reviews 602 College & Research Libraries erature” entry, which is written almost entirely as a summary of literary works that have been filmed, with only one di­ rector being named, the editors clearly do not perceive Arab cinema to be part and parcel of Arabic literary activity. Compared to even the new edition of The Encyclopaedia of Islam, this new and much shorter work is obviously more reader-friendly in terms of both the lay­ out of pages and the length of the entries, as well as through the elimination of fig­ ures not of literary interest. In addition, there are more entries for more recent authors than in The Encyclopaedia of Islam. Even with a 1998 publication date, how­ ever, the cutoff date for emerging authors was 1980. It seems inevitable that an online version will eventually be needed and that this work will form part of some larger database. The focus of this work on its selected realm of Arabic literature, ancient and modern, is both a strength and a weakness. If a would-be user does not know whether the subject person is Persian, Turkish, or Arab or actually a lit­ erary figure or perhaps a scientist, she or he will not know whether to consult it, although Persians writing in Arabic have been included as well as Arabs writing in French. If a much-less-expensive paper edition were available and perhaps limited to modern authors, whose coverage seems to be a major strength of this work, that smaller book might well be a student’s best friend when studying for an exami­ nation in Arabic literature in translation. In its current form, it will, instead, be of most use to instructors preparing a class, wondering at the last minute, for ex­ ample, whether Moulud Mammeri (1917– 1989) was Algerian or Tunisian and wrote in French or Arabic. All of the many people associated with this labor of love are to be congratulated. It would have been interesting, however, to see what would have issued from them had they been given a longer leash in the form of more lines and encouraged to write only about figures and topics they found passionately engaging. If one rea- November 1999 son for the 1980 cutoff date was the edi­ tors’ fear of letting new authors into the canon prematurely, this encyclopedia constitutes a canon and stands as a state­ ment of the status of the study of Arabic literature among, primarily, English-lan­ guage scholars. The work contains a great quantity of carefully sifted, useful infor­ mation on Arabic literature and authors, but few pyrotechnics. In short, the edi­ tors and contributors may end up preach­ ing to the choir by providing information for those best able to discover it on their own in other sources, rather than finding new readers for Arabic literature.—Will- iam Maynard Hutchins, Appalachian State University, Boone. Jones, Plummer Alston, Jr. Libraries, Im- migrants, and the American Experience. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood (Contri­ butions in Librarianship and Informa­ tion Science, no. 29), 1999. 236p. $59.95, alk. paper (ISBN 0-313-30769-5). LC 98­ 26439. “Bustling Queens [New York] Library Speaks in Many Tongues,” proclaimed the headline of a recent New York Times article on the nation’s busiest library sys­ tem. Describing collections that include Hindi newspapers, Chinese mystery nov­ els, Harlequin romances in Spanish, and Urdu potboilers (not to mention Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus in Chi­ nese), along with children’s story hours and English classes, the article captured the purposefulness and dynamism of the library system’s operations as they per­ tain to immigrant populations. The inter­ action between American public libraries and immigrant communities is, of course, not new; and some of its history may be found in Plummer Alston Jones Jr.’s thoughtful, well-documented new vol­ ume. It is nicely illustrated and contains a good index. Jones focuses on two particular eras in American immigration: the years of “free immigration,” from 1876 to 1924; and the time of “restricted immigration,” from 1924 to 1948. Interspersed with general discussions of each period’s political cli­ Book Reviews 603 mate, Jones profiles several of the key fig­ ures who best characterized each era. There is a fine account of Jane Maud Campbell’s (1869–1947) career as an ad­ vocate for “the downtrodden,” and a nicely objective discussion of the publi­ cation efforts of John Foster Carr (1869– 1939), who, although not a librarian, had a distinct impact on library work with immigrants. (Jones appropriately entitles this chapter “The Publisher as Propagan­ dist.”) Other subjects include Cleveland Public Librarian Eleanor (Edwards) Ledbetter (1870–1954) (“The Librarian as Social Worker”) and Edna Phillips (1890­ 1968) (“The Librarian as Educator”). The various organizations with whom these individuals were affiliated and the posts they held are duly reported by Jones. Jones, director of the library services and professor of library science at Catawba College in Salisbury, North Carolina, has previously written the his­ tories of two North Carolina families. He is usually careful to walk the often-pre­ carious line between what is and is not “PC,” but his great enthusiasm for his subject—librarians and the impact they had on immigrants—sometimes gets in the way. Describing American librarians as “sovereign alchemists” who turned “the base metal of immigrant potentiali­ ties into the gold of American realities” smacks a little uncomfortably, I think, of Index to advertisers 33rd CA Int’l Antiq. Bk. Fair 585 ACRL 541 AIAA 514, 551 Alibris 512 Amer. Chemical Soc. Cover 2 & 3 Archival Products 550 BIOSIS 570 Blackwell’s Book Services 531 R.R. Bowker 596 CHOICE 584, 597 EBSCO Cover 4 K.G. Saur 507 Library Technologies 542 Library Tech Alliance 606 OCLC 508 “The White Man’s Burden.” (“Librarians possessed the magic—the know-how— to impose Americanization on immi­ grants,” Jones declares at one point.) One also might suggest that the picture has not been (and continues not to be) all that rosy. For instance, in his fascinating (and very chilling) article, “The Origins of the Dewey Decimal Classification Scheme” (Libraries & Culture, Spring 1998), library historian Wayne Wiegand describes how the world’s most widely used library clas­ sification scheme was based on the alarm­ ingly narrow and presumptuous moral and intellectual climate that prevailed at the tiny Amherst College campus in the 1870s. How are librarians faring today with respect to multicultural patrons? The Queens borough public library system is obviously a success story. Programs such as “The Challenge to Change: Creating Diversity in Our Libraries” (held Oct. 1– 2, 1998 at Penn State University and co­ sponsored by ARL, and the Penn State, Rutgers, University of Maryland, and University of Pittsburgh Libraries) speak to librarians’ interest in adopting diver­ sity-conscious policies and practices in personnel and management operations, library services, and collection develop­ ment. On the other hand, foreign-lan­ guage books are usually among the first victims of budget cuts, and our standard reference tools often fall far short of the mark: a social worker or psychiatrist wanting to respond to a Korean patient’s complaint of hwa-byung (symptoms attrib­ uted to suppression of anger, such as in­ somnia, fatigue, panic, fear of death, de­ pression, etc.) is not going to find that ail­ ment listed in the DSM-IV (how on earth to fill out the insurance form?). The recently mounted Holocaust Me­ morial Museum’s exhibit, “Voyage of the St. Louis,” documents how 937 passengers who set sail to escape Hitler’s Europe in 1939 were turned away from American shores. Jones’s chronicle is a small, hap­ pier take on an extremely complex, peren­ nially troubling issue.—Ellen D. Gilbert, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ.