She (Oxford World's Classics)

£3.495
FREE Shipping

She (Oxford World's Classics)

She (Oxford World's Classics)

RRP: £6.99
Price: £3.495
£3.495 FREE Shipping

In stock

We accept the following payment methods

Description

Tania had planned to spend the rest of her career in the Osceola County School District. She was 51. She could have stayed for years at Tohopekaliga, a school she loved that had only just opened in 2018. The library was clean and new. The shelves were organized. The chairs had wheels that moved soundlessly across the carpet. The floor plan was open, designed by architects who had promised “the 21st century media center.” They would tell each other about the gifts people had made for them, the cards, the flowers, the cake, the lemon meringue pie. Last first period, last lunch period. Erin would tell Tania that her assistant principal asked her three times whether she had changed her mind about leaving. Tania would say her assistant principal asked her to say something on the systemwide radio, and what she said was “Mrs. G signing off. Media center closed until further notice.” They would sit in the store they had just leased, the crystal shop in Kissimmee that was becoming a bookstore. There were no books yet on the shelves, but there would be soon. Every book they could afford. Any book at all. The school was Mennonite, and conservative. There was no dancing. The Mennonite parents didn’t drink. But there was never censorship. The library had an aspect of calm, an expanse that opened itself up to Tania every time she entered. She saw books in English and Spanish and shelves of novels. “This is what the world is like,” she remembered thinking.

It would have made for fascinating viewing, but the more time she spent with Cobb the more she began to suspect that something about her story didn’t add up. One woman did come forward years later to say she was the Babushka Lady, and that two men claiming to work for the government took her camera away, but her claim was largely dismissed because the camera she said she was using was not invented at the time. Sacco’s illustrated reportorial deep-dive felt like a breakthrough not just for journalism but also for the graphic novel — proving that what we once called comics can be a conduit for the darkest and most serious material. Nathan Thrall, author of the recent book “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama,” calls it “a powerful and brilliant work of reportage that uncovers, in the form of a graphic novel, an Israeli massacre in Gaza in 1956, at the same time depicting in Sacco’s inimitable style the present-day lives of the people of Rafah and Khan Younis.”The late, Palestinian Christian-born scholar of anticolonialism wrote several influential volumes on conflicts around the world, including a memoir, “ Out of Place.” Hammad particularly recommends this 1986 book, “a long essay accompanied by and responding to a series of photographs of Palestinians by the Swiss photographer Jean Mohr. This book explores the multifariousness of Palestinian experiences with tenderness and insight.” Adina Hoffman, author of “Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City,” calls this Said’s “least outwardly polemical work, though it’s among his most persuasive, and moving ... searching essays about what might be called the varieties of Palestinian experience.” And sometime in the middle of all that, as she showed up every weekday at 7 a.m. and tried to focus on the job she had signed up for, which was, she thought, to help students discover a book to love, Tania could feel something shifting inside her 21st-century media center. The relationships between students and books, and parents and libraries, and teachers and the books they taught, and librarians and the job they did — all of it was changing in a place she thought had been designed to stay the same. I was worried enough that the Babushka Lady could be Jerrie that I confronted Jerrie,” she says. “It took me a while to be able to work up to the conversation with Jerrie and her answers to that conversation were not particularly reassuring to me.” Decades before the latest eruption of war in Israel and Gaza that began with Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre — and well before Internet algorithms amplified misinformation — the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was already a source of confusion, competing claims, “Rashomon”-like narrative clashes. Even basic facts seem to defy confirmation or debunking.

I wish I would take more joy in this moment, I do take a sense of relief and satisfaction that I’m at the end, but it wasn’t something I relished. I just felt an obligation to tell a difficult story.” To celebrate Joe Biden’s 81st birthday, Donald Trump released an alleged physical showing him to be healthy and in shape. “We all know Donald Trump is the picture of health. Specifically, the before picture,” Stephen Colbert joked on The Late Show. She says that while she cannot be certain who the Babushka Lady is: “I am certain that the Babushka [Lady] is an under-researched character, that she was completely overlooked. If that happened today there would be a manhunt for her and you would expect to see the footage.”

Morgan believed the forgotten library book had been absorbed into the family's collection

She decided to look at photographs to see if she could spot Jerrie in Dallas, and came across the “anomaly” of the Babushka Lady.

Now, 19 10th-graders at Tohopekaliga High School walked through the doors. “Okay, everybody, we’re here because you’re going to learn some very important things about the library,” said their teacher, Carmen Lorente. Tania pointed to the left side of the room. Classics, dystopian, fantasy, historical fiction, horror, humor. She pointed to the right. Mystery, realistic fiction, romance, sci-fi, sports, supernatural. And over there — far corner of the room — 153 graphic novels. She kept going. Nonfiction, careers. 11,600 books, 6,000 e-books. She had wanted to leave on her own terms. But as she walked out, she wasn’t sure that was what she had done. I felt that she presented a facade, some of which was true. She was a pioneering woman, that was true, she was a very capable woman, but there is an enigma that is almost impossible to pin down.” When she had decided to become a librarian almost 10 years ago, it was for a simple reason: She loved to read. Now she watched as the work she did at a high school in Central Florida became part of a national debate. There were fights going on over democracy and fascism. There were parents and school board members arguing on social media and in meetings. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) wasn’t just passing laws but using them to run for president. To Tania, the pure act of reading was becoming more and more political, and as a result, she had to spend much of her time reviewing the books on her shelves — not to suggest one to a student but to ask herself whether the content was too mature for the teenagers at her school. Then she had moved on to the books in each teacher’s classroom, because as of this year, the state considered those books to be part of the library, too.

Other 'guilty' patrons sent in their overdue books after hearing about the return

There was no deathbed confession, no tell-all letter, no smoking gun document left for the chronicler of her life. Jerrie’s explanation for what she was doing there stretched credibility to the limit: she said she had been hired by Life magazine to fly a reporting team to Dallas to cover the presidential visit, but that when they heard he had been assassinated they abandoned the assignment and left.



  • Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
  • EAN: 764486781913
  • Sold by: Fruugo

Delivery & Returns

Fruugo

Address: UK
All products: Visit Fruugo Shop