She (Oxford World's Classics)

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I wish I would take more joy in this moment, I do take a sense of relief and satisfaction that I’m at the end, but it wasn’t something I relished. I just felt an obligation to tell a difficult story.” She says that while she cannot be certain who the Babushka Lady is: “I am certain that the Babushka [Lady] is an under-researched character, that she was completely overlooked. If that happened today there would be a manhunt for her and you would expect to see the footage.” Jerrie’s explanation for what she was doing there stretched credibility to the limit: she said she had been hired by Life magazine to fly a reporting team to Dallas to cover the presidential visit, but that when they heard he had been assassinated they abandoned the assignment and left. One woman did come forward years later to say she was the Babushka Lady, and that two men claiming to work for the government took her camera away, but her claim was largely dismissed because the camera she said she was using was not invented at the time.

Now, 19 10th-graders at Tohopekaliga High School walked through the doors. “Okay, everybody, we’re here because you’re going to learn some very important things about the library,” said their teacher, Carmen Lorente. Nothing about the laws, nothing about reviewing books, nothing about book bans at all. Tania scrolled through the questions and added one more. “What is your stance on Censorship?” she wrote, though she had no way of knowing whether it would be asked, or how the next librarian might answer. Look her up on Wikipedia and you will find a lengthy entry about her extraordinary life as a pioneer, adventurer and champion of women’s rights. To celebrate Joe Biden’s 81st birthday, Donald Trump released an alleged physical showing him to be healthy and in shape. “We all know Donald Trump is the picture of health. Specifically, the before picture,” Stephen Colbert joked on The Late Show. It wasn’t just Tania doing this. It was more than 1,400 librarians in all of Florida’s 67 counties, each district interpreting the law in its own way. In the panhandle, Escambia County had instructed its schools to close parts of their libraries entirely until every book on every shelf had been reviewed for sexual content. In Charlotte County, near Fort Myers, schools were told to remove any books with LGBTQ characters from elementary and middle school libraries.They would tell each other about the gifts people had made for them, the cards, the flowers, the cake, the lemon meringue pie. Last first period, last lunch period. Erin would tell Tania that her assistant principal asked her three times whether she had changed her mind about leaving. Tania would say her assistant principal asked her to say something on the systemwide radio, and what she said was “Mrs. G signing off. Media center closed until further notice.” They would sit in the store they had just leased, the crystal shop in Kissimmee that was becoming a bookstore. There were no books yet on the shelves, but there would be soon. Every book they could afford. Any book at all. She decided to look at photographs to see if she could spot Jerrie in Dallas, and came across the “anomaly” of the Babushka Lady. Sacco’s illustrated reportorial deep-dive felt like a breakthrough not just for journalism but also for the graphic novel — proving that what we once called comics can be a conduit for the darkest and most serious material. Nathan Thrall, author of the recent book “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama,” calls it “a powerful and brilliant work of reportage that uncovers, in the form of a graphic novel, an Israeli massacre in Gaza in 1956, at the same time depicting in Sacco’s inimitable style the present-day lives of the people of Rafah and Khan Younis.” That was before the school board meeting on April 5, 2022, when Tania watched parents read aloud from books they described as a danger to kids. It was before she received a phone call from the district, the day after that, instructing her to remove four books from her shelves. It was before a member of the conservative group Moms for Liberty told her on Facebook, a few days later, that she shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near students. It had been 18 months since then. Nine months since she had taken Florida’s new training for librarians, a mandatory hour-long video, and heard the state say that books in the library must not contain sexual content that could be “harmful to minors” and that violating this statute would result in a third-degree felony. “A crime,” the training had said. “Districts should err on the side of caution.” It had been seven months since she began collecting Florida’s laws and statutes in a purple folder on her desk, highlighting the sections that made her mad, and also the ones that could get her fired. Six months since she broke out in hives, since eczema crept up the side of her face, since she started having trouble sleeping and got a prescription for an anti-anxiety medication. Five months since she stood in her house crying and her husband said it wasn’t worth it anymore. He could work two jobs if he had to. “You need to quit,” he’d told her. Six weeks since the start of another school year. Five weeks since she had given her notice. Tania had planned to spend the rest of her career in the Osceola County School District. She was 51. She could have stayed for years at Tohopekaliga, a school she loved that had only just opened in 2018. The library was clean and new. The shelves were organized. The chairs had wheels that moved soundlessly across the carpet. The floor plan was open, designed by architects who had promised “the 21st century media center.”

It would have made for fascinating viewing, but the more time she spent with Cobb the more she began to suspect that something about her story didn’t add up. And sometime in the middle of all that, as she showed up every weekday at 7 a.m. and tried to focus on the job she had signed up for, which was, she thought, to help students discover a book to love, Tania could feel something shifting inside her 21st-century media center. The relationships between students and books, and parents and libraries, and teachers and the books they taught, and librarians and the job they did — all of it was changing in a place she thought had been designed to stay the same. This has not been an easy process,” she says. “It was a reluctant process for me. It’s not an easy story to tell or one that I enjoy telling, frankly. It’s a tough story to talk about America and a woman I know and show what I found out about her and publicly say it. From the 12th century to the 18th, therefore, the template for a woman reading in a painting was the established iconography of the Annunciation. Its adaptation by Boucher represented a daring relaunch for the king’s former mistress. While another portrait of Pompadour made her book titles visible, here we do not know what volume from her extensive library she has chosen. Let’s just say it’s unlikely to be the Psalms.

Other 'guilty' patrons sent in their overdue books after hearing about the return

The first is the 17th-century The Great Picture, produced for Lady Anne Clifford and now at Abbot Hall in Kendal. Clifford spent much of her adult life in legal battles for her Yorkshire inheritance. Her tenacity finally paid off and she celebrated her triumph by commissioning an extraordinary life-sized painting of herself, her parents and her siblings from an artist thought to be Jan van Belcamp. Her answers were bizarre, off the rails,” she says. “She seemed first of all thrilled that I had found June Cobb. I expected her to walk out in a huff that I was looking into this or I had come up with a wild theory. A number of people fell down the JFK assassination rabbit hole never to return,” she writes, “and I wasn’t in a hurry to become one of them.” There was no deathbed confession, no tell-all letter, no smoking gun document left for the chronicler of her life. Almost everybody has seen the Oliver Stone movie JFK,” she says, “and when I saw that movie [released in 1991] I came away thinking there’s probably a lot more to the story. I probably would have leaned – a lean, not a certainty – that there could be more to it. What that would look like I had no idea.”