Founded in 1931 after an act of Congress, the National Library Service’s talking book program initially recorded a limited number of general-interest books on vinyl for the blind. An even smaller number of selections was, and continues to be, available in Braille. In the 1960s, the Library of Congress extended the service to patrons with any physical disability preventing them from reading print. As users increased, so did the number and variety of books in the collection. The NLS motto, “That all may read,” appears today at the top of their home page.
The commercial market for audiobooks, once little more than LP records of poetry and short plays, grew exponentially with the advent of cassette tapes. Revenue for books on tape reached $200 million in 1987 and $1.5 billion in 1995, according to Publishers Weekly. The National Library Service, however, had one thing commercial publishers did not: permission to record any books it wished as long as those books were never available outside the library.
Many of us are familiar with this historical narrative of how cultures can rapidly – and violently – decline and fall. Recent history appears to bear it out, too. Post-invasion Iraq witnessed 100,000 deaths in the first year and a half, followed by the emergence of ISIS. And the overthrow of the Libyan government in 2011 produced a power vacuum, leading to the re-emergence of the slave trade.
However, there’s a more complicated reality behind this view of collapse. In fact, the end of civilisations rarely involved a sudden cataclysm or apocalypse. Often the process is protracted, mild, and leaves people and culture continuing for many years.
No-No Boy is a daring book and, I would say, a test of and testament to character. There is no other novel like it about Japanese Americans in the postwar period. In the book, which is being released in a new edition this month, John Okada wrote of the reentry into civil society of young second-generation, or nisei, men who had served in the U.S. military during World War II. More particularly, through the character of Ichiro Yamada, he wrote of draft resisters who spent the war in prison. In so doing, he probed the intense center of the Japanese American community’s internal conflicts—confusions of loyalty and rights of citizenship, racial self-hatred and shame, the immigrant’s agony of failure and loss of a future, proscriptions of silence and resistance.
While the peninsular Russian province of Kamchatka is not exactly in Sarah Palin's sightline, its far, far Eastern and Northern coordinates make it more like Nome than Moscow. Rife with wildlife, volcanoes, and treacherous topography, it's also almost inaccessible, with no major roads connecting it to the rest of Russia — because it was a closed military zone until 1989.
Kamchatka, with its main city of Petropavlosk, forms the backdrop to a stunning debut novel from Julia Phillips, Disappearing Earth.
Russell’s ease with her material, her sheer glee on the page, shines through in each piece. There are just eight stories here, but each one holds a tiny, complete vision: eight delicious wedges of an orange.