A compelling exploration of the battle over “a world-class library that lost its way in the digital age.”
The struggle to save a New York icon.
Patience and Fortitude, the names of the venerable lions flanking the entrance of the New York Public Library, serve well as the title of journalist Sherman’s debut book about the determined and courageous protestors battling vast changes to the library. Based on articles that he published in the Nation, Sherman presents a scathing exposé of a proposed Central Library Plan that would have demolished the NYPL stacks, sent 3 million books off-site to Princeton, New Jersey, and left branch libraries destitute. Many noted writers and scholars were aghast: Salman Rushdie signed a protest letter, as did Tom Stoppard, Ann Patchett, Donna Tartt, Jonathan Lethem, and others. But the library’s board of trustees were equally notable—including Toni Morrison, former Harvard president Neil Rudenstine, and historian Robert Darnton—and they struggled to address the institution’s dire economic straits. The NYPL, the only private library among the world’s great research libraries, “must find about 70% of its revenues from the private sector.” Benefactors’ donations temporarily stemmed the erosion of money, but soon after Brooke Astor donated $5 million, for example, the library was once again broke. In the 1980s, under Vartan Gregorian’s presidency, the NYPL’s endowment rose to $172 million, but the need for more funds never abated. The library took to selling off art and property, closing branches, and retaining architect Norman Foster to revamp the Fifth Avenue building, de-emphasizing research but creating modern, inviting spaces. It would become, one critic said, “a vast internet cafe,” where visitors could check email and read e-books. Many of the library’s trustees would not talk to Sherman, and even Bill de Blasio, who supported the protestors, declined to be interviewed. Nevertheless, Sherman has unearthed convincing evidence that the CLP was misguided; the library, he urges, “needs government regulation” and “a new generation of public-spirited trustees.”
A compelling exploration of the battle over “a world-class library that lost its way in the digital age.”Pub Date: June 23, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61219-429-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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