She (Oxford World's Classics)

Product Information

If that were not startling enough, she also came to suspect that Cobb was a mysterious character known to Kennedy investigators as the Babushka Lady, who was the closest person filming the president at the moment he was shot, but who vanished after the assassination, along with her all-important footage. Finding the Babushka Lady (so called because of her triangular ‘babushka’ headscarf) and her close-quarters film of the fatal moment has been something of a holy grail for JFK investigators for the past 60 years. She had wanted to leave on her own terms. But as she walked out, she wasn’t sure that was what she had done.

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.” There was no deathbed confession, no tell-all letter, no smoking gun document left for the chronicler of her life. Morris, for his part, calls this magisterial memoir by the late Israeli novelist “brilliant (if overlong),” but its length is merited by the scope of Oz’s project — an early history of Israel nested inside a painful family story. Opening on the moment when the United Nations approved the Israeli state (when he was 8), Oz moves through his bookish, left-Zionist upbringing among immigrants from Eastern Europe and covers the lasting scars of his mother’s suicide — as well as the cultural legacy of the Holocaust. Natalie Portman directed and starred in a 2015 film adaptation. “A very personal memoir of growing up before, during and after 1948,” adds Gorenberg. 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.I was worried enough that the Babushka Lady could be Jerrie that I confronted Jerrie,” she says. “It took me a while to be able to work up to the conversation with Jerrie and her answers to that conversation were not particularly reassuring to me.” She heard the first-period bell ring, 7:15 a.m. She’d wanted to get to the box right away, but now she saw one of the school administrators at her door, asking whether she’d heard about the latest education mandate in Florida. Arnold’s photo has long been considered a visual paradox, with its combination of high and low art, Irish laureate and Hollywood star, intellectual man and flibbertigibbet woman (in this, the composition finds an echo in Variety’s headline announcing Monroe’s marriage to Arthur Miller: ‘Egghead Weds Hourglass’). Many have struggled to imagine that Monroe could actually have been reading Ulysses, but Arnold’s account of how the photograph came into being sounds convincing: Monroe ‘kept Ulysses in her car and had been reading it for a long time: she said she loved the sound of it and would read it aloud to try to make sense of it – but she found it hard going.’ I felt that she presented a facade, some of which was true. She was a pioneering woman, that was true, she was a very capable woman, but there is an enigma that is almost impossible to pin down.”

Or follow me down the rabbit hole here … they were just white buses,” Colbert laughed. “There’s this thing called Occam’s razor, which is what I use to cut my ears off when Clay Higgins speaks.” 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.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. But she was happy; she technically denied being June, then proceeded to tell me lots of things about June that no one would know unless they worked closely with June or were June. 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. The late, Palestinian Christian-born scholar of anticolonialism wrote several influential volumes on conflicts around the world, including a memoir, “ Out of Place.” Hammad particularly recommends this 1986 book, “a long essay accompanied by and responding to a series of photographs of Palestinians by the Swiss photographer Jean Mohr. This book explores the multifariousness of Palestinian experiences with tenderness and insight.” Adina Hoffman, author of “Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City,” calls this Said’s “least outwardly polemical work, though it’s among his most persuasive, and moving ... searching essays about what might be called the varieties of Palestinian experience.”

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.

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.

So, how do you feel?” Tania would ask Erin, because it had been hard to pin down, the feeling that she had as she left Tohopekaliga High School for the last time. Decades before the latest eruption of war in Israel and Gaza that began with Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre — and well before Internet algorithms amplified misinformation — the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was already a source of confusion, competing claims, “Rashomon”-like narrative clashes. Even basic facts seem to defy confirmation or debunking.

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

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.” 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.” When she had decided to become a librarian almost 10 years ago, it was for a simple reason: She loved to read. Now she watched as the work she did at a high school in Central Florida became part of a national debate. There were fights going on over democracy and fascism. There were parents and school board members arguing on social media and in meetings. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) wasn’t just passing laws but using them to run for president. To Tania, the pure act of reading was becoming more and more political, and as a result, she had to spend much of her time reviewing the books on her shelves — not to suggest one to a student but to ask herself whether the content was too mature for the teenagers at her school. Then she had moved on to the books in each teacher’s classroom, because as of this year, the state considered those books to be part of the library, too. 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.