factotum's Full Review: Scott Douglas - Quiet, Please: Dispatches from a P...
Scott Douglas has been blogging about his job as a librarian for the Anaheim Public Library for a couple of years now at McSweeney's Internet Tendency. Quiet, Please: Dispatches from a Public Librarian takes this material and expands upon it into a full-fledged book. I happen to be a Southern California-based librarian myself, so I've always taken an interest in Douglas's observations. The blog works really well; the job is episodic in nature and well-suited to that medium. And not to say a worthwhile book couldn't be written about a public librarian in this part of the country--Don Borchert's Free For All is pretty good--but this book isn't it. It offers some insights into the profession, but not enough to offset the more mundane passages and the more annoying quirks of his prose style.
The most egregious flaw in the writing of the book, even more than the author's hubris in assuming that everything he writes is worthy of the readers attention,(1) is the constant use of footnotes.(2) He interrupts every other paragraph, it seems, with a footnote that is generally not germain, or, if it is relevant, that would have been better suited to exist in the main body of the paragraph.(3) This is probably an attempt at humor, and once or twice it might be funny. Throughout the enterity of the tome? Not so much.(4)
Putting all the flaws aside, the book has its moments. He describes library patrons and employees well. He tells some revealing tales about how libraries and city governments work. He sticks it to library school. But the best passages are the ones that I recognized from the blog in the first place, and the rest is mostly filler.
Quiet Please is a book that will surprise people who don't spend a lot of time in libraries. They are not what you think they are, not anymore. People who work or frequent libraries will find it ruefully funny, at least in patches. But I'd recommend reading the "Dispatches From A Public Librarian" at McSweeney's to see if you have a taste for this writing.
1. For example, he writes a lot about his tastes in literature and music as if they weren't totally pedestrian.
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