Eric Moon: The Life and Library Times

Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0786412534, Paperback)

Eric Moon, a progressive, even radical librarian who for more than 50 years has served his profession as goad and prod, devoted practitioner, gutsy journalist, magnanimous publisher, revered and resented association leader, smug antagonist, beloved mentor and antic crony, has been at the center of almost every important debate involving the shape and direction of the library profession in North America since the late 1950s and well into the 1990s, and before that for some years in England.

Editor of Library Journal, president of Scarecrow Press, president of the American Library Association, Moon has had an opinion on all of the heated issues that have preoccupied librarianship in recent decades: civil rights, social responsibility, intellectual freedom, spurring the young and the new, balanced collections, public funding, and the Sisyphean "governance" of the ALA.

Eric Moon’s life is told with the help of Kister’s 115 hours of interviews with Moon and his wife, and over 50 hours with dozens of friends and associates. This unvarnished account balances Moon’s ambitions and accomplishments with his demons and failures and not only tells the story of the man but also outlines the main course of events in Anglo-American librarianship during the past half century.