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.
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.
317 pages (October 2018)
Book Page at BookBrowse.
To find a discussion guide for this book in the NoveList Plus database, go to the Library's website, click on Novelist under "We Recommend" → "Book Services". Click on "Book Discussion Guides" in the right sidebar on NoveList's home page. Then, either enter the title in the Search box or search for the title alphabetically. (You will need your Salt Lake County Library card number to access this resource outside a county library.)
Review from The Boston Globe
Behind the Book with Susan Orlean (from North Richland Hills Library):
So Many Questions: Susan Orlean (from Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity) :
This title is available for download as an eBook and as an eAudioBook. Learn more about downloadables from the library here.
Title Read-alikes: The Library: a catalogue of wonders by Stuart S. Kells; The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt; A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: from Ancient Sumer to Modern to modern-day Iraq by Fernando Báez; The Professor and the Madman: a tale of murder, insanity, and the making of the Oxford English dictionary by Simon Winchester; American Lightning: terror, mystery, movie-making, and the crime of the century by Howard Blum; City at the Edge of Forever: Los Angeles reimagined by Peter Lunenfeld; New York, New York, New York: four decades of success, excess, and transformation by Tom Dyja; Paradise: one town's struggle to survive an American wildfire by Lizzie Johnson; Katrina: after the flood by Gary Rivlin; Killers of the Flower Moon: the Osage murders and the birth of the FBI by David Grann; Educated: a memoir by Tara Westover; Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction by Rebecca Knuth; and Apostles of Culture: The Public Librarian and American Society, 1876-1920 by Dee Garrison
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