Ameritopia

Ameritopia: the unmaking of America, by Mark R. Levin. Another right-wing blowhard discourses on why the nation is under threat (from the left, surely). Kirkus puts it well in a succinct review: Ultimately, the book never rises above partisanship and is not likely to win any converts. It seems a stretch to claim that there is any movement currently afoot in the United States today that is even remotely comparable to the societal changes implemented in Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto. Simply invoking the words of Ronald Reagan might appease some, but it is hardly sufficient for constructing a convincing argument. A polemic for like-minded readers.

Amen. Preaching to the choir.

Making Ignorance Chic

Maureen Dowd takes note of librarians in her column.



The false choice between intellectualism and sexuality in women has persisted through the ages. There was no more poignant victim of it than Marilyn Monroe. She was smart enough to become the most famous Dumb Blonde in history. Photographers loved to get her to pose in tight shorts, a silk robe or a swimsuit with a come-hither look and a weighty book — a history of Goya or James Joyce’s “Ulysses” or Heinrich Heine’s poems. A high-brow bunny picture, a variation on the sexy librarian trope.

Kissinger dissertation

Came back from lunch to a question of finding Henry Kissinger's doctoral dissertation. Googling the term Kissinger Elena Kagan (I recalled some news item to that effect – which turned out to be a Daily Beast quiz Is Elena Kagan a Socialist and was about their senior theses) eventually led me to Henry Kissinger - Conservapedia. Therein I saw reference to his dissertation: "A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-22," a study praising how the conservative diplomats of the era built a stable and peaceful international system after the Napoleonic wars. 

The dissertation was published in 1957 by Houghton Mifflin [940.57 K].As the father, who had asked the question, said his son attends Yale, I went to Yale.edu, found a link to the library, entered the title, and got a record back:

A world restored; Metternich, Castlereagh and the problems of peace, 1812-22.

Author:	Kissinger, Henry, 1923-
Title:	A world restored; Metternich, Castlereagh and the problems of peace, 1812-22.
Published:	Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1957.
Description:	354 p. illus. 23 cm.
Location:	SML, Stacks, Yale Classification
Call Number:	Bi43 957K
Status:	Not Checked Out
Subjects (Library of Congress):	Metternich, Clemens Wenzel Lothar, Fürst von, 1773-1859.
	Castlereagh, Robert Stewart, Viscount, 1769-1822.
	Europe --Politics and government --1815-1848.
Database:	Yale University Library

The first link in searching on Google scholar was Kissinger: A Biography, by Walter Isaacson.

Wrote the kid an email, and closed the case (sorta).

A day in the life

A music question to begin with: sheet music for two songs: Sitting on the Dock of the Bay (Otis Redding, in Three decades of rhythm & blues classics), and Don't you worry about a thing (Stevie Wonder, in Stevie Wonder complete).

A second question: an older woman wanted information about Invasive ductal carcinoma (a type of breast cancer).

“invasive ductal carcinoma” refers to cancer that has broken through the wall of the milk duct and begun to invade the tissues of the breast. Over time, invasive ductal carcinoma can spread to the lymph nodes and possibly to other areas of the body.
According to the American Cancer Society, more than 180,000 women in the United States find out they have invasive breast cancer each year. Most of them are diagnosed with invasive ductal carcinoma.
Although invasive ductal carcinoma can affect women at any age, it is more common as women grow older. According to the American Cancer Society, about two-thirds of women are 55 or older when they are diagnosed with an invasive breast cancer. Invasive ductal carcinoma also affects men.

Later, a mother and daughter came over to Reference, the mother asking for material on politics. Her 15-year-old daughter got an internship at Senator Schumer's office. She knows nothing about politics. I suggested The Nation, 1865-1990 ( edited by Katrina vanden Heuvel, whhose name I know)  and No excuses by Robert Shrum. I told her to use the table of contents and index to focus in on topics and names, rather than just dive into the book. I also suggested she go to senate.gov to look up Schumer.

A few minutes before one a mother walked down the steps whilst finishing a cellphone conversation (with the ear implant, not a phone), and asked for a play for her 8th-grade daughter. I did a quick reference interview: does she like to read? Is she a good reader? I thought of Neil Simon. Then I thought of downloadable books, so I asked her if her daughter has an iPod. Of course. I showed her how to go to the website to look for ebooks and recorded books, and also mentioned Playaways. She was thrilled.

Book Fair's dissident guests roil China

A dispute between China and organizers of the famed Frankfurt Book Fair threatens to overshadow the world's premier publishing event and become a diplomatic headache for German Chancellor Angela Merkel ahead of elections later this month.

The rift broke open last weekend at a symposium to herald next month's Frankfurt Book Fair, whose guest country of honor this year is China. Just as the 2008 Olympics ushered China's economic and sporting accomplishments onto the world stage, the fair is intended to do the same for its literary achievements. Some 2,000 Chinese publishers, artists and writers are expected to attend, and the first of hundreds of exhibits, readings and author tours already began this spring.

The fair's official Chinese organizing committee, though, took issue with the invitations of two dissidents to the symposium, titled "China and the world -- perception and reality."

After the Chinese delegation threatened to boycott the event, book fair organizers withdrew invitations to journalist and environmental activist Dai Qing and poet Bei Ling -- only to have them come as the guests of the German PEN club of independent writers.

Perception and reality is quite an apt title, it seems.

The German government could face a tricky balancing act if it wades in to the dispute. China is a critical trading partner and helped jump-start Germany's export-heavy economy's climb out of its recession in recent months.

But Ms. Merkel has made defending human rights a cornerstone of her foreign policy. Two years ago, she defied Chinese pressure and criticism by becoming the first German chancellor to receive the Dalai Lama.

Books on Political Conspiracy

1. It Can't Happen Here. Sinclair Lewis. Doubleday, 1935

A charismatic Democratic senator who speaks in "noble but slippery ­abstractions" is elected president, in a groundswell of cultish adoration, by a nation on the brink of economic ­disaster. Promising to restore ­America's greatness, he promptly ­announces a government seizure of the big banks and insurance ­companies. He strong-arms the ­Congress into amending the Constitution to give him unlimited emergency powers. He throws his ­enemies into concentration camps. With scarcely any resistance, the country has ­become a fascist dictatorship. No black helicopters here, though. Sinclair Lewis's dystopian ­political satire, now largely forgotten except for its ironic title, was a ­mammoth best seller in 1935, during the depths of the ­Depression and the rise of fascism in Europe. His president, Berzelius ("Buzz") Windrip, is a ruthless phony with the "earthy sense of humor of a Mark Twain"; one of the few who dare oppose him openly is a rural ­newspaper editor who is forced to go on the run. Lewis's prose could be ­ungainly, but he captured with caustic humor the bumptious narrow- ­mindedness of small-town life.

2. The Ministry of Fear. Graham Greene. Viking, 1943

Set in London during the Blitz, "The Ministry of Fear"—the only novel Graham Greene wrote during the war years—opens with a ­now-familiar Hitchcockian gambit: An innocent man stumbles upon a secret and is marked for death. Arthur Rowe, a loner who has just been released from an insane asylum, wins a cake at a carnival by guessing its precise weight. Concealed in the cake is a spool of film intended for a Nazi spy. Rowe becomes the target of a ­shadowy international espionage ring bent on stealing vital British war plans. On this slim armature Greene constructs a richly atmospheric thriller, one of the classics of the genre. His prose is spare and elegant, his pacing masterly. The protagonist, haunted by a terrible crime in his past, loses his memory and comes to feel "directed, controlled, molded, by some agency with a surrealist imagination," pursued through a city where entire buildings can disappear overnight in a bombing raid.

Also made into a film starring Ray Milland and Marjorie Reynolds.









3. Libra. Don DeLillo. Viking, 1988

Don DeLillo, our poet of paranoia, here reimagines the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It's a conspiracy theory about ­conspiracy theories, about the ­powerful ­mythology of the greatest crime of the American century. DeLillo's ­language is dazzling as he presents an ingenious fusing of fact and fiction, theory and reality. A CIA operative ­devises an "electrifying event" that will force the invasion of Cuba. He ­enlists a pawn, Lee Harvey Oswald, to unwittingly carry out a "spectacular miss." But of course a perfect plan conceived by "men in small rooms" must self-destruct in the cold light of reality. This is a ­hallucinatory ­meditation on the ­seductiveness of conspiracy: strangely lyrical and fraught with steadily ­encroaching ­terror. Oswald, the ­puppet, is no more paranoid than his masters; the difference is that they realize that there is always "a world inside the world."

4. Advise and Consent. Allen Drury. Doubleday, 1959
A generation of political junkies got hooked on the ways of Washington because of this book, published 50 years ago. The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, "Advise and Consent" revealed the ­inner ­workings of the Senate—and ­offered compelling drama along the way. An ailing, manipulative, FDR-like president nominates as secretary of state an ­arrogant liberal intellectual and would-be Soviet appeaser, meant to evoke Alger Hiss. In the midst of his vicious confirmation battle, evidence emerges that he was once a member of a secret Communist cell. Allen Drury, who was a reporter in the New York Times's Washington bureau, is not exactly subtle about his politics: All of his bad guys are soft on ­Communism. The capital he depicts is a period piece: Senators all orate like William Jennings Bryan; socialite ­hostesses have boozy salons where senators get sloppy; a hint in a ­newspaper column can destroy a ­politician's career. But it's addictive reading and arguably still the best novel about Washington politics.

Made into a film with Henry Fonda, Charles Laughton, Don Murray, Walter Pidgeon, Peter Lawford, Gene Tierney, Franchot Tone, Lew Ayres, Burgess Meredith, Eddie Hodges.




5. The Matarese Circle. Robert Ludlum. Bantam, 1979

No one will ever call ­Robert Ludlum a great novelist or even a good writer of prose. But "The Matarese Circle," his best thriller, ­perfectly captured the paranoid ­suspicions of post-Watergate America. In Ludlum's cosmology, it's always a few brave individuals up against ­immense and yet somehow still ­unseen conspiracies. An ancient secret society of assassins-for-hire has been revived by a powerful organization that turns out to be controlling entire governments. Only two men can save the world: one a rogue agent in the CIA, the other in the KGB—sworn ­enemies forced to work together. Eventually they uncover a sinister plot involving a Kennedy-like family and an impostor who is on the verge of being elected to the White House. There is a classic scene in which our hero ­discovers who is in on the conspiracy and it turns out to be . . . everyone.


—Mr. Finder, a member of the ­Association of Former Intelligence Officers, is the author of nine ­novels, including "Paranoia" and "High Crimes." His suspense thriller "Vanished" has just been published by St. Martin's Press.

Polite Debate at Grassley's Iowa Town Halls

Not all town-hall meetings are raucous. And some take place in libraries.

Back home for his first set of public events since Congress left its recess, Grassley has packed his town halls, which he holds in the same locations every year, more than ever. When he showed up in Winterset on Wednesday morning, his aides had already moved the event from a meeting room in the library to a nearby park, as a crowd that would normally be about 70 was instead several hundred. In Afton, an event that had been planned at the city hall was moved to a Methodist church nearby, and even then people were standing outside the door trying to hear the longtime senator.

And note this exchange:

Iowans just might be less eager to yell and be rude. When one man in Afton asked Grassley why he was eager to change a health-care system that many Americans like, the senator started referring to a private conservation he had with a Democratic senator on Capitol Hill.

"Which one?" the man shouted.

"I can't tell you that," Grassley said.

"Why not?" the man snapped back.

"Because it was a private conservation," Grassley responded.

"Oh, okay," the man said, and let the senator finish.

Imagine acceptin gthe keeping of confidentiality.

Yiddish: NYC’s 2nd Political Language

In 1922, Fiorello H. La Guardia was re-elected to Congress after he rebutted charges of anti-Semitism by challenging a rival to debate in Yiddish. La Guardia was fluent in Yiddish. His Jewish rival was not.



July 21, 2009
Yiddish Resurfaces as City’s 2nd Political Language
By SAM ROBERTS

In 1897, Isaac Fromme, an office-seeker from the largely Jewish Lower East Side, punctuated his campaign palaver with Yiddishisms to refute insinuations that he was Irish. In 1922, Fiorello H. La Guardia was re-elected to Congress from East Harlem after he rebutted charges of anti-Semitism by challenging a rival to debate in Yiddish. La Guardia, a son of Jewish and Italian parents, was fluent in Yiddish. His Jewish rival was not.

That Yiddish remains the second language of New York politics was demonstrated yet again over the weekend in the disembodied debate between Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the State Senate.

On Friday, Mr. Bloomberg said that for the Senate to adjourn for the summer without voting to extend his control over New York City’s school system was “meshugeneh.”

To which State Senator Hiram Monserrate replied on Sunday: “We believe it would be meshugeneh not to include parents in the education of our children. As opposed to loosely using the word ‘meshugeneh,’ we would also say we don’t need a yenta on the other side of this argument and this debate.”

Neither Mr. Monserrate, who is Hispanic, nor Mr. Bloomberg, who is Jewish, was surgically precise with his Yiddishism.

But their casual embrace of an onomatopoetic language is a reminder of how universal Yiddish has become. Not only in New York, where Jews now constitute fewer than one in five mayoral election voters, but even beyond. Meshuga and yenta both appear in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The last Jewish mayor, Edward I. Koch, suggested as much on Monday when he offered an obvious reason why New York politicians drift into Yiddish. “They all want to sound like citizens of the world,” Mr. Koch said.

The comedian Jackie Mason said Mr. Bloomberg would have felt more self-conscious about using Yiddish 10 or 15 years ago. “It’s now hip to be Jewish,” he said. “A Jew used to be embarrassed at saying a Jewish word.”

Twenty years ago, Mr. Mason himself regretted being quoted as describing David N. Dinkins, the Democratic mayoral candidate, as “a fancy schvartze,” invoking a Yiddish word, often used derogatorily, for a black man. Mr. Mason later apologized. “I’m a comedian,” he said then, “not a politician.” He was criticized for calling President Obama the same word during a show this year, but told the entertainment Web site tmz.com that it was no longer a pejorative term.

In 1998, Senator Alfonse M. D’Amato referred to his Democratic opponent, Charles E. Schumer, as a “putzhead.” The backlash to Mr. D’Amato’s reference resonated because of his own reputation for crudity and because he at first denied using the slur.

“I think that Mayor Bloomberg probably used Yiddish as a way of having his kugel and eating it, too,” said Michael Wex, the author of “Born to Kvetch” and “Just Say Nu.”

“His use of meshugeneh — a not uncommon solecism, incidentally; the adverb should be meshuga — seems intended to strengthen his point at the same time as it gives his expression of it a heartfelt, rather than denunciatory, feel,” Mr. Wex said. “The idea that ‘this is crazy, pure and simple’ comes across all the more strongly by implying that English simply lacks the words to describe what he’s feeling — that in his guts, as they used to say, he knows it’s nuts.

“Rather than crossing ethnic lines here, Mayor Bloomberg seems to be presenting himself as an Everyman who, since he happens to be Jewish, expresses himself in the idiom that’s supposed to be closest to his heart,” Mr. Wex said.

“Senator Monserrate raises the stakes, though, by calling the mayor a yenta —‘a female motormouth,’ ” Mr. Wex continued. “If the senator’s earlier uses of meshugeneh were meant to show that he could play the mayor’s game, yenta is his way of proving that he can even play it better.”

Whatever the mayor’s motivation in resorting to Yiddish, the debate with some of the Democratic senators, who want to loosen mayoral control of the schools, was degenerating well beyond meshugas into a very English digression. When Mr. Bloomberg invoked Neville Chamberlain on Friday in defending his version of mayoral control over education against any compromise, was he suggesting that the senators were comparable to Adolf Hitler?

“It wasn’t an analogy at all — the mayor was talking about endless negotiations in general,” Stu Loeser, Mr. Bloomberg’s chief spokesman, explained on Monday. “The former prime minister’s name is now synonymous in the American lexicon with appeasement and endless negotiations. Since it wasn’t an analogy, the mayor wasn’t comparing anyone to anyone else.”

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.

Praise song for the day.

Elizabeth Alexander's poem for the Inauguration of Barack Obama as POTUS.

Tuesday, January 20, 2009
THE POEM

Praise song for the day.

Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others' eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, "Take out your pencils. Begin."

We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, "I need to see what's on the other side; I know there's something better down the road."

We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.

Some live by "Love thy neighbor as thy self."

Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.

In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.

Veeps

Veeps: Profiles in Insignificance. 973.099 K

Bill Kelter ; artist, Wayne Shellabarger. Marietta, Ga: Top Shelf ; London: Diamond, 2008.

Insights Both Fresh and Tested

The typical books-of-the-year list is confined, with good reason, to books that were published during that year. But the crush of recent economic news means that several older books suddenly have a new relevance. So while 2008 books still dominate my choices, you will also find a prophetic book from 2003 and a classic from the late 1950s. The idea is to create a reading list for anyone trying to make sense of the world right now.

The obvious place to start is the financial crisis, and the clearest guide to it that I’ve read is “Financial Shock” by Mark Zandi, a founder of the research firm Moody’s Economy.com.

I recently read the early parts of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s trilogy, “The Age of Roosevelt,” written more than a half-century ago. It is a bit triumphalist, but its age offers an advantage I hadn’t anticipated: you can draw the historical analogies for yourself. The debt-fueled business excesses of the 1920s sound especially, and chillingly, familiar.

I also asked Barry Gewen, an editor at The New York Times Book Review, if he would put together a canon of Depression books, and we have posted the list on our economics blog, nytimes.com/economix. At the top is “Freedom From Fear,” David Kennedy’s 1999 Pulitzer Prize winner (which, at almost 1,000 pages, is still 1,000 pages shorter than the Schlesinger trilogy).

To try to keep the current crisis from turning into a depression, the Obama administration is going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars next year, much of it on a vast infrastructure program. And it so happens that one of the better-reviewed nonfiction books of 2008 was, in large part, about infrastructure. The book is “Traffic” by Tom Vanderbilt. The reviews focused on Mr. Vanderbilt’s entertaining tour through the anthropology of driving. But “Traffic” also has a larger message.

The next book was written more than five years ago, but it’s still the closest thing to an obituary for the Big Three car companies, as they once were. It was written by Micheline Maynard, a longtime automobile journalist who now works for The Times, and it’s called “The End of Detroit.”

“Detroit’s long reign as the dominant force in the American car industry is over,” she wrote, in the first sentence of the first chapter. She predicted that one of the Big Three could collapse within a decade. “The ultimate irony,” Ms. Maynard continues, is that Detroit “has been defeated by companies that did the job Detroit once did with unquestioned expertise: turn out vehicles that consumers wanted to buy and vehicles that captured their imaginations.” The Big Three’s ability to solve this problem, quickly, will largely determine their postbailout fate.

That's in a book published in 2003. It is, obviously, prophetic. I think that within two years there will be only 2 Detroit companies, and neither will be that strong. Chrysler and GM might well merge, but the sum of two sick companies will be one bigger sick company.

And, then, politics.

From the left, Larry M. Bartels, a Princeton political economist, explained in “Unequal Democracy” that the economy has consistently performed better under Democratic presidents than Republican ones over the last 60 years. For middle-class families, incomes have risen more than twice as fast under Democrats as under Republicans. Mr. Bartels makes a strong case that the pattern is more than coincidence. I’m not sure that cause and effect are as tightly linked as he suggests. But his critics have yet to come up with an argument as strong as his.

From the right, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam pleaded with their fellow Republicans to come up with an economic strategy beyond tax cuts. In “Grand New Party,” Mr. Douthat and Mr. Salam lay out an alternate agenda, for overhauling taxes, lowering health care costs, improving schools and reducing the number of single-parent families.

Lower health costs, better schools, social engineering; they're rightists?

Finally, I will mention a book that I already recommended once this year — “The Race Between Education and Technology,” a history of American education by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz.

Two questions, a visit

In the afternoon I was asked two reference questions, and Dr. Eisenberg visited.

First, a graduate student who said she had four kids at home came to do work on her PhD dissertation, and wanted books on differentiated instruction. That proved to be, as I anticipated, far too specialized an academic subject for a public library. Hewlett-Woodmere has quite limited book resources on educations (Dewey 371 and 378), but database resources are plentiful. I got her on Galenet and ERIC. That pleased her.

A website (of the Macomb, Michigan School District) defines Differentiated Instruction as a flexible approach to teaching in which the teacher plans and carries out varied approaches to content, process, and product in anticipation of and in response to student differences in readiness, interests, and learning needs (Tomlinson, 1995, p. 10).

A college website has an entire web page on differentiated instruction.

Second, a young woman who turned out to be a teacher (high school, perhaps) was looking for a book containing scripts on Twilight Zone episodes. HWPL does own such a book: As timeless as infinity: the complete Twilight Zone scripts of Rod Serling. Well, it's not complete.

Hardly complete; there were 5 seasons (36, 29, 37, 18, and 36 episodes). At any rate, the script the teacher wanted wasn't in the book. It was The Shelter (episode 3, Season 3). She planned to use it by juxtaposing it to some other element. Sounded interesting. She had a printout with other titles from other libraries, and was planning to do some more searching.

I told her about LILRC (the Long Island Libraries Resources Council), a consortium of Long Island libraries. Her home library, I told her, would be able to giver her a pass to, say, Hofstra University, if she found that Hofstra had something useful. "I didn't know about that," she said, adding "and I thought I knew libraries pretty well."

Dr. Eisenberg, a retired MD who visits the Library every once in a while (to get books for his wife), stops and schmoozes with as many people as possible when he does so. He can stay for a solid fifteen minutes with one person. Yesterday I told him about the new book I'm reading, Lessons in disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the path to war in Vietnam. We had a short discussion about Bundy, the Viet Nam War, and presidents. Always pleasant to speak with him.