by Matthew Battles ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2003
A must for every home or institutional collection. (11 illustrations)
Historical survey by a rare-book librarian of the defining epochs and events leading to both the destruction and proliferation of libraries.
Rebutting the stereotype of a silent sanctum in which mousy librarians maintain perfect order, the author reminds us how chaotic and impermanent these repositories of accumulated knowledge are. He contends that a library, “a world, complete and uncompletable,” draws its reason for existence from the culture in which it arises, a situation as liable to shifting social currents as the edifice housing it is subject to weather and other disasters, both natural and man-made. Battles follows the notorious “biblioclasms” of past ages, from the burning of the library at Alexandria to the bonfires of the Nazis, who destroyed more than 100 million books. He asserts that “most books are bad, very bad in fact,” and bemoans their inability to surmount the babble of their times. He does not, however, suggest that their fates are deserved; rather, that an ironic result of gathering so many volumes in a single place is that it makes them ready targets for revisionist fervor. Many small collections in obscure and scattered locations, on the other hand, ensure that more books will survive the onslaught of marauding princes, vengeful dictators, and fanatical clerics. Among the other ironies the author points out: many of the scrolls in Herculaneum survived the volcano of a.d. 79 because they burned, thereby making the charred remains amenable to spectral photography, which rendered their ancient text visible, while intact scrolls of the same age have long since crumbled into dust. Battles points out that books have always been an ephemeral experience: older manuscripts and proscribed texts were often recycled or reused, the imperfect palimpsests still visible to later readers. Yet he seems to lament the onset of the digital age, with its 800-million-page archive, by attesting that libraries now exist in a “state of flux which is indistinguishable from a state of crisis.”
A must for every home or institutional collection. (11 illustrations)Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-02029-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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developed by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
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by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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