Diplomacia e Relações Internacionais
- Um Leitor Voraz, Que Deveria Estar No Guiness Dos Maiores Leitores Do Mundo (shanghai Daily)
Incrível motorista-leitor, mas é duvidoso que ele consiga ler oito livros por dia. Em todo caso, se trata de um amigo dos livros, e portanto meu amigo. Não tive o prazer de encontrá-lo, quando morei em Shanghai, em 2010, mas vou procurá-lo, da próxima...
- Ah, Essas Bibliotecas Escondidas De Ratos De Bibliotecas (como Eu...)
CITY ROOMA Library Where the Hush Is Over Its Very ExistenceThe New York Times, August 6, 2013 By STEPHEN FARRELLNothing on the street outside says that it is there. First-time visitors must push through a revolving door of a court building in Lower...
- Tom Skidmore's Brasiliana Collection Of Books And Papers At The Brown University Library
The Thomas E. Skidmore CollectionIn April 2006, Prof. Skidmore donated his personal library and papers to Brown University Library. The monograph collection consists of approximately 6,000 items, mainly in English and Portuguese language,...
- Ainda Precisamos De Bibliotecas? Um Debate No New York Times
More Relevant Than Ever Luis Herrera is the city librarian of San Francisco. The New York Times, December 27, 2012 The public library is a true American invention. Perhaps no other place captures the values of freedom of expression and democracy like...
- Emily Dickinson: A Poeta Americana Dos Livros...
In a Library A precious, mouldering pleasure 't is To meet an antique book, In just the dress his century wore; A privilege, I think, His venerable hand to take, And warming in our own, A passage back, or two, to make To times when he was young. His...
Diplomacia e Relações Internacionais
Livros que moldaram os EUA - Library of Congress
List-o-mania
The Library of Congress’s arguable roster of “Books That Shaped America”
The City Journal, 3 July 2012
In 1987, David Letterman inaugurated his famous Top Ten lists, which included Elf Pickup Lines (Sample: “I’m down here”); Ways to Reduce the Federal Deficit (“Sell ad space on president’s forehead during State of the Union speeches”); Unsuccessful Mall Shops (“Jiffy-Spay”); and many others. American media had already been infected; magazines and newspapers promptly took List-o-mania to the next level. Today Esquire publishes a roster of the Top 100 Women, Time offers mini-biographies of the Most Influential People, Forbes identifies the Most Powerful Celebrities, the New York Times informs its readers of the Top Ten Must-Have Apps, and theWashington Post reveals the Top 15 Happiest Countries.
One might think the august Library of Congress would be immune to pop trends, but one would be wrong. A group of anonymous librarians have just revealed their own list: 88 “Books That Shaped America.” The fiction list is mainly a catalogue of obvious choices: Huckleberry Finn, Moby-Dick, The Red Badge of Courage, The Catcher in the Rye, The Scarlet Letter, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Little Women, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Among them, however, are some questionable items. Why Ernest Hemingway’s For Whomthe Bell Tolls, and not his Collected Stories, which completely reshaped American prose? Why Gone with the Wind? Did it really change America, or just the budgets of American cinema? Similarly, Edgar Rice Burroughs’sTarzan is hardly a nation-shaping novel; its sway—if any—was to give employment to a parade of Hollywood actors, white and black, as well to a series of chimpanzees who played Cheetah.
Seven works of poetry made the cut: Emily Dickinson’s Poems, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Gwendolyn Brooks’s A Street in Bronzeville, Robert Frost’s New Hampshire, Langston Hughes’s Weary Blues, William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All, and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. If all these are deserving, why not influential works by such masters as Wallace Stevens? Marianne Moore? ee cummings? Robert Lowell? John Berryman? Sylvia Plath? In the field of nonfiction, the librarians perform a balancing act worthy of a circus aerialist. The muckraker Upton Sinclair is represented byThe Jungle (an exposé of the meatpacking industry), and Ira Tarbell by herHistory of Standard Oil. The list must have seemed a bit too anti-business, for the librarians shoehorned in Atlas Shrugged, by the libertarian icon Ayn Rand.
The librarians seem a bit pathetic in their yearning for political correctness. Obviously they felt that gays had to be represented, so here is Randy Shilts’sAnd The Band Played On, about the AIDS epidemic. African-American writers are omnipresent, from Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois to Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin. Hispanics are represented by Cesar Chavez, feminism by Betty Friedan, Native Americans by non-Indian Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. But where are Asians? How about Maxine Hong Kingston? Amy Tan? David Hwang? Evidently, after the librarians fit in Zane Gray’s Riders of the Purple Sage and Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon, there just wasn’t any room.
The number seems arbitrary as well. Maybe the librarians were thinking of the Steinway keyboard. Or of Mandy Patinkin, who played a character called 88 Keys in the movie Dick Tracy. Or of the number of constellations in the sky. Or of the atomic number of radium. It’s hard to know what they had in mind—other than joining the ranks of list makers like Letterman. The big difference is, audiences laugh with David.
loading...
- Um Leitor Voraz, Que Deveria Estar No Guiness Dos Maiores Leitores Do Mundo (shanghai Daily)
Incrível motorista-leitor, mas é duvidoso que ele consiga ler oito livros por dia. Em todo caso, se trata de um amigo dos livros, e portanto meu amigo. Não tive o prazer de encontrá-lo, quando morei em Shanghai, em 2010, mas vou procurá-lo, da próxima...
- Ah, Essas Bibliotecas Escondidas De Ratos De Bibliotecas (como Eu...)
CITY ROOMA Library Where the Hush Is Over Its Very ExistenceThe New York Times, August 6, 2013 By STEPHEN FARRELLNothing on the street outside says that it is there. First-time visitors must push through a revolving door of a court building in Lower...
- Tom Skidmore's Brasiliana Collection Of Books And Papers At The Brown University Library
The Thomas E. Skidmore CollectionIn April 2006, Prof. Skidmore donated his personal library and papers to Brown University Library. The monograph collection consists of approximately 6,000 items, mainly in English and Portuguese language,...
- Ainda Precisamos De Bibliotecas? Um Debate No New York Times
More Relevant Than Ever Luis Herrera is the city librarian of San Francisco. The New York Times, December 27, 2012 The public library is a true American invention. Perhaps no other place captures the values of freedom of expression and democracy like...
- Emily Dickinson: A Poeta Americana Dos Livros...
In a Library A precious, mouldering pleasure 't is To meet an antique book, In just the dress his century wore; A privilege, I think, His venerable hand to take, And warming in our own, A passage back, or two, to make To times when he was young. His...