February reference questions

5 February: A story, yesterday's 5pm newscast on ABC News about an oral surgeon who is pioneering a new approach to osteonecrosis. Went on ABC website, found health story; googled NYU Dental School, searched faculty for Kenneth Fleisher.

5 February: Newspaper articles about Martha Graham. Showed high schoolers how to limit searches in ProQuest Historical newspapers using date parameters.

9 February: A patron who calls regularly, always looking for telephone numbers of companies, this morning called looked for local, as opposed to Washington DC, numbers for Senators Collins, Snowe and Specter, the three Republicans who are supporting the Economic Recovery Act (the stimulus package) in the US Senate. Curious: will she call to support or oppose?

12 February (Happy Birthday Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin): A patron asked about knot theory. There are 4 books system-wide on the subject: The geometry and physics of knot, The knot book : an elementary introduction to mathematical theory of knots, Knot theory, and Knots : mathematics with a twist

21 February: LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) is a rating system for green buildings. A patron wanted material of becoming an Accredited Professional. The Green Building Certification Institute (GBCI) has an examination for such accreditation.

An 11th grader working on the Lincoln letters assignment could not find any information on the 73rd Illinois Regiment. A google search produced some results: a book entitled Illinois in the Civil War; The US Army War College at Carlisle Barracks (though searching within the site timed out); Illinois in the Civil War site.

26 February: A senior asked for Tchaikovsky, Peter Ilyich, 1840-1893. Quartet: D major for 2 violins, viola and violoncello: Op. 11. HWPL, of course, owns it. Amazing music collection. Now, the question arises: just exactly how is Peter Ilyich's patronymic spelled? I've seen variations over time: Tchaikovsky, Tschaikovsky, Tchaikowsky, and so on.

27 February: a college student asked for print and electronic sources to use for a paper he's doing on the adaptation of killer whales. Gave him list of publications (Daedalus, Discover, Kids Discover, National Geographic, National Geographic Kids, Natural History, Omni (last issue 4/95), Physics Today, Popular Science, Science, Science News, Scientific American, Sea Frontiers, Sky & Telescope, Smithsonian), and showed him how to use Access Science and Galenet.

Geniuses at Play, on the Job

Unless you’re just off the shuttle from Alpha Centauri, you’re already aware of the product that made Google famous: its Search box. It’s become the card catalog for the Internet (and a whopping moneymaker for Google).

Good one: Internet card catalog.

Officer Krupke, You’re Historically Precise

Cody Green, left, as Riff, and Lee Sellers as Officer Krupke in the Broadway musical “West Side Story,” now in previews at the Palace Theater.


Here’s a real New York detective story — or actually, more of a police officer story. A sergeant story. Sergeant Krupke, to be exact, and the search for his perfect 1950s uniform.

You remember Officer Krupke. He’s the hapless foil for the high-spirited gang of teenagers of “West Side Story” and the target of a celebrated quasi-profane lyric that sent us all into conniptions way back before actual profanity got much of a hearing in public.

Last summer, with a revival of the acclaimed 1957 Leonard Bernstein-Stephen Sondheim musical heading for Broadway (previews began Monday at the Palace Theater), the costume department started researching the authentic uniform for Krupke.

Directed by the nonagenarian stage legend Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book, the production includes some notable updates, namely a new bilingualism that adds Spanish flavoring to what is, after all, the Shakespearean tragedy of a famous love undone by New York ethnic hatreds. The revival strives, too, for a timelessness somewhat removed from the original 1950s setting.

But not when it came to Krupke’s uniform, which had to be genuine 1957. Or so the assistant costume designer, Michael Zecker, was told.

“They wanted film-level research,” said Mr. Zecker 41, recounting what was to become an arduous scholarship project. “Honestly, I was a little taken aback.”

Pictures he found at NYPL weren't good enough.

That quest then took him to the Police Academy at 235 East 20th Street, where new officers are trained. “But the library didn’t have anything like that,” Mr. Zecker said. “Just information for police officers today.”

With growing desperation that he could ever lay his hands on a 1950s police manual, he sent an e-mail message in September to a librarian at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, a unit of the City University of New York, at 899 10th Avenue at 59th Street.

‘We are trying to be as accurate as possible and I’m trying to locate a uniform manual from the 1950s with instructions on how to wear the uniform and accessories properly,” he wrote. “If you don’t think you can help me, perhaps you know someone who could. I bet there is someone out there who is an expert in the field!”

There was.

Within a day, his e-mail inbox dinged with a response:

Your question about police uniforms in the 1950s was referred to me. The Rules and Procedures of the NYPD, ch. 25, has every specification for uniforms and equipment that you would ever need for realistic historical detail. I have the 1956 edition, which is the one you want given that WSS opened in 1957.

The uniforms section covers everything from ‘prescribed uniforms’ through “seasonal uniforms” to insignia, cap devices, etc. I have the manual, which is loose leaf in my office. The R & P, combined with period photos, which we also have, should do it for you. Please let me know how you’d like to proceed.

It was signed by Larry Sullivan, associate dean and chief librarian.

Dr. Sullivan was also able to come up with a perfect model in a ’50s uniform: Lloyd Sealy, a ground-breaking police commander, in his time the highest-ranking black officer in the New York Police Department, for whom the John Jay library was named; he died of a heart attack in the library in 1985 at age 68.

Cecil Layne/Lloyd Sealy Library, John Jay College of Criminal Justice An undated photo shows Lloyd George Sealy, smiling in center, most likely at his 1959 promotion to police lieutenant. (Updated; for details




And what was that hard-won data conveyed to Mr. Zecker for “West Side Story”?

The matter is addressed in a document on police uniforms — read it here [pdf] or in the document player at the end of this post.

Under Seasonal Uniform Changes (remember, the story takes place in “the last days of summer”), Section 15.1 Subsection C provides that, unless otherwise authorized by the chief inspector, between 12:01 a.m. June 1 and 12:01 a.m. Oct 1:

Sergeants, patrolmen and motor vehicle operators shall wear the regulation shirt, black tie, tie clasp and black belt with dark buckle, preferably gun metal. Sergeants and patrolmen shall wear the shield over the left breast and precinct numerals or letters on both sides of the collar, one inch from edge.

The cap (7.0) was to be worn “squarely on the head, with center of visor directly over the nose.” The tie (13.0 c) was to be knotted in a standard four-in-hand (no bow ties, please), and the shoes and socks (13.0 i, j,) were to be, naturally, black.

As for the shirt (13.0 b): “regulation blue military shirt with 24 ligne removable brass buttons.”

Ligne?

A button measure, Dr. Sullivan said. A ligne was one-fortieth of an inch.

New York Police Department 1956 Rules and Procedures

It Happened Tomorrow

A regular patron, one of the group of senior guys, over at the Information Desk, asked if if I had tomorrow's lottery numbers. I said, "yes, but it'll cost you." He then told me about this film: he knew Dick Powell was in it, but couldn't remember the tile. So, I went to IMDb.com and searched through Dick Powell's credits, and found it.

Title: It Happened Tomorrow

City Cleared to Reject Religious Monument

Public parks can keep out a monument offered by a small religious group even if they contain a privately donated monument to the Ten Commandments, a unanimous Supreme Court ruled Wednesday.

The decision was a relief to government agencies across the country, which had feared an adverse ruling could force them to accept almost any monument offered by any group.

Writing for the court, Justice Samuel Alito said the key was whether the monument was best compared to speeches, leaflets and other private expression that traditionally takes place in parks, or more akin to a painting or statue in a public museum.

Governments may not favor some views over others in a public forum like a park. But they may choose which works to display in a museum or which books to stock in a library, without a First Amendment obligation to give equal access to any donated material.

"may choose which works to display in a museum or which books to stock in a library"

Advanced chess openings

Around 11.30am, a man walked over to the Information Desk and asked for a recent book about chess openings, advanced openings. It needs to be recent; nothing old, he emphasized. And not for beginners, he stressed. Alright, let me take a look, I said. As I searched the OPAC he re-emphasized: opening moves, not for beginners, and nothing old. I acknowledged his request, again. Nothing much resulted at first, and he repeated his requests.

Just then a woman approached the Desk, and stood to his right, my left, close, making certain her presence was noticed. Right after that two of the regular group of old guys that come in around 9.30, and hang out for the rest of the morning also approached the Desk. They stood to my right, the chess man's left, and also stood so that their presence was noticed.

I kept searching. The chess man kept repeating his needs: chess openings, a recent book, not for beginners. His voice was not meek, nor low. He added that he did not want to go downstairs. The woman and the two men were clearly getting impatient; their body language was clear. One of the seniors inched (or milimetered) closer and closer, and made his displeasure at the chess man's requests and monopolizing of time obvious. Finally, he just put his elbow in front of the chess man and got partly in front of him.

Chess man was annoyed, nearly angered. "Would you give me some space?" he asked forcefully. The senior gruffly answered that he was taking up too much time. Chess man argued back.

In an emphatic tone I told him to talk to me, and ignore the other man. I had to repeat myself, but I got his attention. I finally found a book, and put a reserve on it for him. He left. I then helped the woman, who praised my handling on the situation, then asked for a book. Finally I turned to the senior. He asked for an eyeglass case that a page had told him had been found and given to the Desk. I told him everything was turned over to Lost & Found, and added that what he had done was inappropriate. He apologized. After getting his eyeglass case, he came back and apologized again.

Another patron came over, and told me I had handled the matter well. I remarked that 7-year-olds have to be handled that way. She looked a little puzzled. I told her that they had behaved as they were 7 years old: petulant, look-at-me, do it now. It worked out.

Will crisis produce a new Gatsby?

Article in WSJ by Sean McCann, English professor at Wesleyan University.

* FEBRUARY 21, 2009

Will This Crisis Produce a 'Gatsby'?
The 1930s galvanized a generation of authors and filmmakers, recasting the American journey

* Article
* Comments

more in Economy »
BY SEAN MCCANN

In the fall of 1933, Sherwood Anderson left his home in New York City and set out on a series of journeys that would take him across large sections of the American South and Midwest. He was engaged in a project shared by many of his fellow writers -- including James Agee, Edmund Wilson, John Dos Passos, and Louis Adamic -- all of whom responded to the Great Depression by traveling the nation's back roads and hinterlands hoping to discover how economic disaster had affected the common people. Like many of his peers, Anderson had anticipated anger and radicalism among the poor and unemployed. Instead, he discovered a people stunned by the collapse of their most cherished beliefs. "Puzzled America," the title of the book he composed out of his journeys, said it all.

In particular, Anderson found the people he met to be imprisoned by what he called the "American theory of life" -- a celebration of personal ambition that now seemed cruelly inappropriate. "We Americans have all been taught from childhood," Anderson wrote, "that it is a sort of moral obligation for each of us to rise, to get up in the world." In the crisis of the Depression, however, that belief appeared absurd. The United States now confronted what Anderson called "a crisis of belief."

View Full Image
Gatsby
Everett Collection

Robert Redford in the 1974 film "The Great Gatsby."
Gatsby
Gatsby

As Anderson knew, the notion that the United States is a uniquely open society, where the talented and industrious always have the chance to better their lot, is a central element of American self-understanding. The notion has been a prominent feature of American culture since the days of Ben Franklin, and it remains a core feature of the national ethos to this day. Indeed, in recent months the election of Barack Obama has reminded Americans of the promise that in the United States opportunity can be open to all.

The Great Depression, however, subjected even the strongest convictions to stark challenge, revealing cracks in the vision of social mobility that the recent prosperity of the nineteen-twenties had managed to obscure. In truth, the notion that the U.S. was an open and fluid society had always been nearly as much myth as reality -- even when, as was necessarily the case, it was assumed to apply to white men alone. But the myth had come to an especially paradoxical stage in its development in the years leading up to the crash.

Never in American history had the vision of social mobility been more forcefully asserted than in the 1920s. And rarely had the image been so far out of keeping with reality. The Republican Party, which dominated national politics throughout the decade, extolled the twin virtues of economic competition and personal ambition, reminding Americans often that they lived, as Herbert Hoover remarked, in "a fluid classless society...unique in the world." That rhetoric was redoubled by a booming new advertising industry which promised that consumers might vault up the ladder of social status through carefully chosen purchases (often with consumer credit, a recent invention).

And yet, the United States actually became less equal and less fluid in the 1920s, as the era's prosperity increasingly benefited the wealthiest. By the end of the decade, the top 1% of the population received nearly a quarter of the national income, an historic peak that would not be approached again until this past decade. Indeed, the term "social mobility" was coined in 1925 by the sociologist Pitrim Sorokin, who used the phrase to identify a phenomenon in apparent decline. "The wealthy class of the United States is becoming less and less open," Sorokin wrote, "and is tending to be transformed into a caste-like group."

The conflict between the American myth of a classless society and the reality of the nation's deepening caste divisions was the irony at the core of some of the greatest literary works of the 1920s, including Theodore Dreiser's "An American Tragedy" and F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby." But it was not until the Great Depression that the traditional vision of social mobility imploded.

Traveling the country, Anderson and his fellow observers found a populace confused by a collapse they could not understand. Everywhere he turned, Anderson noted, he heard the same refrain, "I failed. I failed. It's my own fault." The documentary books that he and his contemporaries created provided a kind of counter-narrative to the conventional American story of personal freedom and individual ambition. These works featured a journey not upward toward wealth and progress, but back into the hinterlands of a confused and immobilized nation.

That journey was echoed by a whole genre of "road" novels, written by angry young writers like Nelson Algren, who depicted an itinerant population of bottom dogs lurching from one disaster to the next. These novels answered the classic American vision of opportunity by imagining a nation of wanderers rapidly going nowhere.

So, too, did the cycle of gangster films -- "Little Caesar," "Scarface," "Public Enemy" -- which reached the peak of their popularity in the early '30s. Depicting boldly ruthless young men whose quests for wealth and power were doomed to end in self-destruction, the gangster film cast personal ambition as a cruel delusion. Even the era's light-hearted "screwball comedies," such as "It Happened One Night" and "My Man Godfrey," were sometimes fables of downward mobility, where arrogant socialites were brought down a notch by their encounters with ordinary people.

The road novels, documentary books and gangster films of the 1930s depicted the myth of social mobility as a bitter cheat. The era's screwball comedies viewed it merely as delightfully laughable. But all suggested that the Depression had left a core feature of American ideology in disarray, and thus emphasized the extent to which the traditional American language of personal ambition was open to redefinition. That opportunity would be seized on by a cohort of artists and intellectuals who took the crisis of the Depression as a chance to cast the idea of social mobility less as a framework for individual striving and more as an occasion for collective action.

John Steinbeck's novel "The Grapes of Wrath" made the Joad family's flight from the dust bowl into an emblem of people coming together to remake their world. A similar image was implicit in the very title of Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor's documentary book "An American Exodus." Even works of light entertainment like the massively popular "Gone With the Wind" or John Ford's landmark Western "Stagecoach" were in keeping with the prevailing message of the times. All these works told of epic journeys in which a group of people overcame destructive competition in their discovery of a common destiny. Each called for Americans to act collectively to remake a democratic society where opportunity would be open to all.

In effect, such declarations helped lay the cultural groundwork for the New Deal, providing the ideological infrastructure for the new governmental institutions created during the '30s. It is not yet clear whether the current economic disaster will produce anything like the profound transformation that shook the U.S. during the Great Depression. Our own crises of belief are likely just beginning. If we are fortunate, however, we will have a generation of artists and intellectuals like those of the 1930s to help us imagine our way past confusion.

Sean McCann, a professor of English at Wesleyan University, is the author of "A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential Government."

A Stimulus Deal for Writers

Soul of a People
by David A. Taylor
Wiley, 260 pages, $27.95)

Writers and artists have "got to eat, just like other people," Harry Hopkins, director of the New Deal's Works Progress Administration, observed during the middle of the Depression. The statement was true enough, of course, but Hopkins offered it defensively. With about 20% of the labor force unemployed in 1935, the WPA aimed to provide jobs to the millions of employable people on relief – including writers, artists, musicians and actors. The chief purpose of the Federal Writers' Project, as with the other WPA programs for the artistic downtrodden, was to sustain the individuals and, by giving them paid work, keep up their morale and their skills. Secondary was the hope of the Writers' Project's director, Henry Alsberg, and other idealists that the ultimate result of their work – principally, comprehensive guidebooks for each of the 48 states and Washington, D.C., as well as New York and other cities – would be an honest and even ennobling portrait of America.

My copy of the WPA Guide to New York is a treasure.

Alfred Kazin, in his 1942 masterwork, "On Native Grounds," hailed the WPA guides as not merely "a super-Baedeker" but "a repository as well as a symbol of the reawakened American sense of its own history."

The guidebooks "made up America's first self-portrait," says Mr. Taylor. He takes his title from a claim by Mark Twain that "when a thousand able novels have been written" about a people, then "there you have the soul of the people." Though the guidebooks were not novels and did not number 1,000, the enthusiastic Mr. Taylor fancies that the WPA writers engaged in "the kind of experiment" that Twain had in mind.

"one of the serious deficiencies" in the Federal Writers' Project (which at its peak in 1936 employed nearly 6,700 people) was "the sharply uneven distribution of literary talent throughout its forty-nine offices," noted Jerre Mangione in "The Dream and the Deal" (1972), which remains by far the best account of the Project. Not surprisingly, he said, "the ablest writers on the Project were to be found in New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco – those traditional incubating centers of literary talent." There were, of course, exceptions, a notable one being Vardis Fisher, who wrote most of the Idaho guidebook and managed to get it published first of all the guidebooks – and to enthusiastic reviews from around the country. Mr. Taylor's chapter on Fisher and the Idaho Project is one of his most interesting.

... politics – communism in particular – played a big role in many of these writers' lives. Mr. Taylor acknowledges the often divisive Communist presence in the Project but says hardly a critical word about it. He devotes much ink to Richard Wright but fails to tell, as Wright himself did in his memoir "Black Boy," how after he broke with the Communist Party and joined the Writers' Project in Chicago, the many Party members in the Project ostracized him and tried to get him fired as an incompetent.

I read about that in Hazel Rowley's biography of Richard Wright.

as Jerre Mangione observed, the reawakening of Americans' interest in their own history that Alfred Kazin perceived in the guidebooks had to be postponed, because of World War II: "The guidebooks were virtually forgotten as a symbol and largely ignored for their practical value." But, as he and Mr. Taylor make clear, readers, especially writers and editors, who have discovered the somewhat outdated volumes in recent decades have found them useful and illuminating, and even inspiring.

It's a Still Life That Runs Deep

Fool's paradise

Fool's paradise: players, poseurs, and the culture of excess in South Beach. (2009). Steven Gaines. New York: Crown Publishers.

What happens in Miami Beach stays in Miami Beach—or at least until Gaines showed up. For many casual observers, Miami conjures up images of beaches and retirement homes, but those familiar with the city's inner workings know the area is about three things: money, power and more money. This high level of gimme-gimme isn't exactly a new phenomenon; the eternally warm and sunny metropolis has been attracting greedy showbiz heavies, petty criminals and straight-up mobsters since the days of Al Capone. A truly flexible journalist whose previous books have covered topics as diverse as the Beach Boys (Heroes and Villain, 1986), decadence in the Hamptons (Philistines at the Hedgerow, 1998) and real estate in Manhattan (The Sky's the Limit, 2005), Gaines is at ease with all aspects of his subject, drifting easily between Miami's past and present. The author conveys the historical background breezily and informatively, and his obsession with real-estate development rarely slows the momentum. Gaines also loves his characters, no matter how flawed they may be. His portraits of old-school hoteliers Ben Novack and Harry Mufson, mercurial businessman Michael Capponi and über-wealthy developer Stephen Muss are compelling and nonjudgmental. His colorful snapshot of the weirdness that is Miami Beach will forever color your view of the Sunshine State. Original, gossipy and flat-out fun—will either have you booking the next flight or scare you off the place altogether. Author events in New York City and Miami Beach. Agent: Richard Pine/Inkwell Management Copyright Kirkus 2009

Hello, Operator?

Right on schedule, as on every Friday, early in the morning, she called. "Good morning, would you be kind enough to give me two telephone numbers?" She always asks for two numbers. It can be a hardware store, a dry cleaners; today it was two Enterprise-Rent-a-car offices, both in Eastern Suffolk, one in Riverhead, the other in Southampton. After I gave her the numbers, as ususal, she said "thank you dear. Have a nice day." Makes getting a Master's degree in Library and Information Science seem worthwhile.

Arthur Chaise? Chaize?

A Russian woman, caretaker of an older woman who came in looking for The city of falling angels: a Venice story. (2005). Berendt, John. New York: Penguin Press. When I said it was downstairs, being non-fiction (call number 945.31 B, the caretaker said "you don't read fiction; get something else." The woman asked for The Lucky One. (2009). New York: Grand Central Pub.

The caretaker than went on at some length about an American writer of detective stories who se books every family, that is, every reading family, owns in Russian translation. His name? Chaiz, Chase, something along those lines. Detective stories, she repeated insistently. I could find nothing of anyone with such a name. She said she would have to go to Little Russia (Moscow?) in Brighton Beach and get his name in translation.

Two requests for music: one for The lady and her music, by Lena Horne; another for Légendes, by Franz Liszt; HWPL owns the first, but it is in repair; and no local library owns the second. i told both patrons to contact their local libraries, say I had conducted a First Search, and give their libraries the OCLC numbers (34508258, and 14446330).

The Islamic Enlightenment

Recalling an era when science and scholarship were prized

“Seven years before the earthquake that shook the moral foundations of Crusader Antioch, Adelard surveyed the world around him and pronounced it rotten.
– Read an excerpt from "The House of Wisdom"”

By John Freely
Knopf, 303 pages, $27.95

Mr. Freely begins with the ancient Greek philosopher Thales and concludes in the 17th century with Isaac Newton and the Scientific Revolution.

Though holding thousands of Greek and Persian manuscripts, the House of Wisdom was no inert repository. Beginning under al-Mansur and continuing for two centuries, its collections – containing virtually the entire corpus of Greek scientific and philosophical literature – would be studied, commented upon and translated, with ever increasing refinement, into Arabic. These translations, later rendered into Latin and Hebrew, would have a decisive effect on Western thinkers, beginning with the Scholastic theologians of medieval Paris and Bologna and culminating in the revival of Greek learning in the Renaissance.

Mr. Freely includes lucid diagrams, together with magnificent color plates taken from illuminated manuscripts. But his account is cursory; it has a potted feel, as though drawn from lecture notes. Worse, it is marred by many errors...


by Jonathan Lyons
Bloomsbury, 248 pages, $26

Jonathan Lyons tells the same story in a far more reliable way. In "The House of Wisdom," he shapes his narrative around the travels of the little-known but extraordinary Adelard of Bath, an English monk who traveled to the East in the early 12th century and learned Arabic well enough to translate mathematical treatises into English.

Mr. Lyons's narrative is vivid and elegant, though marred at times by tendentiousness. Medieval Muslims, as he says, did find Europeans uncouth as well as brutal. (Though Mr. Lyons doesn't mention it, medieval Muslims were shocked to realize that "the Franks" were ignorant even of such refinements as underarm deodorants.) Mr. Lyons is right to remind us of the spectacular savagery of the Crusaders who waded knee-deep in blood through the Holy Sepulchre and of the embarrassing inability of Europeans to tell time once the sun had set.


Istanbul University Library/The Bridgeman Art Library

A 16th-century depiction of astronomers at the Galata observatory in Istanbul.

Sullenberger sweats lost book

May he be a role model so that more people use libraries and develop such a sense of honor.

Hero pilot Chesley (Sully) Sullenberger sweats lost book

by Bill Hutchinson - Daily News

Tuesday, February 3rd 2009, 7:37 PM
He has nerves of steel, but hero pilot Chesley (Sully) Sullenberger is jittery about an overdue library book.

Living up to his squeaky clean image, the US Airways captain has informed his hometown library that he may not be able to return a borrowed book - about ethics, of all things.

The former fighter pilot has a good excuse: The book was lost when he was forced to make a splash landing on the frigid Hudson River last month.

Sullenberger and co-pilot Jeffrey Skiles have been credited with saving themselves and 153 passengers and crew.

Officials at the Danville, Calif., library revealed that the flying ace rang them up saying the book is still in the crashed airliner's cargo hold and could he get an extension and a waiver on overdue fees.

The book had been borrowed from the Fresno State University library.

Peter McDonald, dean of library services at Fresno State, said he was bowled over by Sully's sense of responsibility.

"Clearly this is a wonderful, feel-good story, and we honor Mr. Sullenberger both for what he did on the Hudson and for his quick response to a lost book," McDonald told the Fresno Bee newspaper.

Citing privacy issues, McDonald refused to reveal the book's title and said Sullenberger's name should have been kept confidential.

"But now that the story's broke, we thank him again and we will replace the book in his honor," said McDonald, adding that any overdue fees will be forgiven.

Sullenberger, 58, had just taken off from LaGuardia Airport Jan. 15 when his Airbus jet flew into a flock of birds, causing both engines to conk out.

Unable to make it safely to an emergency landing strip, Sullenberger decided to ditch the plane in the river.

A similar scare happened yesterday in Denver when a United Airlines jet was forced to return to the airport after a bird was sucked into one of its engines on takeoff.

The Boeing 757 landed safely and none of the 151 passengers and crew was injured.

Technology in the Library

A patron called looking for the song "Blue Prelude" (found in book entitled Sammy Kaye's musical memories - call number [MUSIC] Q 784 S). Tried faxing it to her, twice, but her number was busy. She called back fifteen minutes later; a problem with her fax machine. Could I fax it to her library, North Bellmore? Of course. When I started to dial the library to alert them, I relalized I did not know her name. So I got on whitepages.com, did a reverse lookup on her number, and got the name Norman Perkins. Then got on Millenium and looked up Norman Perkins; copied his address and looked up the address: two names appeared, Norman and Sonya. Faxed music and a cover sheet, on the latter writing that Mrs. Sonya Perkins would pick up the sheet music. Voila.

Mean Streets

Home buyers signed a statement saying they would 'not permit the premises to be used or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race.'

In "Levittown," a vigorous and often surprising narrative, David Kushner journeys into the racially charged heart of what newspapers once trumpeted as "the most perfectly planned community in America." Today Levittown serves as condescending shorthand for suburban conformity. But just after World War II, Levittown, N.Y., and its sister community of Levittown, Pa., symbolized liberation from crowded urban neighborhoods for families whose idea of the American dream was a private home and a patch of grass.

Both Levittowns were conceived from the start as complete communities, themselves prefabricated, so to speak, with shopping centers, churches, pools, parks, curved streets for a rural feel and cul-de-sacs where children could play safely. The Levittown customer, declared Bill Levitt, was "not just buying a house, he's buying a way of life." By 1952, the Levitts were building one out of every eight homes in the country. Time magazine dubbed their company the "General Motors of the housing industry."

But there was a snake in paradise: racial segregation. Buyers of Levittown homes were required to sign a statement that declared, in bold capital letters, that they would "not permit the premises to be used or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race." Like many developers, the Levitts believed that racial integration was commercial suicide.

Mr. Kushner suggests that the demand for housing in the years after the war was so great that the Levitts could have integrated their towns from the start and thus set a national pattern. Instead they capitulated to what they perceived to be Americans' darkest fears. "The plain fact is that most whites prefer not to live in mixed communities," Bill Levitt repeatedly declared.

The core of Mr. Kushner's story focuses on the campaign to desegregate Levittown, Pa., in 1957. He deftly splices together the experiences of two families at the center of what became a terrifying ordeal. Bill and Daisy Myers and their children were educated, friendly, quiet people – just the sort of folks anyone would want to have next-door – except that they were black. Their staunchest local allies were Bea and Lew Wechsler, labor organizers and longtime members of the Communist Party. The Wechslers were among the few whites who remained uncowed by the venomous racism that gripped Levittown that summer.

With the support of local Quakers and the NAACP, the Myerses moved into their Cape Cod-style "dream house" on Deepgreen Lane. They got more than they bargained for. Crosses were burned. Mobs waving Confederate flags staked out their home night and day. Rocks were thrown through their windows. Malicious callers rang their phone around the clock: "I will not let my children drink chocolate milk again as long as I live!" one irate woman yelled at Daisy Myers. Threats were made to burn them out. The local authorities refused to intervene. The police, for the most part, claimed that they were helpless to control the mobs. Many residents in fact blamed the Myerses for provoking all the "agitation."

Books on Charles Darwin

Article by James A. Secord, editor of Evolutionary writings/Including the Autobiographies Charles Darwin


The Tree of Life
By Peter Sís
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003

The Beak of the Finch
By Jonathan Weiner
Knopf, 1994

The Politics of Evolution
By Adrian Desmond
University of Chicago, 1989

Charles Darwin
By Janet Browne
Knopf, 1995, 2002 (two vols.)

Darwin Loves You
By George Levine
Princeton, 2006

Abe as He Really Was

Mathew Brady's photograph of Lincoln in February 1860.


"A. Lincoln" (Random House, 796 pages, $35), by Ronald C. White Jr., is the first comprehensive, single-volume biography of Lincoln since David Herbert Donald's in 1996.

Lincoln's relation to the written word is the subject of Fred Kaplan's "Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer" (Harper, 406 pages, $27.95). Not unlike Allen C. Guelzo, who argued in "Redeemer President" (1999) that Lincoln deserves to be considered a first-rate political thinker, Mr. Kaplan argues that Lincoln deserves to be considered a first-rate American writer.

Lincoln actually knew more than he let on, as Craig L. Symonds, a retired Annapolis professor, notes in his splendid "Lincoln and His Admirals" (Oxford, 430 pages, $27.95). The only president to hold a patent (on a device designed to lift riverboats over shoals), Lincoln was fascinated by maritime technology and frequently visited the Washington Navy Yard to see the latest weapons and engines.

Working at close quarters with Lincoln in the White House was an education in itself, as Daniel Mark Epstein observes in "Lincoln's Men" (Collins, 262 pages, $26.99), his study of Lincoln's secretaries: John Hay, John Nicolay and William Stoddard.

Lincoln in Black and White

A Harvard scholar takes a look at the Great Emancipator

The Wall Street Journal: There have been 14,000 books written about Lincoln, according to you, more than any other American. Isn't that enough?

Mr. Gates: The only person who has received more attention in print is Jesus, which is astonishing. But, no one has done a book or film from my particular perspective.

Yet you grew to like him even more after delving into his racial attitudes, correct?

The difference between Lincoln and everybody else is that he had a capacity to grow. In the last speech of his life, Lincoln said for the first time in the American presidency: "I want to give the right to vote to [a few] black men." He thought the Declaration of Independence included black men. Thomas Jefferson didn't do that.

Barack Obama swore the oath of office on the Lincoln Bible and references Lincoln frequently in speeches.

Barack Obama is the logical extension of Lincoln's decision to abolish slavery in the South and his embrace of black rights at the end of his life. Also, Lincoln was the Great Reconciliator "with malice toward none": That's Barack Obama.

In the film you show "Abraham Obama," a work by street artist Ron English that melds Lincoln and Obama's faces into a single image. Do you think the comparison is appropriate?

When we filmed they gave me a poster. I'm looking forward to having Abraham Obama sign it.

The Presidential Bookshelf

Books on POTUS include these two.

Dewey at the Super Bowl

Douglas J. Rowe, AP Entertainment Writer, reviewed NBC's telecast of the Super Bowl. He had kind words for Al Michaels, the announcer and John Michaels, commentator.

Michaels and Madden played off each other as well as ever, too.

When Pittsburgh QB Ben Roethlisberger went over to the sideline trying to decide what play to call, Michaels said:

"He has a 150 to 200 plays on that wristband so maybe they needed some help with the Dewey decimal system to find it."

"Just imagine what the print looks like on that," Madden responded.

"You gotta have Ted Williams' eyesight," Michaels theorized.

Gotta love a football announcer that brings in the Dewey Decimal system.