I flew to Princeton, New Jersey a year ago and found only one bookstore, actually I found two, but one of them was permanently closed. The one I did find was in a basement with so few books I could count them. When I asked a bored clerk if he had any books to recommend, he curtly said “no” and turned away. What a jerk! I thought that Princeton would be like Cambridge or Berkeley, spilling over with new and used bookstores. What a disappointment.
I did buy my daughter a Princeton sweatshirt, which she was wearing several months later while eating lunch in a remote village in Peru. A woman approached us and said she had just moved to Princeton and asked if we lived there. I explained that I only visited, and we immediately launched into a conversation about my amazement at the absence of bookstores. It was one of her disappointments in moving, she said. Her previous town had a wonderful bookstore, but there was nothing in Princeton.
But the Princeton trip wasn’t a total book failure. I visited the college bookstore, and while every end cap had a sign for “staff recommendations,” most were empty, and the selection was sparse. I talked with the lone employee who recommended Sen. Kerry’s latest book, but since I was still irritated with him from the 2004 election, I told the clerk I wasn’t interested. Then, with a shrug, he pointed out the new book by Anne-Marie Slaughter, the dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, called The Idea That Is America. The book discusses whether or not our founding principles match our foreign policy actions: it is an inoffensive, non-ideological, thoughtful book. A few months later I invited several people, both conservatives and liberals, to meet to discuss it, and we were able to talk about various issues without spewing, sputtering or raising our voices. We should require all our representatives to read it and behave similarly.
Tags: New Jersey, New Jersey bookstore, Princeton, Princeton bookstore
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