Title: The Library Book Pdf
Susan Orlean, hailed as a "national treasure" by The Washington Post and the acclaimed best-selling author of Rin Tin Tin and The Orchid Thief, reopens the unsolved mystery of the most catastrophic library fire in American history and delivers a dazzling love letter to a beloved institution - our libraries.
On the morning of April 29, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. As the moments passed, the patrons and staff who had cleared out of the building realized this was not the usual false alarm. As one fireman recounted later, "Once that first stack got going, it was good-bye, Charlie." The fire was disastrous: It reached 2,000 degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed 400,000 books and damaged 700,000 more. Investigators descended on the scene, but more than 30 years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library - and if so, who?
Weaving her lifelong love of books and reading with the fascinating history of libraries and the sometimes eccentric characters who run them, award-winning journalist and New York Times best-selling author Susan Orlean presents a mesmerizing and uniquely compelling story as only she can. With her signature wit, insight, compassion, and talent for deep research, she investigates the legendary Los Angeles Public Library fire to showcase the larger, crucial role that libraries play in our lives.
To truly understand what happens behind the stacks, Orlean visits the different departments of the LAPL, encountering an engaging cast of employees and patrons and experiencing alongside them the victories and struggles they face in today's climate. She also delves into the evolution of libraries across the country and around the world, from a metropolitan charitable initiative to a cornerstone of national identity. She reflects on her childhood experiences in libraries; studies fire and attempts to burn a copy of a book herself; and reexamines the case of Harry Peak, the blond-haired actor long suspected of setting fire to the library more than 30 years ago. Along the way, she reveals how these buildings provide much more than just books - and that they are needed now more than ever.
Filled with heart, passion, and unforgettable characters, The Library Book is classic Susan Orlean and an homage to a beloved institution that remains a vital part of the heart, mind, and soul of our country and culture.
Susan Orlean takes on a favorite subject for readers everywhere - and is back to form This is a terrific book, Susan Orlean at her considerable best. Her only peer for nonfiction is John McPhee, in my opinion. If you are a reader, you probably already have a profound attachment to and curiosity about libraries and librarians. Orlean's book will satisfy your curiosity and reaffirm your attachment.This book has her signature combination of threads that add up to a whole: we hear about the horrendous fire at the LA main library, we trace the early history of the library and its colorful head librarians, we hear about the issues that face libraries today (homeless users) and we hear about the puzzling self-contradictory man who was accused of but probably did not start the library fire. Orleans knows that people like to read about other interestisng people, so she switches among library staff, the arson suspect and his family, and current library staff.She also knows that people like to get the inside story about institutions and places we mostly see from the outside as customers or users. So we get plenty of both. Sure you probably knew that being able to reserve books over the Internet vastly increased the resources devoted to shipping books from branch to branch, but Orlean makes it concrete by visiting the LA library shipping facility. And so on. As with Orlean, there's not a word out of place or a non-telling detail.So if you care about libraries at all, this is the book for you. Perhaps introducing each chapter with a few catalog entries (I almost said catalog cards, but there are no such things any more) is a bit cute, but it doesn't really get in the way. And if you thought her previous book about Rin Tin Tin wasn't up to her best, don't worry. This one definitely is.The Library Mysteries On page 92 of her new book, “The Library Book,” Susan Orlean makes an interesting and revealing confession about how she came to write it: “Right before learning about the library fire, I had decided I was done with writing books. Working on them felt like a slow-motion wrestling match, and I wasn’t in the mood to grapple with such a big commitment again. But here I was. I knew part of what hooked me had been the shock of familiarity I felt when I took my son to our local library — the way it telegraphed my childhood, my relationship with my parents, my love of books. It brought me close, in my musings, to my mother, and to our sojourns in the library. It was wonderful and it was bittersweet, because just as I was rediscovering those memories, my mother was losing all of hers. . . . Soon the dark fingers of dementia got her in their grip, and they pried loose random bits of her memory every day. . . And I knew that now I was carrying the remembrance for both of us. The reason why I finally embraced this book project — wanted, and then needed, to write it — was my realization that I was losing her.”Orleans’ passion for her subject matter, and her dogged determination to tame it and bring order to the vast landscape it opened up to her, bears witness to her commitment to her desperate belief in the persistence of memory, and the role that books, and libraries, play in preserving it.Behind their apparent benign blandness, libraries and librarians are revealed in this exploration to be as varied and interesting as any enterprise on the planet. Libraries are far more than repositories of books, and their role in shaping culture and actively assisting in dealing with some of its most intractable problems — notably homelessness — are remarkable and mostly go unrecognized and unappreciated. Orleans’ historical summary and prolonged meditation on these and other contributions do a real service in reminding us just how important this institution is to our society.But Susan Orleans is too good a writer to be satisfied with a historical survey, and this book is laced not only with colorful characters, but with the drama of architectural battles over the fate of the burned Los Angeles Library, and the mystery surrounding the origins of the fire itself. These musings lead her down many an interesting rabbit hole to explore the science of arson investigation, the preservation and recovery of damaged books, and many other arcane but fascinating topics.This book was my most rewarding read of the summer. It will be published in October, and will also be available in audiobook form, read by the author.Can we talk about Chapter 5? SPOILER ALERT. In Chapter 5, the author burns a book. In a story of a devastating fire in a library, seven hundred thousand books destroyed, librarians crying and exhausted volunteers, the author burns a book to see how it feels. What? Assuming she had editors, how was this chapter left in? I don’t understand.
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