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"The Library At Night" Buy Cheap The Library At Night online at searchforprice.com |
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Amazon Price: $18.15Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Prices subject to change. Buy this item from AMAZON.COMThis item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping.
Label:Yale University Press Languages: English,English,English, Manufacturer: Yale University Press
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Product Description:
Inspired by the process of creating a library for his fifteenth-century home near the Loire, in France, Alberto Manguel, the acclaimed writer on books and reading, has taken up the subject of libraries. “Libraries,” he says, “have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I’ve been seduced by their labyrinthine logic.” In this personal, deliberately unsystematic, and wide-ranging book, he offers a captivating meditation on the meaning of libraries. Manguel, a guide of irrepressible enthusiasm, conducts a unique library tour that extends from his childhood bookshelves to the “complete” libraries of the Internet, from Ancient Egypt and Greece to the Arab world, from China and Rome to Google. He ponders the doomed library of Alexandria as well as the personal libraries of Charles Dickens, Jorge Luis Borges, and others. He recounts stories of people who have struggled against tyranny to preserve freedom of thought—the Polish librarian who smuggled books to safety as the Nazis began their destruction of Jewish libraries; the Afghani bookseller who kept his store open through decades of unrest. Oral “memory libraries” kept alive by prisoners, libraries of banned books, the imaginary library of Count Dracula, the library of books never written—Manguel illuminates the mysteries of libraries as no other writer could. With scores of wonderful images throughout, The Library at Night is a fascinating voyage through Manguel’s mind, memory, and vast knowledge of books and civilizations. | |  | |  |
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Customer Reviews: Average Rating:  Rating : - "A big library really has the gift of tongues and vast potencies of telepathic communication"
Alberto Manguel starts this wonderful book quoting Northrop Frye. Manguel is a prolific writer who returns time and again to the joys of reading: A History of Reading, With Borges, A Reading Diary: A Passionate Reader's Reflections on a Year of Books, and this most recent triumph.
When he was seven Manguel assembled "a minuscule Alexandria, about one hundred volumes of different formats on all sorts of subjects." In Toronto he filled bedrooms, the kitchen, corridors and the bathroom with books -- his kids needed a library card to go home. In his dream library "books have no title and boast no author, forming a continuous narrative stream in which all genres, all styles, all stories converge ... a stream into which I can dip at any point of its course." He lives with 30,000 books and reads in his library at night "when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but this space of books remains in existence."
Manguel analyzes the library as Order, Power, Chance, Mind, Imagination, Identity and Home, and others. He describes the library of Alexandria, the personal libraries of Montaigne, Rabelais, Borges and Hitler. "In the spring of 1945, a group of American soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division discovered, hidden in a salt mine near Berchtesgaden, the remains of the library of Adolf Hitler, haphazardly stashed in schnapps crates with the Reich Chancellery address on them." Manguel believes Hitler had 16,000 volumes, ranging from military history to spirituality, popular fiction and a few classics.
Manguel is critical of the Web: "The Web, and its promise of a voice and a site for all is our equivalent of the mare incognitum, the unknown sea that lured ancient travelers with the temptation of discovery." He points out that it delivers ephemera; 70% of its communications are destroyed after four months. "On the Web, where all texts are equal and alike in form, they become nothing but phantom text and photographic image."
Nonetheless he remembers reading for Jorge Luis Borges when he was a student. In "The Library of Babel" Borges predicted the Kindle: in a footnote Manguel that Borges wrote that the whole library, which includes every text in the world, could be reduced to one handheld book of infinitely thin pages.
The Borges note is only one of many many pleasures here. This book is playful, scholarly and erudite and a great joy for anyone who loves to read. + See Full Customer Review | | | | |
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