October 2006    

Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction Author: Rebecca Knuth Publisher: Praeger $39.95 Cloth (233 p.) ISBN: 0275990079 B&T         YBP Reviewed by Robert Nardini, Senior Vice President & Head Bibliographer There's an odd symmetry in the fact that just as the old idea of a universal library containing all human knowledge becomes something close to plausible, thanks to mass digitization projects carried on by Google and others, we've at the same time seen growing interest in the destruction of libraries and the irretrievable loss of the knowledge contained in books that are bombed, burned, looted, drowned, or otherwise destroyed. In 2001 Jonathan Rose brought together a group of scholars in The Holocaust and the Book to chronicle the destruction of 100 million books by the Nazis. Harvard librarian Matthew Battles, in his widely-reviewed Library: An Unquiet History (2003), opened a chapter entitled "Knowledge on Fire," by observing, "If the nineteenth century was about the building of libraries, the twentieth was about their destruction." Battles briefly described Nazi depredations while recounting the 1992 Serbian attack on the Bosnian National and University Library in Sarajevo, as well as other instances of bibliographic catastrophe. In 2004, James Raven's Lost Libraries: The Destruction of Great Book Collections since Antiquity offered a collection of fifteen new essays by different scholars whose scope was library ruin from ancient times, through the English Civil War and French Revolution, to several episodes of the twentieth century. Rebecca Knuth, a contributor to that book, the prior year had brought out her own Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century. Now Knuth, who is chair of the Library and Information Science program at the University of Hawaii, has established herself as the most active scholar in the field by bringing out a second book on the topic of "biblioclasm," as she calls it, Burning Books and Leveling Libraries. In the earlier book, Knuth used case studies of Germany, Bosnia, Kuwait, China, and Tibet to argue that libricide was often coincident with genocide. In her current book, Knuth again employs case studies to examine a wider range of motivations for library destruction. In 1984, Dutch anti-apartheid protestors destroyed the library of Amsterdam's South African Institute. To these extremists, the library served as a local symbol of the South African regime. "Ethnic biblioclasm" was the motivation behind the 2004 destruction by a Hindu mob in India of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute and its invaluable collections, following publication of an Oxford University Press book on Hindu-Muslim relations; of Sri Lanka's Jaffna Public Library in 1981, when Sinhalese police and paramilitaries wrought violence on Tamils; and of Shiite libraries in Iraq by Saddam Hussein in 1991. Totalitarian regimes seeking to eliminate opposition destroyed libraries in Germany in the 1930s, in Cambodia during the 1970s, and in Afghanistan over the 1990s. War provided a backdrop for library destruction, looting, and pillage across Europe during World War II, in the 1967-1970 Nigerian Civil War, in the overthrow of Communist governments in Romania in 1989 and Albania in 1991, and more recently, in 2003, in Baghdad, where U.S. troops did not stop Iraqi looters from carrying off treasures from the National Library and other cultural institutions. This is less a work of history than of social science, as Knuth attempts to mount her own analyses within sociological frameworks explaining vandalism and extremism. Readers who seek a rich narrative, or who might want more than the one lean paragraph provided by Knuth about the last surviving copy of a 22,000-volume encyclopedia produced in China in the 1400s and burned by Peking insurgents in 1900, will often be disappointed. Instead, they will find such passages as this one: "Social movements are a form of collective action undertaken to change existing cultural patterns at the levels of individual behavior, social institutions, and structures." Knuth's books are valuable reminders, nonetheless, that for as long as libraries seem worth building and maintaining, extremists will have a good material target, even if they are thwarted by the likes of Google in their aim to erase the cultural record. Published by YBP Library Services 999 Maple St., Contoocook, NH 03229 USA v: 800.258.3774   f: 603.746.5628 w: www.ybp.com   e: academia@ybp.com All rights reserved.