Monday, May 9, 2011

Let's Play "Name that Book"

The patron told me that she was looking for a book. The title, she thought, was something like future shock and the author was something like Alvin. I'm pretty old, as I never tire of telling you, so I remember when the book Future Shock by Alvin Toffler was a big deal back in the 70's. I even vaguely remembered the futuristic cover, which looks pretty quaint now:



So I piped up cheerfully about the Toffler book and quickly figured out that we even had a copy, since people at my library are notorious for never weeding any book, no matter how outdated it may be.

She gave me funny look and informed me that it wasn't Future Shock, and the author wasn't Alvin Toffler, but the title was similar, as was the author. But it wasn't about that at all.

I pressed on, asking questions about when she thought the book came out (last year? when she was in high school?), where she heard about it, and the like.

She said that it had been a bestseller maybe a year ago. Maybe less, maybe last fall. She seemed pretty sure it was nonfiction. I asked her if she could remember where she heard about it, hoping that it was an Oprah sort of thing that would be fairly easy to track down, but she remembered nothing.

More questions revealed that it was an exposé of some sort.

So, to recap:
bestseller
maybe last year
probably non fiction
exposé
environment-related

Definitely not Michael Pollan
definitely not Malcolm Gladwell
No way it was Jonathan “Safran” Foer

It did not, in fact have food or eat in the title.

What do you think? Any ideas. The woman is long gone, having grown tired of my fruitless searching and endless questions, so no time pressure.

2 comments:

laura said...

I'm gonna guess The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein (whose name is nothing like Alvin, but ... ah well).

Darryn said...

Maybe the person was thinking (Calvin) Klein instead of Naomi.