This book appealed to me on many levels: it discusses libraries, sociology, libraries as a within social science, economics, and it was just over 100 pages. Kathleen de la Peña McCook summarizes the book in the preface, which is a godsend for the reader. It is good to know what you are getting into before you read a book like this. The text may be short but the concepts are huge.

Although a treatise on the history and current state of public libraries, D’Angelo does not mention libraries all that often. What he talks about instead are the foundations that allowed the public library to come into existence and the path the public library has taken after the development and increasing dominance of capitalism based on mass culture and market engineering.

Basically, democracy as a form of government requires acknowledgement of a public good and a striving to attain what is best for most of the people. In order to determine what is good for the public, we need education. In order to obtain education so that people may participate in the democratic process, we need civil education and public libraries.

Public libraries met the needs of educating the public, and this was their main focus until the rise of popular culture in the 1950s. As mass consumption and consumer capitalism became the norm, attentions began to shift. Entertainment was given precedence and information took the place of education. We are left with infotainment, a non-critical approach to receiving information but not necessarily knowledge.

Despite the dreariness and the occasional over-assumptions, this was a wonderful read. I enjoyed seeing all of those old, familiar names bandied about. Reacquainting myself with and doing my best to digest their big sociological concepts gave me pause and made me remember what I’m doing here in the first place. Although the book essentially (and eventually) breaks down to public libraries, I would recommend this to anyone who wants to know more about democracy and what capitalism has done to it. I highly recommend this to librarians as a refresher and a reminder of our social responsibilities.

excellent review history of Public libraries in the US and the evolution of their mission

This brilliant essay is an urgently needed addition to the growing number of volumes dealing with various aspects of the dumbing-down of America. For one thing, its focus on the institution of the public library as a crucial yet endangered pillar of democracy is an original one, and, the way D’Angelo tells it, the fate of the public library in the U.S. is most symptomatic of the social disease the book examines. Additionally, the alarming title is justified not only by the gravity of the problem but also by the fact that for all one can see important books like this one have yet to be read widely enough to influence the electorate and legislature sufficiently to have a tangible impact.

Though he sounds the tocsin in his title, D’Angelo’s exposition is strongly characterized by the enlightened qualities of calm yet rigorous rationality and the broadest knowledge and wisdom, precisely those virtues the loss of which he dreads. In the conclusion to the first chapter titled “The Crisis of Democracy and the Public Library” he lucidly and succinctly charts his course:

“How did we get to the point of having libraries without librarians? How did we lose the ‘public’ in ‘public library’? And why should we care? To answer these questions we will have to delve into the history of libraries and librarianship as well as explore larger trends in politics and the economy. We will need to think about the mission of a public library and what distinguishes it in a fundamental and essential way from a private market business. We will need to think about the difference between entertainment and education, pandering and edification, a market economy and democracy. What we will find is that democracy, civil education, and the public good are the three pillars supporting the public library. Postmodern consumer capitalism threatens all three and with them the institution of the public library.” (3-4)

The delving, exploring, and questioning that follow constitute a most engaging and accessible mix of history, philosophy, economics, and a model example of independent critical thinking. One gets a crash course in not always reverent intellectual history and philosophy, the history of reading and libraries, the economics of capital in its various stages of evolution, and much else, but the author never loses sight of his central theme, the role of the public library as “the people’s university”, that educational resource that picks up where schools leave off and provide the edification that makes true democracy possible.

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