Heart of the Community: The Libraries We Love : Treasured Libraries of the United States and Canada - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0977015920 ISBN 13: 9780977015924

Publisher: Berkshire Pub Group, 2006

Synopsis

Published in an oversize format (9.25x12.25"), and full of color photos, this volume contains descriptions and histories of 80 libraries mainly in the US and a few in Canada, with two pages devoted to each. Each library's address, details about its founding and building, current specialities and focus, and future plans are included in each profile. Annotation ©2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

About this title

About the Author

Editors Karen Christensen and David Levinson founded Berkshire Publishing Group in 1998. Levinson, a cultural anthropologist, had been the vice president of a major think-tank at Yale University, the Human Relations Area Files, and served as editor-in-chief of the 10-volume Encyclopedia of World Cultures. Christensen had returned to the United States after a decade in London, where she worked in scientific publishing and with Valerie Eliot editing the first volume of the T. S. Eliot letters. They founded Berkshire with a vision of promoting a greater knowledge of other nations and peoples. Berkshire s library reference and other publications are the result of dynamic collaborations by an worldwide network of scholars. Christensen and Levinson were assisted by an Advisory Board that included Leslie Burger (President of the American Library Association), Nancy Kranich, Kathleen de la Peña McCook, Tom Phelps, Sally Reed, and others.

From the Inside Flap

Here you'll find stories from the oldest libraries in America, like the Sturgis Library in Barnstable, Massachusetts, as well as from some of the newest, such as the Desert Broom Branch of the Phoenix Public Library, built in 2005, and the Village Branch in Lexington, Kentucky, which opened in 2004 in a convenient storefront location. There are large urban libraries like the Boston Public Library, with 6.1 million books, and The City Library of Salt Lake City, located in "Library Square," an entire city block occupied by the library, cultural organizations, a coffee shop, and deli. On the other end of the spectrum is the small but mighty Bayliss Library in Glenn, California--open just eight hours a week--where volunteers and professionals have saved their rural library from closing time and time again. Creative energy abounds throughout the book. The Aztec Library, for example, capitalized on an alleged UFO landing to raise the $2 million needed for an expansion. One library is located in a former train station, another in the home of the World War II journalist, Ernie Pyle. In these pages, you'll see the beauty of libraries--their architectural grandeur and regional distinctiveness--as well as their less tangible qualities--warmth, inclusiveness, and excitement about ideas and knowledge

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Ernie Pyle Library
Albuquerque--Bernalillo County Library System
Albuquerque, New Mexico

If these walls could talk, they would talk of war and peace: the war that Ernie Pyle experienced first hand and wrote about so prophetically and the peace that he found in this little white house with the picket fence in Albuquerque.

Journalist Ernest Taylor Pyle (1900-1945) was not a desk reporter. He and his wife, Jerry, built the little clapboard house in 1940 as a place to call home while they wandered the country for Ernie's job as a roving human-interest writer for Scripps-Howard newspapers. After his death in 1945, and Jerry's seven months later, the Pyle estate offered the property to the City Of Albuquerque, and in 1948 the house became the first branch of the city's public library system.

A Perfect Fit Overall
Pyle's travel assignments kept him moving about the country during the 1930s, writing columns in a down-to­earth, folksy way that earned him a wide following. The columns from those times are collected in ,Home Country and Ernie Pyle's Southwest. By 1940 Ernie was famous. However, after crossing the country thirty-five times, he and Jerry began to feel as though they were, in Ernie's words, "swinging forever through space without ever coming down." They decided to build a house in Albuquerque where they could spend a month out of every year just relaxing. In an article entitled "Why Albuquerque?" Ernie listed all the reasons why he and Jerry had chosen the town: they had a country mailbox instead of a slot in the door; people were friendly yet allowed the Pyles their privacy; Ernie could wear overalls every day, even to the cantina in the old Alvarado Hotel, and nobody raised an eyebrow; the days were warm, the nights were cool, and the air was unsullied by smoke and soot; meadowlarks sang in the morning, rabbits nibbled the lawn at night, and the quail didn't fly away when the Pyles came out onto the porch. Ernie thought the sunsets so violently beautiful they almost frightened him; there were no streetcars; men wore cowboy boots instead of street shoes; and the tempo of life was slow. Besides, he said, half the horizon was his just for the looking.

At the outbreak of World War II, Ernie became a war correspondent during the blitz in England. He went with the U.S. Army to North Africa and from there to the invasion of Italy. He witnessed the landings at Normandy and the liberation of France. By 1944 Time magazine was calling him "America's most widely read war correspondent." Instead of the mass media reports about what the armies or the commanding generals were doing, Pyle wrote from the perspective of the common soldier, an approach that furthered his popularity. His wartime writings are preserved in the books Brave Men, Here is Your War, and Ernie Pyle in England. He came home when he could to Jerry and the little white house. He won the Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 1944. In 1945 Ernie accompanied U.S. troops to the South Pacific, and on April 18 he was killed by a Japanese sniper on the island of Ie Shima.

A Lasting Memorial
When the Pyles' house was converted to a library, every attempt was made to keep the character of the place intact. The room configuration remains the same, and the picket fence that Ernie built is kept white with fresh paint. The grave of their favorite dog, Cheetah, is there as is the memorial for Captain Waskow, the hero of one of Ernie's most famous columns. The place has the flavor of the old days in Albuquerque, before the war changed everything. Inside the library, a collection of memorabilia honors the war correspondent. His hat and his sun goggles are on display along with numerous photographs, scrapbooks of articles by and about Ernie Pyle, and the newspaper announcing his death in front-page headlines.

Since the Ernie Pyle Library is a full-service library in the Albuquerque-Bernalillo County Library System, visitors can read children's books in the kitchen, check out bestsellers at the living room, read fiction in Ernie's bedroom, or look in the bathroom mirror where Ernie himself must have looked while he shaved in the morning. The bathroom is stocked with periodicals.

In 2004 the Ernie Pyle Library underwent a makeover. Mayor Martin Chavez, who remembered riding his bike to the library as a boy, saw to it that the buildings were refurbished. The library has recently been listed as the only historic landmark in Albuquerque. Visitors from all over the world come to see the little house that Ernie built and pay their respects to his memory. Patrons come to read quietly, enjoy the summer reading club events, or take part in the storytime picnics underneath the old sycamore tree.

Edition details

• Publisher: Berkshire Pub Group
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0977015920
• ISBN 13: 9780977015924
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 182
• Editor: Karen Christensen, David Levinson