Lobbying for Libraries and the Public's Access to Government Information: An Insider's View by Bernadine E. Abbott- Hoduski. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003. 289 pp. ISBN 0- Ready to play Beltway ball? Whether we’re taking on the Hill—Capitol Hill, that is—on behalf of access to government information or whether we’re marching down to town hall to secure our acquisition budget, Lobbying for Libraries is the librarian primer for influencing politicians and advancing our causes. In this “Insider’s View,” Bernadine E. Abbott-Hoduski—the founder of the American Library Association’s Government Documents Roundtable—details effective tools for librarians to: finagle funding and resources, design a legislative bill, communicate with policymakers, and influence public policy at the local, state, or federal level. Abbott-Hoduski appears to have done all this and more with style and effectiveness throughout her twenty-plus year career lobbying for access to government documents in Washington D.C., mostly in her role as a staff member for the U.S. Congress Joint Committee on Printing. For many of us librarians, however, the intersection of library and government is a controversial or even disparaged space; nevertheless, we can no longer afford to avoid it. Our resistance to politicking may emanate from some personal “culturally-induced bias against the whole messy business of politics” (Beckerman, 1996, p. 24). More significantly, our reluctance may emerge from our best efforts to uphold the essential library mission of confidentially and impartially providing information about a range of topics from a variety of perspectives—a tenet that could yield dramatic benefits during eras of political witch-hunts. 1 Institutional relations between libraries and political bodies seem to jeopardize— if not contradict—our core principle of impartiality. The true contradiction of working inside the political Machine comes not from any compromise of our ethic, but from our belief that libraries are inherently apolitical and that impartiality is always viable. Libraries are founded first upon a political infrastructure that casts these institutions as democratic spaces: The public library is a means of democratic progress precisely because of its relationship to books and reading. It provides free access, without regard to personal or social characteristics of library users, to sources of value and knowledge as a means of enhancing individual progress toward “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” In addition, it serves as a source of knowledge for the informed citizenry on whom the fate of responsible democracy rests (Raber, 1997, p. 67).