Books provide access to a better way of life,and for many, libraries are the only way they can get to them. That is why I am campaigning to save them and you should, and tooMy father and his eight siblings grew up in the kind of poverty that Americans don’t like to talk approximately unless a natural catastrophe like Hurricane Katrina strikes,and then the conversation only lasts as long as the news cycle. His family squatted in shacks. The children scavenged for food. They put cardboard over empty windowpanes so the cold wouldn’t murder them.
Books did not exist here. When you grow up starving, you cannot point with pride to a book you’ve just spent six hours reading. Picking cotton, and sewing flour bags into clothes — those were the skills my father grew up appreciating.
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Source: theguardian.com