Amazing feat

The rise and fall of the great powers : economic change and military conflict from 1500 to 2000 / by Paul Kennedy. New York, NY : Random House, c1987.

How did he know about 2000 in 1987?

Halloween at the Library

Starting today at the Children's Room.

A man came in asking for Dear Mr. Henshaw / Beverly Cleary ; illustrated by Paul O. Zelinsky.

A mother with her two daughters were looking for a PG-rated DVD; they looked at Home Alone 4, but Mum nixed it. The violence was okay, but the plot includes a relationship that clearly she did not approve of.

A father with his son, Joseph, who is in the third grade, asked for a book; recommended Cam Jansen.

It has gotten busy, and I can't keep up, but I've recommended, and as wasked about, Patricia Giff, Barbara Cohen, Robert Munsch. Books on Thanksgiving (on Halloween Day), Magic school bus.

At 3, I repaired upstairs to Reference. Decidedly different in Reference than in Children's. A few people studyuing, 6 Internet PCs in use. A patron I know came over and asked for three books:

 Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society, by Glenn Dynner. An associate professor of religion at Sarah Lawrence College. Growth and development of Hasidic movement in Eastern and East Central Europe. Glenn Dynner draws upon newly discovered Polish archival material and neglected Hebrew testimonies to illuminate Hasidism's dramatic ascendancy in the region of Central Poland during the early nineteenth century. (from Oxford Press)




Blind jump: the story of Shaike Dan, by Amos Ettinger. Found it in Suffolk.

Blind Jump is the story of the amazing exploits of Shaike Dan. During World War II, Shaike Dan volunteered to parachute behind enemy lines in Romania on behalf of British Intelligence. His jump had two objectives: to locate the prison camp where 1,400 Allied Air Force crewman, downed when bombing the Ploesti oil fields in Romania, were being held, and also to find ways to get them out of Romania so that they could go back into action and resume their contribution to the war effort. The second objective was to try to rescue Jews from Eastern Europe and get them to Palestine.

Rome and Jerusalem: the clash of ancient civilizations. Martin Goodman. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2007.
933.05 G

Clearly there is a theme running through his requests. He is one of the more interesting patrons I encounter here.

Follow the hyperlink

A fascinating article in the current issue of the New York Review of Books on three books about the Dreyfus Affair, by Robert Gildea. In the Contributors page, he is identified as Professor of Modern History at Oxford University. Indeed.

Four of his books are in the OPAC:

Barricades and borders : Europe 1800-1914. Oxford [Oxfordshire] ; New York : Oxford University Press, 1987.
Children of the Revolution : the French, 1799-1914. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2008.
France since 1945. Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2002.
Marianne in chains : everyday life in the French heartland under the German occupation. New York: Henry Holt, 2003.

HW owns the 2nd and 4th; I'm going to take a look.

A Reference library

Reading Alan Schom biography of Napoleon Bonaparte; as he set sail on Egyptian invasion, described on page 96. "As part of a theoretically semiacadmic mission, polymath Monge, chemist Claude Louis Berthollet, and their colleagues had ordered dozens of crates of astronomical, chemical, physical, survey, surgical, and pharmaceutical instruments, accompanied by by a reference library of several hundred tomes of science, philosophy, history, and geography, not to metion an array of what proved to be antiquated and all-but-useless maps of Egypt." p.96

Says much about weeding and keeping the collection fresh and current.

Texas textbooks rewrite U.S. history

A fascinating look at how conservatives wield their power.

Last week, the Texas Board of Education debated the statewide curricula, most notably the social studies curriculum. These board members are elected officials— not experts or professional historians— though according to the March 12 issue of The New York Times, “some members of the conservative bloc held themselves out as experts on certain topics.”

Certain ones? Which?

What upset people, however, was not the makeup of the Board, but its decisions. The aforementioned bloc (10 of the 15 members) espouses conservative values— they question Darwin, they believe the founding fathers were guided by Christian principles and they dislike Thomas Jefferson for coining the term “separation of church and state.”

Imagine conservatives disliking Jefferson, he of states's rights.

On this last point, the Board decided to replace Jefferson on a list of Enlightenment thinkers students should know with Calvin, Aquinas and Blackstone. It also neglected to add notable Hispanics to the history of the Mexican-American War. Nuanced defenses of McCarthy and criticism of Johnson’s Great Society were included in the curriculum, however, comprising a neat, Republican package that passed along party lines, 10-5.

History according to the conservatives.

The influence of this decision goes beyond Texas. Since Texas is the second most populous state, textbook publishers tailor their American History texts to Texan standards. And since the most populous state, California, is so persnickety about its curriculum, Texas really sets national standards for what students will learn. This is especially true given the primacy of the textbook in America. Indeed, the textbook is the cornerstone of public secondary civics education and far more influential than the teacher. The teachers who write test questions from their own words and research are far fewer than the mass of underpaid, overworked, non-history majors who pull test questions straight from the book. In too many classrooms, practice questions at the end of chapters stand a good chance of becoming actual test questions.

The saving grace is that most high school students don't give much attention to history class, ignore much of what terachers say, and forget the answers they've provided to test questions as soon as the test is over.

So if most students are simply learning by rote in public schools, what they are memorizing is very important. Since these schools are public, it is not just a matter of what parents want students to learn, but what parents and special interest groups can lobby politicians to include in curricula and thus force students to learn (unless attentive parents intervene). Because make no mistake— anything run by the government is ultimately backed by a monopoly of coercive force. Thus, this debate about an American history curriculum is really a battle over what will be the state-sanctioned, monolithic account of how things were.

Clearly this article comes from a liberal viewpoint, but, anything run by the government is ultimately backed by a monopoly of coercive force? What exactly does that mean? What the right wing says?

Everyone ought to stop fooling themselves. There is no one authoritative history, in America or anywhere else. Bias is inherent to historiography. No matter how closely a historian scrutinizes sources and attempts to balance one account with another, by the very selection of some sources over others, a particular account is written; not all sources can be included, and that is OK.

Truth must still be sought, though, and certain histories will do this better than others. Simply because there is no one irrefutable account does not make all accounts equally valid or valuable. It would behoove the people of this nation to start compiling the truths of their own stories and presenting them alongside many others, rather than jostling to write their own pages in the state-approved story book of what really happened. This can take the form of textbook-free classrooms that rely on articles and primary sources or free association of like-minded individuals to educate their children in a certain tradition (read: private schools). Embracing our differences has always made us stronger as a nation, and it is what will keep us ahead in the coming decades, even as European countries wrestle to redefine what it means for them to no longer be ethnic nations. The beauty of this civic nation is forged in the fires of pluralism. E pluribus unum: “Out of many, one.”

By NATHAN STRINGER

Published: Thursday, March 25, 2010

Books on Political Conspiracy

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

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

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

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

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









3. Libra. Don DeLillo. Viking, 1988

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

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

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




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

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


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

Boreslav

A youngster from the Hebrew Academy (HAFTR) came over to the Reference desk asking about Boreslav. A reference interview identified him to have been a Polish king in the 1300s. We looked in the OPAC (bibliographic instruction), and found some books on Polish history. She wanted to know about finding scholarly articles. Later, she came over to the desk and showed me a book about Jews written by Simon Dubnov. In it, there is reference made to the charter issued by King Boreslav.

Victory by Longbow

Agincourt
By Bernard Cornwell
(Harper, 451 pages, $27.99)


Reviewed by Ron Maxwell
Mr. Maxwell has written a cinematic trilogy on Joan of Arc titled "The Virgin Warrior." He wrote and directed the motion pictures "Gettysburg" and "Gods & Generals." His Web site can be found at www.ronmaxwell.com.

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.

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.

Extra, Extra! Lunar Man-Bats

The New York Sun.

When Ira Stoll and I were preparing to re-launch The New York Sun in 2001, the Atlantic Monthly sent around a reporter to find out, among other things, why we had picked the name. I immediately started rattling on about how the Sun, in the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, had stood for limited and honest government, equality under the law, constitutionalism, and other features of high-minded conservatism. I was just getting warmed up when the reporter, David Carr, caught me off-guard by inquiring about the New York Sun's notorious moon hoax.

Say what?

I had read the histories of the great 19th-century broadsheet that went out of publication in 1950 and whose flag we had just picked up. But so fascinated was I by its political pedigree that I had only skimmed the part about how it built its early circulation by claiming in a news story that, in South Africa, astronomers peering through a new type of telescope had seen life on the moon -- including swarms of flying man-bats.

What a way to sell newspapers.

When the Sun was born in 1833, New York had a population of more than 250,000, but its 11 daily newspapers had a combined circulation of only 26,500. These were days, Mr. Goodman notes, when a "newspaper's fortunes rose and fell on the personality of its editor."

He tells of the editor of the Herald, James Gordon Bennett, once getting caned so badly that he took to keeping a set of loaded pistols in his office, and of Evening Post editor William Cullen Bryant horsewhipping William Leete Stone, of the Commercial Advertiser, who fought back with a cane that concealed a steel sword.

Making today pale by comparison.

In the early 19th century, a daily newspaper typically cost 6 cents. In 1833, the Sun, under Benjamin Day, broke into this market with a tabloid that sold for a penny. Although set in small type, it was given over to reports of murder and crime, written up in a colorful fashion. And in the bottom right corner of page one -- in a place where other papers sometimes ran fiction -- its first issue featured a dispatch about a boy who whistled in his sleep.

No nudies in those days; no equivalent to Rupert Murdoch. But wait!

The Sun was in business for two years when Day brought in as editor a Briton, Richard Adams Locke.

Those Brits.

Swirling through Mr. Goodman's telling of this story are such figures as Edgar Allan Poe, who was a Sun contributor and once penned a balloon-to-the-moon fantasy, and P.T. Barnum, a master of the newspaper-aided publicity stunt. "The Sun and the Moon" also addresses subjects such as abolition, of which the Sun was a particularly energetic advocate. Editor Locke himself refused for some years to admit to writing the moon hoax. When, in 1840, he finally confessed, he defended it as a satire on the then-current rage by which astronomy had become what he saw as a "pseudo philosophy."

Imagine how that'd go over today.

Skewed Values

Weeding the biography section; now in the letter M. Mao, Mencken, Michener, Monroe. Found 7 biographies of Marilyn, 2 of President James. Seems a little skewed, but, that's just me, I suppose.

Casanova: Librarian, too

In 1928, Viennese writer Stefan Zweig declared that Casanova "proved that one may write the most amusing story in the world without being a novelist, and give the most admirable picture of the time without being a historian." Anyone who reads Casanova's memoirs, which he composed to console himself in a lonely old age – he died at 73 in 1798 – will see the rightness of Zweig's claim. Yet almost nobody does read them. Casanova's "History of My Life" is an invaluable record of 18th-century Europe, but it is also one of the longest works ever written. The standard English edition runs to more than 3,600 pages.

3,600 pages? Ouch.



Giacomo Casanova' by Anton Raphael Mengs




Casanova with a conquest in Paris

Can I recommend a book?

A mother came over to the Information Desk asking for the Young Adult Mystery section; I directed her (well, her children, whom she directed) to the YA section. Mysteries have a skull on the spine. Then she asked me to recommend a book for her tenth-grader who "doesn't like to read."

A book to read is very broad, I said; can we get specific? What do you like?

"I don't know," he answered.

"Scary things?" I asked, keeping Stephen King in mind.

"No, not that."

"Detective stories," I suggested; that got no enthusiasm. He and his mother engaged in a friendly word interplay, she suggesting this or that, he declining her suggestions.

"History?" I asked.

"Yes."

"The American Civil War?"

"Yeah." That connected.

I gave him a printout of a book by James McPherson.

"Someone told me about a 3,00 page book on the Civil War."

"I don't know that there's one book that's three thousand pages," I said, immediately searching in my mind for a multi-volume set that would qualify. I thought of Douglas Southall Freeman and then of Shelby Foote. I gave him a printout of the latter, and sent him off to the 973.7 section. He seemed satisfied. I know I was.

Again I was happy to have given a patron material he wanted and liked getting. Again my knowledge helped me to recommend a good book.

A library question, and an answer

A young man came in today asking for material on the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (passed in 1890). He's an 11th grade student at Ramaz. A search on the OPAC returned very little material: the only book was a biography of Benjamin Harrison, during whose presidency the Act passed.

I looked at Economics books; the indexes (actually indices, but why quibble?) revealed little, but it was a start. Following, I went to books written by economists: Galbraith, Friedman, Thurow; not much. But I did get a lead: look at the trusts themselves: Carnegie (steel), Morgan (money), Rockefeller (oil). I suggested to the student that he look at the index of each book, and determine if the pages on the Act were relevant.

A satisfactory start: he left with books and ideas, and a lesson on using the index of a book as a research tool.

A satisfactory end: I did my job well, and provided information and a lesson to a patron. This is a time when being a librarian is satisfying and rewarding.

Casanova Librarian

Reading "The Know-It-All", and found this snippet under Casanova: in his final years, Casanova was a librarian. Sexes up the image of librarians.

Entry on page 32 reads: "The famous 18th-century lothario ended his life as a a librarian. Librarians could use that to sex up their image."

Indeed.

The Know-It-All: one man's humble quest to become the smartest person in the world, by A.J. Jacobs (Simon & Schuster, New York: 2004)

Chocolate.org has this picture of Casanova, and this caption: Chocolate has a reputation as an aphrodisiac. The physiological basis of this claim is still controversial; but the insatiable womaniser Giacomo Casanova made a habit of consuming chocolate before lovemaking - and few of the women he seduced complained afterwards. Further, the website, in describing the substance, states that "reportedly 50% of women claim to prefer chocolate to sex. The mature images hyperlinked to this word show some fascinating evidence

A Library encounter

This is the manna of librarianship. A man came in and told me he would "like to donate to the library a copy of the book I just wrote." It's entitled "Revolutionary War - Battle of Brooklyn: The Battle of Long Island". I asked him to sign it, and, in a shaky hand, he did: Sam W. Galowitz. It is 202 pages, including maps, appendices, and tables. It pains me, a trained indexer, to say that it has no index.

He was back in a couple of minutes to tell me he is currently working on a book about Richard Hewlett. A Tory sympathizer and gun-runner, he was one of the men most wanted for capture (he was to be given no quarter, Mr. Galowitz told me) by the Revolutionary forces. Yes, his family lived in this area which is now Hewlett. One of his descendants has the local high school named after him, G.W. Hewlett. We agreed it would be rich irony if the GW stands for George Washington, as is, of course possible, given his ancestors political sympathies.

I asked him if he knew of the American Revolution Round Table; he did not. I told him it meets at the Williams Club, once every other month. He knew of the Williams Club, and recognized the name Tom Fleming.

We talked a bit about Hewlett, just two history buffs chatting. What fun.