The Questioning Librarian

The President-Elect and the President meeting at the White House Like so many others in this country, the results of the Election came as a shock to me, the outcome a possibility so mind-numbingly terrifying that, until the very end, it did not even seem worth thinking about. Yet here we are, watching as lobbyists fill out the transition team , Washington insiders are considered for Cabinet positions , and Trump promises to at least consider keeping parts of the Affordable Care Act that he and other Republicans pledged to repeal and replace immediately. While politicians often don't keep their promises, the speed with which so many of the President-elect's campaign promises have been abandoned is dizzying. My initial shock, and deep sadness, in the first few days have gradually begun to give way to anger instead. I've wondered how something like this could have happened, how a know-nothing charlatan blustered his way into the highest office in the land. Much ink ...

I've long been fascinated by the occupants of the White House, along with the history of slavery in the United States. Given that, a book like Robert Strauss' new biography of James Buchanan,  Worst. President. Ever.,  was going to be a must-read regardless, even if it hadn't been given such a catchy title.  Plenty of ink has been spilled about great men who've held the highest office in the United States. Any reader interested in learning any imaginable minutia about the lives of Lincoln, Washington, and the Roosevelts have hundreds of books to choose from, including multi-volume doorstoppers like Edmund Morris' three volume biography of Teddy Roosevelt, coming in at over two thousand pages. But with forty-four presidents having taken the reins in our two hundred forty year history, inevitably not all come out looking so great. While the current vogue is to label either George W. Bush or Barack Obama as the "Worst President Ever," depending on ...

Science writer Mary Roach is never one to shy away from parts of science that verge on the absurd, as anyone who has read any of her books surely knows. I'd read two of her previous books, and been enchanted enough by Roach's unique combination of endless curiosity and a wry sense of humor that I rushed to lay my hands on her newest book. Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War will not fail in living up to the expectations that fans of her work will bring. Those who have never read her before will be hard-pressed to put down a book that I finished in a few short days.  The real joy of reading something by Mary Roach is her talent for seeking out strange areas of science that a reader might never have known about. As an investigator, she answers questions you never knew you had. Her newest work   is no exception. We discover, for instance, how the military tests the ability of a fighter jet to survive a mid-air collision with a large bird--by firing a dead chicken...

The jurors take a break in 12 Angry Men On the hottest day of the year, the trial of an eighteen year old boy for the murder of his father concludes--the jurors withdraw for deliberations, tasked with determining whether the defendant is guilty. If they agree, a death sentence will be handed down. The case seems an easy one, with the jury ready to reach a verdict in less than five minutes of deliberation, but one juror is not convinced. Over the objections of the others, he demands a recounting of the evidence presented, arguing that surely a man's life is worth more than a few moments' thought. Over the course of several hours, the jurors weigh the evidence of the case, and with it weightier issues of class, justice in the United States, and the intersection of the two. 12 Angry Men  remains relevant to us as we continue to deal with these issues nearly sixty years after the film's release. The great strength of the film lies in the fact that only two of the jur...

Klansmen during the Reconstruction era While catching up on Game of Thrones a few weeks ago, I was particularly struck by the appearance of the terrorist organization known as the Sons of the Harpy. After the outlawing of slavery, this group, sporting golden masks to hide their identities, wages a campaign of terror against former slaves, the occupying army, and those who support the new government. Their parallel in the real world is obvious, an echo of the horror unleashed by the Klan and other white supremacist groups during the Reconstruction period of U.S. history and continuing for well over a century beyond that. This unprecedented campaign of violence against newly freed slaves and those who supported them crushed the hope that emancipation and the early stages of Reconstruction promised, disenfranchising African-Americans who had only just begun to exercise their right to vote and hold office.  In the face of this backlash, the Federal government finally backe...

Trump supporters pledging to vote in primary elections  A few years ago, a friend of mine recommended that I read one of Sinclair Lewis' later works, a novel called It Can't Happen Here . Writing in the 1930's, Lewis imagined what a fascist government would look like in the United States, his work rebutting the idea that such an idea was impossible in a nation that took so much pride in democratic principles. From his vantage point, this outcome was not impossible in the slightest. With figures like the pro-fascist radio priest Father Coughlin, and Louisiana governor Huey Long prominent in those years, an American version of fascism in power was all too easy to imagine. In the novel, Senator "Buzz" Windrip wins election to the Presidency after promising a return to American greatness, one that had no place for outsiders, dissenters, and minority groups. While cloaking himself in the rhetoric and symbols of American patriotism, his inauguration ushers in a r...

There is nothing quite so insulting to one's intelligence as a snake oil salesman. Even worse is one who comes back to the same place, peddling exactly the same shoddy goods as the first time. An editorial that appeared in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review last week is one of the finest examples of snake oil salesmanship that I've read in quite a while. The author, hailing from the conservative Commonwealth Foundation, is hawking the same old batch of peculiar remedies that conservatives have been promoting since the early eighties.  Pennsylvania's population is declining, he laments, and it's all because of the reckless tax and spend policies of Governor Wolf! Breathlessly, he relates just how many Pennsylvanians are leaving the state, crushed under taxes, longing to breathe free elsewhere. If only the state would slash taxes, our residents would want to stay, and corporations would beat down the door to open up shop here--utopia would be achieved! This argum...

It's a rare gift to be able to accessibly present real science to the public. It's even rarer to find someone who does so with an enthusiasm and humor that Mary Roach brings to the table. I picked up a copy of Packing for Mars  on a whim. I'd never heard of the author before, but the premise sounded interesting. Humans evolved to survive the conditions on Earth; what happens, then, when we go into space, a place without air, food, water, or anything else we need? This thought fascinated Roach so much that she spent two years finding out, traveling and interviewing and researching all possible aspects of it. This isn't the glory you see on television, she writes. Far more interesting than the glamour shots of the moon landing are the mundanities that make it all possible. To illustrate her point, she begins with the flag planting ceremony from the moon landing. Months of preparation went into ensuring that a flag would go with the Apollo astronauts; since there is n...

I've always been interested in history, but in high school I found American history to be incredibly boring. It was often presented as a black and white affair, completely scrubbed of any nuance. It was only after discovering the true complexity of our history that I began to find it fascinating, and there are few who portray this complexity as well as historian Joseph Ellis. This meant that his newest book, The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution , was an immediate must-read. Ellis, the author of numerous other books on U.S. history, takes on the story of how we came to have our Constitution. This development was far from inevitable, he asserts, and would have been an unlikely outcome after the Revolutionary War had it not been for the efforts of four individuals. Washington, future Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Monroe all worked both publicly and behind the scenes to ensure that the Constitution came into being.  Bo...

Old reels of microfilmed newspapers (image from the Manchester Library of New Hampshire) Last year, as the terrorist group Daesh expanded the territory under their control, they made a great show of destroying artifacts and sites of historic value in their wake. They were only the latest in a long line of similarly fundamentalist groups that took pride in working to erase our history--the Taliban notoriously demolished ancient statues of the Buddha in Afghanistan, and Malian rebels torched hundreds of manuscripts before they abandoned Timbuktu, to name just two examples. But you don't have to burn books or pick up a hammer to destroy history. While it is not spectacular enough to attract headlines, benign neglect has destroyed enough of the historical record to warrant notice as well, thanks in part to the underfunding of libraries and historical societies. It doesn't generate the same outpouring of outrage and emotion that the deliberate destruction of our past doe...