Review of "Black Belt Librarians: Every Librarian's Real World Guide To A Safer Workplace." on 'Storygraph'
2 stars
Since this book is so short, I kept a running tab of comments as they occurred to me. This is what I came up with, and the accompanying page numbers:
2: Why the alphabet is in alphabetical order is not a stupid question. For that matter, if there is any profession where the idea of a stupid question shouldn't exist, it's Teacher, closely followed by Librarian.
16: Who is Lash Larue? If he died 20 odd years ago and hasn't really been around since the 50's, why would you use him as an example? Especially as an example of an immature person.
17: If "expressing yourself in written form" is so important for security personnel, why are there so many grammatical errors in this book?
35: "D and F students... roaming the hills"? Even I find that offensive in this context, and I always had good grades in school. Granted, …
Since this book is so short, I kept a running tab of comments as they occurred to me. This is what I came up with, and the accompanying page numbers:
2: Why the alphabet is in alphabetical order is not a stupid question. For that matter, if there is any profession where the idea of a stupid question shouldn't exist, it's Teacher, closely followed by Librarian.
16: Who is Lash Larue? If he died 20 odd years ago and hasn't really been around since the 50's, why would you use him as an example? Especially as an example of an immature person.
17: If "expressing yourself in written form" is so important for security personnel, why are there so many grammatical errors in this book?
35: "D and F students... roaming the hills"? Even I find that offensive in this context, and I always had good grades in school. Granted, it would have been funny somewhere/when else. At least, I hope it was meant to be funny.
Page 37-8: These canned empathetic responses are so obvious, I can only imagine patrons becoming more frustrated.
39: "wee little ego"? I'm not critical of Graham's word choice, I'm perplexed by it.
45: "belt clips are also perfect for the male staff". I know this came out way back when in 2006, but I'm pretty sure that women have been allowed to wear pants since then.
57: The "About the Author" section calls him a guru. That's never a good sign.
Well, those were my ill-conceived, on the fly, knee-jerk reactions while reading this book. In general, I think the book is mostly filled with good ideas. But I also think you would be hard pressed to find a librarian who was surprised by any if them. Like most "gurus", his advice boils down to doing things you would already be doing anyway, were it not for some difficulty the guru typically doesn't mention. Like money. Or staff you can actually expect this level of competency from, and who aren't mostly volunteers.