![]() ![]() Find your way to the dog cemetery outside Paris. ![]() Go to the swamp with those machete-wielding convicts. I like to think of Orlean as some kind of agent, hired to work for our restless curiosity. Readers of her Orchid Thief (1998), Rin Tin Tin (2011) and her many New Yorker profiles know that Orlean can start with a Florida orchid man and deliver a book on botany and the Seminole Wars, or can start with a plaster dog on her grandfather’s desk and give us a book about World War I, early Hollywood, and dog breeders in Texas. The world didn’t end, or not yet the Los Angeles Public Library survived and we are lucky to have lived long enough for Susan Orlean to write a book that begins with that library fire but delivers a lot more. “The books burned,” Orlean writes, “while most of us were waiting to see if we were about to witness the end of the world.” A near apocalypse at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor drove the fire to the back pages of American newspapers. We didn’t hear much about the library fire. On April 29, 1986, a fire consumed or damaged more than a million books in the main branch of the Los Angeles Public Library. It’s a masterful tribute to libraries, and, even better, it has a plot and a storyline. ![]() The Library Book is a book for every reader and every writer. ![]()
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