The Invention of Wings

 Sue Monk Kidd, "The Invention of Wings," Penguin Books,  2014. 

Acknowledgements
...
The following institutions, which along with Historic Charleston Foundation and Drayton Hall, served as resources: The Charlesong Museum, the Charleston Library Society, the College of Charleston's Addlestone Library and the Avery Research Center, the Charleston County Public Library, the South Caroliniana Library, the Aiken-Rhett House Museum, the Nathanial Russel House Museum, the Charles Pinckney House, the Old Slave Mart, Magnolia Plantation and Gardens, Lowcountry Africana, Middleton Place and Boone Hall Plantation. [p. 371]
...

Jaqueline Coleburn, rare book cataloger at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., for her enormous assistance in providing me with a treasure trove of letters, newspapers, Anti-Slavery Convention proceedings and other documents related to Sarah and Angelina Grimke and early-nineteenth-century history. [p.371]

COMMENT

To write her historical novel, Kidd made use of a resources from a wide variety of cultural institutions including museums, historical societies and libraries.  She mentions one librarian by name who was especially helpful to locate historical materials that contribute to the historical accuracy of a fictionalized story. 

The Radical Feminism of a 17th-Century Priest

 Judith Shulevitz,  "The Radical Feminism of a 17th-Century Priest,"  September 2021, Atlantic pp. 94-101.

I stumbled upon Poulain at the Barnard library in 2016.  I was reading up on feminists of the past because I felt stifled by the feminism of the present, particularly the kind just then embodied by Hilary Clinton, whose presidential campaign leaned hard on the notion that she would shatter the glass ceiling -- never mind that most American women were just trying to get by.  I wasn't struggling to get by, but I wasn't soaring either. 
...

Fully forgotten by the 19th century, Poulain took a long time to resurface.  In 1902, a young French graduate student named Henri Pieron pulled Poulain's dusty books of the shelves of the French National Library, apparently by chance (the copy of On the Equality of the Two Sexes had likely never been opened, since the pages were uncut).  Pieron recognized the significance of his find: He was something of a radical himself, and precociously well read in philosophy.  In a pioneering essay, he described the experience or reading Poulain: "Sometimes the astonishment is such that you feel the need to return to the first page and make sure that the Roman numerals really do say 1673."

COMMENT

A radical feminist book from 1673 is re-discovered twice-- once by the author who feels that there is something missing from "glass ceiling" feminism, and once in 1902.  Shulevitz says that instead of crediting Poulain's ideas, other writers simply adopted them with their own modifications.  Returning to the original source re-introduces caregiving as a feminist issue and one that had been utterly  left out of much contemporary feminism until COVID exposed the lack of support for mothers and other caregivers.  

 Kelly Jensen, "Anti-Critical Race Theory Parents fight The Hate U Give," book Rion, August 10, 2021. https://bookriot.com/the-hate-u-give-challenge/?fbclid=IwAR3xZMSlv3isO98FaNDjN_BxJ_A3708MG1uTShFYKHpVh_Y6mR5fUUEqZdQ

In most parts of the US, if public schools aren’t back in session, they will be soon. If fights about masking or not masking during a global pandemic and rise of the COVID-Delta variant weren’t enough, nor were protests against access to inclusive sexual education material, now teachers and librarians have to fight a third front. Opponents to Critical Race Theory (CRT) are flooding school and library board meetings, hoping to squash use of titles that explore anti-racism. Angie Thomas’s award-winning debut The Hate U Give is one such title under the spotlight by anti-anti-racism activists in Putnam County, New York.

...

The Hate U Give is no stranger to criticism, having been on the American Library Association’s most challenged list since its publication in 2017. Reasons for its continual challenge include it being “‘pervasively vulgar’ and because of drug use, profanity, and offensive language.” 

COMMENT

Librarians are in the role of defending a book from angry parents and maintaining a list of banned books.  Without saying it in so many words,, the article makes it clear that the censors have not read "The Hate U Give" but then again, censors almost never seem to have actually read the books they object to. 
 

 

The Books that Changed My Life Weren't Very Good

 Danika Ellis "The Books that Changed My Life Weren't Very Good," Book Riot  April 209, 2021. https://bookriot.com/books-that-changed-my-life/?fbclid=IwAR0pNwY-CRmK11x3nfG83MySaefkwDiZOCgKpHWyNXdJ9tmq6PGATuKIoGg

I keep a giant list of books I want to read — actually, I keep three: ones available through the library, through inter-library loan, and ones I’d have to buy to read. These have been steadily growing for decades now, and there are thousands of books on them. I also almost never consult them?? They seem to exist just so I can believe that one day I will read them all.

...

I requested the book, and when I began reading it, my mind was blown. Here was a completely different way of understanding desire and identity. Diamond laid out the incredible complexity of the biological components of sexual attraction, and the book included multiple accounts of women who had gone through the same journey as I had. It rewrote my relationship to my queerness, my identity, my understanding of the basic building blocks of desire. It’s also…not a perfect read. It’s cissexist and has a small sample size. It can be incredibly dry. But it changed my life.

COMMENT

To this writer, the library represents aspirational reading. One day she requests a book on the list from the library (Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire by Lisa M. Diamond) and discovers insights about human sexuality that are relevant to her own identity.

I Haven't Read Books by Cis-Het White Men for Years: I don't Miss Anything

 

Tika Viteri, I Haven't Read Books by Cis-Het White Men for Years: I don't Miss Anything. BookRiot.com July 9, 2021. https://bookriot.com/not-reading-cis-het-white-men/?fbclid=IwAR0D9yjnahMHdbJzZMZCdzyZrVQiP73IJ466wMthgZfzxExbflYwl25BUEo 

I’m one of those annoying people who taught themselves to read at age 3 (word up to Matilda Wormwood) and attempted to hide books under my pillow at night. The summer I was 5, my brother was born and I was bored, so I toddled my pre-K self half a mile down to the local library and tried to convince the librarian that she could, in fact, give me my own library card without my mom’s signature. She wasn’t having it, so I walked all the way back home, then back to the library with the completed application in hand. Someone from the local bar called my mother to let her know I was just walking around downtown by myself, and my mom said, “It’s ok, she’s going to the library.” It was a different time.

COMMENT

 I had a similar experience.  When I was 5 I wanted to get a library card for the school library, but the librarian refused to believe that a 5 year old could read.  She made me come in with my mother and read aloud from a book.  The book included the word "orphan" which I did not know and pronounced as three syllables:  "or-pa-han".   The librarian did not tell me I was pronouncing the word wrong until I had read the whole book and I nursed a grudge against her until I went to a different school. 

Can You Please Help Me Get Out of Prison

 Emily Bazelon, "Can You Please Help Me Get Out of Prison?", New York Times Magazine, July 4, 2021, pp 27-33, 47, 49.

It started with an email I received from a retired librarian in Oregon  "Dear Ms Bazelon, Karen Oehler write in July 2019.  "I correspond with an inmate, Yutico Briley, at Dixon," a prison in Jackson, La.  For a couple of years, Oehler and Briley had been writing to each other through a support program for incarcerated people. 

...

Briley mentioned that one of his favorite books was "Exodus,' the 1950's novel by Leon Uris about the founding of the state of Israel, which he borrowed from the prison library cart.  I remembered the paperback copy I checked out from the library when I was growing up.  "One of my faviore things to read about is history," he wrote,. "The book I read is old, and the pages crch when you flip them."

...

I went to law school and passed the bar, but I've never practiced law.  I decided, though I had never intervened like this before, to call a few innocence lawyers on Briley's behalf.  I wasn't sure why -- he was one prisoner among millions.  Was it because I wasn't really planning on writing about him?  Because Briley saw himself in the young men in my book?  Because he mentioned the novel "Exodus"?  I didn't know.  But hen that's often true of relationships and of stories.  One spark catches.  Maybe others follow

COMMENT

What a great library story!  Yes, there are lawyers involved, but Briley's innocence wouldn't have been  established without libraries --first, because of a retired librarian who is still involved in social justice work, and secondly, by his choice of reading that happened to establish a bond with Bazelon.  At age 19, Briley was sentenced to 60 years without possibility of parole.   He spent eight and a half years in prison before a new D.A. was elected in New Orleans who campaigned on a promise to re-examine wrongful convictions.

Invasive Species

 Rebecca Mead. "Invasive Species"  New Yorker July 2021, pp. 20-24.

In the late nineteen-eighties, Finnish researchers, led by a zoologist named Pekka Niemela, gained unusual access to a rare manuscript in the collection of the Vatican Library, "De Arte Venandi cum Avibus," or "On the Art of Hunting with Birds." The book, attributed to Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor, was made between 1241 and 1244. The Vatican's manuscript, which is in two volumes, was compiled by Frederick's son Manfred more than a decade later, after the original work was lost during the Battle of Parma.  The manuscript passed though the hands of several eminent noblemen and intellectuals before entering the papal collection in 1622. [p.23]

...

Thanks to the intercession of Simo Orma, an academic at the Finnish Institute in Rome, Niemela and a zoologist were granted permission to see the manuscript, under the watchful eye of the head librarian.  The scholars concluded that the four images were of the same bird, and, by examining the remains of pigment on the ancient pages, they ascertained the original creature's coloring.  They could also make an educated guess at the cockatoo's gender: female, as indicated by reddish flecks in the iris of its eye.  [24]

COMMENT

 The presence of an Australasian cockatoo in a one-of-a-kind ancient book reveals historic trade connections.  The picture was detailed enough so that researchers could determine the color of the actual bird, something that they probably could not have learned from a digital image.   Since the Vatican Library is not public, researchers needed special permission to see the book.