Libraries around the country are tiptoeing toward reopening, but they’re not just trying to figure out how to safely lend out books. These are community hubs where parents bring their toddlers for story time, where people come to use the computer, where book groups meet. Now all of that has to be rethought.
“It’s awful because it’s the opposite of what we normally try to do,” said Karen Kleckner Keefe, the executive director of the Hinsdale Public Library just outside of Chicago. “We want to be the community living room, we want everyone to stay and get comfortable. And to design service to prevent lingering and talking is so different from everything we’ve been working toward.”
There’s a grim familiarity to stories about young girls falling prey to men in positions of power. As readers, we recognize the girl’s first heady thrill at being called special by someone who seems to have the authority above all others to declare it, and then we follow that plotline to its heart-rending conclusion. The best-selling authors Candace Bushnell and Katie Cotugno explore this territory in Rules For Being a Girl, a book so engaging and lively it might take you a moment to pinpoint the disquiet you feel upon reaching its end.
In the 75 years since President Harry Truman ordered atomic bombs to be dropped on two Japanese cities, American attitudes toward that decision have gradually shifted. Immediately after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, polls showed that 85 percent of people in the United States approved of Truman’s action. However, by 2005, on the 60th anniversary of the bombings, support for the decision had fallen to 57 percent, while 38 percent of Americans believed it either wrong or unnecessary.
Approaching the commemoration of the bombings this summer, two veteran journalists have tried to put that decision in context. The book by Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, written with the Associated Press’s Mitch Weiss, focuses on the 116 days between Truman’s sudden ascent to the presidency, after Franklin Roosevelt’s death in mid-April 1945, and the use of the first bomb, on Hiroshima, in early August. “Countdown 1945” contains no surprises and will quell no controversies. But it is a compelling and highly readable account of one of the most fateful decisions in American history.
In his book, Rebello chronicles how Susann’s salacious bestseller went from page to screen. If that sounds like a dull procedural, think again. Rebello delivers a surfeit of detail — some chapters are so top-heavy with names and facts one fears they may topple over like one of the stupendous hairpieces featured in the film. Though the book is gossipy, it is full of surprises and even suspense — revealing how cutthroat and puerile Hollywood can be.
Each day at 8am, my mother the lunch lady works
the assembly line of newly made meals Each a
stamp of mass, scratched from the unlimited land of
heather and sunflower risings