The Library Book

lingua English

Pubblicato il 06 Dicembre 2018

ISBN:: 978-1-4767-4018-8

(1 recensione)

On the morning of April 28, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. The fire was disastrous: it reached two thousand degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more. Investigators descended on the scene, but more than thirty 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 into an investigation of the fire, award-winning New Yorker reporter and New York Times bestselling author Susan Orlean delivers a “delightful…reflection on the past, present, and future of libraries in America” (New York magazine) that manages to tell the broader story of libraries and librarians in a way that has never been done before.

In the “exquisitely written, consistently entertaining” (The New York Times) The …

On the morning of April 28, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. The fire was disastrous: it reached two thousand degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more. Investigators descended on the scene, but more than thirty 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 into an investigation of the fire, award-winning New Yorker reporter and New York Times bestselling author Susan Orlean delivers a “delightful…reflection on the past, present, and future of libraries in America” (New York magazine) that manages to tell the broader story of libraries and librarians in a way that has never been done before.

In the “exquisitely written, consistently entertaining” (The New York Times) The Library Book, Orlean chronicles the LAPL fire and its aftermath to showcase the larger, crucial role that libraries play in our lives; delves into the evolution of libraries; brings each department of the library to vivid life; studies arson 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 LAPL more than thirty years ago.

“A book lover’s dream…an ambitiously researched, elegantly written book that serves as a portal into a place of history, drama, culture, and stories” (Star Tribune, Minneapolis), Susan Orlean’s thrilling journey through the stacks reveals how these beloved institutions provide much more than just books—and why they remain an essential part of the heart, mind, and soul of our country.

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UNESCO released studies in 1949 and in 1996 listing all the libraries that have been demolished throughout modern history. The number of books destroyed, by UNESCO’s count, is so enormous – in the billions – that I sometimes find it hard to believe there are any books left in the world.

È illuminante vedere come le peggiori nemiche dei libri siano le stesse degli esseri umani: intolleranza e guerre, che hanno fatto strage di biblioteche e culture fin da quando si è iniziato a scrivere. Il senso di perdita che si prova leggendo dei libri andati perduti – due milioni di libri nella sola Italia durante la Seconda Guerra Mondiale – è enorme.

Burning books is an inefficient way to conduct a war, since books and libraries have no military value, but it is a devastating act. Destroying …

Puoi trovare questa recensione anche sul mio blog, La siepe di more

UNESCO released studies in 1949 and in 1996 listing all the libraries that have been demolished throughout modern history. The number of books destroyed, by UNESCO’s count, is so enormous – in the billions – that I sometimes find it hard to believe there are any books left in the world.

È illuminante vedere come le peggiori nemiche dei libri siano le stesse degli esseri umani: intolleranza e guerre, che hanno fatto strage di biblioteche e culture fin da quando si è iniziato a scrivere. Il senso di perdita che si prova leggendo dei libri andati perduti – due milioni di libri nella sola Italia durante la Seconda Guerra Mondiale – è enorme.

Burning books is an inefficient way to conduct a war, since books and libraries have no military value, but it is a devastating act. Destroying a library is a kind of terrorism. […] Taking books away from a culture is to take away its shared memory. It’s like taking away the ability to remember your dreams. Destroying a culture’s books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.

The Library Book è un bellissimo libro sull’amore per i libri e – sopratutto – per le biblioteche, che svolgono un ruolo sociale che va ben oltre il semplice prestare libri. Orlean ci racconta di come la Los Angeles Public Library sia un luogo di riferimento per persone senzatetto o che hanno bisogno socializzare; io posso raccontarvi di come avere una biblioteca con Internet point gratuito possa essere molto importante per chi è in cerca di un lavoro. Per non parlare della possibilità di chiedere discretamente aiuto se si è vittime o testimoni di violenza di genere, bullismo, razzismo, omobitransfobia o altri abusi.

Ma questo non era un libro sull’incendio del 1986 alla Los Angeles Public Library? Sì, se ne parla, ma in una maniera piuttosto dispersiva, ed è il maggior difetto del libro. Ogni capitolo parla di una caratteristica diversa e o di eventi significativi sulle biblioteche in generale o della Los Angeles Public Library, dando l’impressione di lasciare davvero poco spazio all’incendio. Il che lo rende al contempo un libro che farà impazzire d’amore qualunque topo da biblioteca e un libro frustrante nel seguirne ogni divagazione da quello che dovrebbe essere l’argomento centrale.

Quale delle due sensazioni prevale tra amore e frustrazione? Per me decisamente l’amore: sono un topo di biblioteca perso...

My family was big on the library. We were very much a reading family, but we were a borrow-a-book-from-the-library family more than a bookshelves-full-of-books family. My parents valued books, but they grew up in the Depression, aware of the quicksilver nature of money, and they learned the hard way that you shouldn’t buy what you could borrow. Because of that frugality, or perhaps independent of it, they also believed that you read a book for the experience of reading it. You didn’t read it in order to have an object that had to be housed and looked after forever, a memento of the purpose for which it was obtained. The reading of the book was a journey. There was no need for souvenirs.