January 27—Most amazingly weird book of the day was Brad Meltzer’s History Decoded: The Ten Greatest Conspiracies of All Time, which has pockets and slots in which you find little messages and secrets revealed. It’s like a kid’s book for adults. So if you want to know who really killed Abraham Lincoln and JFK, or are wondering about Area 51, this is the book for you. I seemed to be in the violence and disaster section of the 300s today. #NeverAgain by David Hogg and Lauren Hogg covered the 2018 shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. A section at the end of what is really an extended booklet titled #NeverForget begins with the shooting at Columbine High School and ends with Great Mills High School, in Great Mills, MD, in which 2 died.
In addition to books on school shootings, rape, violence, and other mayhem, there were a number of books on natural disasters and climate change. Are We Screwed? and The End of Food pretty much sum up the outlook. But there must be hope in How to Give up Plastic, by Will McCallum. Unintended Irony Department: I found a severely water damaged copy of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. The library is going to order a new copy! Mildly amusing was the juxtaposition of a book by T. J. English and Paul French. I was hoping a title by Isaac Deutscher might precede English, or Marcello Tedesco would follow French. Strangest title by far was A Kosher Christmas. There seems to be a veritable cottage Industry of crime established by the late Ann Rule, Washington’s own true crime journalist. The titles in this section alone were Every Breath You Take; Too Late to Say Goodbye; Heart Full of Lies; Green River, Running Red. This list doesn’t even include her most famous book, The Stranger Beside Me, about Ted Bundy, since the library doesn’t own it. By the way, I’m glad Mark Harmon has established himself as Leroy Jethro Gibbs in NCIS, though I’ll always think of him as the personification of Ted Bundy. Surprising finds: Eichmann Before Jerusalem and Worse Than War were in the true crime section. I agree, genocide is true crime. . . The 380s started to get a bit more interesting, covering bookstores and the post office. Which reminds me. As a kid I assigned myself to read all of the pony express books in the Chico Public Library. This was not a huge task, since the pony express lasted only a year and a half, so there weren’t that many book about it. Maybe three. The 390s were even more interesting, as they deal with Customs, Etiquette, and Folklore. This explains the jumble of books on weddings, funerals, and food. And even though we have the Internet, there is Chase’s Calendar of Events 2019, with everything in one place. Who knew that July 1 was the commencement of International Alopecia Month for Women? Or that it was also the start of Bioterrorism/Disaster Education and Awareness Month? There is a lot to study in that book. Comments are closed.
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Author Rebecca Moore is Professor Emerita of Religious Studies at San Diego State University. She is currently Reviews Editor for Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions and Co-Director of The Jonestown Institute. Archives
December 2021
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