![]() First edition | |
Author | Susan Orlean |
---|---|
Language | English |
Subject | Los Angeles Central Library |
Genre | Nonfiction |
Set in | Los Angeles, California |
Publisher | Simon & Schuster |
Publication date | 2018 |
Publication place | United States |
Media type | Book |
Pages | 336 |
ISBN | 978-1-4767-4018-8 |
The Library Book is a 2018 non-fiction book by Susan Orlean about the 1986 fire at the Los Angeles Central Library. It received strongly favorable reviews and became a New York Times Best Seller.
When Orlean's son had a school assignment to interview a city employee, he chose a librarian and together they visited the Studio City branch of the Los Angeles Public Library system which reignited her own childhood passion for libraries. [1] The immersive project involved three years of research and two years of writing. [2] Orlean hired a fact-checker to ensure the book was accurate, explaining, "I don't want a substantial error that changes the meaning of my book, but I also don't want silly errors". [3]
The Library Book was published by Simon & Schuster on October 16, 2018. [4] The first edition was 336 pages. [4]
The Library Book alternates between a true-crime work on the suspicion of arson in the 1986 fire at the Los Angeles Central Library; and a broader history of that library and Orlean's personal devotion to libraries in general, especially as the site of fond memories she shared with her mother.
Regarding the suspected arson, Orlean traces the story of suspect Harry Peak, who was arrested but ultimately not tried in a criminal trial for arson, due to the weakness of evidence against him. Peak and the City of Los Angeles settled dueling civil suits shortly before Peak’s death from complications of HIV/AIDS in 1993.
The Library Book received strongly favorable reviews and was selected as a "PW Pick" by Publishers Weekly . [4] Reviewing the book for The New York Times , Michael Lewis wrote, "Susan Orlean has once again found rich material where no one else has bothered to look for it…Once again, she's demonstrated that the feelings of a writer, if that writer is sufficiently talented and her feelings sufficiently strong, can supply her own drama. You really never know how seriously interesting a subject might be until such a person takes a serious interest in it." [1] In The Washington Post , Ron Charles called The Library Book "a wide-ranging, deeply personal and terrifically engaging investigation of humanity's bulwark against oblivion: the library." [5]
The Library Book became a New York Times Best Seller. [6]
As of 2019, Orlean is slated to collaborate with James Ponsoldt to write and executive-produce an adaption for television. [7]
Adaptation is a 2002 American comedy-drama film directed by Spike Jonze and written by Charlie Kaufman. It features an ensemble cast led by Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, and Chris Cooper, with Cara Seymour, Brian Cox, Tilda Swinton, Ron Livingston, and Maggie Gyllenhaal in supporting roles.
Susan Orlean is an American journalist, television writer, and bestselling author of The Orchid Thief and The Library Book. She has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1992, and has contributed articles to many magazines including Vogue, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and Outside. In 2021, Orlean joined the writing team of HBO comedy series How To with John Wilson.
The Los Angeles Public Library system (LAPL) is a public library system in Los Angeles, California. The system holds more than six million volumes, and with around 19 million residents in the Greater Los Angeles area, it serves the largest metropolitan population of any public library system in the United States. The system is overseen by a Board of Library Commissioners with five members appointed by the mayor of Los Angeles in staggered terms, and operates 72 library branches throughout the city. In 1997 a local historian described it as "one of the biggest and best-regarded library systems in the nation." It is not to be confused with the LA County Library system which operates several library branches across certain areas of Los Angeles County.
Mary Emily Foy was the first woman head librarian of the Los Angeles Public Library, appointed to the job in 1880 at the age of 18. She had graduated the year before from Los Angeles High School. She served for only four years but left a legacy for Los Angeles librarians to remember.
Robin Wasserman is an American novelist and essayist.
Bernie Siegel is an American writer and retired pediatric surgeon, who writes on the relationship between the patient and the healing process. He is known for his best-selling book Love, Medicine and Miracles.
Robert A. Kurson is an American author, best known for his 2004 bestselling book, Shadow Divers, the true story of two Americans who discover a World War II German U-boat sunk 60 miles off the coast of New Jersey.
The Revolution: A Manifesto is a New York Times #1 best seller by Republican former U.S. Congressman Ron Paul. The work was published on April 30, 2008, by Grand Central Publishing. According to Paul, the book is based on written notes during his 2008 presidential campaign.
Isabel Wilkerson is an American journalist and the author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010) and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020). She is the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism.
The Glass Castle is a 2005 memoir by American author Jeannette Walls. Walls recounts her dysfunctional and nomadic yet vibrant upbringing, emphasizing her resilience and her father's attempts toward redemption. Despite her family's flaws, their love for each other and her unique perspective on life allowed her to create a successful life of her own, culminating in a career in journalism in New York City. The book's title refers to her father's ultimate unfulfilled promise, to build his dream home for the family: a glass castle.
Mary Lou Mackey is an American novelist, poet, and academic. She is the author of eight collections of poetry and fourteen novels, including the New York Times best-seller A Grand Passion and The Village of Bones, The Year The Horses Came, The Horses At The Gate, and The Fires of Spring, four sweeping historical novels that take as their subject the earth-centered, Goddess-worshiping cultures of Neolithic Europe. In 2012, her sixth collection of poetry, Sugar Zone, won a PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award. Another collection, The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams: New and Selected Poems 1974 to 2018, won a 2018 Women’s Spirituality Book Award from the California Institute of Integral Studies; and the 2019 Eric Hoffer Small Press Award for the best book published by a small press. Her first novel, Immersion, was the first novel published by a Second Wave feminist press. Long concerned with environmental issues, Mackey frequently writes about the rainforests of Costa Rica and the Brazilian Amazon. In the early 1970s, as Professor of English and Writer-In-Residence at California State University, Sacramento, she was instrumental in the founding of the CSUS Women's Studies Program and the CSUS English Department Graduate Creative Writing Program. From 1989-1992, she served as President of the West Coast Branch of PEN American Center involving herself in PEN's international defense of persecuted writers.
Columbine is a non-fiction book written by Dave Cullen and published by Twelve on April 6, 2009. It is an examination of the Columbine High School massacre, on April 20, 1999, and the perpetrators Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. The book covers two major storylines: the killers' evolution leading up to the attack, and the survivors' struggles with the aftermath over the next decade. Chapters alternate between the two stories. Graphic depictions of parts of the attack are included, in addition to the actual names of friends and family.
Amy Wilentz is an American journalist and writer. She is a professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, where she teaches Literary Journalism. Wilentz received a 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for her memoir, Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti, as well as a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship in General Nonfiction. Wilentz is The New Yorker's former Jerusalem correspondent and is a contributing editor at The Nation.
Althea Hester Warren was the director of the Los Angeles (California) Public Library from 1933 to 1947 and president of the American Library Association in 1943-1944. She was inducted into the California Library Association's Library Hall of Fame in 2013.
Mikel Frans Jollett is an American musician and author. He is best known as the frontman for American indie rock band the Airborne Toxic Event as well as the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Hollywood Park (2020).
A Stolen Life: A Memoir is a true crime book by American kidnapping victim Jaycee Lee Dugard about the 18 years she spent while sequestered and enslaved with her captors in Antioch, California. The memoir dissects what she did to survive and cope mentally with extreme abuse. The book reached No. 1 on Amazon's sales rankings a day before release and topped The New York Times Best Seller list hardcover nonfiction for six weeks after release.
Heavy: An American Memoir is a memoir by Kiese Laymon, published October 16, 2018 by Scribner. In 2019, the book won the Carnegie Medal for Nonfiction and Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other awards and nominations.
John F. Szabo is an American librarian, library executive, and the twentieth City Librarian of Los Angeles, the chief executive of the Los Angeles Public Library. He previously served as the Director of the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System, Clearwater (FL) Public Library System, Palm Harbor (FL) Public Library, and the Robinson (IL) Public Library District. In 2015, the Los Angeles Public Library won the National Medal for Museum and Library Service, the nation's highest honor for a library or museum. Awarded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the medal was presented by First Lady Michelle Obama at a White House ceremony.
Richard J. Riordan Central Library, also known as the Los Angeles Central Library, is the main branch of the Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL), in Downtown Los Angeles. It is named after Mayor of Los Angeles Richard Riordan.
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014) is a memoir by American attorney Bryan Stevenson that documents his career defending disadvantaged clients. The book, focusing on injustices in the United States judicial system, alternates chapters between documenting Stevenson's efforts to overturn the wrongful conviction of Walter McMillian and his work on other cases, including children who receive life sentences, and other poor or marginalized clients.