Continuing with our Everyone is a Poet Series, we connected with District 6 Supervisor Jane Kim.

Kim read a poem written by her dear friend Dennis Kim and gives us a little bit of her art background, pre-City Hall.  We love it!

1. J. Edgar Hoover – yes, the infamous Director of the FBI knew his Dewey Decimal System, and so should you. In order to qualify for George Washington Law School’s evening program, Hoover became a government employee, clerking at the Library of Congress.

2. Laura Bush – the former First Lady (and expert sorter) received her Master’s in Library Science from the University of Texas and worked as a librarian before marrying the future leader of the Free World. Once in the White House, Ms. Bush didn’t forget her early passion for the book: she soon created the Laura Bush Foundation for America’s Libraries.

3. Marian Paroo– the fictional librarian from River City, Iowa came to life as the buttoned-up-yet-still-sexy romantic lead in the Tony Award-winning 1957 Broadway musical The Music Man. Enjoy Kristen Chenoweth and Mathew Broderick in the 2003 production of The Music Man as they perform the classic “Marian the Librarian” here.

4. Mao Tse-tung –Chairman Mao, the Chinese Communist revolutionary and founding father of the People’s Republic of China, got his start in the stacks. Early on, he worked for the chief librarian at Peking University.

5. Giacomo Casanova – the infamous lover, adventurer, author and socialite eventually settled down some later in life, spending thirteen years until his death as the Count of Waldstein’s librarian in the Count’s chateau at Dux. We’re sure remaining quite in the library was never so difficult!

6. Batgirl – Who better to fend off Gotham City villains than the head of the Gotham City Public Library? Not only does Batgirl’s alter ego Barbara Gordon (played by Yvonne Craig in the original TV series and later by Alicia Silverstone in the movie Batman & Robin) have a doctorate in Library Sciences and a genius-level IQ, she would later go on to become a United States Congresswoman!

7. Lewis Carroll –It should be no surprise that the famous poet and author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass spent time as the sub-Librarian at Christ Church of Oxford University.

Special Mention – Though she doesn’t even count as a fictional character, per se, we wanted to pay homage to the iconic “pin up librarian” imagery made famous during World War II. Though we have all seen many variations of this icon, several things remain constant: her hair is always neat and up, her glasses are always low on her nose, and she is always ready to check you out. A great example can be found here.

1. The Joy Luck Club – This 1989 best-selling novel by Amy Tan focuses on four Chinese American families from our very own San Francisco. Three mothers and four daughters share stories from their lives in little vignettes. Check out either the novel or the 1993 film adaptation.

2. Mamma Mia – In 1975, ABBA wrote the song. In 1999 it became a smash hit musical.  In 2008 it was turned into a movie starring Meryl Streep, and the rest is history. The plot centers on single mom Donna, her bride-to-be daughter Sophie, and the three former flames that could all be Sophie’s father. Madness ensues and Streep sparkles, as per usual. Check it out here.

3. The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood – Ya-Ya Sisterhood is the 1996 New York Times best seller from Rebecca Wells, recounting the strained relationship between play director Sidda and her mother. The immense popularity of the book spawned a 2002 film of the same name starring Ellen Burstyn and Sandra Bullock. Check out the book or the movie here. Ya-Ya!

4. Steel Magnolias – Originally produced in 1987 as a stage play before being adapted to the big screen in 1989, Steel Magnolias depicts the bond among a small group of women from Natchitoches, Louisiana. The all-star cast is led by Sally Fields, who finds herself struggling over the sudden death of her daughter Shelby, (Julia Roberts). You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, but only if you check out the script or movie.

5. Gypsy – What Mother’s Day list would be complete without honoring Mama Rose, the most overbearing stage mom of them all? Rose has been performed on stage by the likes of Ethel Merman, Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly, Bernadette Peters and Patti Lupone. The 1962 film of the smash Broadway musical starred Rosalind Russel. We also suggest checking out the book that started it all, Gypsy Rose Lee’s Gypsy: a Memoir.

6. The Bad Seed – Many are familiar with the spooky 1956 cult classic that turned a pig-tailed, 10 year old named Rhoda Penmark (played by Patty McCormack)into an icon of evil. In The Bad Seed, mother Christine Penmark makes the ultimate sacrifice to protect her only child, the deliciously sadistic little Rhoda. If you have only seen the movie we also suggest the original 1954 novel, which boasts a far creepier ending.

7. Mommie Dearest – We couldn’t resist. Originally published in 1978 by Christina Crawford as a memoir and exposé about her adoptive and often cruel mother Joan, it’s the campy 1981 film version, (starring a horrific Faye Dunaway) that we all know best. Thanks to bitter family tensions, Christina’s scandalous memoir has endured as the ultimate homage to questionable parenting. And always remember: no wire hangers!

With CA on the verge of cutting out 100 percent of state funding for public libraries, they have reason to step back and ask, but the answer is no!  Read the article in full here!

What can get children more excited to read than the all-star SF Giants pitcher and his adorable french bulldog Cy?

United Way of the Bay Area has teamed up with the San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department in an effort to win the “Pop Chips Game Changers” contest to bring Lincecum & Cy on a Bookmobile ride along to the Western Addition Branch Library.

Lincecum will then kick-off a read-a-thon and read to children at the branch!

Vote for Timmy to Read to kids here.

You can vote daily until May 20th! Read more about the contest here.

Satan Is Real: The Ballad of the Louvin Brothers (IT Books, 2012), the fifties country/gospel music duo, is just plain weird.

The book is done up to look like a lurid fifties paperback, right down to the 10 Cent price in the upper-right-hand corner of the artificially-aged front cover.  (It plainly states $22.99 on the back right below the very modern barcode, should there be any confusion.) The trim is 5 ¼” X 7 ¾,” somewhere between a rack-sized paperback and a normal-sized hardcover. It looks like nothing else on the shelf; it lacks a dust jacket, instead having illustrated boards with an apparent collage depicting the Louvin Brothers (Charlie and Ira, here curiously sans their usual guitar and mandolin) in full and joyful song.

They’re pasted in front of what is either an exceptionally non-threatening imagining of hell or a barbecue pit that is just minutes away from being ready for a rack of ribs.  Over this is pasted a grinning, red, hovering Satan whom is either gleefully condemning the brothers to the Hot Place or plugging canned meat products.  A tower of flames climbs the left edge of the book and is repeated throughout the text, appearing to burst out of the gutters, spontaneously if unconvincingly, at the beginning of each chapter.  See? Weird.

Charlie Louvin’s book plainspoken-ly tells of the Brothers’ beginnings, sharecropping in a place called Sand Mountain, Alabama.  By their early teens Charlie and Ira had decided the way for them to get away from their unyielding farm–and their daddy’s constant beatings–is through a career in music. Their dogged pursuit of that course is the focus of the book from that point on.  Their two main ambitions, their measures of achievement, were to appear at the Grand Ole Opry and to drive an air-cooled Franklin just like Roy Acuff.  The first they achieved only after years of slogging through the South, playing bars and bowling alleys. The second they only managed to approximate; owning a series of cars–Cadillacs and Corvairs and everything in between–and at times racking up 170,000 miles annually as they rush from Miami to New Orleans to Corpus Christie in fifteen hour breakneck stretches, stopping only long enough to perform and collect their dough, gobbling speed all the while.

These guys weren’t exactly Elvis but fame and Ira’s insecurities quickly got the better of them anyway.  Along the way Ira became a quart-a-day man, beating on, and getting beat on by, a succession of wives; getting into constant fistfights with not only his brother, but with producers and fellow musicians; stomping innumerable mandolins into piles of varnished splinters; and screwing every willing woman who crossed his path.  Finally the family pulled together and leapt into action:

There was this place out east by the Nashville airport that somebody had told me didn’t have no bars on it, but could help a man quit if he wanted to.  So Betty [Charlie’s long- suffering wife] and I somehow talked Ira into going, and he did real good there for little while. But then Faye [Ira’s third wife, who once brained Charlie with a frying pan] slipped him in a pint of whiskey for Christmas, and he drank it and walked out the next day.

I should’ve taken a shovelhead and beat the shit out of her.  But some people will use a drinker’s habit to their own advantage.  And that woman did.  Every time they’d get drunk and get in a fight he’d buy her something. She couldn’t afford for him to get sober.

That was about all I could do.

Well, hell, what could any family in that situation do?  It would seem they tried everything. A couple of years later Faye would shoot Ira six times while he was trying to strangle her with a telephone cord. Apparently both were extremely drunk.  Improbably both survived.  Even more improbably the marriage continued, the bliss interrupted only by the family’s attempt to have Faye committed.  A commitment that was thwarted by—Who else?—the air-cooled-Franklin-owning Roy Acuff.

Eventually, predictably, Ira’s drinking broke up the Louvin Brothers. Shortly thereafter, in 1965, Ira was killed, along with his fourth wife and two of his friends, in a high-speed wreck after a solo gig in Kansas City. The book for all intents and purposes, ends there. It’s an old story, especially if you’re a fan of this kind of book, which I definitely am.  Satan is Real reminds in some ways of Nick Tosches’ Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story in the way it details of the toll that life on the road takes on a musician, although Jerry Lee (and, from what I hear, Tosches himself) appears to have been blessed with that nearly bottomless capacity for derangement that the road demands and that poor Ira Louvin apparently lacked.  Strangely, Charlie devotes all of 22 pages, out of 297, to the forty-six years of his life (he died in 2011) that followed his brother’s death.

Deep in the book, Charlie finally spills and explains that the bizarre book cover is a reproduction of the original cover of the Louvin Brothers 1959 album of gospel tunes, Satan Is Real, and is not a collage at all, but was photographed, rather astoundingly, live:

Ira took it upon himself to design the cover for Satan Is Real, and he had it in his head that he wanted to put a real Satan on the cover.  Well, my oldest boy Sonny had this Lionel Train we’d bought him, and it was attached to a four-by-eight sheet of plywood.  And since neither Ira nor I had any money at the time to go buy a brand new sheet of   plywood, we removed Sonny’s train and sawed the four-by-eight down the middle, cutting the devil out of that.  It was sixteen feet tall when we finished, and we painted it ourselves, and then made the pitchfork and horns from the scraps…There was an abandoned rock quarry by my house that we thought would be perfect.  So we set him up and then went around and collected a bunch of old tires, and stacked them around him.  When the photographer for Capitol Records showed up, we had it all ready to go…and          when he said he was ready, we poured kerosene into the tires and lit them on fire.

Don’t try this at home.

The Reader’s Review is proud to announce that four of the renovated San Francisco branch libraries have now received Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification from the U.S. Green Building Council!

Both the Park and Anza branch libraries were certified LEED Gold. The Presidio and Parkside branch libraries were certified LEED Silver.

Translation: are renovated libraries are now officially awesome.

LEED certification means that new and renovated buildings meet vital performance standards such as energy savings, water efficiency, C02 emissions reduction, improved indoor environmental quality, and stewardship of resources and sensitivity to their impacts. Cruising the stacks has never been so earth friendly!

All four branch libraries were renovated in the last 18 months as part of the city’s Branch Library Improvement Program.

If you can’t make it out to all four newly-minted Green branch libraries, take a minute and get a virtual tour of each branch’s unique Green features.

• Anza Branch
• Park Branch
• Parkside Branch
• Presidio Branch

W. C. Fields recalled it as a period in his life, “when I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.”  (This line was discovered in an op-ed essay mentioned below…)

The years between 1919 and 1933 also represent an extraordinary time in the United States, because despite our so-called dry status, we managed to usher in Jazz, and publish a number of extraordinary novels that remain some of the best of the 20^th Century.

Friends of the Library invites you to revisit the era on Friday April 27, when it hosts its latest IMBIBE event at the Western Addition Branch Library.

Some 5,000 speakeasies operated in San Francisco during prohibition. What’s more, it was also home to a number of breweries, including Albion Castle, a European Gothic masterpiece located in the Bayview. We’ve included a link to a guide about the breweries, and a little bit of history on the castle, which boasted its own natural springs to make its beer.

And to help get you in the mood for a night of food and drink at the Library, here is a handful of classic novels published during those turbulent years; you may want to check out one, or two, before you arrive to hear the Broun Fellinis perform on Friday.

• Babbitt. Written by Sinclar Lewis and first published in 1922, Babbitt is a classic satire of American culture, society, and behavior.

• The Great Gatsby.  F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel published in 1925, hardly needs describing. Set against the backdrop of Prohibition and bootlegging, the novel highlights the rapid changes in wealth and status in the United States. The Great Gatsby is considered by some be the Great American Novel.

• The Sun Also Rises. Ernest Hemingway’s window on the life of a group of expatriates has been continuously in print since its publication in 1926.

Finally, Timothy Egan wrote a smashing opinion piece in the New York Times over the weekend on whether the Unites States does better when our Presidents hit the bottle. See for yourself, if only to catch the photo of FDR with his cigarette holder.