Today

First two hours, covered Children's; questions: books about Spring, rainbow, for pre-K; Spiderman.

At 11, up to Reference, question about Marco Polo's travels. Man said he had already traveled to the East, while in the service (Armed Forces). Wants to follow some of Polo's route. Asked about a city called Kamul. Found a result that puts it in western Iran. (Just noticed there is also a Kamul-li, in Korea.) Also asked about Tabriz (in Iran, as well). Said he'll probably go to China; fascinated with the East. I endorsed Venice.

He already has this book, but when I showed him the one I knew, he became enthusiastic, and took it with him.

Marco Polo : from Venice to Xanadu / by Laurence Bergreen.


This book (right) is the companion to the show I saw on PBS. Found it online, showed him it can be watched online.




In the afternoon, back at Reference, a young man came over to the desk, looking for a book on SAT Math; alas, our copy is out. He returned, asking for The talented tenth, by W. E. B. DuBois. We own a book, The Negro problem; a series of articles by representative American Negroes of to-day, which contains that essay. A new one to me; there is always more to learn.

Book Fair's dissident guests roil China

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Books 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.