The big news today, which you probably don't need my little blog to tell you, are the new releases today from Al Gore and Khaled Hosseini, Assault on Reason and A Thousand Splendid Suns, respectively. I should probably be excited, but here's the truth--I never read Kite Runner or saw An Inconvenient Truth, and I can't say I plan to anytime soon.
So here's my alternate pick of the week:
Belle Greene was an African-American woman born in the late nineteenth century. Passing as white, she became a librarian at Princeton University and was then hired (when she was only 20!) to be the librarian for J.P. Morgan. She then created and curated for him one of the most renowned private collections of rare books and manuscripts in the world (which you can see now that the Morgan is a public museum). Ms. Greene was also quite a saucy lady, with flirtations a plenty and an ongoing love affair with a married man. I think I probably would have skipped right over this book if I hadn't already been familiar with her. My friend Alan told me about Ms. Green when I was getting my degree in library science--he thought I would appreciate a woman who said (perhaps apocryphally) "Just because I am a librarian doesn't mean I have to dress like one!"
1 comment:
enjoy diane sawyer proving Al Gore right:
here
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