one. Dang, dude, I thought, I have nothing to do with your taxes. Second time that man used that line I did say to him that I have nothing to do with setting tax rates (and that perhaps he should contact the tax assessor), though I saw clearly that the man's problems were deeper than his library-tax rate; he was simply an angry man.

I insist on being treated with respect. I am a professional. I have two Master's degrees. I ain't gonna allow some nitwit to game me.

I like people. In fact, I love people. I enjoy and relish the opportunity to banter with folks, to exchange bon mots, to make suggestions and jokes, to listen to witticisms and ramblings: I became a librarian in part because I simply love people. But I will not be treated with disrespect. Too many librarians will, and do, and that damages our profession.

You think all it takes to be a librarian is to say, hey, just Google it, or dang, just read a Nelson DeMille book? Well, sister, it takes a lot more; look, brother, at what the results are when you google a topic a ninth-grader needs to do a research paper on for History class: can you spot the outright racist crap? Can you differentiate between the valid and the inappropriate? Is there not a database the Library subscribes to that is right for this assignment? Is there more wisdom than watching reality shows? than watching The Daily Show (let alone less-intelligent shows) -- and I dig Jon Stewart much.

It takes a lot of work to get an MLS degree. Having an MLS qualifies me, as it qualifies every holder of such degree, to a hell of a lot more than to be able to tell some twerp that he needs to click on the printer icon in Adobe in order to get a PDF to print; but it requires that every librarian recognize that there is a whole hell of a lot more to being a librarian, professional information specialist, than having people walk all over us because we are too wimpy to tell them to shape up, use their own brain, and stop being such pains in the glutæus maximus.

It is as much, and perhaps more, of our responsibility, as professionals, as librarians, to insist on respect, as it is the public's responsibility to accord us such respect, In fact, such respect will not be given, let alone granted, unless we insist on it.

I insist.

Can't make this stuff up

10.25am on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving; it is as slow as expected. But there is still activity and there are still people to deal with.

A patron came over to say that he wasn't getting wi-fi reception on his laptop computer. This is a fairly common occurrence; when it happens, we contact IT. I picked up the phone, and dialed extension 333.

As I picked up the telephone and dialed, a woman came over and asked for a programs guide.

"I'll be right with you," I said, as the phone rang.

"Oh, you're on the phone?" she asked.

Yes, she did ask.

MacArthur's Reputation

The Question of MacArthur's Reputation
By Robert H. Ferrell
(University of Missouri Press, 111 pages, $19.95)

In an attack that Douglas MacArthur bragged about, and for which he received a medal, an important breakthrough was made on the Hindenburg Line.

MacArthur's heroism on the Châtillon soon became part of his legend and, in the coming decades, figured prominently in his biography. Within weeks of the breakthrough he was bragging about it.

Yes, this is the army man who defied his Commander-in-Chief, President Truman, the very same army man who insisted a line of nuclear weapons be drawn across the Korean Peninsula in order to slow down the Communists. Turns out that Douglas MacArthur was a blowhard. It was not just the liberals thought so; it was the truth. Spin control managed to suppress the truth for decades, but not forever.

MacArthur never fought shy of the limelight – and history has forgiven him, not least because of his heroic leadership in World War II and the Korean War. Yet it is shocking to learn that he wasn't actually present on the Côte de Châtillon on Oct. 16 and that he didn't lead his men through the wire; he was back at a command post behind the lines.

Thus, his words that division commanders must instill 'the fighting spirit' into their commands by personal presence and example' were empty. He lied.

I have long wondered just how heroic this Army officer really was; he seemed very much an usurper, a blowhard, a manipulator. Long ago I read that the well-known (I refuse to call it famous) landing in the Philippines that fulfilled his I shall return pronouncement was staged: he had the photographer take the shot again, so that he would look appropriately heroic. The thesis of this book seems to agree with that judgement.

The attack was led by two exceptional officers: Maj. Lloyd D. Ross and Lt. Col. Walter E. Bare. They instilled the "fighting spirit" in the 167th and 168th Regiments, and they rallied the lines. It is they who deserve the credit that MacArthur claimed for himself.

And his reputation was based on stolen credit. What kind of honor is that?

This extraordinary falsehood is the impetus for Robert H. Ferrell's "The Question of MacArthur's Reputation." Having written widely before on the Meuse-Argonne campaign, Mr. Ferrell was bothered by the contradictions in the accounts of Châtillon. He delved into the archives and, in this rigorously researched and densely constructed historical essay, demolishes MacArthur's pretensions. It isn't just that the general stole credit. When his men failed to take the Châtillon on Oct. 14, he ordered them on a suicidal bayonet assault, at night, against fortified positions. The protests of Ross and Bare saw the order countermanded, which probably saved MacArthur's career.

Reckless, too, not just a liar.

Mr. Ferrell makes little attempt to explain MacArthur's actions. He notes that Gen. John Pershing, the leader of the American Expeditionary Force, badly needed a victory. His first two attacks in the Argonne had failed dismally and the third was failing when Strom and his men sprang open the Dame Marie. MacArthur's regiments then gave the AEF a taste of success. MacArthur was a dashing and convenient hero. As the commanding officer, though, he would have enjoyed a large part of the glory even without claiming to have led the assault itself. Legends are made on the battlefield, where facts are often hard to establish. Mr. Ferrell has established a big one – that, in this case, MacArthur lied. It is up to future biographers to sort out what such a fantasy means to a soldier's reputation.

And I wonder how often this victory of MacArthur's is included in biographies?

New World, New Ideas

The Calvinists who settled Massachusetts Bay in the 17th century – Puritans and Pilgrims alike – lived in what we moderns might call a perpetual state of creative tension. Their worldview was founded on a belief in themselves as a community covenanted with God and bound together in a common calling; yet each member of the community had to find his own salvation alone, in prayer and reflection, while awaiting the divine gift of justifying faith. Calvinist theology told these settlers that God had predestined only a select number to find such faith. Yet they also believed in the freedom of the human will to choose between good and evil. It was a paradox that, in John Calvin's view, would liberate the faithful from the "wheel of works" preached by contemporaneous Catholicism – the need to merit salvation by doing good on Earth. For others, the paradox opened a window to antinomianism, the profoundly destabilizing belief that for the elect all things are permitted.

What we call puritan is hardly was Puritans were, it seems.

Sarah Vowell's "The Wordy Shipmates" is an attempt to recapture this world for present-day sensibilities. In the process, she was written a breezy book about 17th-century Puritans, if that is not a complete oxymoron.

She particularly focuses on 1637, a year in which the colony's fortunes were at a low ebb. First, Archbishop of Canterbury Laud launched an effort to revoke the colony's charter – but the boat carrying the English authorities sank on its way. Then the colonists fought a bloody war against the Pequot Indians – which they won by massacring an entire native town, women and children included.

And here is a familiar name:

Finally, Anne Hutchinson challenged the divinely ordained social hierarchy by publicly attacking the theological purity of virtually every minister in the colony; she claimed they had reverted to a covenant of works, one of the very ideas that Puritans had left England to avoid. If a woman preaching were not sufficient affront, Hutchinson's followers went from church to church heckling the local ministers. The imbroglio ended when Hutchinson confessed to receiving direct revelations from God and she and her followers were banished to Rhode Island, where they kept company for a time with fellow religious seeker and exile Roger Williams. As the annus horribilis ended in peace, the Puritans could be forgiven for thinking that, indeed, the Lord delighted to dwell among them.

Anne Hutchinson has a River Parkway named after her: the Hutch.

The Wordy Shipmates
By Sarah Vowell
(Riverhead, 254 pages, $25.95)

The Road to Meltdown

THE ASCENT OF MONEY
By Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 442 pages, $29.95)MR. MARKET MISCALCULATES
By James Grant (Axios Press, 430 pages, $22)

Shoe-Leather Rhapsody

My commute is unusual, and different every day. One route takes me past my favorite coffee shop, the jeweler where I bought my wife's engagement ring and the library where I've read away dozens of hours.

Nice way to begin an article, praising a library.

In "The Lost Art of Walking," a slight but amusing treatise on pedestrianism, the novelist Geoff Nicholson describes walking in New York as "a risky activity, a form of combat, a struggle for dominance, sometimes a contact sport." Well, there is that, too.

I assume they both are referring to Manhattan. And, yes, it could be treacherous to walk along Manhattan sidewalks. Yet they should try downtown Flushing one day.

Mr. Nicholson summons the image of Errol Flynn, as boxer James Corbett in the 1942 movie "Gentleman Jim," practicing his fleet footwork by walking down the sidewalk against traffic. Six decades later, New Yorkers have become perhaps less agile but no less aggressive. Of the 70,000 collisions between automobiles and pedestrians in the U.S. each year, Mr. Nicholson notes, fully 15,000 – "a staggering proportion" – take place in New York.

Interesting way of putting it: collisions between automobiles and pedestrians. Collisions? Isn't that a pedestrian being hit by a car? Well, I can see cars being hit be pedestrians in NYC.

If any single idea is central to Mr. Nicholson's ramble through the lore of pedestrianism, it's this idea of walking as a method of discovery – both of the world and one's own thoughts about it.

Interesting to think of the term pedestrian, as both a person who walks and someone common, ordinary.

It is a modern idea, and mostly an urban one. In the 19th century, the Romantic movement helped foster a world-wide cult of pseudospiritual wandering, a communing with nature that would supposedly foster a heightened sense of truth and beauty. But Mr. Nicholson's own pedestrianism finds roots in Baudelaire, who coined the term flâneur to describe a city walker who savors the spectacle of modern life as an ever-changing work of art.

I savor walking in cities. It is a sort of art. I can remember many walks: San Francisco, even LA, Guadalajara, and my own New York. I've taken my own walking tours in NYC.

The Lost Art of Walking
By Geoff Nicholson
(Riverhead, 276 pages, $24.95)

A New Era in Publishing

For the last 500 years, publishers have relied on paper to distribute information. Now their readers are going online for their morning news, movie schedules, and restaurant reviews. It’s no surprise that publishing is going through seismic changes that affect how content is created, produced, distributed, discovered, and sold.

How I accessed this very article is a case in point: wanting to not just read it on paper, I entered a Google search term: netconnect judy luther, and clicked on the second hit (http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6547057.html).

The convenience of anywhere, anytime access to information is driving the rapid conversion of print content onto the web. Over the last decade, there has been a progressive migration of content beginning with indexes and reference tools, journals and their back files, and now books propelled by investments from Google and Microsoft. Readers also have the option of hearing an audiobook, listening to music, or watching videos.

Destructive Delusions

Our lives are more deeply affected by science and technology than ever before, but that does not mean that we are more rational than our forefathers in our everyday conduct. Superstition springs eternal in the human mind, or gut, and the fact that Charles Mackay's great book, "Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds," published in 1843, should be so pertinent to our current economic situation proves it.

The subtitle of this review, How therapists and 'victims' seized on the idea of repressed memory, leveling false charges and ruining lives, is not a postulate that some would accept. In fact, a friend of mine would vehemently disagree (and likely hurl not just one insult at the very temerity of the reviewer to assert it).

The reviewer, Theodore Dalrymple, is described as a contributing editor of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal and the author of "Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy".

Searching for the Manhattan Institute on Google yields this entry under its URL: The Mission of the Manhattan Institute is to develop and disseminate new ideas that foster greater economic choice and individual responsibility.

Immediately I think: right wing. Let me investigate. It is difficult to get a handle on it. But then I linked to a New York Post editorial listed on its website, Ideas Matter New York Post, editorial, January 30, 2003 and I think I may have an answer:

New Yorkers, in particular, have good reason to be grateful to the Manhattan Institute: Its ideas and proposals formed the basis of Rudy Giuliani's governing philosophy and his determination to challenge the long-accepted notion that New York City was simply ungovernable.

Giuliani - who was first exposed to those ideas at a Manhattan Institute conference on "Rethinking New York" - proved the skeptics wrong. Boy, did he ever.

President Bush, meanwhile, is one of the institute's biggest fans.

Well, if an organization boasts of a NY Post editorial, I have an idea of what its politics are, or might (well) be.

Back to the point: how does this man simply assert this:

One of the most extraordinary outbreaks of popular delusion in recent years was that which attached to the possibility of "recovered memory" of sexual and satanic childhood abuse, and to an illness it supposedly caused, Multiple Personality Disorder. No medieval peasant praying to a household god for the recovery of his pig could have been more credulous than scores of psychiatrists, hosts of therapists and thousands of willing victims. The whole episode would have been funny had it not been so tragic.

His bio in the Manhattan Institute website has the following profile:

Theodore Dalrymple is the Dietrich Weismann fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to City Journal. He is a retired doctor who most recently practiced in a British inner-city hospital and prison. Dr. Dalrymple has written a column for the London Spectator for thirteen years and writes regularly for National Review. Denis Dutton, editor of Arts & Letters Daily, called Dr. Dalrymple the "Orwell of our time."

Well, he has credentials, indeed. Yet I read sentences in this review which make me wonder how he can be so self-assured and certain.

In 300 years' time, our descendants – who will, of course, pride themselves on their superior rationality – will read of the recovered-memory-driven prosecutions of parents (usually fathers) as we now read of the Salem witch trials. And some future Arthur Miller will set his "Crucible" in a late-20th-century psychiatric hospital in which the disorder was supposedly treated but was actually manufactured.

In 1692 could someone have said that in 2008 the trials would be seen as he asserts people in 2308 will see recovered memory as sham as witch trials?

This next assertion leaves me wondering:

Perhaps the most alarming (or depressing) thing about this story – clearly, economically and sometimes amusingly told by Dr. McHugh – is that the worst excesses did not take place among the poorly educated class of society, whom one might expect to be easiest prey to ludicrous notions, but among the well educated.

Why would one expect the educated to be less gullible than the poorly educated?

Mr. Dalrymple is not content with discrediting (to his assurance) the idea of recovered memory; he takes on Freud himself.

Dr. McHugh is surely right in seeing the buried-treasure school of psychology, introduced as a system by Freud, as one of the roots of the recovered-memory disaster. The supposition that underlying every undesirable behavior there is a hidden psychological secret awaiting therapeutic exposure has taken a deep hold on society at all levels. I remember a burglar asking me, in the prison in which I worked as a doctor, why he continued to burgle, expecting me to say that it was because of his terrible childhood. When I told him it was because he was lazy and stupid, and because prison sentences were not nearly long enough, he burst into laughter.

Now there is a valuable underpinning of a theory: a burglar he didn't coddle broke out in laughter. That proves Freud was wrong, doubtlessly.

In "Try to Remember," Dr. McHugh hints at the cultural context in which preposterous and vicious accusations against parents and others could be so easily believed by seemingly intelligent people, including courtroom judges. He rightly notes that the hysteria was presaged in the 1970s by the popularity of the best-selling novel "Sybil," which incorporated theories about childhood sexual abuse and Multiple Personality Disorder advanced by "a strange off-beat psychiatrist, Cornelia Wilbur."

Off-beat? What in heck does that mean?

But I wish that he had probed more deeply into that cultural context. Freudianism alone could not have produced the necessary atmosphere; there must have been other forces at work as well. The sanctification of victims and victimhood comes to mind.

Hey, you're not sick; stop whining and just get better. Sound psychiatry.

Oy vay.

Try to Remember
By Paul R. McHugh, M.D.
(Dana Press, 276 pages, $25)

The Drop of a Feather

Plumes - By Sarah Stein (Yale University Press, 244 pages, $30)

Talk about crazes: The tulip mania of 1634, when speculation in tulip bulbs from Holland reached such heights that one collector paid 1,000 pounds of cheese, four oxen, eight pigs, 12 sheep, a bed and a suit of clothes for a single Viceroy bulb. The tulip market collapsed barely three years later; hundreds of investors were ruined, and thousands of bulbs lay rotting in warehouses.

Must've been, or seemed, quite a bulb, that Viceroy.

It is the tulip craze that is most often cited in discussions of speculative bubbles, like the frenzy for Internet stocks a decade ago and the more recent madness in the mortgage and credit markets. But the rage for ostrich feathers a century ago is instructive, too. When ostrich feathers flounced into vogue among the fashionable set in Paris, London and New York,

traders assumed that the popularity of plumes would stay permanently aloft, as if floating on an endless zephyr.

I can just hear it: it's different this time.

Of course there were a few cautious voices. One South African ostrich farmer warned members of the feather industry that they were dealing "with an uncertain, arbitrary, whimsical love of luxury . . . at our own risk. We cannot expect it to be durable." Such spoilsports were booed off the stage. Another dealer more typically crowed that a fine ostrich feather was "an investment for life" and that the plume "has been in fashion for centuries past, and will probably be for centuries to come. It holds its place like the diamond." At the height of the boom, Ms. Stein notes, the price per pound of plumes almost equaled that of diamonds.

That's optimistic: for centuries to come.

In South Africa, where the Barbary ostrich (prized for its extra-fluffy plumage) was domesticated and raised on ranches, and in London, where the feathers were brokered, and on New York's Lower East Side, where the feathers were applied to garments, most of the men and women in the feather business were Jewish.

Fascinating. Any parallel to the garment industry? I wonder. Certainly a parallel to other times were reactions when World War 1 spelled the end of the ostrich feather craze: with the collapse, anti-Semitism flared: "Once valued for their extra-regional contacts," Ms. Stein writes, "Jews were now disparaged for their cosmopolitanism and recast as ruthless speculators inclined to prey on economically vulnerable farmers."

However, Ms Stein does venture to say some things which might prove provocative in some quarters.

Ms. Stein, who specializes in Sephardic studies in the history department of UCLA, is quick not to attribute the rise and collapse of the feather market to Jewish cunning or sharp practice. She does, however, point to what she calls a "symbiotic relationship between ethnicity and particular commercial networks." She recognizes that this is a provocative note to strike and defends it by saying: "It has been the goal of this book to eschew the indignity that popular and scholarly sources have directly or indirectly associated with Jews' involvement in modern global commerce. This ambition has been shaped not in the interest of taboo-breaking," she writes, but because "modern Jews" undertook "commercial practices" for "clear historical reasons."

Take nerve to venture outside widely-accepted strictures and break new theoretical ground.

Ms. Stein, who specializes in Sephardic studies in the history department of UCLA, is quick not to attribute the rise and collapse of the feather market to Jewish cunning or sharp practice. She does, however, point to what she calls a "symbiotic relationship between ethnicity and particular commercial networks." She recognizes that this is a provocative note to strike and defends it by saying: "It has been the goal of this book to eschew the indignity that popular and scholarly sources have directly or indirectly associated with Jews' involvement in modern global commerce. This ambition has been shaped not in the interest of taboo-breaking," she writes, but because "modern Jews" undertook "commercial practices" for "clear historical reasons."

Clear historical reasons?

For centuries, when European Jews were ghettoized and subjected to special "Jew taxes," and not allowed to own real estate, Jews were forced into businesses dealing with products that could be easily transported from place to place – coins, precious stones, commercial paper, works of art. It was easy to roll an oil painting into a suitcase when it was time to flee. And what could be lighter than a bagful of feathers when that ominous knock from the tax collector – or someone much worse – came at the late-night door?

Lighter, but not as easy to carry as a few little stones - valuable gems - inside one's pocket or purse.

It might be simpler to say that Jews took to ostrich feathers not because of the "symbiotic relationship between ethnicity and particular commercial networks" but because of generations of hard luck.

Simpler, yes, but as accurate? Perhaps simplistic.

Not that every financial bubble-burst is the same. When the feather market collapsed, a magazine joked that the newly devalued ostrich might make a nice change for Thanksgiving dinner, adding: "Heaven help him who gets the neck."

Town Seeks a Library Benefactor to Ward Off Taxes

GILMANTON, N.H. — This town’s new library has thousands of books, a handsome circulation desk and plenty of chairs for quiet lounging. Now it needs a final, crucial component: a budget so it can open.

Just a small detail.

so far, they have avoided asking for a local tax increase to cover the library’s annual operating budget. This is New Hampshire, after all, where taxes are reviled and frugality is prized.

Taxes delivered services.

Instead, the group is scouring New England, even placing advertisements in the alumni magazines of Harvard and other Ivy League universities, looking for someone who will provide at least $1 million for a private endowment. That is enough, they say, to pay a part-time librarian and other basic costs for years to come. But, so far, there have been no takers.

A novel way of doing things. (Pun acknowledged: novel way.)

New Hampshire was also the first state to enact a law allowing local taxes to support public libraries, in 1849.

Cheryl Senter for The New York Times

A refurbished barn is now a library in Gilmanton, N.H., though it still lacks the money to open. Elizabeth Bedard arranged chairs in the reading area.

Napoleon in Egypt

Napoleon in Egypt

By Paul Strathern
(Bantam, 480 pages, $30)

Dewey call number: 962.03S


In the summer of 1797, Napoleon Bonaparte hatched a plan of conquest worthy of his idol, Alexander the Great. Then a brash, 27-year-old general in the French Revolutionary army, Napoleon dreamed of leading a full-scale invasion of Egypt and the Middle East before marching on to the ultimate prize: British India. It would be a campaign of choice rather than necessity that would – if successful – make him the ruler of a vast Oriental empire and, possibly, of France itself.

His superiors decided to let him go: out of the way, far away, he might die, and they'd be done with him. He thought Alexandrians would welcome him with open arms (an American Vice President would suffer the same illusion about Iraq 206 years later - except that the VP would not be leading armies, simply rooting them on from far, far away).

In "Napoleon in Egypt," Paul Strathern has written both a gripping adventure story and a sobering morality tale. The cocksure French came to Egypt as conquerors, offering the gift of civilization to a backward and oppressed people. Their ultimate downfall serves to highlight the perils as well as the potential benefits of such an undertaking.

Napoleon would eventually defeat Mameluke armies, including Murad Bey's at the Battle of the Pyramids, and settle down to rule. He would be called Sultan El-Kebir, Great Ruler.

The engineers, artists, cartographers, physicists and zoologists Napoleon brought with him conducted much-celebrated scientific and archaeological discoveries would help to redeem the expedition in the eyes of posterity. Although ancient Egypt was not entirely unknown to Europeans at the end of the 18th century, it was still an obscure subject. One of the future keys to unlocking its mysteries was a black basalt slab covered with inscriptions unearthed in 1799 during the construction of a French fort: the famed Rosetta Stone, from which ancient hieroglyphics would eventually be deciphered. There would turn out to be little time for any lasting reforms of Egyptian society, but the results of the expedition's knowledge-gathering efforts – compiled in the multivolume "Description de l'Égypte" (1809-26) – played a major role in Europe's understanding of distant cultures.

Eventually Napoleon's forces would be defeated, first losing its naval power in Aboukir Bay to English naval forces led by Nelson; and later as he tried advancing into Syria without naval support.

To ingratiate himself with the Egyptians, Napoleon had brought with him a copy of the Koran (cataloged in his library under "Politics"), which he claimed to read from every night.

Curious cataloguing, though understandable in context.

Shooting to Thrill

Annie Leibovitz from "Annie Leibovitz: At Work"

"Self-portrait" (1970)

Now the Drum of War

When the Civil War erupted in April 1861, Walt Whitman, at age 42, was too old to bear arms in the Union Army. It seemed that his best days as a poet were behind him as well. Half a dozen years had passed since the first publication of his "Leaves of Grass" collection, and the literary sensation over its cosmic display of passions had subsided. Whitman appeared to be slipping into creative decline.

Two of the bard's brothers, Andrew and George, enlisted in the Union army. George was wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg in late 1862. Walt went looking for him.

So began one of the most remarkable odysseys in American literary history, a quest that transformed Whitman, the visionary egoist of "Leaves of Grass," into a man of action and engagement with the world.

In "Now the Drum of War," Robert Roper captures this turning point in Whitman's life -- the transformation of his poetry but also the dramatic new chapter in the story of the Whitman family. In "Song of Myself," from "Leaves of Grass," Whitman had proclaimed: "I contain multitudes." First among those multitudes, no doubt, were the influences derived from a large family so roiled by love and strife that it makes Eugene O'Neill's Tyrone family look like the Waltons.

Great line.

Walt's brother Jeff, a civil engineer who might have qualified for an exemption from the military draft but paid $400 for a substitute to take his place. The three other brothers were Eddie, the youngest in the family, who was mentally retarded; the disease-addled Jesse; and Andrew, the other army volunteer, who died of consumption in 1863.

While there was little Whitman could do for his bulletproof brother in the hospital, he discovered a new vocation: caring for soldiers in more desperate straits. Rather than returning home to New York, Whitman stayed in Washington, working in a patent office by day and nursing soldiers in military hospitals by night.

George had fought in 17 major battles, had his canteen shot away at Spotsylvania, and had his clothes shot through a dozen times. He'd wind up being promoted to captain.

Mr. Roper argues persuasively that George's diary notes influenced Walt's writings, including the war poems in "Drum-Taps" (1865). Still, there were some aspects of the war that defied even Whitman's skills. "History had outrun conception," Mr. Roper writes. "A way of talking about the horror had not yet been invented." Not until World War I would poets find words adequate to render the nightmare.

Walt Whitman, aided by seeing the conflict through his brother George's eyes and by using the evidence of his own senses, wrote the best war poetry possible in his time, verses that shunned sentimentality while ennobling the cause but stopped short of irony while recording the horrific effects of modern warfare.


Now the Drum of War
By Robert Roper
(Walker, 421 pages, $28)

Extra, Extra! Lunar Man-Bats

The New York Sun.

When Ira Stoll and I were preparing to re-launch The New York Sun in 2001, the Atlantic Monthly sent around a reporter to find out, among other things, why we had picked the name. I immediately started rattling on about how the Sun, in the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, had stood for limited and honest government, equality under the law, constitutionalism, and other features of high-minded conservatism. I was just getting warmed up when the reporter, David Carr, caught me off-guard by inquiring about the New York Sun's notorious moon hoax.

Say what?

I had read the histories of the great 19th-century broadsheet that went out of publication in 1950 and whose flag we had just picked up. But so fascinated was I by its political pedigree that I had only skimmed the part about how it built its early circulation by claiming in a news story that, in South Africa, astronomers peering through a new type of telescope had seen life on the moon -- including swarms of flying man-bats.

What a way to sell newspapers.

When the Sun was born in 1833, New York had a population of more than 250,000, but its 11 daily newspapers had a combined circulation of only 26,500. These were days, Mr. Goodman notes, when a "newspaper's fortunes rose and fell on the personality of its editor."

He tells of the editor of the Herald, James Gordon Bennett, once getting caned so badly that he took to keeping a set of loaded pistols in his office, and of Evening Post editor William Cullen Bryant horsewhipping William Leete Stone, of the Commercial Advertiser, who fought back with a cane that concealed a steel sword.

Making today pale by comparison.

In the early 19th century, a daily newspaper typically cost 6 cents. In 1833, the Sun, under Benjamin Day, broke into this market with a tabloid that sold for a penny. Although set in small type, it was given over to reports of murder and crime, written up in a colorful fashion. And in the bottom right corner of page one -- in a place where other papers sometimes ran fiction -- its first issue featured a dispatch about a boy who whistled in his sleep.

No nudies in those days; no equivalent to Rupert Murdoch. But wait!

The Sun was in business for two years when Day brought in as editor a Briton, Richard Adams Locke.

Those Brits.

Swirling through Mr. Goodman's telling of this story are such figures as Edgar Allan Poe, who was a Sun contributor and once penned a balloon-to-the-moon fantasy, and P.T. Barnum, a master of the newspaper-aided publicity stunt. "The Sun and the Moon" also addresses subjects such as abolition, of which the Sun was a particularly energetic advocate. Editor Locke himself refused for some years to admit to writing the moon hoax. When, in 1840, he finally confessed, he defended it as a satire on the then-current rage by which astronomy had become what he saw as a "pseudo philosophy."

Imagine how that'd go over today.

Revolutionary Scamp

The drillmaster of Valley Forge.





The Granger Collection, New York

German soldier of fortune and American ally Baron von Steuben (1730-94)

Promised Land

Jay Parini's 13 titles that changed America. I still remember reading his biography of John Steinbeck; fondly. That book solidified my admiration for Steinbeck's art.

His survey begins with William Bradford's "Of Plymouth Plantation," an Old-Testament-style narrative of exile and salvation in which the wilderness of the New World is both desert and promised land.

Reading Mr. Parini's descriptions of these 13 books feels like watching a time-lapse film of cultural evolution – with the perennial motifs of American life changing colors and sprouting the odd appendage over the course of two centuries. His selections make it possible to see Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," largely written in a Benzedrine-fueled three-week burst in 1951, as an extended riff on the themes of exploration and westward discovery first expressed in "The Journals of Lewis and Clark." Thoreau's "Walden" looks like a spiritual riposte to the materialism that Benjamin Franklin took for granted in his "Autobiography," while Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People" puts Franklin's practical-minded expediency to cynical use. Works as different as Benjamin Spock's "Commonsense Book of Baby and Child Care" and Betty Friedan's "Feminine Mystique" share an interest in retooling postwar domestic life that fits comfortably alongside Thoreau's effort to dodge the life of quiet desperation he saw most of his contemporaries leading.

“Every nation has a founding myth, or myths: stories that talk of bright but challenging beginnings, portraying the drama of self-definition and establishment. “



Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-96)



Henry David Thoreau (1817-62)





Betty Friedan (1921-2006)





Dr. Benjamin Spock (1903-98)


Mark Twain (1835-1910)

Skewed Values

Weeding the biography section; now in the letter M. Mao, Mencken, Michener, Monroe. Found 7 biographies of Marilyn, 2 of President James. Seems a little skewed, but, that's just me, I suppose.

Hawaii admitted to Union

A patron asked: when was Hawaii admitted to the Union as a state? 1958, I said, but I checked. Answer was August 21, 1952. My birthday. Patron said he was wondering, because Baruch, he said, laughing: he's made Barrack into a Jew.

From Gym Rat to Alpinist

If a climber gets overconfident or is hounded by weather, scaling the Northeast Ridge of Bugaboo Spire, a massive pyramid of rock towering over a glacier, can be more hazardous than its modest 5.7 rating on the Yosemite Decimal System might indicate.



Northeast Ridge of Bugaboo Spire

Mixed metaphors, er .. that is

In today's Wall Street Journal, there is a story about a meat-processing company. The language gets just a mite mangled. To wit:

A recent decision by Smithfield Foods Inc. to use only American pork in its products could boost its bottom line. But what the company really needs are higher prices for its live hogs and lower costs for raising cash.

Last month, Smithfield completed the sale of its beef-processing and cattle-feeding operation to JBS SA of Brazil. Now that beef is off its balance sheet, analysts are expressing a fair amount of bullishness about the Smithfield, Va., company's shares.

Let's see: Smithfield decided to concentrate on pork, so it sold its beef and cattle operations; now that it has no beef, some analysts are bullish on the company.

Say what?

Search power

It's easy to become jaded, or complacent, about the depth and volume of information available at the click of a button or the push of a key, yet, every once in a while, I am reminded that there is indeed an immense amount of digital information available.

I've been listening to a CD: Big Joe Turner's Greatest Hits. The listing of personnel for different tracks has some entries of "unknown", and I wanted to see if I could get deeper than that. I entered a search statement in Google: new york november 3, 1955 joe turner session. First hit was Atlantic Records Discography: 1955 - session index. It's part of the Jazz Discography Project.

Unfortunately, it does not include any further information than what the CD sleeve has; nonetheless, it is really neat that that information is online.

Casanova: Librarian, too

In 1928, Viennese writer Stefan Zweig declared that Casanova "proved that one may write the most amusing story in the world without being a novelist, and give the most admirable picture of the time without being a historian." Anyone who reads Casanova's memoirs, which he composed to console himself in a lonely old age – he died at 73 in 1798 – will see the rightness of Zweig's claim. Yet almost nobody does read them. Casanova's "History of My Life" is an invaluable record of 18th-century Europe, but it is also one of the longest works ever written. The standard English edition runs to more than 3,600 pages.

3,600 pages? Ouch.



Giacomo Casanova' by Anton Raphael Mengs




Casanova with a conquest in Paris

Revolution Is No Tea Party

Jonathan Karl, of ABC News, reviews a biography: Samuel Adams: A Life, by Ira Stoll (Free Press, 338 pages, $28).

he was perhaps the most forceful single figure behind the American Revolution. He was also America's first great political operative, mastering the arts of spin and strategy in ways that future generations of David Axelrods and Lee Atwaters could profitably emulate. Ira Stoll, in his pithy and well-researched biography, sets out to rescue Adams from historical obscurity.

flagitious: extremely wicked, deeply criminal
condign: fitting or appropriate and deserved; used especially of punishment

The book makes it abundantly clear why the British so detested Adams. He started talking independence more than a decade before the Declaration and did more than anyone to organize opposition to colonial taxes and to make "no taxation without representation" a rallying cry.

The original spinmeister. An incident on March 5, 1770, which led to shots being fired, resulted in 11 colonists shot, 5 fatally.

The facts surrounding the incident are still in dispute, but, writes Mr. Stoll, "what is certain is that Adams pressed immediately and aggressively to wring every possible bit of political advantage from the bloodshed." He started by giving it a name: the Boston Massacre.

Sam engaged in agitprop, writing 20,000 words on the subject in Boston newspapers. Juries acquitted six soldiers, and found two guilty of merely manslaughter. Sam was incensed. One can only imagine what he thought of his cousin John, who defended the British soldiers in court.

Family gatherings must have been tense. A curious twist, considering John would become president, and Sam would be relegated to oblivion.

Adams's next major move was to instigate what turned out to be the Boston Tea Party, a protest against yet another British tax. Adams publicized the episode in a way that would, once again, maximize support for the cause of independence. He pointed out – in public letters and newspaper columns – that the ships themselves were not harmed, only the tea; in a bit of revolutionary spin, he blamed the whole thing on the unyielding royal governor.

That's spin control.

If Mr. Stoll's biography lacks the narrative power of books on other Founders, such as David McCullough's "John Adams," the reason may be that the paper trail left by Samuel Adams is frustratingly short. He destroyed much of his correspondence during the revolutionary years, fearful that it could fall into the wrong hands. Some of the letters that remain end with the words "burn this." This Adams wasn't playing for the history books. He was trying to plot a revolution. Mr. Stoll makes a convincing case that Samuel Adams is not just the most underrated of the Founders but also one of the most admirable, down-to-earth and principled (he worked to abolish slavery).

A Republican, not a Federalist (as was John), he was 81 when Jefferson became president. TJ certainly thought highly of Sam.

"I often asked myself, is this exactly in the spirit of the patriarch of liberty, Samuel Adams? Is it as he would express it? Will he approve of it?" Jefferson lamented that the 81-year-old Adams could not serve in his administration, but, he wrote, "give us your counsel my friend, and give us your blessing." Adams died two years later.

If Mr. Stoll's biography lacks the narrative power of books on other Founders, such as David McCullough's "John Adams," the reason may be that the paper trail left by Samuel Adams is frustratingly short. He destroyed much of his correspondence during the revolutionary years, fearful that it could fall into the wrong hands. Some of the letters that remain end with the words "burn this." This Adams wasn't playing for the history books. He was trying to plot a revolution. Mr. Stoll makes a convincing case that Samuel Adams is not just the most underrated of the Founders but also one of the most admirable, down-to-earth and principled (he worked to abolish slavery).

Easy ≠ Right

With federated search, users can use a one-box, keyword search approach to retrieving information from any number of book and article databases without knowing specialized search techniques or terminology. This is what patrons want—the simplicity of a Google search. This is what we librarians want, too—patrons to use our licensed databases and find high-quality information easily. But federated search doesn’t necessarily make anything easy. In an ideal world, it would, but no matter the implementation or what technology may come, federated search will always be an overly simplistic solution to an extremely complex problem.

Many problems, many challenges, have simple solutions, or simple enough solutions. Too often some people look to make some challenges and situations more complex than they need be.

Federated Searching

Allows searching across multiple resources.

Google Scholar is a federated searching tool; it offers a results list, and a little blurb for each link.

Worldcat.org is more library-oriented, searching from one entry all resources: DVDs, articles, books journals. Aside from a list of results, on the left-hand side it has a "Refine Search" column as a guide to help narrow the search.

Vendors such as EBSCO, Gale and ProQuest provided multiple databases as well. Here at HWPL we have the ability to check on use all databases.

while searching dozens of substantially different databases is beneficial in many contexts, it’s important for librarians to keep in mind both the strengths and weaknesses concerning the federated search approach, yet many librarians fail to consider this (see Melissa Rethlefsen’s “Easy ≠Right,” for more on these concerns). Their assumption seems to be that the more you can search at one time, the better the results for the user, which is not always the case.

A new book