The Piedmont Avenue Branch is Now Open for Sidewalk Pickup!  

Margaret was the Children's Librarian at our Piedmont Avenue Branch for 4 years. 

You can rent one, or hundreds of other tools, for a week from the Oakland Tool Lending Library (OTLL) http://fotll.org/ . 

There are gardening and digging tools, carpentry and woodworking tools, plumbing tools, concrete and masonry tools, and several other categories. Just to give you an idea of the breadth of the over 3,500 tools available, there are ten different kinds of hammers. The complete list, including power tools, is at www.oaklandlibrary.org/tools.

The OTLL is in the basement of the Temescal Branch. It is staffed by library employees and is funded by the City of Oakland and property taxes from Measure Q. You can read its full 20-year history here http://fotll.org/history/

In order to place a hold on the item(s) you want to rent, call OTLL at 510-597-5089 Thursday through Saturday, 10am – 1pm. There is sidewalk pickup on those same days and hours, at the library at 5205 Telegraph Ave.

Dear Hoot Fans—we are happy to invite you to our meeting on Wednesday, September 30^th at 7 p.m. We know it’s another Zoom meeting, but we have updates on our quest for a new home for our library and we want you to come hear and plan. Please join us using this Zoom link:  Friends of Piedmont Avenue Library   Meeting ID: 893 7498 4967 Passcode: FOPAL.   See you on the ‘net! 

A podcast I was listening to recently started off with the question, “What is the purpose of economics?” I think economics should have something to do with making life better for people. That podcast was about a new biography of John Maynard Keynes, the British economist who advocated for increased government expenditures and lower taxes to stimulate demand and strengthen the economy. That biography sounded interesting.

But even more interesting was the book I was reading at the time, The Anarchy by William Dalrymple. It’s a fascinating history of the East India Company, starting off when Shakespeare was in mid-career in the early 1600s, describing the formation of a joint stock company dedicated to international trade, whose mercantile activities gradually grew to include military combat with foreign competitors and Indian rulers all over the Asian sub-continent.

This was an international corporation unfettered by any meaningful government control for almost 200 years, with a private army, at its height, twice the size of Britain’s. The British government did not finally take over its military and governmental machinery until the middle of the 19^th century. When we think about economics in relation to modern multinational corporations, national and international politics, this story has something to tell us.

William Dalrymple is a superb writer, a dramatic storyteller, with strong opinions on the heroes and villains of this long colorful tale. He has lived in India most of his life and enriches his writing with source material in Persian, Urdu and other languages, providing a perspective rarely offered by European historians.

Dalrymple’s story of the First Anglo-Afghan War, “Return of a King”, was similarly enriched by non-European sources and written with a similar energy and excitement. I’ll never forget seeing Dalrymple presenting that book at the Mechanic’s Library, standing at the podium with a glass of red wine, painting a picture of a British scout, crouched in the hills of Afghanistan, spying on a caravan of Russian soldiers, sent by the Czar, at the beginning of The Great Game between Britain and Russia. He paused in the middle of this story, looked down to find his glass was empty. He asked, “Is there any more wine?” Someone scampered up with a bottle, refilled the glass, and he continued with his entrancing story. Dalrymple is my kind of writer.

With or without a glass of wine, red or otherwise, I think you’ll find this an exciting, often troubling, but always interesting tale, with a lot to tell us about the world we live in today.