The Questioning Librarian

One of our favorite national stories is that of the self-made man. This mythos infiltrates much of our culture, from the novels of Horatio Alger and our delight in the success of people like Andrew Carnegie to its less savory forms--our critique of the poor for their perceived failings, and the joy of a large swath of the population whenever a politician takes aim at "handouts" for those they judge to have simply made bad life choices.  This mythos declares that everyone's fortunes are the result solely of their own hard work and choices, regardless of circumstances. The rich deserve what they have earned, in this story, and the poor deserve what they have gotten. The narrative is a powerful one, and we view many of the issues facing our society through this lens. Why should we help the poor, some demand to know, when they need to just get a job, an education, work harder? Why should we allow a modest tax increase on the rich, others ask--why punish them for their ha...

A few weeks ago, I was stuck in the airport, my flight delayed by five hours. While I tend not to read many ebooks myself, on that Friday, however, I was very glad to have remote access to my library's online collection to ease the boredom of the wait and the subsequent flight. Adam Hochschild's To End All Wars was a book that I had meant to read a while ago but never gotten around to, and it proved an engrossing read. Just over a century ago when the nations of Europe declared war on one another, much of the populace broke out into spontaneous celebration. Cheering crowds gathered before the royal palaces in Germany, Russia, and Britain. It was a war that many in Europe had expected for years, war's outbreak an event that had been both feared and longed for. But not everyone was cheering, and it is the dissenters to the war that Hochschild focuses much of his attention on. While men like Rudyard Kipling celebrated the war as heroic, others like Bertrand Russell sp...