Nicholas A. Basbanes
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13
Average rating: 4.5 of 5
Los Angeles Central Library fire -- Biblioteca Alexandrina 4 out of 5 stars.
9 of 11 people found this review helpful.
I have not finished reading "Patience & Fortitude," although it is still on my wish list as a book I would "love to have." I *have* read enough to feel justified in making two comments here, one on a matter Basbanes discusses as the worst library disaster in American history, and a scandal which occured two years after he devoted the epilogue of this book to the Biblioteca Alexandrina, widely touted as "the new 'Library of Alexandria.'"
Basbanes devotes a page and a half to discussing the diastrous fire at the Los Angeles Central Library in 1986, but he omits mention of the scandalous background which transformed a small fire into a major disaster.
The Los Angeles Fire Department had issued numerous citations to the Library Department over a period of several years because of the reckless disregard for elementary fire safety in the building. Famously, bare electric light bulbs were within inches of one stack of books which was piled almost to the ceiling. I had occasion to see "behind the stacks" of the Science and Technology department one day, in the area where patent information was stored, and I was shocked: material was stacked on top of every bookcase in sight, and the place was packed with heaps of books and documents, many of which were destroyed in the 1986 fire.
The Los Angeles City Council was well aware that the central library was a fire trap, but they refused to do anything to upgrade the library facility. Then-Mayor Tom Bradley preferred using City tax money to finance his jet-setting lifestyle of junket after junket to the Far East rather than spend money to bring the Central Library up to even the bare minimums of the Fire Code. The consensus among critics was that the City Council and the Mayor were waiting for the Central Library to burn down so that their campaign contributors could cash in on the building contracts which would be awarded after the inevitable fire.
As it turned out, the fire was a huge windfall for the real estate developers and building contractors who bankrolled our last Mayor, for the City financed the new structure by selling off the air space above it to real estate developers who then applied the "space" they had purchased to erect skyscrapers around the new library to heights which would have been prohibited had the new library not been built. The result was a glut of office space, much of which went empty for a decade or more, and a skyline which no longer included either City Hall or the Central Library, formerly the tallest buildings in their neighborhoods by municipal ordinance. In 2004 it was revealed that the new skyline also made the neighborhood of the new Central Library the #1 target of al-Qaeda in Southern California, ahead of even Disneyland -- a fact which the City and the falsely so-called "Department of Homeland Security" kept secret from the residents and businesses of Los Angeles for three years.
Basbanes was not writing a political diatribe, but I think he did the readers of this book a grave dis-service by allowing them to think that a lone arsonist was solely responsible for the disaster which was the 1986 fire. Tom Bradley and the City Council deserve the blame for creating the conditions which turned a small fire into a hectacomb of books which destroyed a gem of Art Deco architecture. Basbanes quotes Lawrence Clark Powell, former librarian of UCLA, to the effect that the building itself was insignificant. On the contrary, the interior was covered with murals and much statuary and other art graced the building -- much of it totally lost now.
If such compelling information is omitted from the discussion of a library with which I am very familiar, I wonder how much crucial information has been left out of sections about libraries with which I am unfamiliar.
Basbanes cannot be faulted for omitting mention of the scandal which has destroyed the reputation of the Biblioteca Alexandrina, to which he devotes the epilogue of "Patience & Fortitude" -- the events took place two years after the first edition of this book was published. One hopes that future editions will devote considerable space to the scandal.
How unexpected the shocking story turned out is demonstrated by the fact that it happened less than a month after Umberto Eco, whom Basbanes interviewed, gave a speech at the BA. The timing was ironic, for the scandal hinged upon a book which Eco had discussed at length in "Foucault's Pendulum," which prompted him to lead the international crusade against the institution which had played host to him so recently.
In December 2003, less than a month after Eco's speech there, the Biblioteca Alexandrina launched a prominent exhibit of "Monotheism," and the book which they choose to place alongside the Hebrew Talmud was not the Septuagint -- the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, which had been written in Alexandria -- but "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion."
For those unfamiliar with it, "The Protocols" is, as Eco had pointed out years earlier in "Foucault's Pendulum," an anti-Jewish Tsarist secret police forgery purportedly containing the details of a plot by "the Learned Elders of Zion" to conquer the world. The book fueled Russian pogroms and Nazi genocide of the Jews, and today it is used by neo-Nazi and radical Moslems alike to stoke hatred of the Jews. As an anti-Jewish book it is sold by neo-Nazi groups in the 21st century and is a best seller in Moslem countries, helped in no small part by the authority of the Biblioteca Alexandrina.
What makes the display of the "The Protocols" such an outrage is that there is no longer any question that the book is a total fabrication. Not only was it a Russian forgery, but it was an almost word-for-word copy of a 19th century German plagiarism of a French novel satirizing Napoleon III and the Second Empire. Its roots may be traced to a novel by French Author Eugene Sue, who outlined a *Jesuit* plot to take over the world. The evidence of this is incontovertible -- today's text of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is a "Jewified" version of 19th century French novels which originally made no mention of Jews, Zionists or otherwise.
Nevertheless, the Biblioteca Alexandrina chose to display "The Protocols" next to the Talmud, and no amount of back-pedaling by director Yousef Ziedan changes the fact that more than $100 million of international funding was ultimately used to propagate a hateful anti-Jewish forgery as a legitimate "religious" text of Judaism (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000183.html).
Basbanes ends the first edition of "Patience & Fortitude" on the hopeful note that, "the Biblioteca Alexandrina ... has the promise of genius." Sadly, it proved its moral bankruptcy less than two years after this book was published. Basbanes owes it to the world to write a revision of "Patience & Fortitude" describing how the high hopes which so many of us had for the "the new 'Library of Alexandria'" were utterly dashed.
I give this book only four stars because I am know that Basbanes omitted information which I think he should have revealed, and I suspect that he did it more than once. If future editions fail to discuss the scandal at the Biblioteca Alexandrina my opinion of the book will plummet.
Editorial Review:
In his national bestseller, A Gentle Madness, Nicholas Basbanes explored the sweet obsession people feel to possess books.Now, Basbanes continues his adventures among the "gently mad" on an irresistible journey to the great libraries of the past -- from Alexandria to Glastonbury -- and to contemporary collections at the Vatican, Wolfenbüttel, and erudite universities. Along the way, he drops in on eccentric book dealers and regales us with stories about unforgettable collectors, such as the gentleman who bought a rare book in 1939 "by selling bottles of his own blood."
Taking the book's grand title from the marble lions guarding the New York Public Library at 42nd Street, Basbanes both entertains and delights. And once again, as Scott Turow aptly noted, "Basbanes makes you love books, the collections he writes about, and the volume in your hand."
