Should you think, however, that this book was written as just another opportunistic, self-satisfied, “look-what-we-did” memoir, Ozma shows in the final entries her true motive for sharing their story. During her college years, her father finds himself forced into retirement by his school’s decision to replace books in the library with computers. For 38 years he had passionately cultivated his school’s collection of books and decorated the library to make it cozy, inviting and inspiring to the children who came there to read and to be read to by a beloved librarian. For her father, Ozma writes, reading is “sacred, traditional, perennial.”
“Unfortunately,” she concludes, “my father’s situation is not unique: day by day, literature is being phased out of our lives and the lives of our children. This is the time to act.”
She urges all of us to make a promise – to children, to ourselves, to the world – to fight for the inclusion of books in our daily lives. The final pages of this memoir include a list of most of the books she and her father read together and a finely worded promise that readers can use to make their own pledges.
For those booklovers everywhere who sometimes pause to consider a future without printed books or the libraries to house them, this is the book to reinforce a promise to ourselves – a resolution to read more, to support our libraries and to pass along a love of literature to our children and grandchildren.
“What greater gift to your descendants yet unborn than the love of books and reading,” Brozina asks in the book’s foreword.
What greater gift, indeed.
– article submitted by Gina Malone