The Thin Red Line

While I posted an Easy Books roundup just yesterday  I felt this Easy Non-Fiction title I stumbled upon last week rated a post of its own.    The Librarian of Basra is a true story about Alia Muhammad Baker who is the librarian in Basra, Iraq.   When war comes Alia fears that her library and its 30,000 books may be destroyed.   She begins taking the books home and storing them safely and arranges for other library staff members to do the same.    While the library does end up getting burned and destroyed Alia and her colleagues are able to save fully seventy percent of the library’s collection.

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I vividly remember as a child, in the days before Court TV when cameras were generally not allowed in court rooms, seeing the artist’s renditions of key testimony from various trials and hearings on the evening news.   I remember being so struck by how the drawings of what happened that day seemed to make it all more Real to me than the broadcasts of real trials and hearings would later seem when as now such broadcasts became ubiquitous.

Steve Mumford’s Baghdad Journal, subtitled An Artist in Occupied Iraq caught my attention the moment that I saw it.  It is the first time in many years  I have encountered art as journalism, and I was struck once again at how much more effective good drawings can be at conveying a reality vis a vis the endless propaganda  errr copy and film footage we have already seen regarding Iraq.

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April Fools!

Awhile back I did a post about Gary Trudeau’s latest Doonesbury collection and Frank Rich’s The Greatest Story Ever Sold and remarked that while both were excellent books I find I no longer have the stomach to read about our inept and corrupt politicians.   After reading an article in Newsweek  I recently posted to my politics blog (for the first time in ages) to plead my case that opposing Hillary Clinton does NOT constitute misogyny or sexism.   But the four books I am featuring today,  all of which have been in my stack for well over a month and some of which are Past Due at the library,  and  none of which I have been able to bring myself to read strongly suggest that I really am burned out on reading about political stuff.

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