088: As Others See Us by Goran Palm

088.7: Palm, Goran. As Others See Us. Translated by Verne Moberg. Indianapolis, IN: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1968. 242 pp.

Dewey Breakdown:

• 000: Computer science, information, and general works
• 080: General collections
• 088: General collections in Scandinavian languages
• 088.7: General collections in Swedish

Goran Palm may not be known to a lot of reader in the United States, but in Sweden, he has been ranked highly over the last four decades. He has won the Samfunder De Nio Grand Prize (1985), the Selma Lagerlof Prize (1998), and the Stig Dagerman Prize (2005) (just to name a few). His writings in Sweden have championed the causes of society equality, free speech, and literary activism. In As Others See Us, he forces the reader to view other countries at their level, almost taping your eyes open as a lowlight reel of social ills is projected in front of you.

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089: Best Loved Chinese Proverbs by Theodora Lau

089.951: Lau, Theodora with Kenneth and Laura Lau. Best-Loved Chinese Proverbs, 2^nd Ed. New York: Collins Reference, 2009. 154 pp. ISBN 978-0-06-172686-6.

Dewey Breakdown:

• 000: Computer Science, Knowledge, and General Works
• 080: General collections (Quotations)
• 089: General collections in Italic, Hellenic, or other languages
• +951: Chinese

The Lau family has brought together many, many Chinese proverbs in a slim volume entitled Best-Loved Chinese Proverbs. This short book organizes Chinese traditional sayings into thematic categories arranged alphabetically from those on ability to those on worry. There’s not much more to say here. It’s well put together and dutifully decorated. Some of the more obscure sayings have a small explanatory passage afterwards to help those confused by the proverb. Other than that, it’s a quick little missive you can enjoy in small bites or read in an hour or two. Here are a few of my favorite proverbs:

083: The Words of Albert Schweitzer by Albert Schweitzer

083.1: Schweitzer, Albert. The Words of Albert Schweitzer. Selected and edited by Norman Cousins. New York: Newmarket Press, 1984. 96 pp. ISBN 0-937858-41-2.

Dewey Construction:

• 000: Computer Science, Information, and General Works
• 080: General Collections
• 083: General collections in other Germanic languages
• 083.1: General collections in German

[This book was so short that I finished it in about an hour, so I thought I’d treat you to another review today.]

When you first come upon the “general collections” division in the Dewey (080s), it’s a bit confusing. The classification note for 080 reads as such: “Class here abstracts, addresses, lectures, essays, interviews, graffiti, [and] quotations.” This means that books that are just a collection of any of those things get sorted here. Since today’s subject—Albert Schweitzer—originally wrote in German and since it is a collections of quotations and an excerpt from a speech, the only place to fit this volume is in 083.