Not a question, an assertion

I'm sitting at the Reference desk at 11.15am, and a couple walk down the steps having a high-volume conversation bordering on a spat. I'm the only person at the desk. The woman reluctantly looks over at me, looks away, and, quite reluctantly, walks over to me.

"I guess you're the person I have to see," she asserts, not convinced of the veracity of that statement she herself has made.

I smile and say, "I'm the only one here."

She hands me a piece of paper with a call number written on it. I point out to her where she'll find the book.

She walks away, muttering, "I've never been down here."

Not a close encounter of the library kind.

2 libraries, 3 songs

Two libraries called, back to back, both looking for sheet music:

* Farmingdale looking for: You'll always be the One I Love (librarian said Dean Martin sang it)
* Oyster Bay looking for: You made me love You, and It had to be You.

Found all three, with Keyword searches.

It had to be you; song. Lyric by Gus Kahn. Sheet music
Jones, Isham, 1894-1956.
New York, Jerome H. Remick & Co. [c1924]
score (5 p.)

You made me love you (I didn't want to do it) in
100 years of popular music, 1900 piano, vocal, chords. Q 785.5 O
Miami, Fla. : Warner Bros., c2003.
1 score (255 p.) ; 31 cm.

You'll always be the one I love in
Frank Sinatra : the best of the Capitol years. Q 784.8 Sinatra
Sinatra, Frank, 1915-1998.
Miami, FL : Warner Bros. Publications, c1997.
1 score (233 p.) : ill. (some col.) ; 30 cm.

And I also found this little gem (it also has You made me Love You):
Barbershops, bullets, and ballads : an annotated anthology of underappreciated American musical jewels, 1865-1918 / compiled by William E. Studwell and Bruce R. Schueneman ; song texts assembled and revised by Bruce R. Schuenemann.

Looking at it, I quickly realized it's an annotated anthology (780.973 B), and contains facts, not music. You made me Love You was published in 1913, says the annotation, continuing:

words by Joseph (Joe) McCarthy (1885-1943), lyrics by James V. Monaco (1885-1945), a romantic protest song, first appeared in the extravaganza The Honeymoon Express (1913). Bandleader Harry James used this AL Jolson favorite as one of his themes, brilliantly performed by James on his trumpet.
Both compilers are librarians: Studwell (MA, MSLS) at Northern Illinois Universitry, DeKalb; Scheneman (MLS, MS) at Texas A&M.

HWPL is the only library in Nassau that owns the book (no surprise there), and the book has not circulated since being entered into the collection on June 19, 2001 (no suprise there, either).

Noise policy

She called again. Yes, the same woman. This time she asked: "that area on the first floor, in the rear, where there overstuffed couches [ed: there are actually overstuffed chairs] and three tables, are people allowed to speak back and forth about a project?"

"We do allow people to speak back there," I answered, adding, "what they talk about is their choice."

"Well, don't you think it would be a good policy to post a sign back there?" she began to ask.

"If you wish to suggest a policy, I can transfer you to Administration," I interjected.

"Excuse me, can you let me finish my sentence?"

"I can not do such a thing. Policies are handled by Administration; I would be glad to transfer you," I said, and began reaching for the phone pad.

"It's very rude that you interrupted me," she lectured. "You should really let me finish my sentence, and as you are not letting me finish my sentence, I see no use in speaking with you."

Click.

New Partners for a Music Catalog

In the digital age, old music catalogs remain important.

Dutch Investors Buy Rights to Rodgers & Hammerstein, Adding to Library

Music library in this case.











The Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization includes copyrights to musicals including 'The Sound of Music,' above, among others. Richard Rodgers, below at left, and Oscar Hammerstein, circa 1957
















A music-publishing fund primarily owned by a giant Dutch pension fund has acquired the music-publishing catalog of the iconic songwriting duo Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, in a deal that highlights the ongoing value of music-publishing assets even in the age of online piracy.


Music publishing -- the ownership and exploitation of copyrights on melody and lyrics -- has grown in importance in the digital age. It's a part of the music business that has held its value far better than the sound recordings owned by record labels, because fees from publishing rights can be collected from a broad range of uses, not all of which are vulnerable to piracy. For instance, music publishers collect royalties when songs are played on the radio, in restaurants and bars and when any version of a song (not necessarily the original recording) is used in a movie, television show or commercial.

Not quite tangible, it is, nonetheless, a treasure trove of assets. [Tangible can be defined as perceptible by the senses, though especially the sense of touch.]

Michael Jackson bought the rights to much of the Beatles catalog in the 1985 for $47 million. In the decades since, that purchase has provided hundreds of millions of dollars in cash -- partly through the sale of a 50% interest to Sony -- that have partially insulated Mr. Jackson from a variety of financial travails.

A $47 million investment returned "hundreds of millions."

Imagem said that the acquisition of the Rodgers & Hammerstein catalog makes it the world's largest independent music publisher, with annualized revenue of more than more than €100 million, or about $126 million, and the rights to more than 200,000 pieces of music. The Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization includes copyrights to the music and lyrics to musicals including "Oklahoma," "The King & I" and "South Pacific." It also holds 12,000 songs by 200 other writers including Irving Berlin and Mr. Rodgers's other famous lyricist-collaborator, Lorenz Hart.

The thoroughbred Overdose extended his record to 12 wins in 12 races on Sunday in Budapest.

The jockey Christophe Soumillon and Overdose after a victory on Sunday at Kincsem Park.

April 20, 2009
Hungary’s Spirits Are Back Up, on a Horse
By NICHOLAS KULISH

BUDAPEST — A racehorse bought for a pittance has turned into a national hero in crisis-stricken Hungary.

The thoroughbred known as Overdose pounded down the stretch here at Kincsem Park on Sunday to extend his record to 12 wins in 12 races, his jockey clad in the red, white and green of the Hungarian flag.

And for an afternoon at least, the crowd of more than 20,000 in the grandstand and lining the rail, along with all the Hungarians watching at home, could forget about the resignation of the prime minister and their currency’s nosedive.

As times have gotten tougher here, the 4-year-old Overdose has become the Hungarian Seabiscuit, a symbol of hope for Americans during the Great Depression. He appears to remind Hungarians of themselves: undervalued and underestimated.

“This horse has a mission here in Hungary,” said Zoltan Mikoczy, Overdose’s owner, a cheerful, balding steel trader with a weakness for thoroughbreds.

It is hard to overstate the great pride that Hungary, a small nation that has suffered many disappointments, feels for Overdose. The country was already afflicted with high debt and anemic growth before the global credit crisis struck last fall, leading to a bailout by the International Monetary Fund.

But now, instead of bailouts and bankruptcies, talk has centered for a change on Overdose’s new flashy Belgian jockey, Christophe Soumillon, who is married to a former Miss France, and on comparisons to the 19th-century Hungarian filly Kincsem, one of the greatest horses of all time and namesake of the track, who retired with an unblemished record in 54 races.

“I can compare Overdose to Seabiscuit,” said Zalan Horvath, the secretary of the Association for the Future of Equestrian Sports in Hungary. “I say that because the Hungarian nation has had a lot of bad times, in the last centuries but also lately.”

While Overdose’s fame is not as great as Seabiscuit’s, his success may be even more surprising. Mr. Mikoczy, 47, went to Newmarket, in Britain, with friends in 2006, after promising his wife that he would not buy another horse after purchasing four at a sale a month earlier. He put up his hand “just for fun” when the bidding for Overdose was merely about $3,500, never imagining that he would walk out with a thoroughbred for such a bargain basement price.

Nor did anyone predict victories for the horse in Rome and Baden-Baden, Germany. “We didn’t expect anything from the horse when he arrived,” said Sandor Ribarszki, the horse’s trainer, a quick-witted joker who has called Overdose “short” and “kind of ugly.” Now Mr. Ribarszki said he had trouble sleeping at night, wondering if anything had happened to the horse.

Since Overdose’s victory streak began, Mr. Mikoczy said, he has been offered $6.5 million for the horse, but has refused to sell.

“I didn’t buy the horse for business or to make a profit,” Mr. Mikoczy said. “You do not sell dreams.”

Overdose has been called the Wunderpferd, or Miracle Horse, in Germany and the Budapest Bullet in Britain. A writer at Britain’s Racing Post recently raved that he “leaves the stalls with the overdrive already engaged.”

But Overdose’s one setback may have done more to cement his reputation in Hungary than his dozen straight victories. At the prestigious Prix de l’Abbaye at Longchamp in Paris, Overdose appeared to win the premier sprint race with a time just shy of the 25-year-old course record.

But the seeming victory was nullified because a malfunctioning gate prevented one of the other horses from starting. Overdose’s team decided he had expended too much effort to be allowed to run again. His rival, Marchand D’Or, went on to win the race, and later the title of best European sprinter.

Tivadar Farkashazy, a Hungarian television commentator and journalist, compared the debacle to the Treaty of Trianon, signed in 1920 at Versailles, which whittled Hungarian territory down to a fraction of its size and remains a source of national outrage.

“Again the tough luck, again in France,” said Mr. Farkashazy, who has also written a book about the horse.

Trianon has special resonance to Overdose’s story. While the horse trains in Hungary and wears the colors of the country, his owner is an ethnic Hungarian who lives across the border in Slovakia.

“It’s important that the horse remains Hungarian,” Mr. Mikoczy said, even though there are superior facilities available in other countries. Indeed, Hungarian racing had been in a slow decline since World War II, and the money-losing Kincsem Park was in danger of closing, a fate Overdose appears to have prevented for the time being.

There is a clear patriotic tilt to the horse’s reception. He rode out Sunday with an honor guard of six flag-bearing riders dressed as Hussars, the famous Hungarian light cavalry, as tens of thousands screamed.

“For us Hungarians, it’s a big deal,” said Livia Nagy, 23, one of the thousands who came out for the race. “Overdose is something we can be proud of.”

The horse’s popularity has even attracted politicians. On Friday, Viktor Orban, chairman of the center-right Fidesz Party and a former prime minister who hopes to reclaim the job in next year’s election, turned up with a crowd of television cameras to pose with the star.

“Failure is the most often heard expression in Hungary today — failure, mistake, pessimism. When even a horse is able to make a miracle from nowhere, it’s a sign of hope that we can get out from the desperate situation we are now in,” Mr. Orban said.

“If I were a politician, I would do the same, because Overdose is one of the most famous persons in Hungary,” said Mr. Horvath, “even though he is a horse.”

New Looks at the Fields of Death for Jews

Visitors at the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem, where research is being done on lesser-known killing fields.




Jews executed in October 1941 in Serbia. One goal of the Yad Vashem project is to learn more exactly how many were killed.

April 20, 2009
New Looks at the Fields of Death for Jews
By ETHAN BRONNER

JERUSALEM — In the Ukrainian town of Berdichev, Jewish women were forced to swim across a wide river until they drowned. In Telsiai, Lithuania, children were thrown alive into pits filled with their murdered parents. In Liozno, Belarus, Jews were herded into a locked barn where many froze to death.

Holocaust deniers aside, the world is not ignorant of the systematic Nazi slaughter of some six million Jews in World War II. People know of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen; many have heard of the tens of thousands shot dead in the Ukrainian ravine of Babi Yar. But little has been known about the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of smaller killing fields across the former Soviet Union where some 1.5 million Jews met their deaths.

That is now changing. Over the past few years, the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum and research center in Israel has been investigating those sites, comparing Soviet, German, local and Jewish accounts, crosschecking numbers and methods. The work, gathered under the title “The Untold Stories,” is far from over. But to honor Holocaust Remembrance Day, which starts Monday evening, the research is being made public on the institution’s Web site.

“These are places that have been mostly neglected because they involved smaller towns and villages,” said David Bankier, head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem. “In many cases, locals played a key role in the murders, probably by a ratio of 10 locals to every one German. We are trying to understand the man who played soccer with his Jewish neighbor one day and turned to kill him the next. This provides material for research on genocide elsewhere, like in Africa.”

For the purposes of this project, a killing field entails at least 50 people, said the project director, Lea Prais. The killing began in June 1941 with the German invasion of the Soviet Union. From the Baltic republics in the north to the Caucasus in the south, Nazi death squads combed the areas.

The first evidence for what took place was gathered right after the war by Soviet investigating committees largely focused on finding anti-Soviet collaborators.

The new research checks that evidence against German records, diaries and letters of soldiers, as well as accounts by witnesses and the few surviving Jews, some of whom climbed out of pits of corpses. Sometimes, the researchers said, the Soviets seemed to have exaggerated, and that is noted on the Web site. One goal of the project is to learn more exactly the numbers killed.

One little-known case comes from a German sailor who filmed killings in Liepaja, Latvia. The film has been on view for some years at the Yad Vashem museum. But the new Web site has a forgotten video of a 1981 interview with the sailor, Reinhard Wiener, who said he had been a bystander with a movie camera.

According to part of his account, “After the civilian guards with the yellow armbands shouted once again, I was able to identify them as Latvian home guardsmen. The Jews, whom I was able to recognize by now, were forced to jump over the sides of the truck onto the ground. Among them were crippled and weak people, who were caught by the others.

“At first, they had to line up in a row, before they were chased toward the trench. This was done by SS and Latvian home guardsmen. Then the Jews were forced to jump into the trench and to run along inside it until the end. They had to stand with their back to the firing squad. At that time, the moment they saw the trench, they probably knew what would happen to them. They must have felt it, because underneath there was already a layer of corpses, over which was spread a thin layer of sand.”

Ms. Prais said one of the discoveries that had most surprised her was the way in which Soviet Jews who survived the war made an effort to commemorate those who had perished. In distant fields and village squares they often placed a Star of David or some other memorial, despite fears of overt Jewish expression in the Soviet era.

“The silent Jews of the Soviet Union were not so silent,” she said.

The slaughter that some of them had escaped defies the imagination. One case Ms. Prais and her colleagues have cross-referenced involves what happened in the town of Krupki, Belarus, where the entire Jewish community of at least 1,000 was eliminated on Sept. 18, 1941.

A German soldier who took part in the mass killing kept a diary that was found on his body by the Allies, she said. In it, he wrote of having volunteered as one of “15 men with strong nerves” asked to eliminate the Jews of Krupki. “All these had to be shot today,” he wrote. The weather was gray and rainy, he observed.

The Jews had been told they were to be deported to work in Germany, but as they were forced into a ditch, the reality of their fate became evident. Panic ensued. The soldier wrote that the guards had a hard time controlling the crowd.

“Ten shots rang out, 10 Jews popped off,” he wrote. “This continued until all were dispatched. Only a few of them kept their countenances. The children clung to their mothers, wives to their husbands. I won’t forget this spectacle in a hurry....”

10 Letters a Day Reach Obama

Mike Kelleher, the director of the White House Office of Correspondence, uses a white board to keep a rough tally of mail sorted by subject

More Photos >











April 20, 2009
Picking Letters, 10 a Day, That Reach Obama
By ASHLEY PARKER

WASHINGTON — The task of keeping a president in touch with his public is daunting, as Mike Kelleher well knows.

Tens of thousands of letters, e-mail messages and faxes arrive at the White House every day. A few hundred are culled and end up each weekday afternoon on a round wooden table in the office of Mr. Kelleher, the director of the White House Office of Correspondence.

He chooses 10 letters, which are slipped into a purple folder and put in the daily briefing book that is delivered to President Obama at the White House residence. Designed to offer a sampling of what Americans are thinking, the letters are read by the president, and he sometimes answers them by hand, in black ink on azure paper.

“We pick messages that are compelling, things people say that, when you read it, you get a chill,” said Mr. Kelleher, 47. “I send him letters that are uncomfortable messages.”

The ritual offers Mr. Obama a way to move beyond the White House bubble, and occasionally leads to moments when his composure cracks, advisers said. “I remember once he was particularly quiet,” said Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, David Axelrod, “and I asked him what he was thinking about, and he said, ‘These letters just tear you up.’ It was after getting a poignant letter from a struggling family.”

Some letters begin “I didn’t vote for you”; others end “May God bless.” One missive came in the form of baseboard molding, covered with $2.70 in stamps and a scrawl urging the president to “Fix housing 1st!” Heaps of letters offer advice on the best treats for the first dog, Bo, and people have sent in colorful dog sweaters.

Mr. Kelleher said the president had used the letters to ask policy questions of government agencies, and Mr. Axelrod recalled a letter circulated among staff members from a woman in Glendale, Ariz., who was in danger of losing her home because her husband had lost his job.

The White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, said Mr. Obama “believes it’s easy in Washington to forget there are real people with real challenges being affected by the debate.” Mr. Emanuel added that he had seen the president turn to policy advisers in meetings and say, “No, no, no. I want to read you a letter that I got. I want you to understand.”

Cynthia Arnold of Stewartstown, Pa., wrote the president to tell him what had happened as she started watching his inauguration on television. Her son, Pvt. Matthew J. Arnold, 23, whose unit might be deployed to the Middle East, called her from Fort Hood, Tex., to ask for her help filling out paperwork.

“He was calling to ask me who should make his funeral arrangements in the event of his death, his father or me,” Mrs. Arnold wrote. “He advised me that it should probably be his father since I could barely make it through the call. He was calling to ask me where he should convalesce in the event of his being injured, there in Texas or at home in Pennsylvania.”

Using enlarged type to make sure the president would “be able to read it,” she urged him to “please make our troops one of your priorities.” A few weeks after she mailed the letter, Mrs. Arnold received a handwritten note from Mr. Obama.

“I will do everything in my power to make troops like Matthew my priority,” the president wrote. “Please tell him ‘thank you for your service’ from his commander in chief!”

He signed the note “Barack Obama,” with a big looping B and O. Mrs. Arnold said she was so overwhelmed that the president had called her son by his first name that she “just burst into tears.” She is storing the letter in a safe deposit box until she can have it framed.

Mr. Kelleher, who has three daughters, later told Mrs. Arnold that the letter had caught his attention because he is a parent.

A graduate of Illinois State University, Mr. Kelleher served in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone in the mid-1980s. He ran unsuccessfully for Congress in Illinois in 2000, which was when he first crossed paths with Mr. Obama, who also was running for Congress. In 2006, Mr. Kelleher became the director of outreach in Mr. Obama’s Senate office in Chicago.

Describing his current job, Mr. Kelleher talks about each letter’s “character,” the pictures and messages in crayon from children, and the postcard-size notes from older people, written on typewriters that still have a cursive font.

Mr. Kelleher’s office has a red box for what he calls “life-and-death constituent case work.”

“So someone says, ‘I’m despondent and I want to commit suicide,’ or ‘I have a life-threatening illness and I need help here,’ ” Mr. Kelleher said. “We immediately respond to those.” Threats are reported to the Secret Service.

On Inauguration Day, Michael Powers of Pikeville, Tenn., wrote to Mr. Obama, telling him he had lost his father, a three-pack-a-day smoker, to lung cancer in 1979.

“Enclosed is a picture of my father, and I have carried it for almost 30 years now,” wrote Mr. Powers, 54. Seeing images of Mr. Obama with his daughters had made him miss his father “more than I think I ever have.”

“If you always want to be there for your girls,” Mr. Powers urged, “then stop smoking NOW!”

About a month later, Mr. Powers received a reply. After thanking him for “the wonderful letter, and the good advice,” the president wrote, “I am returning the picture, since it must be important to you, but I will remember your dad’s memory.”

On the wall of his sparse office, a few blocks from the White House, Mr. Kelleher has two letters from his daughter Carol, 10. She wrote to him once and, when he did not reply, she wrote “a second, meaner letter,” he said. That letter begins, “I have noticed you did not reply to my letter.”

“So I had to reply to her,” he said, sounding less keeper of the gate and more hapless father, impressed by the power of letters.

Mahmood Mamdani

A patron who calls regularly on Saturdays asked for books by Mahmood Mamdani.

When victims become killers : colonialism, nativism, and the genocide in Rwanda (2001)
Good Muslim, bad Muslim : America, the Cold War, and the roots of terror (2004)
Saviors and survivors : Darfur, politics, and the War on terror (2008)

Mahmood Mamdani (b. 1947 in Kampala, Uganda) is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government in the Departments of Anthropology and Political Science at Columbia University in the United States. He is also the Director of Columbia's Institute of African Studies. He is a former President of the Council for Development of Social Research in Africa (CODESRIA) Dakar, Senegal.

Kafka

A patron requested Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life.

Library Journal Reviews

Trying to deconstruct Kafka's writing is an ambitious undertaking. Kafka's stories and characters, not to mention the term Kafkaesque and its evocations, are familiar to millions of people, many of whom have never read anything he wrote. It's easy for readers to come to Kafka with a prefabricated impression—e.g., he was a genius writer, neglected in his lifetime, who ordered that all his works should be destroyed; he was lonely, stuck in a dead-end job, and tormented by fear of sex. The focus of British novelist Hawes's (Speak for England ) book is to debunk these myths of Kafka, an ambitious, earthly lawyer and literary figure who lived an adjusted life—and even enjoyed "expensive porn." Taking a satirical approach, Hawes intends to reveal the truth beneath the image academics and critics have maintained and to restore Kafka for a general audience using "long-lost dynamite" never presented before. This includes reproductions of pictures and drawings, most of an erotic and pornographic nature. Despite the humorous style, this book is an original, fact-based study presenting some provocative ideas that will be of interest to Kafka scholars and students. Highly recommended for research and comprehensive literary collections.—Ali Houissa, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY

'Who Is Mark Twain?'

Although I'm rather tired of Twain (nearing end of the Powers biography), this seems interesting.









Mark Twain, photographed in 1901, sitting on the deck of a ship.












In "Happy Memories of the Dental Chair," a piece in the new book, Twain describes his dentist: "He was gray and venerable, and humane of aspect; but he had the calm, possessed, surgical look of a man who could endure pain in another person."

Robert Miller, publisher of HarperStudio, said the hardcover edition has a print run of 16,500 copies. "Twain's the grandfather of Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart and Steve Martin," said Mr. Miller. "He has such a dry, subversive wit that you feel like he's invented modern humor."

Recognize that voice

The same woman who called a couple of days ago called, looking for the number for Georgetown University. That was simple. (202) 687-0100

Lincoln Memorial Diary

A fascinating piece in the Times website today.

Op-Archive: Lincoln Memorial Diary

After news of President Lincoln's assassination reached New York, in all arteries and capillaries of the city, shopkeepers designed makeshift shrines to the martyred president. An anonymous diarist walked for miles, drawing sketches of as many storefronts as he could (evidence suggests, but does not confirm, that the diarist was a man). Through his relentless activity this nameless reporter made the news a bit more comprehensible. Here are selections from the diary entries. Click on the yellow icons for annotations by Ted Widmer. (McLellan Lincoln Collection, John Hay Library, Brown University) Full Story »

Plates.

A library afternoon

Arrived at the Information Desk at 1pm, and found a man on the quick-check PC waiting for it to reboot; while waiting, and then while computing, he carried on an animated, yet sotto voce conversation with himself. He stayed for half an hour.

It didn't end there.

A man came over, and spoke so softly I leaned over to listen; I had to ask him to speak up. He wanted to know about the $250 in the stimulus bill; his counselor had told him to go to the Library or post office for information. Some quick thinking, and I decided to tell him to contact his elected representatives for details. I gave him office numbers for Representative Carolyn McCarthy, Senator Charles Schumer, and State Senator Dean Skelos. That satisfied him. He did ask if I knew about the $250; I told him that I didn't want to give him erroneous information, and that contacting his elected representatives was the way to go. I did tell him about the few extra dollars in paychecks beginning this month. He said he doesn't work. He seemed, well, I wasn't surprised when he said that. He asked if I'd seen the new Cardinal assume office (is that the right term?) yesterday (the day before?) in New York, and I told him no, I'd been working. He said he watched it, and liked it a lot. He also said that the Mayor would be going to a baseball game today, and I remarked that it was a beautiful day for a game. He said he'd be playing basketball tomorrow, and I remarked how our new President also plays basketball. He countered by saying that the President had worked out with the Knicks a couple of days ago.

An older man (60ish), whom I've seen before, appeared. Wearing a big yarmulke covering the middle of his head, wearing a bright yellow windbreaker, he started talking to me from several feet away, apparently about a problem with the copier. He'd lost a dime, and had not gotten a second copy. I went over, using a copy card, and helped him. His original was a crumpled piece of paper, stained; perfectly his. Made a copy, went back to the desk. Within minutes he was back, saw me helping someone, and said he was next. (His ID is a Transportation Access card from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.) He wanted the name and address of the CEO of the Port Authority of NY & NJ. While I was getting him that he went on about changes he proposed making to the transportation system to make everything better, more efficient, less costly. Twice he needed help with the word processor. And a third time. Just minutes ago (2.27pm) I saw him leave; I was busy; he left his ID.

Other happenings. It has been steadily busy. And to top it all off, Ilene Wolper is watching a DVD. As I passed by on one of my trips to help Mister Massachusetts, she called out "I'll be right off." And she showed up in minutes, asking if the library has volunteer positions. Oy vay. I sent her up to Administration, after assuring her that yes, I did believe she had library experience. When she came downstairs a few minutes later, she asked me if she could look at books. I told her that she could, of course.

And then the patron wearing a t-shirt with Hugo Chavez's face and the slogan toward Socialism kvetching because the wi-fi isn't working and he needs to get work done. He persisted. I had called the technician to troubleshoot it, saw him doing so, and told this patron so. He asked three, four more times, hanging around the front of the Desk. I called the tech two, three times, but got no answer. Patron persisted, insistently.

"We're running a library here, not a private service," I said to him.
"You're doing your job, and I need to do mine."
I resisted an urge to tell him to ask President Chavez for a wi-fi connection. I called the tech again, and again there was no answer. I called Reference and asked if the tech was downstairs; no. The patron walked away, muttering, and I heard him say "this is bullshit." Well, yes. but can we do?

Not a boring afternoon shift.

Many questions, one patron

A patron whose voice I recognized called just before 2pm, while I was at the Information Desk. She started by asking if someone with a card from a Nassau County library could borrow items from Suffolk County libraries. Not directly, I told her; we could do an inter-library loan. How about the reverse? she asked: could someone with a card from a Suffolk County library could borrow items from Nassau County libraries? Again, I told her, not directly; but with an inter-library loan. I told her about the LILRC pass that would allow her access to participating college libraries.

She then moved on to the main event. She asked about a book by W. Cleon Skousen, The making of America. Hillside Library owns it, I told her. Next she asked for The naked Communist, which East meadow owns. She then moved onto The 5000 year leap : the 28 great ideas that changed the world, which is in the system but dangling.

Then it got interesting. She asked if there was a way to find out if a book had been stolen. Curious, and getting a little tired, I told her that someone who does not return a book, or returns it late gets fined, or charged for the missing book.

"But someone could get his wife and kids to take books from the shelf, right?"

That one got me.

"If they take books off the shelf, and never return them, is there a way to know?"

She was on a roll.

"Why isn't The 5000 year leap by Skousen on the shelf?"

"I can't answer why, but I can tell you it isn't available for circulation."

"It's available from Barnes & Noble," she parried. "Why isn't it available from a library?"

By now I wanted to get off the phone. It was past 2pm, the next librarian was ready to take the desk, and I wanted out.

"It was recommended by Glenn Beck," she asserted.

That did it for me. Glenn Beck is a wacko, right-wing fanatic. Enough. She continued ranting about Barnes & Noble.

"Is there something else I can help you with? I need to help the next patron," I said.

Click.

Judith Krug, Fought Ban on Books

American Library Association- Judith F. Krug in 2007.

Judith F. Krug, who led the campaign by libraries against efforts to ban books, including helping found Banned Books Week, then fought laws and regulations to limit children’s access to the Internet, died Saturday in Evanston, Ill. She was 69.

As the American Library Association’s official proponent of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech since the 1960s, Ms. Krug (pronounced kroog) fought the banning of books, including “Huckleberry Finn,” “Mein Kampf,” “Little Black Sambo,” “Catcher in the Rye” and sex manuals. In 1982, she helped found Banned Books Week, an annual event that includes authors reading from prohibited books.

Amazing that Huck and Mein Kampf get lumped together.

She also fought for the inclusion of literature on library shelves that she herself found offensive, like “The Blue Book” of the ultraconservative John Birch Society. The book is a transcript of a two-day monologue by Robert Welch at the founding meeting of the society in 1958.

Even the distasteful deserves protection, for free speech is free speech. We can not begin decidin what is protected and what is not protected. Speech is protected, period.

“My personal proclivities have nothing to do with how I react as a librarian,” Ms. Krug said in an interview with The New York Times in 1972. “Library service in this country should be based on the concept of intellectual freedom, of providing all pertinent information so a reader can make decisions for himself.”

Intellectual freedom is the bedrock of democracy.

The issues have changed over time. In December 1980, Ms. Krug’s observation that complaints about the content of books in public libraries had increased fivefold in the month since Ronald Reagan was elected president was widely reported. In an interview with The Times, she said that many of the complainants identified themselves as members of Moral Majority, a strongly conservative group, but the Rev. George A. Zarris, chairman of Moral Majority in Illinois, denied there was any organized effort.

Any coincidence? Absolutely none.

But the situation illustrated a frequent conflict in issues over library censorship. Ms. Krug pushed what she often described as a pure view of the First Amendment against what her opponents often said was the democratic will.

Democratic will, or tyranny of the majority (or, perhaps, a vocal minority).

Ms. Krug later became a leader in fighting censorship on the Internet, an issue taken up by libraries because many people with no computers at home use library computers. The question involved not just a limited number of books for a particular library’s shelves, but efforts to keep theoretically unlimited amounts of indecent material from children by means of technological filters.

More recently, Ms. Krug fiercely fought a provision in the USA Patriot Act that allows federal investigators to peruse library records of who has read what. Former Attorney General John Ashcroft dismissed protests about the law as “baseless hysteria.”

Ah, yes, John Ashcroft, that great defender of freedom.

Ms. Krug credited her parents as inspiring her passion for free expression. In 2002, she told The Chicago Tribune about reading a sex-education book under the covers with a flashlight when she was 12.

“It was a hot book; I was just panting,” she said, when her mother suddenly threw back the bed covers and asked what she was doing. Judith timidly held up the book.

“She said, ‘For God’s sake, turn on your bedroom light so you don’t hurt your eyes.’ And that was that,” Ms. Krug said.

Cyber study sites

Cezanne and progeny

View Slideshow

Sheet music, and Armani

A patron asked for two songs: I'm Already There, by Lonestar; and Theme from Love Affair, by Ennio Morricone. First one is in a book The 2000s : 35 great songs from country's greatest stars [MUSIC] Q 784.52 T. The second we do not have. I called Patchogue Medford, and they will fax it (if it is found in a book I saw on their OPAC). Patron is from Rockville Centre. He'll be back tomorrow to pick it up. Asked him his name, so I could leave it in Circulation for him.

"Armani," he said.
"Any relation?" I asked.
"Yes." Second cousin. "I see him, not very often."

Nosology

A patron came over to the Reference Desk this morning looking for a reference book.

ICD-9-CM professional for physicians. Volumes 1 and 2.
Salt Lake City, UT ; Reston, VA : Ingenix, 2002-

Call Number: R 616.0012 I 2009 v.1 and 2

Subject Nosology -- Handbooks, manuals, etc.
Diseases -- Handbooks, manuals, etc.

Nosology? the branch of medical science dealing with the classification of disease.

'Kind of Blue'

Miles Davis's album ranks as one of the best jazz recordings of all time.


"Kind of Blue" ranks as Davis's most esteemed recording. Despite its complete lack of vocals, the disc became his best-selling album, totaling four million copies and still moving about 5,000 copies a week.

Davis once famously said, "Don't play what you know, play what you don't know." His players' improvisations here sound clean, fresh and original, as they nimbly respond to the challenge of unfamiliar pieces and the novel organizing principle of modes.

Not all critics think this is Davis's best recording, but it is unquestionably his most iconic and, for many, the quintessential jazz album.

Sultan of Suave

"Puttin' on the Ritz"
791.4302 Astaire L
By Peter J. Levinson
New York: St. Martin's Press.

"Fred Astaire"
B Astaire E
By Joseph Epstein
New Haven: Yale U. Press

Downturn Puts New Stresses on Libraries

Rosalie Bork, an Illinois librarian, is seeing more stress.


The public library here had just closed its doors one evening in December when two homeless men who had been using the stacks as shelter from the cold got into a fight on the outside steps. What began as bickering took a violent turn when one of the men pulled out a knife and stabbed the other six times, leaving him bleeding beside the book drop.

Putting things in perspective, our problems are small.

Like libraries across the country, Arlington Heights Memorial had strived to keep pace with the changing times, ensuring its relevance in the digital age by becoming something of an indoor town square, and emphasizing that its money-saving services catered to the community’s needs.

These days, however, community need reaches far beyond reference help — and in many libraries, it is turning a normally tranquil place into an emotional and stressful hotbed.

Perhaps because of the nature, the demographics, of the communities HWPL serves, the tranquility here is broken only mildly. Of course, but a bus ride away are other demographics.

As the national economic crisis has deepened and social services have become casualties of budget cuts, libraries have come to fill a void for more people, particularly job-seekers and those who have fallen on hard times. Libraries across the country are seeing double-digit increases in patronage, often from 10 percent to 30 percent, over previous years.

We certainly have increased use.

The stresses have become so significant here that a therapist will soon be counseling library employees.

“I guess I’m not really used to people with tears in their eyes,” said Rosalie Bork, a reference librarian in Arlington Heights, a well-to-do suburb of Chicago. “It has been unexpectedly stressful. We feel so anxious to help these people, and it’s been so emotional for them.”

Well-to-do suburb fits Hewlett and Woodmere, indeed.

“Adults complain a lot about kids just playing games and you know, ‘I need to do a résumé, or ‘I need to write, I need some help,’ ” Ms. Jones said. “There’s a bit of frustration.”

That's familiar, at least the game playing.

Ms. Jones instructed her staff to tread carefully. “You don’t want to upset people,” she said. “You don’t know what might set somebody off.”

Very carefully.

Paul LeClerc, president of the New York Public Library, said résumé writing had become a major use of library computers, and every librarian in the system had received training in how to better assist patrons conduct job searches. The 40 million visits to New York libraries over the past year, he said, is the greatest ever in a 12-month period.

What a concept: specialized training.

In Sacramento this year, two branches of the public library temporarily stopped accepting cash as fines for overdue books, after thieves struck three times since June — in one instance, taking off with a safe filled with money.

Go where the money is, but that seems ridiculous.

In Lynchburg, Va., a gunman shot a man outside the public library on a Monday afternoon in late January. The victim, who survived, staggered into the library bleeding and looking for help. Since then, an off-duty police officer has been hired by the library for extra security.

We at times discuss the value of a security guard, but our problems don't quite measure up to that.

And in Quincy, Mass., where a man was recently arrested in the library and charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, among other offenses, a police officer on beat patrol now walks through the library during operating hours.

With an estimated 2,500 patrons visiting the library every day, employees must now park at a parking lot at a nearby church.

2,500? We can't get more than a couple of hundred, except on Wednesdays, movie day. The 2pm film showing can draw 160 people, and the parking lot gets full.


“When you walk by our new job-search desk, you see people in line and even waiting on the benches for assistance,” said Ms. Moore, the director of the Arlington Heights Memorial Library.

Soem people complain when they have to wait for an Internet machine here; they should consider the alternative.

Reference question

A patron called asking about Jewish population in Aden. Found article in Encyclopedia Judaica, emailed answer. Nice to use technology to provide library service.

100 powerful web tools

100 Powerful Web Tools to Organize Your Thoughts and Ideas

Reviewing our options

Will Manley writes a great column for the ALA magazine, American Libraries. In the March 2009 issue he discusses collection development, and book selection.

Back in 1971, my library school professors all emphasized the importance of creating balanced collections of quality books. Over time, however, librarianship has increasingly emphasized pandering to public demand. Popular fiction, for instance, began to take precedence over serious literary fare. It became not only okay but desirable to buy 20 copies of the latest Danielle Steele potboiler for every copy of the latest Philip Roth novel.

American Libraries(CB). American Libraries (Volume 40, Issue 3, March 2009).
Chicago, IL, USA: American Libraries, 2009. p 72.
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/ala/Doc?id=10275610&ppg=74

Copyright © 2009. American Libraries. All rights reserved.

He goes on to discuss book reviews, Amazon, and ends with a joke.

Technological wow!

I searched for the quotation below in Google. Link number 1 was to Google Books. I selected the icon to Save, send or embed a section of this page. I highlighted the text, and a window popped up Share this clip. I can paste the image or the text, to notebook or blog, or embed. As I did below.

Mark Twain's Letters By Mark Twain, Albert Bigelow Paine

I can also copy the text, as in this case:

Mark Twain's Letters By Mark Twain, Albert Bigelow Paine

Mark Twain's Letters By Mark Twain, Albert Bigelow Paine: "Say I am as prompt as a clock if I only know the day a thing is wanted otherwise I am a natural procrasti naturalist Tell me what day and date you want Nos and and I will tackle and revise them and they ll be"

In the Ron Powers bio it is noted as being from a letter Mark Twain sent to William Dean Howells, dated 8 December 1874.

{Notice the space between procrasti and naturalist; in the book it is a hyphen.}

Pura Belpré.

Searching for info, came across this name: Pura Belpré.

Pura Belpré (died 1982), was the first Puerto Rican librarian in New York City. She was also a writer, collector of folktales, and puppeteer. There is some dispute as to the date of her birth which has been given as February 2, 1899, December 2, 1901 and February 2, 1903.

The white tiger

Adiga, A. (2008). The white tiger: a novel. New York: Free Press.

This is not the first time a patron has asked me for this book.


Kirkus Reviews
What makes an entrepreneur in today's India? Bribes and murder, says this fiercely satirical first novel. Balram Halwai is a thriving young entrepreneur in Bangalore, India's high-tech capital. China's Premier is set to visit, and the novel's frame is a series of Balram's letters to the Premier, in which he tells his life story. Balram sees India as two countries: the Light and the Darkness. Like the huddled masses, he was born in the Darkness, in a village where his father, a rickshaw puller, died of tuberculosis. But Balram is smart, as a school inspector notices, and he is given the moniker White Tiger. Soon after, he's pulled out of school to work in a tea shop, then manages to get hired as a driver by the Stork, one of the village's powerful landlords. Balram is on his way, to Delhi in fact, where the Stork's son, Mr. Ashok, lives with his Westernized wife, Pinky Madam. Ashok is a gentleman, a decent employer, though Balram will eventually cut his throat (an early revelation). His business (coal trading) involves bribing government officials with huge sums of money, the sight of which proves irresistible to Balram and seals Ashok's fate. Adiga, who was born in India in 1974, writes forcefully about a corrupt culture; unfortunately, his commentary on all things Indian comes at the expense of narrative suspense and character development. Thus he writes persuasively about the so-called Rooster Coop, which traps family-oriented Indians into submissiveness, but fails to describe the stages by which Balram evolves from solicitous servant into cold-blooded killer. Adiga's pacing is off too, as Balram too quickly reinvents himself in Bangalore, where every cop can be bought. An undisciplined debut, but one with plenty of vitality. Agent: Cathryn Summerhouse/William Morris Copyright Kirkus 2008 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.

Library Journal Reviews

This first novel by Indian writer Adiga depicts the awakening of a low-caste Indian man to the degradation of servitude. While the early tone of the book calls to mind the heartbreaking inequities of Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance , a better comparison is to Frederick Douglass's narrative about how he broke out of slavery. The protagonist, Balram Halwai, is initially delighted at the opportunity to become the driver for a wealthy man. But Balram grows increasingly angry at the ways he is excluded from society and looked down upon by the rich, and he murders his employer. He reveals this murder from the start, so the mystery is not what he did but why he would kill such a kind man. The climactic murder scene is wonderfully tense, and Balram's evolution from likable village boy to cold-blooded killer is fascinating and believable. Even more surprising is how well the narrative works in the way it's written as a letter to the Chinese premier, who's set to visit Bangalore, India. Recommended for all libraries.—Evelyn Beck, Piedmont Technical Coll., Greenwood, SC
[Page 89]. Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.

A library patron

"I love this library; it has so many resources," a woman who came over to the Information Desk asking to use the word processing machine.

It Has Computers, Gives Advice and Is Free

Anthony Morris at the Queens Borough Public Library where he worked off his debt for past due library fines.

March 26, 2009
It Has Computers, Gives Advice and Is Free
By JOSHUA BRUSTEIN

Anthony Morris’s job search hit a snag this month when the Queens Borough Public Library notified him that he could not get a new library card until he paid about $80 in fines.

Mr. Morris, 31, had been unemployed for eight months and did not have the money. But he had amassed an armful of library books he needed to prepare for an exam that was part of the application process for a job at Con Edison, and he also needed a library card to browse online classified sites. So he asked if he could work off his debt.

After 22 hours of sorting books in the reference section at the Jamaica branch, Mr. Morris got his library card — and was asked to apply for a part-time position at the library.

“It’s just minimum wage, but it beats a blank,” said Mr. Morris, who lives nearby and previously worked at a chemical plant that manufactured leather dyes. He is waiting to hear whether he got the job.

While such direct results are certainly rare, the city’s public libraries are increasingly serving as makeshift employment centers. At the 58th Street branch of the New York Public Library in Manhattan, out-of-work professionals crowd the computers in the afternoon, a time that had previously been dominated by elderly patrons, and books on résumé writing are hard to keep on the shelves. The Science, Industry and Business Library on 34th Street drew 700 people to a career preparedness fair in January, and the Bronx Library Center recently doubled the number of computer classes it offers to the elderly because people looking to re-enter the work force had packed the existing classes to overflow levels.

“We’ve been in the job-search business for decades,” said Paul LeClerc, the president of the New York Public Library, noting that President Obama has said that a librarian helped him find his first job as a community organizer. “This is a continuation.”

The new role comes amid a broader surge in demand for libraries’ free goods and services that is typical during economic downturns. In the fourth quarter of 2008, circulation rose 16 percent compared with the previous year at the New York Public Library, which serves Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island; 9 percent at the Brooklyn Public Library; and 2 percent in Queens. All three systems also report significant increases in the number of visits.

But the libraries are facing steep cuts in the mayor’s proposed budget for next year, and have other economic woes. Brooklyn has already shut its branches on Sundays and is considering trimming hours further. This month, a hotel company backed away from its pledge to purchase the Donnell Library, a five-story building on 53rd Street, whose sale was intended to help pay for the $250 million renovation of the New York Public Library’s headquarters on Fifth Avenue.

At the Bronx Library Center, near Fordham University, Janice Moore-Smith, an education and career counselor, has over the years typically helped half a dozen people a day with their résumés. In recent months, it has often been 10. And Ms. Moore-Smith said that she had been scheduling more joint sessions for husbands and wives in which she doles out emotional support along with employment tips.

“I’m doing couples therapy,” she said.

The most common service being sought, librarians said, is computer time. At the Queens Library for Teens in Far Rockaway, more and more teenagers are showing up to sign on, saying their parents have canceled Internet service at home. And with Web sites largely having replaced newspapers as the most common job-listing venues, finding work without Internet access has become increasingly difficult.

Kerwin P. Pilgrim, division manager of the Brooklyn Public Library’s education and job information center, said that he began training 15 staff members to provide individual assistance to job seekers last summer, in anticipation that demand would rise as the economy worsened. In January, the library announced that there would be one such staff member available at all times in at least one branch within each group of four branches.

Until recently, Mr. Pilgrim said, most people who came to the library’s résumé workshops were looking for entry-level jobs. Now, the proportion of professionals in the classes has soared.

“When the banks started going down, we saw some people who had been employed for a long time and had never taken the time to write résumés or work on interviewing skills,” he said. “People got comfortable, and basically their résumés were never updated.”

Mitch Baucus has long been a regular at the Flushing branch of the Queens library, but lately it has transformed from a place of leisure to his virtual office.

When he was working as a legal researcher for a lawyer in Great Neck, Mr. Baucus regularly spent an afternoon each weekend reading newspapers and magazines at the library. Since he was laid off in early December, he has been showing up five or six days a week to scour the Internet for employment opportunities.

He spent several months searching without success, then noticed something he had overlooked.

“I realized there was a person sitting there and his job was to help people with their résumés and interviewing skills,” he said. “So I went up to him and asked him for help.”

An earlier version of this article misidentified which branch drew 700 people to a career fair in January. It was the Science, Industry and Business library on 34th Street, not the Bronx Library Center.

Tweet

A Twitter follower (imagine that, I'm being followed) has a post in his blog dated 28 February 2009, that refers to a book entitled Made to Stick.

Today's questions

Where to file tax forms 1040, and 1041 (Estate taxes)

The 8th Confession, James Patterson; not yet out.

Levittown called about a CD that only HWPL owns. Checked the shelf; not there. In transit. Levittown placed the hold, and the librarian had seen the OPAC message in transit, yet still asked me to check the shelf. Huh?

The seniora began to arrive, as usual, around 1.30, for today's film. Some come over to Information Desk to reserve books.

A Library Friend asked for The madonnas of Leningrad: a novel, by Debra Dean.

A patron wanted the New York Times

Mrs. Ochman (one of our regular callers, who often wants movie reviews from Newsday read to her) called for Brain surgeon: a doctor's inspiring encounters with mortality and miracles, by Keith Black with Arnold Mann. She said she saw him on Channel 13.


A senior asked for Safe passage: the remarkable true story of two sisters who rescued Jews from the Nazis / Ida Cook.

A senior who moves and talks really slowly asked about Sunday's movie, a special program sponsored by the National Council of Jewish Women; it will be A walk to beautiful. She asked to reserve it.

Right behind her a woman asked for tickets for Sunday's movie. "All out," I told her. "They're all gone?" she asked. "Yes," I answered. "No tickets left?" she asked. I nodded.

Tax forms: "do you have instructions books?" "Yes, one for 150, a handful for 203." "Do you think you'll have them later in the afternoon?" "I can't predict; I'm not good at forecasting." "Do you think other libraries have them?" "I have no way of knowing." Hesitating, he said thank you and hung up.

Tickets? No, to three people.

A patron asked for Jhumpa Lahiri's new book, Unaccustomed earth; it's out. Then asked for People of the book, by Geraldine Brooks (which has been very popular and in high demand, a welcome antidote to all the requests for Patterson, Roberts and Steel); it's out. Asked for The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz; it's out. Asked for Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill; here, took it. Asked for Dangerous laughter : thirteen stories, by Steven Millhauser; in, took it.

A patron asked for Before the Sabbath / Eric Hoffer.

It is now 2pm.

At 6.35 a young lady came in asking for materials on Fred Korematsu. A mother was in yesterday researching the same name for her daughter (8th grade). We have a book on WW 2 biographies, and electronic databases can provide additional materials.

A Tuesday library encounter

A patron came over to the Reference Desk looking for help with a song. It was in two books, but both were out. He didn't want a fake book. So I looked in the Patchogue Medford Library's Popular Music Song Index for it. Found it. Called PML to have it faxed. A librarian said she would. After several minutes of it not arriving I went over to the patron and told him that if he cared to leave his name, once the fax arrived we'd put it at the Circulation Desk for him. He agreed, and gave me his name. Eliot Weiss.

In a moment, I made a connection. I asked him, "Chess? Teach in Brooklyn?" Yes, he said, and said "Kings of New York." Indeed, I told him, I read the book, and really enjoyed it. I asked him about the kids in the book, if they were in touch with him, if they stayed with chess. Yes, he said, they stay in touch. Two are continuing to play it, and all the others stay in touch with the game.

I also told him about reading Jennifer Shahade's book, Chess Bitch, and of reading Marilyn Yalom's book about the Chess Queen.

Cool.

How is that spelled?

A patron asked for the movie Shine, which is out. Being about a pianist, he asked me to find another film about a piano. I entered paino instead of piano, and wound up with The Visitor (production designer, John Paino).

A Victorian Novel in Stone

The British Houses of Parliament stand beside the Thames, a symbol of London itself. Their silhouette, culminating in the great clock tower that houses Big Ben, is famous all over the world. Yet this is a building that came about by accident and whose precise authorship was for many years clouded by controversy. Its proper name is the Palace of Westminster, for it replaced the medieval palace, begun by Edward the Confessor, where from the 13th century onward Parliament habitually met. Over the years the old building was expanded, altered, filled in and divided until it had sprawled into a higgledy-piggledy mess, with several shops and a pub jammed up against the walls.

Slideshow

Books From the Great Depression

Peter Conn selects unsurpassed novels about the Depression

1. Now in November
By Josephine Winslow Johnson
Simon & Schuster, 1934
A fictional account of one family's experience on the land, Josephine Winslow Johnson's best-selling novel won the Pulitzer Prize before sinking into undeserved obscurity. The Haldmarnes leave an unnamed city for the countryside when Father loses a good job in a lumber mill and with it any hope of financial security for his wife and their three daughters. The mortgaged farm to which the family moves yields little: The novel's central section is a day-by-day reckoning of the land's collapse into baked and cracking clay during the killing drought in the Great Plains of the 1930s. "Now in November" is one of the most convincing and hair-raising depictions of the Dust Bowl in the literature of the Depression. Unfortunately, history would find room for only one Dust Bowl novel, John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath."
2. The Big Money
By John Dos Passos
Harcourt, Brace, 1936
Norman Mailer often said that John Dos Passos had written the great American novel in the three volumes of the "U.S.A." trilogy. "The Big Money" was the final volume in the series, and its success put Dos Passos on the cover of Time magazine. The novel deploys several narrative techniques in an effort to tell the whole story of America's march toward the Crash. Long conventional storylines alternate with stream-of-consciousness monologues, brief biographies of famous and infamous Americans, and "newsreels" made up of newspaper headlines, popular songs and advertising slogans. "The Big Money" opens at the end of World War I and concludes in the early years of the Depression. The final scene presents a vagrant trying to hitch a ride: The open road to American opportunity has become a dead end. Dos Passos's sustained, bitter and often funny exposé of Roaring Twenties excess is the best fictional explanation ever written of how Americans got themselves in the biggest economic mess in their history.
3. Appointment in Samarra
By John O'Hara
Harcourt, Brace, 1934
John O'Hara's first and best novel tracks the final three days in the life of a young man named Julian English. He is 30 years old, charming and good-looking, married to an attractive woman, and successful as the manager of a Cadillac franchise in a town called Gibbsville. Julian is also a dangerous drunk and a moral trifler, filled with envy and insecurity, a man with no discernible convictions. His rapid decline in the course of the novel is an emblem of moral exhaustion. "Appointment in Samarra" is set in 1930, after the Crash but before the advent of the New Deal. O'Hara always insisted on the precision of that date: His failed hero registers the sense of impending and general collapse.
4. The Good Earth
By Pearl S. Buck
John Day, 1931
A Pulitzer Prize winner, Pearl S. Buck's "The Good Earth" was also the best-selling novel in the U.S. for both 1931 and 1932. The book would shape American perceptions of China for two generations. The main characters, a poor farmer named Wang Lung and his wife, O-lan, are recognizable human beings, not mere Oriental stereotypes, who do their best to survive in a punishing world of famine, bandits, war and plague. Why did a book about an obscure rural family in a distant land sell so well in the early Depression years? To begin with, Buck was a fine storyteller, and her images of the Chinese countryside are memorably vivid. Beyond that, the novel resonated with the realities of Depression America: The portraits of suffering but resilient Chinese farmers spoke eloquently to Americans trying to make sense of their own diminished circumstances.
5. The Day of the Locust
By Nathanael West
Random House, 1939
The best novel ever written about Hollywood appeared in the last years of the Depression. A young artist, Todd Hackett, has come to the West Coast to paint the legions of bored and lonely men and women who migrate to California in pursuit of a dream they never find. The studios' celluloid fantasies mock the deprivation of the country throughout the 1930s, providing escapist entertainment in the midst of despair. The novel is punctuated with scenes of violence -- drunken brawls, bloody cockfights, sexual assault -- that unfold in the glow of Southern California's legendary warmth and sunshine. In the climactic scene, a murderous riot provoked by a movie premiere provides a "real" counterpart to Todd's painting, "The Burning of Los Angeles."
Mr. Conn's "The American 1930s: A Literary History" has just been published by Cambridge University Press.

A Traveler's Way With Words

Lafcadio Hearn: American Writings
Edited by Christopher Benfey
(Library of America, 848 pages, $40)


Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) is best known as the magisterial interpreter of Japan to the English-speaking world, a role he played after moving there in 1890, marrying a Japanese woman and then publishing a series of books in the West, such as the story collections "In Ghostly Japan" (1899) and "Kwaidan" (1904). But before his expatriation, Hearn was America's ace traveloguist. A generous compilation of his early journalistic writing throughout the New World from the Library of America reveals how powerful this forgotten genre can be.

Hearn's American masterpiece, collected in the Library of America edition, is "Two Years in the French West Indies" (1890). It includes a section called "A Midsummer Trip to the Tropics," an ecstatic but closely observed account of his voyage from New York down to the Lesser Antilles (the string of islands stretching from Antigua to Grenada). The bulk of the book, though, is a 300-page chronicle of Hearn's sojourn on Martinique, where he "fell under the influence of that singular spell which the island has always exercised upon strangers."

Hearn's descriptions of the land and sea are all the more vivid for their almost scientific precision. A vast valley in Martinique, he writes, is "watered by many torrents, and bounded south and west by double, triple, and quadruple surging of mountains, -- mountains broken, peaked and tormented-looking, and tinted (irisées, as the creoles say) with all those gemtones distance gives in a West Indian atmosphere."

An interloan

Under the heading of unusual books, this is an entry: From Ararat to suburbia; the history of the Jewish community of Buffalo. (1960). Selig Adler; Thomas Edmund Connolly. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America. College libraries, as well as Brooklyn Public, own it.

A Counterinsurgency Primer

The Accidental Guerrilla
By David Kilcullen
(Oxford, 346 pages, $27.95)