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
A heartfelt if somewhat unsurprising view of old age by the former president. Carter (Living Faith, 1996, etc.) succinctly evaluates the evolution and current status of federal policies concerning the elderly (including a balanced appraisal of the difficulties facing the Social Security system). He also meditates, while drawing heavily on autobiographical anecdotes, on the possibilities for exploration and intellectual and spiritual growth in old age. There are few lightning bolts to dazzle in his prescriptions (cultivate family ties; pursue the restorative pleasures of hobbies and socially minded activities). Yet the warmth and frankness of Carter’s remarks prove disarming. Given its brevity, the work is more of a call to senior citizens to reconsider how best to live life than it is a guide to any of the details involved.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1998
ISBN: 0-345-42592-8
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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