I don’t recall whether it was a college professor or a friend who recommended the Lubell book to me in the early 1960’s. I didn’t know that it had won the distinguished Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for the best book on government and democracy in 1952.
However, after nearly 50 years, I still recall the insight that the thin book gave to me as I later read book, newspaper, and magazine articles on politics and current events. Lubell had been surprised by the unexpected Harry Truman re-election win in 1948. His path-finding book recounts his investigation to learn how Truman won and, just as importantly, why Thomas Dewey (the overwhelming favorite of the professionals) had lost the election.
Many generations of news analysts, pollsters, political professionals, college students, and the general public who have an interest in politics are indebted to Samuel Lubell for his insightful work, which influences writers and readers to this day. The 1952 volume is not dated and still can be read for its great analysis of what happened in a monumantal, never-to-be-forgotten Presidential race.
Reviewed by: Ernest J. Webby, Jr., Reference Librarian (PT), Newton Free Library
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This is a moving story of a peasant woman’s struggles, endurance, and ever-present hope for a better future. The novel portrays village life in India as the characters confront poverty, loss, and changing times and values. Although published in 1954, the modern reader will find it both timeless and touching.
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Wallace Stegner is my favorite author. All of his books are excellent. But Angle of Repose is the first that I read, and I have always loved it the most. It is a beautifully written book about a New England woman marrying and moving west with her mining engineer husband. Stegner really captures the mind of a woman in her struggle to cope with a new culture, dimished resources, marriage, children and her own professional career. She maintains her sanity!
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The first book of Heinlein’s science fiction that I read and hugely enjoyed, leading me to read every one of his many novels.
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To pass the time and help a hospitalized speechless Alzheimer’s patient who had just suffered a stroke I read aloud poetry. Several visits had passed without any communication from the patient, but during a reading of “Bed in Summer” from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses, without any prompting from me the patient recited the last few stanzas. Who knows how many years had passed since she had read this poem! That is the last time I heard the patient utter any complete sentences. This memory makes the Child’s Garden of Verses my most unforgettable book. 
Mills’ bizarre debut novel is a dry, expertly crafted satire of working-class drudgery along the drizzly English-Scots border, unlike anything you’ll ever read and with some truly warped implications about the control and confinement of itinerant high-tensile fence installers. The former bus driver’s second masterwork, 
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