Libraries 'Popular,' but Suffering from Economy

A brouhaha is brewing in Philadelphia: the mayor is closing 11 library branches, and there is great opposition to such action.

These tough economic times, as we have been saying, have forced a lot of people to find new ways of doing things to save money,” “Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams said. “And listen to this next one – with money so tight, the costs of books has people turning to a place where you can actually get books free, then return them for the next user. The library business, it seems, is booming. But now they could use some help in this economy.”

We have been very busy this last week, much more so than usual, and unexpectedly so, surprising many of us.

NBC correspondent Chris Jansing interviewed a librarian that detected an uptick in “wild” behavior at one library – which Jansing deemed a result of the economic downturn. Wild is not a word you usually associate with libraries, but the economic downturn has made them wildly popular,” Jansing said.

According to Jansing, in Philadelphia, there are plans to shut 11 of 54 branches of their library – which was met with an emotional outburst by one resident. I can’t believe anybody is going to close this damn thing down,” said one grown man in tears over a library closing Philadelphia.

There are many stories about the library closings in Philly; a sampling:

Preliminary injunction granted to stop library closings!

Judge halts closure of 11 Philadelphia libraries

Judge to Nutter: Keep those libraries open

Russian Concubine

A patron called asking for this book; put it on reserve for her.

Obama's Down Payment

In an interesting essay on the economic stimulus package that the incoming Obama administration is devising, Lawrence Summers makes this encouraging remark:

The Obama plan represents not new public works but, rather, investments that will work for the American public. Investments to build the classrooms, laboratories and libraries our children need to meet 21st-century educational challenges. Investments to help reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil by spurring renewable energy initiatives (many of which are on hold because of the credit crunch). Investments to put millions of Americans back to work rebuilding our roads, bridges and public transit systems. Investments to modernize our health-care system, which is necessary to improve care in the short term and key to driving down costs across the board.

Those are classrooms, laboratories and libraries. For a librarian, that's good news.

In fact, on Sunday, on Meet the Press, David Gregory of NBC interviewed David Axelrod, who helped run the Obama campaign and has been appointed an adviser, also spoke of investing in libraries.

It is good to know that the incoming administration intends to do more than just build roads and bridges.

Making of a Mogul

William Randolph Hearst is a mythical giant in American life. A newspaper mogul, a powerful man who was listened to, and whose newspapers were read, he was also the object of Citizen Kane, called by many the best American film of all time.

He was a newspaper owner and publisher. As with every form of the written word, editing is crucially important. In this review, in the first sentence of the second paragraph, this glaring gaffe jumps out: Ah, but there was a time – not so long ago in the grand scheme of things – when people not only read newspapers but waited with baited breath for the latest edition to hit the street.
Baited? To catch fish? Or bated, as in reduced, lowered, restrained? Indeed bated.

The Uncrowned King
By Kenneth Whyte Counterpoint, 546 pages, $30

In 1895, William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951) arrived in New York City from his family home in San Francisco to assume the position of owner and publisher of the New York Morning Journal, a name he immediately shortened to the New York Journal. Once Hearst was installed in his Park Row office, he soon leapt into national prominence; how he managed this breakthrough is the subject of Kenneth Whyte's "The Uncrowned King," an engaging chronicle of Hearst's first three years in New York.

In 1883, freshly expelled from Harvard, he convinced his father, Senator George Hearst (who filled a seat vacated by death for a few months in 1886, then won and served from 1887 until his death in 1890), to let him run the San Francisco Examiner. He ran that newspaper with hucksterism, and moved onto New York in 1895 to run one of 17 dailies then published.

Mr. Whyte offers a sympathetic account of Hearst, presenting him as someone far different from the megalomaniacal Citizen Kane-esque brute of legend. Mr. Whyte's Hearst is eccentric, to be sure, but he is also an earnest general in the vanguard of the paper wars and a virtuoso of the front-page salvo.

Whatever the case, in New York Hearst learned from Joseph Pulitzer (New York World) and Charles Dana (New York Sun): banner headlines, heart-tugging human-interest stories, tendentious crusading, scoops (facts be damned). Hearst gleaned everything he could from Pulitzer and Dana before he surpassed them.

"The Uncrowned King" centers on the two major news stories gripping the U.S. during Hearst's early years at the Journal: the 1896 presidential election, pitting the upstart Democrat William Jennings Bryan against William McKinley; and the Cuban theater of the Spanish-American War.

Ah, yes, yellow journalism. Election in 1896: Jennings Bryan versus McKinley; Spanish-American War.

Bryan lost the election, but Hearst gained tremendous credibility with the Journal's election reporting, Mr. Whyte says. He reports that The Fourth Estate ("A Newspaper for the Makers of Newspapers") praised the Journal for covering the race "in splendid style" and cited the 1.5 millions copies sold of the paper's election edition as evidence that readers trusted the Journal even though its candidate had lost.

Bryan railed about a "Cross of Gold" and gained much support from farmers and other borrowers, and was opposed by East Coast lenders (no one in the West loaned money?), and yet Hearst supported him (curiously to this observer).

Mr. Whyte devotes nearly half of "The Uncrowned King" to the Spanish-American War, specifically the dueling among the major dailies to secure news from Cuba. This was America's first post-Civil War fight as a united nation – or at least it was united behind the cause of Cuban independence after Hearst's relentless campaign to shame a reluctant President McKinley into war. Amid rising tensions between the two countries in 1898, an explosion sank the battleship Maine in the Havana harbor. The cause of the blast was murky, but Hearst seized on it as the ultimate war-worthy outrage. Mr. Whyte acknowledges that the paper practiced some "atrocious journalism" during this period, but he also brings to bear a refreshing sense of context.

Whyte exonerates Hearst: the paper's reporting suggesting that the ship had been sabotaged was based on credible sources, he says. The coverage was "nowhere near the acme of ruthless, truthless journalism."

Hearst wound up on the ground in Cuba as a correspondent. On his return he found himself at the pinnacle of the newspaper world – a successful publisher, acclaimed editor, even a writer of some repute. But he was also reviled in many quarters, particularly by other publishers. A scathing Lincoln Steffens article "became a foundation stone of a Hearst legend that would continue to grow in scale and perversity and culminate in the fine but scurrilous motion picture, Citizen Kane."

The myth exploded:

But then, typically and to his credit, Mr. Whyte tests the conventional wisdom by consulting the autobiography that Steffens wrote many years later. It turns out that Steffens regretted writing the piece because he had been pressured by his editors to take a hatchet to Hearst. Steffens confessed that he had "compromised" with his colleagues "to keep my job." Hearst was "a great man, able, self-dependent," the old reporter wrote. "He had no moral illusions; he saw straight as far as he saw, and he saw pretty far."


One of many New York Journal front pages devoted to news about the destruction of the battleship Maine in 1898. Top: William Randolph Hearst in the early 1900s.

Mesmerizing art

A story in today's Wall Street Journal on "The Best of 2008" - "This Year's Art" features these paintings:

Titian's Danae (1550-3)








Giorgio Morandi's Natura Morta (1961)




















Juan Sánchez Cotán's Still Life with Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber











Gustave Courbet's The Desperate Man











Nicolas Poussin Landscape with a River God



Tiziano Vecellio, Titian was born in the commune Pieve di Cadore, Belluno province, in the Veneto some time between 1485 and 1490, and died in venice on 27 August 1576. The Oxford Online Encyclopedia describes him: The most important artist of the Vecellio family, he was immensely successful in his lifetime and since his death has always been considered the greatest painter of the Venetian school. He was equally pre-eminent in all the branches of painting practised in the 16th century: religious subjects, portraits, allegories and scenes from Classical mythology and history.

The realism in his painting is breath-taking. Titian's late works are described as paintings so bold that Titian's contemporaries described them as painted with brushes "as big as brooms." "Late Titian" reminded us why he was revered by the giants of Western painting -- Rubens, Rembrandt, Poussin, Delacroix, Courbet, Cézanne, and more

Poussin's painting has much mor a mythological feel, and, while great work, simply is not as startling as Titian's Danae. Not to denigrate it, at all; the painting has great features, including the interplay of light and shadows, the mountains dividing it in two, the impressive trees reaching for the heavens.

it was plain that even Poussin's most apparently straightforward investigations of the visual effects of weather were not solely about nature. Instead, they were meditations on larger ideas about the passage of time, morality, mortality, emotion, and more. Transfixed by these complex, compelling landscapes we understood why Poussin was called the "philosopher painter."

Morandi's still life is baffling; I just don't get why it's great art. Ditto Cotan's study. I suppose there are technical accomplishments; I simply do not understand art on that level. To me, art is best on the impression it makes when it is seen.

Coubert's Desperate Man, now here is a startlingly beautiful work of art. The expressiveness of the man's eyes simply astonishes this observer.

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.

In Chicago, a Sarajevo Exile Finds a New Home and Voice

Last year, a teenager in a trench coat shot to death five people in a crowded Salt Lake City shopping mall, before being gunned down himself by police. The story caught the writer Aleksandar Hemon's eye not for its horrible post-Columbine banality, but because of a detail about the shooter -- he was a Bosnian Muslim refugee from Srebrenica, Europe's bloodiest killing field since World War II. Without presuming to know the boy's demons, Mr. Hemon, who fled Bosnia himself, notes that traumas of war and exile lurk deep inside.

Nelson Algren said loving Chicago is like loving a woman with a broken nose, and loving Sarajevo is like loving a woman with a broken spine."

Mr. Hemon is often put in good company with W.G. Sebald, Joseph Roth and Bruno Schultz as well as his generational "immigrant-lit" cohorts -- Gary Shteyngart and this year's Pulitzer winner, Junot Diaz.

He acknowledges literary debts to the late Montenegrin-Jewish writer Danilo Kis and his favorite of favorites, Anton Chekhov.

Julius Fast writer of both Fact and Fiction

Prolific is defined as fecund: intellectually productive; "a prolific writer"; "a fecund imagination". This man can easily be called a prolific writer.

Julius Fast, who won the first Edgar Award given by the Mystery Writers of America and went on to publish popular books on body language, the Beatles and human relationships, died on Tuesday in Kingston, N.Y. He was 89.

Mr. Fast, the younger brother of the novelist Howard Fast, won instant acclaim as a mystery writer. “Watchful at Night,” his first novel, was written while he was still in the Army Medical Corps during World War II. Its cover identified him as Sgt. Julius Fast. The book won the inaugural Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1946 for the best first novel published in 1945.

The Nassau County OPAC lists 21 items under his name (and it lists 119 items for Howard).

In 1946 he married Barbara Sher, also a writer, who survives him, and with whom he wrote “Talking Between the Lines: How We Mean More Than We Say” (1979). Besides his daughter Jennifer, of Shady, N.Y., other survivors are a son, Timothy, of Des Moines; another daughter, Melissa Morgan of Casselberry, Fla.; and five grandchildren. Howard Fast died in 2003.

To support his growing family, Mr. Fast worked as a writer and editor at several medical magazines. A stint at a podiatric publication provided the raw material for “You and Your Feet” (1970), but his wide-ranging interests account for the variety in titles like “The Beatles: The Real Story” (1968), “The New Sexual Fulfillment” (1972) and “Weather Language” (1979).

In 1988 he published “What Should We Do About Davey?,” a semiautobiographical novel about an awkward adolescent employed at a boys’ camp in the Catskills that was very much like the one owned by Mr. Fast’s uncle.

Often he wrote to order for publishers rushing a book into print on a timely subject, like the findings of the sex researchers William Masters and Virginia E. Johnson. Within months of the publication of “Human Sexual Response” in 1966, Mr. Fast produced “What You Should Know About Human Sexual Response.” He also wrote books on how to quit smoking, how men and women can overcome their incompatibilities and the meaning of new research on Omega-3 fatty acids.

“Julius is a fast writer,” said Tom Dardis, the editor who commissioned his Beatles book. “That’s no pun on his name.”

A reference question

ODLIS— Online Dictionary for Library and Information Science

The Long Road to Infinity

Giordano Bruno
By Ingrid D. Rowland
(Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 335 pages, $27)

Was he a megalomanic, a crackpot, a genius or a martyr to science? Over the years, Giordano Bruno has been characterized in all sorts of ways. The short, scrappy Neopolitan was certainly a maverick thinker who challenged the pieties of his day. For his pains, he was incinerated at the stake in Rome, naked and gagged, a kind of a sacrifice to the papal jubilee of 1600.

In "Giordano Bruno," the classicist Ingrid Rowland offers a series of brilliant vignettes tracing this peripatetic figure from his birthplace outside Naples, to the Dominican convent in Naples itself where he studied for the priesthood (he was ordained in his mid-20s), to Geneva, Toulouse, Paris, Oxford, London, Wittenberg, Prague, Frankfurt, Zurich and – finally and dangerously – Venice and Rome.

Early in his studies, Bruno was arraigned before the Inquisition for, among other things, reading forbidden books. Over time, he flirted with Calvinism and later with Lutheranism when he was residing among German scholars. He was excommunicated from both churches. (It is important to note that Bruno was born in 1548, only three decades after Luther nailed his 95 theses on the Wittenberg church door.) He gave lectures on logic and metaphysics and taught at various universities. He wrote many small books on a variety of subjects, often in a poetical style. Eventually, Bruno sought reconciliation within the Catholic fold, only to end his life with eight years of imprisonment and execution for heresy.

Pigeon Trainer in World War II, Dies at 84

Obituaries can be great research tools. I learn a great deal from reading them. This is a particularly interesting one.

In January 1942, barely a month after Pearl Harbor, the United States War Department sounded a call to enlist. It wasn’t men they wanted — not this time. The Army was looking for pigeons.

To the thousands of American men and boys who raced homing pigeons, a popular sport in the early 20th century and afterward, the government’s message was clear: Uncle Sam Wants Your Birds.

Richard Topus was one of those boys.

Now, I might have known about Army pigeons (should they have been Air Force pigeons? I wonder), but I do not remember so.

World War II saw the last wide-scale use of pigeons as agents of combat intelligence. Mr. Topus, just 18 when he enlisted in the Army, was among the last of the several thousand pigeoneers, as military handlers of the birds were known, who served the United States in the war. A lifelong pigeon enthusiast who became a successful executive in the food industry, Mr. Topus died on Dec. 5 in Scottsdale, Ariz., at the age of 84. The cause was kidney failure, his son Andrew said.

Richard Topus was born in Brooklyn on March 15, 1924, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. Growing up in Flatbush, he fell in love with the pigeons his neighbors kept on their rooftops in spacious coops known as lofts. His parents would not let him have a loft of his own — they feared it would interfere with schoolwork, Andrew Topus said — but he befriended several local men who taught him to handle their birds. Two of them had been pigeoneers in World War I, when the United States Army Pigeon Service was formally established.

Of course his parents wouldn't let him have pigeons; they were Jewish.

Pigeoneers. What an interesting word - and concept.

Pigeons have been used as wartime messengers at least since antiquity. Before the advent of radio communications, the birds were routinely used as airborne couriers, carrying messages in tiny capsules strapped to their legs. A homing pigeon can find its way back to its loft from nearly a thousand miles away. Over short distances, it can fly a mile a minute. It can go where human couriers often cannot, flying over rough terrain and behind enemy lines.

By the early 20th century, advances in communications technology seemed to herald the end of combat pigeoneering. In 1903, a headline in The New York Times confidently declared, “No Further Need of Army Pigeons: They Have Been Superseded by the Adoption of Wireless Telegraph Systems.”

Never say never, no?

In all, more than 50,000 pigeons served the United States in the war. Many were shot down. Others were set upon by falcons released by the Nazis to intercept them. (The British countered by releasing their own falcons to pursue German messenger pigeons. But since falcons found Allied and Axis birds equally delicious, their deployment as defensive weapons was soon abandoned by both sides.)

Now, who figured that British falcons would only eat German pigeons?

But many American pigeons did reach their destinations safely, relaying vital messages from soldiers in the field to Allied commanders. The information they carried — including reports on troop movements and tiny hand-sketched maps — has been widely credited with saving thousands of lives during the war.

Incoming pigeon, colonel. No, seriously, sir. Orders from HQ. No, I am not being sarcastic, sir.

Mr. Topus enlisted in early 1942 and was assigned to the Army Signal Corps, which included the Pigeon Service. He was eventually stationed at Camp Ritchie in Maryland, one of several installations around the country at which Army pigeons were raised and trained. There, he joined a small group of pigeoneers, not much bigger than a dozen men.

Camp Ritchie specialized in intelligence training, and Mr. Topus and his colleagues schooled men and birds in the art of war. They taught the men to feed and care for the birds; to fasten on the tiny capsules containing messages written on lightweight paper; to drop pigeons from airplanes; and to jump out of airplanes themselves, with pigeons tucked against their chests. The Army had the Maidenform Brassiere Company make paratroopers’ vests with special pigeon pockets.

American industry contributed to the Allied effort in many ways. Maidenform did more than make bras for Betty Grable. Patriotism takes all forms, and shapes.

After the war, Mr. Topus earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in business from Hofstra University. While he was a student, he earned money selling eggs — chicken eggs — door to door and afterward started a wholesale egg business. In the late 1950s, Mr. Topus became the first salesman at Friendship Food Products, a dairy company then based in Maspeth, Queens; he retired as executive vice president for sales and marketing. (The company, today based in Jericho, N.Y. and a subsidiary of Dean Foods, is now known as Friendship Dairies.)

I know Friendship cottage cheese.

Though the Army phased out pigeons in the late 1950s, Mr. Topus raced them avidly till nearly the end of his life. He left a covert, enduring legacy of his hobby at Friendship, for which he oversaw the design of the highly recognizable company logo, a graceful bird in flight, in the early 1960s.

From that day to this, the bird has adorned cartons of the company’s cottage cheese, sour cream, buttermilk and other products. To legions of unsuspecting consumers, Andrew Topus said last week, the bird looks like a dove. But to anyone who really knew his father, it is a pigeon, plain as day.

Nice touch.

A reference question

Received a call from a Newsday reporter, Carol Polsky, doing research on Harvey Milk. There's a new movie out about him, aptly named Milk. He went to school in Woodmere, or perhaps was from Woodmere (yes, he was; Google searches, including looking in Randy Shilts's book, The Mayor of Castro Street, confirms that), though he graduated from high school in Bay Shore.

I looked at the Hewlett High School yearbooks from 1946, 1947 and 1948, at the reporter's request, to see if I could find any mention of Milk. I did not. All I did find was the name of Mrs. William Milk in 1947's book.

Interesting request. I told her she should get a look at some of the faces in the yearbooks, but she said she was under deadline.

Finding a gem weeding

Continuing to weed biographies as an ongoing project. Up to the Rs: Richelieu, Robeson, Rockefeller. One of the Rockefeller books I evaluated was entitled David, the grandson of the old man. On the back of the book (New York, L. Stuart; 1971) I found a blurb on a book written by Ferdinand Lundberg, America's 60 Families (New York : Vanguard Press, c1937).

Lundberg's book is about the American plutocracy. Thirty years later he would write The rich and the super-rich; a study in the power of money today. (New York, L. Stuart; 1968).

Of some interest

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.

A good book?

I am simply amazed by this fact: there are 1,185 holds on 517 copies of Nelson DeMille's new book, The Gate House. And 617 holds on first copy returned of 376 copies of James Patterson's new book, Cross Country. So many people read the same thing. 106 holds on first copy returned of 254 copies on Danielle Steel's book. No holds on Scott Turow's book, Limitations. The fluff is popular, the better stuff collects dust.

Oy vay.

Birthstones

Just as I ended my harangue about the Dewey System, the phone rang: what is the December birthstone? Googled it: blue Topaz.

As cool and inviting as a blue lake on a blistering summer day,December's birthstone is derived from the Sanskrit word "tapas," meaning fire. This is because Blue Topaz was considered by ancient civilizations to have cooling properties. Not only was it believed to cool boiling water when thrown into the pot, but to calm hot tempers as well! This gemstone was credited with many other healing powers, among them the ability to cure insanity, asthma, weak vision and insomnia. The Blue Topaz was even thought to have magical properties in its ability to make its wearer invisible in a threatening situation.

Jewish sport?

A patron came in (3.15pm) and asked for this book:

Dewey call number: 796.83 B

Author: Allen Bodner.

I just don't get why sports are in the 700s. Yes, the 700s are arts and recreation. Yes, the 790s are recreational and performing arts -- but why? Boxing and puppet theater in the same slot? This Dewey Decimal System is a conundrum wrapped in enigma.

791.572 M is a book by Jay Mohr about his stint in SNL, and right after it, 791.602 G is a book by William Goldman, novelist (Marathon Man ) and screenwriter (The Princess Bride ) was invited to be a judge at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1989, followed by The nature of the beast, by Hans Brick (791.8 B), an animal trainer.

Geez.

New books

4 new books found on the new books cart at the Information Desk this morning:

Flotsam

What a great book! I was talking with a colleague about the weather (yesterday's rains and high tide created flooding), and told her of the detritus I saw in the Woodmere pier, where'd I'd gone during lunchtime.

We wondered whether that detritus was jetsam or flotsam. One of the definitions of flotsam is Flotsam is a children's book written and illustrated by David Wiesner. Published by Clarion/Houghton Mifflin in 2006, it was the 2007 winner of the Caldecott Medal.American Library Association: URL accessed 27 January 2007, Flotsam is David Wiesner's 3rd Caldecott Medal. ...

Such Good Friends

The Eagle and the Crown
By Frank Prochaska
(Yale, 239 pages, $40)

The King and the Cowboy
By David Fromkin
(The Penguin Press, 256 pages, $25.95)

A Film Career Pulled Into Focus

Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master
By Michael Sragow - Pantheon, 645 pages, $40)

I am fortunate to have known a few people who were significant in Fleming's life, including pioneer picturemaker Allan Dwan, who essentially discovered Fleming and brought him into the movie business around 1915. A perfect example of the devil-may-care, anything-goes, haphazard quality of the early movie business is Dwan's description of meeting Fleming, quoted in the book from my 1960s interviews with Dwan.

Dwan explained that one day, while he was shooting in Santa Barbara, his car developed engine trouble. No one on the crew could fix it, but one of the actors told him that he had met a chauffeur in Montecito who knew more about cars than anyone. "So we drove around looking for this fellow," Dwan said, "and at one of these estates there was a tall young boy shooting a .22 -- with a Maxim silencer -- at a target in the garage." That was the guy, the actor said. They pulled the ailing car up behind the man with the rifle. It was Victor Fleming. Without even looking at them, he said: "One of your tappet valves is stuck."

In 1941, Fleming directed his version of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," one of five movies he made with Spencer Tracy, who delivered a tour-de-force performance, but it was a fateful project because Fleming worked for the first time with Ingrid Bergman and fell hopelessly in love with her. Both were married when they became lovers, a romantic saga that is especially affecting and beautifully rendered in Mr. Sragow's account, aided by quotations from Fleming's heartbreaking letters. In one note to Bergman, Fleming said he wanted "to tell you boldly like a lover that I love you -- cry across the miles and hours of darkness that I love you -- that you flood across my mind like waves across the sand."

Wow.

The portrait of Fleming in Mr. Sragow's telling is that of an engaging, complex and endearing person. Whatever one may think of his uneven record as a director, the human being behind the films emerges as someone you would like to have known and clearly would have liked a lot, as Mr. Sragow obviously does. What more could you want from a biography than for it to make the dead come alive again?

Calling All Cars

In Brookfield, Wis., no restaurant has triggered more calls to the police department since last year than Chuck E. Cheese's.

Getty Images

Chuck E. Cheese's

Documents and Disorder

Stalin's Servant -- and Victim

Linking subjects

A colleague talked of research she did for the musical term falling fifths. She showed me three examples of composition that have falling fifths: Beethoven's 9th Symphony, Schumann's string quartet No. 3. Opus 41, and Ned Rorem's War Scenes (Dewey call number Q 784.3061 R).

Having never heard of Rorem, I looked at War Scenes: Rorem set music to Walt Whitman's US Civil War diary, Specimen Days (Q 811 W). Rorem wrote it in protest against the Viet Nam War. A habitual and long-time diarist himself, Rorem has published much. One of those books is A Ned Rorem Reader ([Music] 780.92 Rorem); in it I read part of an essay he wrote on The Beatles. In that essay he made reference to two movies: Express Bongo (Port Washington Library owns the 1959 film on VHS), and Privilege (Hewlett Woodmere owns a new DVD release of the 1967 film).

Thus are subjects hyperlinked in the library. What a way to learn.


Falling fifths are discussed in various articles in IIMP, the International Index of Music Periodicals. But, what are they? A website defines: "in musical terms, a Falling Fifth is a chord progression that goes down “a fifth,” like from a G chord to a C chord (count G, F, E, D, C = 5). When writing music, a falling fifth progression is always acceptable (along with a falling second and a rising third), and if you continue progressing in falling fifths, you’re following the Circle of Fifths."

The website happens to be written by a librarian. Awright!

A reference question

A college-age young man (in my college days he would have been called a hippie) asked for material on the effects of the industrial revolution on workers. A fascinating angle on a familiar topic.

I found this book: The Factory girls: a collection of writings on life and struggles in the New England factories of the 1840's / by the factory girls themselves, and the story, in their own words, of the first trade unions of women workers in the United States ; edited by Philip S. Foner.

Up From Bleed, Blister and Purge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oy.

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

Amazing.

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

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

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

Wimp? Me? Nah!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wimp librarian.

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

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

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

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

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

The questions are clear, obvious, and beg answering:

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

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

* how much crap do librarians have to take?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I insist.

Can't make this stuff up

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, she did ask.

MacArthur's Reputation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reckless, too, not just a liar.

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

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

New World, New Ideas

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

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

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

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

And here is a familiar name:

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

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

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

The Road to Meltdown

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

Shoe-Leather Rhapsody

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

Nice way to begin an article, praising a library.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A New Era in Publishing

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

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

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