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.” From the 12th century to the 18th, therefore, the template for a woman reading in a painting was the established iconography of the Annunciation. Its adaptation by Boucher represented a daring relaunch for the king’s former mistress. While another portrait of Pompadour made her book titles visible, here we do not know what volume from her extensive library she has chosen. Let’s just say it’s unlikely to be the Psalms. 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. 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.” 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.”

So, how do you feel?” Tania would ask Erin, because it had been hard to pin down, the feeling that she had as she left Tohopekaliga High School for the last time. Arnold’s photo has long been considered a visual paradox, with its combination of high and low art, Irish laureate and Hollywood star, intellectual man and flibbertigibbet woman (in this, the composition finds an echo in Variety’s headline announcing Monroe’s marriage to Arthur Miller: ‘Egghead Weds Hourglass’). Many have struggled to imagine that Monroe could actually have been reading Ulysses, but Arnold’s account of how the photograph came into being sounds convincing: Monroe ‘kept Ulysses in her car and had been reading it for a long time: she said she loved the sound of it and would read it aloud to try to make sense of it – but she found it hard going.’ There was no deathbed confession, no tell-all letter, no smoking gun document left for the chronicler of her life. If that were not startling enough, she also came to suspect that Cobb was a mysterious character known to Kennedy investigators as the Babushka Lady, who was the closest person filming the president at the moment he was shot, but who vanished after the assassination, along with her all-important footage. Finding the Babushka Lady (so called because of her triangular ‘babushka’ headscarf) and her close-quarters film of the fatal moment has been something of a holy grail for JFK investigators for the past 60 years.

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. The painting is, in essence, Clifford’s autobiography. It is a groundbreaking work, not least because it predates the modern bookcase itself, the invention of which is often attributed to Samuel Pepys, who commissioned freestanding glazed book cabinets from the joiner Simpson in the 1660s. In The Great Picture Anne Clifford has found true ‘bookcase credibility’. Morris, for his part, calls this magisterial memoir by the late Israeli novelist “brilliant (if overlong),” but its length is merited by the scope of Oz’s project — an early history of Israel nested inside a painful family story. Opening on the moment when the United Nations approved the Israeli state (when he was 8), Oz moves through his bookish, left-Zionist upbringing among immigrants from Eastern Europe and covers the lasting scars of his mother’s suicide — as well as the cultural legacy of the Holocaust. Natalie Portman directed and starred in a 2015 film adaptation. “A very personal memoir of growing up before, during and after 1948,” adds Gorenberg.

But she was happy; she technically denied being June, then proceeded to tell me lots of things about June that no one would know unless they worked closely with June or were June. Like so many before her though, she found herself in the irresistible tractor beam of the Kennedy assassination, and the unanswered questions about what happened on that sunny day in Dealey Plaza that still affect attitudes to government to this day. 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.”Monroe’s pose is focused and intimate. And there is something distinctly racy about the specific edition she is pictured holding. Monroe and her copy of Ulysses bring together two symbols of sexuality, transgression and American modernity. For readers in the 21st century, Joyce’s work is known as a modernist masterpiece. In the middle of the 20th century, however, it had not yet shaken off the scandal attached to its early publication history. Serial publication of the novel was halted in 1920 by an obscenity trial and copies of the first edition, published in Paris by Shakespeare and Company, imported to Britain and the United States were intercepted and confiscated. All we need to know here is the ominously Victorian name of the director of public prosecutions at the time: Sir Archibald Bodkin. His selective reading of the book’s final section was sufficient to convince him that Ulysses was obscene and therefore publication of it should be banned in Britain. Similar measures were taken in the United States. 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. Tania asks students to hold up their wristbands granting them access to a homecoming pep rally. Students at the Tohopekaliga pep rally in late September.

Tania flips through a book in the library's storage area. Much of her time on the job was spent reviewing books to make sure the school was adhering to new state content laws. She heard the first-period bell ring, 7:15 a.m. She’d wanted to get to the box right away, but now she saw one of the school administrators at her door, asking whether she’d heard about the latest education mandate in Florida. 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. 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.” That was before the school board meeting on April 5, 2022, when Tania watched parents read aloud from books they described as a danger to kids. It was before she received a phone call from the district, the day after that, instructing her to remove four books from her shelves. It was before a member of the conservative group Moms for Liberty told her on Facebook, a few days later, that she shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near students. It had been 18 months since then. Nine months since she had taken Florida’s new training for librarians, a mandatory hour-long video, and heard the state say that books in the library must not contain sexual content that could be “harmful to minors” and that violating this statute would result in a third-degree felony. “A crime,” the training had said. “Districts should err on the side of caution.” It had been seven months since she began collecting Florida’s laws and statutes in a purple folder on her desk, highlighting the sections that made her mad, and also the ones that could get her fired. Six months since she broke out in hives, since eczema crept up the side of her face, since she started having trouble sleeping and got a prescription for an anti-anxiety medication. Five months since she stood in her house crying and her husband said it wasn’t worth it anymore. He could work two jobs if he had to. “You need to quit,” he’d told her. Six weeks since the start of another school year. Five weeks since she had given her notice.She had wanted to leave on her own terms. But as she walked out, she wasn’t sure that was what she had done. Maga supporters have “used the footage to bolster their January 6 conspiracy theories”, he explained. The Louisiana representative Clay Higgins, for example, spent time during a hearing to ask the FBI director, Christopher Wray, about “ghost buses”, which he explained were vehicles “used for secret purposes” during January 6 to bring FBI informants “dressed as Trump supporters”. That was his only explanation for why a few buses were painted white. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile. Tania at her soon-to-be bookstore, White Rose Books and More, in downtown Kissimmee. Tania chats with two women asking about the new shop.

Guys, get up. Walk around,” Lorente said. “Look at books. It’s not a chitchat session. You need to be up and actively looking at books.” 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.

Or follow me down the rabbit hole here … they were just white buses,” Colbert laughed. “There’s this thing called Occam’s razor, which is what I use to cut my ears off when Clay Higgins speaks.” She decided to look at photographs to see if she could spot Jerrie in Dallas, and came across the “anomaly” of the Babushka Lady. Her answers were bizarre, off the rails,” she says. “She seemed first of all thrilled that I had found June Cobb. I expected her to walk out in a huff that I was looking into this or I had come up with a wild theory. Nothing about the laws, nothing about reviewing books, nothing about book bans at all. Tania scrolled through the questions and added one more. “What is your stance on Censorship?” she wrote, though she had no way of knowing whether it would be asked, or how the next librarian might answer.