This Best of All Possible Worlds

   If Doctor Pangloss, the esteemed mentor to the young Candide, were alive today he would be a best selling author of self-help books and a fixture of the talk show circuit.  How could it be otherwise?  He taught that this is the best of all possible worlds and therefore anything that happens here must of necessity happen for the best.  Why were noses created?  Why, to prop up our eye glasses of course!
  We meet the good doctor in Voltaire's novella Candide http://catalog.plsinfo.org/record=b1075093~S1  during the course of which the hero of our title meets war, treachery, the great Lisbon earthquake, and the Inquisition, and all this before he even leaves Europe.  It's a delightful read by the Enlightenment's most brilliant and witty philosopher (in this case "witty philosopher" is not an oxymoron).  This book inspired Leonard Bernstein to write a Candide http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=422-yb8TXj8
opera overture which is one of my favorite pieces of music.
  An electronic copy of Candide is available from the Open Library http://openlibrary.org/.  In one format or another give it a try.  It's all for the best!

Joe Toschik is a Public Services Librarian at Half Moon Bay Library