Know Your Library #3

Your guide to books in the Taos Public Library………

     Besides computer access, periodicals, reference materials, interlibrary loan and a place just to be quiet and read for awhile, your library offers 63,000 books. You’re not going to run out anytime soon.

No matter what you need or like, you can find it here. Using the Dewey Decimal system, the universal numbering system for libraries,

We review one non-fiction book from each category, and one novel.

We urge you, too, to browse—you’ll always find something provocative—and certainly something you didn’t know was here.

     The 200s are books on religion, and our library has over 250 titles, including many on Islam, a subject many of us are either ignorant of or about which we’re misled. Also, of course, books on all the other religions of the world.

     A provocative one, and definitely one for our times is LOSING MOSES ON THE FREEWAY by Chris Hedges. (241.52.2) A graduate of Harvard Divinity School and for 20 years a foreign correspondent, Hedges has seen plenty to make him ponder the state of humankind, and plenty to make the reader think. But let him speak for himself:

     “We all stray. We all violate some commandments … But the commandments bind us together. They work to keep us from… false covenants that destroy us… tempt us to be God. . That appear to make us the center of the universe. .. But these false covenants, built around exclusive communities of race, gender, class, religion and nation, inevitably carry within them the denigration of others who we exclude….the covenant offered by the commandments, the covenant of life, is the covenant of love.”

     This is a stringent book. It’s rather like being scrubbed all over with a loofah, or even brillo. But it sloughs away the dead skin, as it were, and makes us think anew. Try it, and others in the 200s.

                                                copyright 2013 by Joanne Forman. All rights reserved.