NONFICTION
The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession, by Allison Hoover Bartlett, $24.95
The term for John Gilkey’s bad habit is bibliokleptomania: stealing books not for profit but because you love them, take pride in them, must have them. Freelance writer Allison Hoover Bartlett introduces the reader to two main characters in this strange true- crime tale.
One is Gilkey himself, who grew up in a family where stealing among siblings was commonplace and who pulled off his first theft (a shoplifted catcher’s mitt) at age 9 or 10. The other is Ken Sanders, a book dealer and amateur detective determined to catch Gilkey, who in the period from 1999 to 2003 stole books valued at $100,000 from dealers around the country.
On the way, the author pauses to illuminate a technique used by opportunists who cut valuable pictures out of books to sell them to unwitting art dealers. It’s called the “wet-string” method, and it works like this:
The culprit “went one day to the library with a length of wool yarn hidden in his cheek. He placed the wet yarn inside a book, along the spine. . .He put the book back on the shelf and came back a few weeks later. As the yarn dried, it grew shorter, which made a clean cut.” The thief didn’t have to use a razor to excise the print — the shrinking yarn had done most of the work for him.
As for Gilkey, who was in and out of jail during the years in which he was interviewed for this book, Bartlett sums him up as “a man who believes that the ownership of a vast rare book collection would be the ultimate expression of his identity, that any means of getting it would be fair and right, and that once people could see his collection, they would appreciate the man who had built it.”
NONFICTION
Airlift to America: How Barack Obama, Sr., John F. Kennedy, Tom Mboya, and 800 East African Students Changed Their World and Ours, by Tom Shachtman, $24.99
This book fills in a piece of President Barack Obama’s background. It is quite an important piece, in that the subject is the so-called airlift, between 1959 and ’63, of hundreds of young Africans to the United States, where they studied at colleges and universities.
One such student, a Kenyan, went to Hawaii, where he met and married a young American woman. In 1961, they had a son, who is now president of the United States.
As Tom Shachtman explains in “Airlift to America,” the private group that brought Obama senior to the States, the African American Students Foundation, was a creature of the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union were rival superpowers and the future of Africa was thought to hang in the balance. The idea was to let promising young Africans experience firsthand the freedom and promise of American life.
No less an analyst than the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. thought the program would advance the cause of civil rights on both continents.
In Shachtman’s telling, the airlift may have made the difference in the very close 1960 election. The Kennedy family foundation was giving money to AASF, and Richard Nixon tried, unsuccessfully, to get the State Department to help finance the program as a way to dampen the favorable publicity for his Democratic rival.
The author argues that the standard explanation for Kennedy’s success among black voters — that they were impressed by his phone calls on behalf of the often-arrested King — should be “revised to include the understanding that his support for the 1960 East African airlift was equally if not more crucial to his election as president.”
