Kurt Vonnegut on Libraries and Books
I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength, who, all over this country (the United States), have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and destroyed records rather than have to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.
So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of Representatives, or the media. The America I loved still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.
And still on the subject of books: our daily news sources, newspapers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books do we learn what's really going on.
2005 Kurt Vonnegut Extracted from A Man Without a Country: A Memoir of Life in George W Bush's America, published by Bloomsbury
