On Books: Why some fail
By Scott Eyman

Palm Beach Post Books Editor

Sunday, April 30, 2006

I thought I'd share a hilarious story that ran in the London Guardian. Basically, a reporter went around asking various publishers about books they published last year that for one reason or other lay down and died.

A common reason was a lack of reviews, for publishing is a review-driven business.

Frankly, some of the books struck me as extreme long shots under any circumstances. One, titled London Born, was dictated by an author who was illiterate. "We had great hopes for this," said the publisher, "but sold only 1,200 copies. I don't know why it didn't work."

Then there was the publisher of Profile books, who bewailed the demise of Rich Cohen's The Record Men, about Chess Records. "It did nothing, selling just under 2,000 copies."

Why?

"We did a crap job."

Finally, a publisher who tells the truth.

Natasha and Pierre...

Say this for Tolstoy: He had confidence in his powers.

Viking's new translation of War and Peace by Anthony Briggs seems to get to the considerably elaborated point a little faster than previous translations — I've only made it all the way through the Rosemary Edmonds translation, which dates from the 1950s. Viking has packaged the book in attractive hard covers, and included some scholarly apparati in the back of the book: a note from the translator, notes on the battles dramatized in the book, an afterword by Orlando Figes and some textual notes, as well.

There is also a listing of summaries of the chapters that reads like something Woody Allen might have written for The New Yorker. Volume III, Chapter 16: "Natasha's illness. The absurd and expensive ministrations of doctors.

"Chapter 17. Natasha and Pierre. She takes communion. A slight improvement."

Quote Unquote...

"What obsesses a writer starting out on a lifetime's work is the panic-stricken search for a voice of his own."

— John Mortimer


On Books: Why some fail

The endangered joy of serendipity
The modern world makes it harder to discover what you didn't know you were looking for
WILLIAM MCKEEN, SPECIAL TO THE TIMES
Published March 26, 2006

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There's an art to finding something when you're not looking for it.

In my freshman class at the University of Florida, I require the 240 students to subscribe to the New York Times Monday through Friday. I haven't even finished announcing this in class the first day, when the hands shoot up. "Can't we just read it online?" they ask, the duh? implicit.

"No," I say and the eyes roll. They think I'm some mossback who hasn't embraced new media.

"Why not?" Challenging, surly, chips on the shoulders.

"Because then you would only find what you're looking for." Appropriately weird, elliptical, professor-like response.

I'm just doing my job: being baffling and obtuse, trying to make people think. By the end of the semester, I hope they get it. An online "front page" offers maybe a half-dozen stories and teasers for a few more - all in all, a poor substitute for the splendor of a good daily newspaper. Readers need someone to sift through the news and decide what's significant enough to go on the front page. That's how editors earn their big bucks. But it's the other stories, the secret stash in the business section, the sports section or on the obituary page, that stop you and make you read.

Nuance gives life its richness and value and context. If I tell the students to read the business news and they try to plug into it online, they wouldn't enjoy the discovery of turning the page and being surprised. They didn't know they would be interested in the corporate culture of Southwest Airlines, for example. They just happened across that article. As a result, they learned something - through serendipity.

Serendipity is a historian's best friend and the biggest part of the rush that is the daily magic of discovery. It's one of those small things that make life worth living, despite all the torment, pain, tragedy and stifling Interstate traffic.

Serendipity is defined as the ability to make fortunate discoveries accidentally. There's so much of modern life that makes it preferable to the vaunted good old days - better hygiene products and power steering leap to mind - but in these disposable days of now and the future, the concept of serendipity is endangered.

Think about the library. Do people browse anymore? We have become such a directed people. We can target what we want, thanks to the Internet. Put a couple of key words into a search engine and you find - with an irritating hit or miss here and there - exactly what you're looking for. It's efficient, but dull. You miss the time-consuming but enriching act of looking through shelves, of pulling down a book because the title interests you, or the binding. Inside, the book might be a loser, a waste of the effort and calories it took to remove it from its place and then return. Or it might be a dark chest of wonders, a life-changing first step into another world, something to lead your life down a path you didn't know was there. Same thing goes with bookstores. We can shop online so easily, but there's still the shipping thing for those of us who are impatient, and so a lot of bookstore traffic is made up of those who can't wait for UPS. Or heck - maybe it's the coffee. Those modern book supermarkets bring coffee and pastries into the equation, something Amazon.com hasn't quite figured out how to duplicate, though I suspect they're working on it.

It's all about time. So many inventions save us time - whether it's looking for information, shopping for clothes try www.llbean.com) or checking what's on television. Time is saved, but quality is lost. When you know what you want - or think you do - you lose the adventure of discovery, of finding something for yourself.

In another context, Thomas Paine once wrote: "The harder the conquest, the more glorious the triumph. 'Tis dearness only that gives everything its value." Too true, Tom. You may have been talking about the struggle for basic human rights and maybe I'm talking about sorting through the bargain table for boxer shorts that don't ride up and instead finding socks with Stratocasters embroidered on the ankle, but we are on the same philosophical page. Looking for something and being surprised by what you find - even if it's not what you set out looking for - is one of life's great pleasures, and so far no software exists that can duplicate that experience.

Technology undercuts serendipity. It makes it possible to direct our energies all in the name of saving time. Ironically, though, it seems that we are losing time - the meaningful time we once used to indulge ourselves in the related pleasures of search and discovery. We're efficient, but empty.

Except for matters of life and death - and shopping at Wal-Mart - there's an emptiness in finding something quickly. (We all want to minimize time in Wal-Mart, don't we? Life is too short to spend too many of its precious moments in that particular hell.)

Serendipity has enriched my life intellectually and emotionally. It's even stepped in and surprised me, giving my career new trajectories. Years ago, when I was a part-time Ph.D. student, writing a historical dissertation on campus riots after the Kent State shootings, I was focusing on a particular antiwar demonstration at the University of Oklahoma. Interviewing my sources nearly 20 years after, I found some of their recollections sharp and others uncertain. I was talking this over with a couple of friends when our conversation was interrupted by a rarely seen colleague who happened to drop into the lounge at that moment. "Say," he said. "Excuse me for interrupting, but that riot you're talking about - did anyone tell you that I filmed it?"

And indeed he had, as a young photojournalist. He gave me a copy of his film, and it confirmed those memories and gave me a sense of the scope of the event. (Modern historians are a lucky tribe. What if Edward Gibbon had a home video of Caesar's assassination when he was writing The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? Maybe it wouldn't have taken him 12 years to finish the damn thing.)

Serendipity has continued to play a part in my work. A few years back, I got a publisher's contract for a book, Highway 61, to be based on a long road trip I planned to make along the famous highway that runs from from the Canadian border to the French Quarter. I kept meaning to spend the months before the trip doing research, getting prepared, efficiently setting up interviews with people along the road. But life intervened. I was busy with work and falling in love. So when my grown son and I hit the road with no plan at all, I was terrified. What if nothing happened? What would I write about? We took our free-fall trip, following the path of the Mississippi River, and serendipity intervened. People walked up and introduced themselves, as if part of a cast of lunatics required in the telling of a good road story. And the plot also presented itself, quite by accident: a long-distance divorced father helping his son bid goodbye to childhood. We were both a little startled by the moments of truth we shared in the front seat.

We made another discovery on that trip. The world of music - a world so important to both of us - suffers from a lack of serendipity. My son is a member of the download generation, which finds its music online. I grew up in a world dominated by that great and subversive force of the 20th century: radio. Fifty years ago, when we were just beginning to cast off the elements of American apartheid, it was relatively easy for our society to enforce racial barriers - separate schools, separate stores, separate neighborhoods. But the music that traveled in the air, via radio waves, did not observe Jim Crow boundaries. White kids, alone in their rooms, tuned their radios at night and heard the music of black America. Black kids found The Grand Ole Opry and learned for themselves about that old, weird America.

The result in my childhood was a serendipitous exposure to music that no amount of downloading can duplicate. As a kid, I'd turn on the radio and hear Frank Sinatra, followed by James Brown, followed by the Beatles, followed by the Supremes - and lots of other people. Music could astonish me. But now, with downloading, it has lost that ability. We miss the element of the chance encounter with musical genius. We have to be told of such genius or hear about it second-hand. One effect is that it's balkanized the audience. We don't have the sense of community. My older children, in their 20s, envy my generation. "We'll never get to fall in love to the great music you had," my oldest daughter once told me.

It's an odd paradox. The audience today is larger and the choices are enormous - and yet more turns out to be less. We have hundreds of choices on television, but will we ever feel the moment of global community we felt staring at that box, watching a man named Armstrong walk upon the moon? Or will we ever, en masse, have a moment like that time the world met the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show? Will the world ever shed so many tears as we did watching the funeral of President Kennedy? We had three choices then and have 300 now. Likewise, in music: We are so formatted now that stations stratify the market, making it unlikely you will ever hear music you do not expect to hear.

The modern world is conspiring against serendipity. But we cannot blame technology. I've met this enemy, and it is us. We forget: We invented this stuff. We must lead technology, not allow technology to lead us. The world is a better and more cost-effective place because of technology, but we've lost the imperfections inherent in humanity - the things that make life a messy and majestic catastrophe.

We must allow ourselves to be surprised. We must relearn how to be human, to start again as we did as children - learning through awkward and bungling discovery. Otherwise, when it's all over and we face the Distinguished Thing, we will have led extremely efficient but monstrously dull lives.

Some years back, Tom Wolfe came to my university and I hosted him for a week. I don't drop his name merely for effect (though it's only two syllables and shouldn't hurt much). It's just that I'll never forget something he told me. On the last night of his visit, we found ourselves alone together at dinner, talking about our children. Though he's 20 years older than me, we were at the same stage: ushering our children into adulthood. I told him that I didn't really understand the profound depth of love until I became a father. And he said that he had married late (at 50) and had children soon after. He said, "And I think, "My God, I could have missed this.' They opened up a door in my heart that I didn't even know was there."

And I realize that serendipity has also been lost in matters of the heart. Now, we plug a list of characteristics into a Web page in search of our True Love. We no longer allow for the chance encounter at the bookstore (we're shopping online, remember?) or sitting next to someone new in church or simply looking into someone else's eyes and feeling the eureka of discovery. We check off the qualities of this idealized other half, as if ordering from a Chinese menu. Matchmaking Web sites have replaced human conversation. (I tried the online thing once, and all I got in return was a stalker. She even wore camouflage.)

Not long after that conversation with Tom Wolfe, a door opened in my heart. I was living my dull, directed and orderly divorced-guy life and one day looked up and was struck by the thunderhammer of love. I wasn't looking for her, but I found her. I had long since given up on the concept of remarriage. Yet, five years later, I am remarried and I am again waist-deep in the adventure of fatherhood. I now have a messy, aggravating and utterly inefficient life - and every day is a bouquet of surprises. I wake each morning, put on my socks and shoes, and face a new day of wonder and discovery. Why deny or refuse such a gift? If I had been looking for it, I would not have found it. It was serendipity, that ability to make fortunate discoveries accidentally, that opened that door in my heart.

And to think: I could have missed this.

William McKeen is chairman of the University of Florida department of journalism.

Yes, I have a lot of books. No, you can't borrow one
WIT'S END
ROBERT MCNEIL

WHO read all the books? Not, I hope, the same person who ate all the pies. Unlike pies, books are meant to be good for you but I think mine are killing me. Well, that's an exaggeration. They're just giving me the occasional duffing up.

Can't blame them really. They've been neglected. I love them still, but have nowhere to put them and don't spend enough time with them any more.

Most of my late teens, twenties and thirties were spent reading and writing. Now, I'm lucky if I get three pages read in bed last thing at night when I drop off after a huge dram and a vanilla slice (crumbs from which will often irritate me in the night).

I have tried, recently, to make more of an effort. "Make time for reading" was once an excellent slogan put out by Edinburgh's libraries. I don't watch much television, beyond football and repeats of Are You Being Served?, and I rarely go on the internet, which strikes me as a paradise for cranks, bullies and perverts. Even so, I still don't like it.

It's not that I've a limited attention span but ... I've forgotten what I was just going to say. No: it's not that I've a limited attention span - didn't I just say that? - it's that I buy too many books. I want to have them all, except perhaps Oprah Winfrey's Guide to the Cosmos.

I love Edinburgh's second-hand bookshops, and will happily browse in them until told to leave. I always feel obliged to buy something, too, being one of those sad sorts who believe that, once you've crossed a shop's portal, you're contractually obliged to purchase something. How I regret the day I inadvertently blundered into Leather and Lace (though that codpiece did eventually make an excellent cloot).

But I will also visit Waterstone's, endlessly being conned into buying three for the price of two: "I'll have Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, please. And The Trial by Franz Kafka. And, er, The Viz Book of Humungous Hooters." And, on the few occasions I wander on to the internet now, I shop like billy-oh at Amazon, not to mention Abebooks (first-class second-hand site).

I just can't resist buying books. I go out for trousers, I come back with books. I go out for a wardrobe, I come back with books. I go out for books, I come back with a hatstand. You know how it is.

And so the books pile up. The desk in front of me, as I write, groans with higgledy-piggledy piles of reference books and dictionaries. At least I don't have to read these from start to finish. Indeed, I rarely see any book through to the end in one go, without starting half a dozen others in the meantime. It is the restless mind, the questing head, the imperial imagination. One thinks: "There must be something out there that will mean something, cheer me up or make everything seem clear." But, as you get older, you realise this ain't going to happen. Tolkien comes closest, but everybody reads him in their teens, and it's all downhill thereafter. Eventually, you just read for diversion or occasional strokes of beauty.

I've bookmarks in around 250 books. The main ones I'm flirting with at the moment are Saint's Getaway by Leslie Charteris (wonderfully arch writer), Traditions of Trinity and Leith by Joyce M Wallace, Overcoming Social Anxiety and Shyness, The Miss Marple Omnibus, Nature Cure by Richard Mabey, and Rubicon by Tom Holland. I've also lined up Sebastian Faulks's Birdsong, Manda Scott's Boudica and Allan Guthrie's Two-Way Split; oh, and I've just started my regular re-reading of The Hobbit.

The last books I finished were Boris Johnson's Seventy-Two Virgins and, before that, Who Will Comfort Toffle?, a Moomin picture book by Tove Jansson.

Surprisingly, one of these books is contemporary. Generally, it takes years for a book to settle and mature before I'll buy it, and I never believe these end-of-year newspaper features where famous people lie about all the recently published books they've allegedly just read.

I should get rid of some more books (I did offload some obscure ones recently), but it goes against the grain. I don't even loan them out, as people never return them. The refusal may offend, but these books have my name in them and a little shorthand note of where I bought them. Sometimes, if they were a real find in a second-hand shop, the whole day comes back to me. How dare borrowers take that away from me and ruin my entire life!

I've lugged my books in scores of boxes through a dozen different flittings. I'm not giving up on them now. Not for all the hatstands in the world.



Scotsman.com Living - Books - Yes, I have a lot of books. No, you can't borrow one

Publisher spurns Harvard sophomore apology

HILLEL ITALIE
Associated Press

NEW YORK - Teenage author Kaavya Viswanathan has acknowledged taking material from fellow novelist Megan McCafferty, but says the borrowing was an accident. McCafferty's publisher doesn't believe her.

"We think there are simply too many instances of `borrowing' for this to have been unintentional," Steve Ross, senior vice president and publisher of the Crown Publishing Group, told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

Viswanathan's publisher, Little, Brown and Company, issued a statement later Tuesday, defending the author.

"We do believe Kaavya. She has apologized, publicly and profusely, for any difficulties that may have come from her actions," Little, Brown publisher Michael Pietsch said in the statement. "We believe that this is an unfortunate but honest mistake, and we intend to give Ms. Viswanathan every opportunity to correct the situation."

Viswanathan, a 19-year-old sophomore at Harvard University, was just 17 when she signed a reported six-figure, two-book deal with Little, Brown. Her first novel, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life," came out in March to widespread publicity. DreamWorks has already acquired film rights.

But readers of McCafferty who had read Viswanathan spotted similarities to McCafferty's books, which include "Sloppy Firsts" and "Second Helpings," and alerted McCafferty, who in turn notified her publisher. Examples of questionable passages were published Sunday on the Web site of the Harvard Crimson.

Viswanathan released a statement Monday apologizing for her borrowings, saying that she was a "huge fan" of McCafferty and "wasn't aware of how much I may have internalized Ms. McCafferty's words." She promised to revise her book, a process Little, Brown says has already started.

Ross said lawyers representing the two publishers have been discussing the controversy and suggested that Little, Brown pull the novel until changes have been made. But Pietsch said that while the publisher would not reprint any more copies of the current version, there were no plans to withdraw it.

"She will revise her novel to remove any inappropriate similarities, and we will reissue it with those changes at the earliest opportunity," said Pietsch, who has previously acknowledged that several weeks will be needed just to print the new copies.

Viswanathan's novel tells the story of Opal, a hard-driving teen from New Jersey who earns straight A's in high school but who gets rejected from Harvard because she forgot to have a social life. Opal's father concocts a plan code-named HOWGAL (How Opal Will Get A Life) to get her past the admissions office.

McCafferty's books follow a heroine named Jessica, a New Jersey girl who excels in high school but struggles with her identity and longs for a boyfriend. McCafferty is a former editor at Cosmopolitan

In a recent interview with The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J., Viswanathan was asked about books that might have influenced her novel. "Nothing I read gave me the inspiration," she responded.

On Tuesday, Crown issued a statement saying that Viswanathan's apology was "deeply troubling and disingenuous.

"We have documented more than 40 passages from Kaavya Viswanathan's recent publication ... that contain identical language and/or common scene or dialogue structure from Megan McCafferty's first two books. This extensive taking from Ms. McCafferty's books is nothing less than an act of literary identity theft."

Little, Brown gave Viswanathan's novel a first printing of 100,000, the publisher said. According to Crown, McCafferty's books have more than 400,000 copies in print. Her third novel, "Charmed Thirds," was released two weeks ago.

"This has been an enormous distraction for Megan," Ross said. "It's been a very, very difficult and devastating couple of weeks for her."


AP Wire | 04/25/2006 | Publisher spurns Harvard sophomore apology

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"That's my calling," she [Meg Cabot] says. "To put the blowjob back in literature."

Collecting lust

The 46th annual New York Antiquarian Book Fair opens today. Among the shelves of rare first editions and bespectacled booksellers, writer and would-be collector Eve Claxton discovers, to her surprise, a distinct whiff of glamour

Eve Claxton
Friday April 21, 2006

Guardian Unlimited

It started 15 years ago when I was an English student, scouring the university secondhand bookshop for the gem-coloured spines of a series of poetry books first published by Penguin in the 1960s. Although they cost just a few pounds each, there was something alluringly addictive about collecting these paperbacks with their lovely covers. Although I now own over 50 of them, I've worked out that I'll need twice that number to complete my collection. I think I'll find it difficult to go to my grave without doing so.
Since moving from England to New York, where my secondhand Penguins appear only very rarely, the search has become all the more enticing. Still, it's not the quest for missing volumes that will compel me to join the multitudes of book collectors at the 46th annual New York Antiquarian Book Fair this weekend. The vendors who pitch their stalls here are mostly selling the kinds of books I can't hope to afford - rare first editions, inscribed copies, ancient manuscripts and literary ephemera often at extraordinarily prohibitive prices. But none of that precludes an innocent spectator's pleasure.

The fair - the oldest in the country - lures nearly 200 booksellers from across the US and around the world to the Park Avenue Seventh Regiment Armory, an imposing red-brick building often used for art fairs, that occupies an entire square block of the Upper East Side. If you can spare a long afternoon, there's no more engrossing pursuit than roaming between the bookseller's stalls, marvelling at the various offerings and wondering if the man asking questions about the autographed first edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (a treasure from last year's fair) is a serious collector or just a fellow ogler.

Although the equivalent fairs in London and California are important fixtures in the booklover's calendar, there's something about New York that inspires an additional fondness and excitement in sellers and clients alike. "This is the fair that, for whatever reason, has the most buzz to it," explains Kevin Kelly, a dealer with JN Bartfield Rare Books and, at 34, one of the fair's younger vendors. "It's where you'll find the biggest concentration of clients and dealers. What happens is that that booksellers tend to save up their best material to showcase in New York."

By way of example, Bartfield's prize specimens this year will include a 1685 fourth folio of Shakespeare's plays, priced in six figures. Other coveted editions on offer include first printings of Jane Austen's Emma and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a leaf of a manuscript for a duet in the hand of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and a printer's proof of On the Road by Jack Kerouac (all of which, needless to say, will set you back several thousands). At the other end of the scale, it is possible to seek out books for under $100, if you're in the market for, say, a first edition of Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities. (In a bid to encourage those with lighter wallets, the fair's organizers are offering a reduced entrance fee to the under-30s.)

Although the phrase "antiquarian book fair" - even one usually ranked as the best in the world - doesn't immediately call to mind the word "glamorous", this year's gathering was given a decidedly more fashionable edge thanks to its opening night party which took place last night. The evening, which benefits the New York Public Library, attracted the kind of fabulous crowd not usually associated with the typically tweedy world of rare book collecting. Event designer David E Monn, better known for creating the extravagant annual Costume Institute ball at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, transformed a corner of the otherwise barebones Armory space into a luxurious "private library", its walls lined with 5,000 rare books. Bespectacled booksellers mingled with gilded New York society types in one of the pleasing clashes of culture that the city so regularly offers.

And rumour has it that collecting is acquiring a more youthful and dashing image of late, at least in New York. Last month's American Vogue described out-of-print book collecting as "all the rage"; you can buy stunning copies of rare and elegant fashion and art books on the top floor of the fancy Manhattan department store Bergdorf Goodman; The Core Club, a new private members club, recently unveiled a members' library filled with signed copies and first editions of literary classics (the collection was assembled by the young literary editor Lea Carpenter, who also co-chaired the opening night of the fair.) In New York, the much-discussed demise of the book in the digital age seems only to be stimulating bibliophilia.

Dealer John McWhinnie, an erudite 38-year-old who runs an uptown book gallery, notes that modern literary editions and photography monographs have doubled in price over the past two or three years. He's at pains to point out, however, that rare book collecting is a very different pursuit from the kind of status-buying that usually goes on in the world of New York art or fashion. "Books tend to be the most personal of collections," he explains. "Someone who buys a book, even a priceless one, is likely to do so because of an intimate connection with that author or work, not because it's a trophy to be displayed."

Does this mean that collectors of expensive books are motivated by the same basic desires as someone who buys sets of cheap paperbacks, for instance? "Most serious collectors buy for love, not investment," McWhinnie agrees. "It's rare that a client will want to resell a book, even when its value has increased considerably." This much I understand. My paperbacks may be almost worthless in monetary terms, but even so, they're probably still the first things I'd save in case of a fire.

· The 46th annual New York Antiquarian Book Fair, sponsored by the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America, runs from April 21-23 at the Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Avenue.

· Eve Claxton is the editor of The Book of Life: A Compendium of the Best Autobiographical and Memoir Writing published by Ebury Press


Guardian Unlimited Books | By genre | Collecting lust

Pithy thoughts on writers & success from the BookBitch...

How to Tell if You Are a Newbie, AKA, Struggling New Writer:

1. You're self-published.

2. You found an agent but still received enough rejection letters to wallpaper your bathroom.

3. Your agent got you published, one book only, with a small publisher that is so new, no one ever heard of it.

4. Your agent got you a contract for one or possibly two books, although after publication of the first book this may push you over the line. (see line below)

5. You can't quit your day job and live off your royalties.


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How to Tell if You Are an Experienced, Successful Author:

1. You have a reputable agent from a well respected agency.

2. You've had at least two books published by a major house - otherwise you can be a one-hit wonder like, say, Harper Lee.

3. You've been nominated for any award in your industry.

4. You've had your book selected for a TV book club.

5. Your income from your books is enough to live on so you can write full time.

BONUS THAT GOES WITHOUT SAYING: Oprah.

PULITZERS AWARDED

FICTION

March by Geraldine Brooks (Viking)


HISTORY

Polio: An American Story by David M. Oshinsky (Oxford University Press)


BIOGRAPHY

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin (Alfred A. Knopf)


POETRY

Late Wife by Claudia Emerson (Louisiana State University Press)


GENERAL NON-FICTION

Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya by Caroline Elkins (Henry Holt)

culturebox
Michiko Kakutani
A critic with a fixation.By Ben Yagoda
Posted Monday, April 10, 2006, at 6:25 AM ET

Michiko Kakutani recently embarked on her 25th year as a New York Times book critic, and it's gotten to the point that when her name is mentioned in print, you can see the smoke rising from the page. The late Susan Sontag complained, "Her criticisms of my books are stupid and shallow and not to the point." Salman Rushdie referred to her as "a weird woman who seems to feel the need to alternately praise and spank." Most notoriously, last year Norman Mailer called Kakutani, who is of Japanese descent, a "one-woman kamikaze" and a "token" minority hire.

Those who rip her are usually authors she has ripped, and their indignation often muddies their logic. Certainly Mailer's insinuations, in addition to being boorish, are unsupportable. It should be clear to anyone who has read Kakutani's reviews that she has an estimable intelligence; she backs this up with what must be many real or virtual all-nighters in which she digests every word ever published by the writer under review. She takes books seriously, a valuable and ever-rarer trait. Furthermore, in my observation, she is more or less right in her judgments most of the time. (I slightly knew Kakutani when we were undergraduates at Yale about 30 years ago but have not spoken to her since.)

But the sour-grapes sniping from spurned authors should not obscure the fact that Kakutani is a profoundly uninteresting critic. Her main weakness is her evaluation fixation. This may seem an odd complaint—the job is called critic, after all—but in fact, whether a work is good or bad is just one of the many things to be said about it, and usually far from the most important or compelling. Great critics' bad calls are retrospectively forgiven or ignored: Pauline Kael is still read with pleasure even though no one still agrees (if anyone ever did) that Last Tango in Paris and Nashville are the cinematic equivalents of "The Rite of Spring" and Anna Karenina. Kakutani doesn't offer the stylistic flair, the wit, or the insight one gets from Kael and other first-rate critics; for her, the verdict is the only thing. One has the sense of her deciding roughly at Page 2 whether or not a book is worthy; reading the rest of it to gather evidence for her case; spending some quality time with the Thesaurus; and then taking a large blunt hammer and pounding the message home.

That message is harsh an awful lot of the time, and publishing folk commonly complain that Kakutani is too hard to please. It's true that the pleasure she appears to take in hurling a voluminous stream of harsh epithets at each dead horse is a bit unseemly, and that her perennial frustration with writers gives her a prim, schoolmarmish air. But negativity has been a good career strategy for her: The citation on her 1998 Pulitzer Prize gave props to her "fearless and authoritative" judgments. And the bigger problem, once again, isn't the number or severity of the pans but the pan-rave mentality. She sometimes seems to be channeling Matthew Arnold, a titan of literature but not the best role model for a newspaper book critic. Arnold was the solemn Victorian who defined criticism as "the disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world" and believed "its business is to do this with inflexible honesty." Arnold compared every work that came across his desk to the "touchstones" that represented the highest standards. If something lacked "high seriousness" (as he felt of Chaucer's and Robert Burns' poetry), it got the inflexible honesty treatment.

Kakutani started her career as a reporter, and her reviews usually have a who-what-when-where news lede right up top that sums up the verdict. In the second paragraph of her review of Nick Hornby's latest novel, she calls it a "… maudlin bit of tripe. 'A Long Way Down' is utterly devoid of the wonderfully acute observations of pop culture that made the author's debut novel, 'High Fidelity' (1995), such a rollicking delight to read, and it is equally devoid of the sorts of savvy social and psychological insights that fueled his impassioned soccer memoir, 'Fever Pitch' (1994). Instead, this cringe-making excuse for a novel takes the sappy contrivances of his 2001 book, 'How to Be Good,' to an embarrassing new low."

I've read A Long Way Down, so let me use it as a case study and the passage just quoted as a case study of Kakutani's problems as a writer. Kakutani is right: The novel is far from "a rollicking delight," as she described his first book. (That characterization of High Fidelity, by the way, is an example of how Kakutani's prose is even flatter when it praises than when it buries.) But neither does A Long Way Down deserve to be called tripe. For Kakutani, there is no middle ground: a list of deficiencies, and a bit of plot summary, are all she has for us, and, lacking any other ideas or themes, she (characteristically) exaggerates the novel's faults. In her world, books tend to be masterpieces or rubbish; in the real one, they're almost always somewhere in between. She also (characteristically) sets up a bogus dichotomy between A Long Way Down and the "good" Hornby books. In fact, an artist's works almost always have more similarities than differences; if the disjuncture here were really as big as she claims, it should be the main subject of her review. The core question is how the current piece fits into the oeuvre, and we expect reflective reviews to address it. In this case, I'd be curious to see a critic consider Hornby's oft-stated and almost obsessive pledge to write books that are entertaining and ultimately uplifting—and how such a project could be expected eventually to encounter artistic and philosophical difficulties.

You'd want this Platonic critic to touch on other stuff, too. He or she could share some insights about the nature of novels written in dramatic monologues, or novels about suicide, or novels, or art, or life. Kakutani's refusal ever to take her eyes off the thumbs up/thumbs down prize, or to lay any of her own prejudices, tastes, or tangentially relevant observations on the table, is dispiriting. One of her favorite gimmicks for ducking subjectivity is to invoke the supposed reactions of "the reader" to a book. This is a rather underhanded device with a tweedy scent of 1940s and '50s arbiters like Lionel Trilling and Clifton Fadiman—and it's a perfect emblem of the way Kakutani muffles her own voice by hiding behind a mask. But it provides the only fun I get from her reviews: First thing, I always hunt for "the reader" (whom I visualize as a kind of miniature androgynous Michelin man) the way I used to count the Ninas in a Hirschfeld drawing. Imagine my delight to come upon Kakutani's January review of Richard Reeves' President Reagan and find two successive sentences telling us that "the reader turns in eager anticipation" to the book because Reeves' previous works on Kennedy and Nixon gave "the reader minutely detailed accounts" of their presidencies.

As a student at Oxford, the future drama critic Kenneth Tynan got back a paper with this comment: "Keep a strict eye on eulogistic & dyslogistic adjectives—They shd diagnose (not merely blame) & distinguish (not merely praise.)" Tynan's tutor, who happened to be C.S. Lewis, was offering a lesson Kakutani could have benefited from. "Utterly devoid … wonderfully acute observations … debut novel … savvy social and psychological insights … cringe-making … embarrassing new low": Virtually every word or phrase is a cliché, or at best shopworn and lifeless, and evidence of Kakutani's solid tin ear. (She has justly been called out for her near-obsessive use of "lugubrious" and "limn," words that probably have never been said aloud in the history of English.) That's what can happen to a writer when she merely praises and merely blames. Kakutani appears incapable of engaging with language, either playfully or seriously, which puts her at a painful disadvantage when she is supposed to be evaluating writers who can and do. Here, she tries to energize the prose with lapel-grabbing intensifiers like utterly and wonderfully and superfluous adjectives like savvy and embarrassing, but they just make her look like she's protesting too much. (Another Lewis quote with relevance to Kakutani: "If we are not careful criticism may become a mere excuse for taking revenge on books whose smell we dislike by erecting our temperamental antipathies into pseudo-moral judgments.")

The qualities most glaringly missing from Kakutani's work are humor and wit. Maybe in an attempt to compensate, she writes one or two parody reviews a year: of a book about swinging London in the voice of Austin Powers, of a Bridget Jones book in the voice of Ally McBeal, of Benjamin Kunkel's novel Indecision in the voice of Holden Caulfield, of Truman Capote's recently discovered novella in the voice of Holly Golightly. Talk about cringe-making. They are so awful, from start to finish, that you cannot avert your eyes, much as you would like to.

The voice this reader would really like to hear in Michiko Kakutani's reviews is not a mock-Holly Golightly voice or the enervated (or prissy) voice of an enshrined critic, but Kakutani's own. Here's a modest suggestion on how to start: Just once, instead of describing what "the reader" expects, thinks, or does, she might try using the word "I."

Ben Yagoda is the author of The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing, and, forthcoming in October, If You Catch an Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech, for Better and/or Worse.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2139452/
Copyright 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

Connelly's Lt. Bosch Moonlights -- in Other Writers' Books

By TOM NOLAN
April 4, 2006; Page D8

Crime-fiction novelist Michael Connelly's many readers look forward to a new book involving his popular series-protagonist LAPD Lt. Hieronymous "Harry" Bosch every year or so. (The author alternates Harry Bosch titles with novels featuring other protagonists. The most recent Bosch book was 2005's "The Closers"; the next Bosch title, "Echo Park," is scheduled for publication in October.

But in February, alert Bosch-watchers were rewarded with a bonus glimpse of the fictional Southern California cop -- not in a Connelly work, but in another writer's novel.

On page nine of "Strange Bedfellows," Paula L. Woods's just-published fourth book about fictional LAPD homicide detective Charlotte Justice, the female cop-narrator catches a glimpse of "a curly-headed, mustachioed guy" in conversation with her boss in front of police headquarters and thinks: Surely her lieutenant "couldn't be trying to get Harry Bosch transferred back to Robbery-Homicide, not after that case he screwed up. Or maybe...Bosch can fill the spot...you'll be vacating if you don't get your act together."

"Charlotte is at a point in her own paranoia about her job," Ms. Woods explained recently, "that she's afraid that she could be replaced. And when that book takes place [in 1993], I knew that Harry had been bounced out of RHD; that was his back-story. So I thought, 'Wouldn't it be interesting if he happened to be there, and she saw him?'...Michael's character I think is so iconic...there was no way that people would say, 'Who's Harry Bosch?'...It's a way of paying homage to the writer."

This fleeting appearance of Mr. Connelly's hero is the latest in a small but growing series of Bosch-sightings in other writers' books. The conscientious, moody L.A. police detective (who debuted in the 1992 novel "The Black Echo") has been interacting briefly with fictional colleagues, it seems, since 2001, when Joe Gores, a Northern California writer, worked a reference to Harry Bosch into "Cons, Scams, and Grifts," one of his "DKA File" novels.

"I stuck him in," Mr. Gores recalled, "not really as a character. I just had my [Bay Area] guys say, 'Well we were talking with Harry Bosch down at the Hollywood station; there's a murder down there, and he's gonna look into it for us.'"

Mr. Gores got permission beforehand from Mr. Connelly for this cameo reference. "As far as I know," says Michael Connelly, now living in Florida, "that was the first time" another author made such use of his series lead. "Other times, I've just kind of heard about it....If it's happening, it's obviously a nice compliment. So, as far as I can tell, it's fine with me."

The most elaborate Bosch cameo yet was one in which Mr. Connelly himself participated. In 2003, when he and fellow detective-novelist Robert Crais each had books scheduled for publication at about the same time, the writers arranged for a Bosch appearance to be matched by a sighting of Elvis -- not Elvis Presley, but Mr. Crais's L.A. private-detective character Elvis Cole.

"The artful reader would recognize 'em," Mr. Connelly said, "because we think we have almost a hundred percent overlap in our audiences....So in my book 'Lost Light,' at one point Harry Bosch comes to a red light, and across the red light is a private detective he knows that's his neighbor, in the yellow Corvette; and they just kind of give each other the smooth-sailing signal.

"Then in Bob's book 'The Last Detective,' he had Elvis Cole taken to the Hollywood police station...and there he talks to another detective, unrelated to the case, who he knew was a Vietnam veteran; and he just gives a few descriptions that kind of made it clear, without naming him, that that was Harry Bosch."

Such overlappings of Bosch into other people's fiction seems an extension of a creative device Mr. Connelly himself employs on a grander scale. In the books of Michael Connelly (16, so far), major and minor characters from this or that series or stand-alone title wander in and out of one another's sagas all the time. The female-criminal lead of 1999's "Void Moon," for instance, has since been glimpsed in a couple of Harry Bosch novels. The journalist-sleuth of "The Poet" (1997) later played a part in one of Bosch's cases. And very sharp-eyed readers of the 2005 book "The Lincoln Lawyer" will spot that novel's eponymous attorney as the son of a man ID'ed long ago as the father of Harry Bosch.

"It's all part of the same canvas," is how Mr. Connelly describes the way his various books tie together. "The main character of all this is Harry Bosch, and his real name is Hieronymous Bosch; and the starting-point of all this was the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch," whose grotesque 15th-century visions find oblique parallels through Mr. Connelly's modern-day tales. In a Bosch picture, the author noted, there are "many different stories going on...but they're all part of the same painting....Things in one corner might not appear to be connected to something in the opposite corner; but when you step further back and see the painting as a whole, then it all fits together."

Adding yet another dimension to Harry Bosch's canvas are many real-life people -- police officers, judges, bookstore owners, art historians -- who make cameo appearances under their own names in Mr. Connelly's fiction.

"There's a couple things goin' on there," the author said of his use of actual folk in his made-up stories. "One is: It helps me write the books...because it's people I know....So I automatically know what they look like, and how they sound, and their postures, and all these things that help me visualize the scenes I'm writing about.

"A second aspect of it is that they're usually people that have been very helpful to me, and it's a way of saying thanks....I don't do it without telling them....In 'Lincoln Lawyer,' I used a judge and everyone in her courtroom, from her bailiff to her clerk to the stenographer; and so I sent the pages, I wanted them all to read it and sign off on it -- because I'm happy not to use their names if they don't want them used."

Mr. Connelly, before becoming a novelist, was for nearly a dozen years a crime reporter, first in Florida and then in Southern California. (A collection of his journalism, "Crime Beat: A Decade of Covering Cops and Killers," will be published this May.) In writing his fiction, he retains a journalist's urge to get the facts straight: "I try to be accurate about Los Angeles. Yes, I'm writing fictional stories; but I put them against a hard, factual surface. And that's not just getting the streets and the city right, but it's trying to get the politics of the police department right and so forth. So, yeah, it really comes out of my instinct as a journalist, I think."

But a novelist's instinct keeps him from using highly visible real-life figures in his fiction: "because if you get into well-known people -- it becomes something different." So when Harry Bosch and colleagues had cause in last year's "The Closers" to visit their department's chief (at one point, bringing him a cup of Starbucks coffee to induce quick access), Mr. Connelly borrowed real-life LAPD head Bill Bratton's Eastern accent ("De-paht-ment") but took pains to call his fictional character simply "the chief of police."

Nevertheless, while on a bookstore tour for the novel, Mr. Connelly got a surprise telephone call: "I'm not sure how he got my cellphone number, but -- it's Chief Bratton. And you know, I was careful not to use his name [in the book]; but he just went right by that, assuming that I was writing about him, and he said: 'You got everything right, except for one thing.' And I kind of braced myself; you know, was he upset about something?

"He said, 'I don't like Starbucks.'"

So the journalist-turned-novelist acquired another bit of true color he might someday add to his fictional L.A. canvas: "There's a little place up in Los Feliz, where he lives -- like, a Vietnamese doughnut shop. He goes there every morning to get coffee on the way in."

Mr. Nolan is the author of "Ross Macdonald: A Biography."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114410282299115781.html

Blooker Prizes: Best Books o' the Blogs and Web Sites

The Lulu Blooker Prizes, the first literary prize devoted to "blooks"--books based on blogs or Web sites--have been awarded in three categories, fiction, nonfiction and comics. There is also an overall winner. The awards are sponsored by Lulu, which makes POD books and an increasing number of blooks.

The overall winner and nonfiction winner is:

Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen by Julia Powell (Little, Brown, $23.95, 031610969X), who spent a year cooking all the recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Cory Doctorow, one of the judges, commented: "Julia & Julia does that amazing nonfiction trick of making you care about a subject through great storytelling, even if you don't care about the subject itself. Powell's heartfelt, funny, and occasionally obscene tell-all about her journey of self-discovery and cholesterol is by turns funny, shocking and delicious. Those who dismiss blogging as 'mere' confessional writing and complaining about one's day job fail to appreciate just how engrossing those genres can be when handled by a talented writer like Julie Powell. The story of how blogging--writing in public--changed Powell's life is inspirational and memorable."

Fiction winner:

Four and Twenty Blackbirds by Cherie Priest (Tor, $13.95, 0765313081). Judge Paul Jones said, "This blook captivated me with its gusto, its invocation of a dark South both in mountains and in swamp. Priest can tell a tale and she can write a sentence that competes with the best out there. Stephen King should be very afraid."

The comics winner:

Totally Boned: A Joe and Monkey Collection by Zach Miller (Lulu Press, $14.95, 1411671902). Doctorow observed: "Laugh-milk-through-your-nose funny comics aimed at an audience that could only be commercially viable through the Internet. Geeks are distributed in a thin Gaussian layer across the world, and while it might not make sense to put one copy of this in every bookstore in America, putting it online where all geeks can find it makes it into a smash success."

Celebrities List Favorite Books for 2006

By GLENN ADAMS
The Associated Press
Friday, March 31, 2006; 4:27 PM

GARDINER, Maine -- Gregg Allman acknowledges that he doesn't read as much as he should. But when a friend gave him a copy of "The Five People You Meet in Heaven," the rocker couldn't put it down.

"I've had it three days and am almost finished, at which time I plan to read it again," the singer and songwriter from The Allman Brothers Band told a retired Maine librarian who asked him what his favorite book is.

Allman joins actors, authors, politicians, a Supreme Court justice and a Harvard astrophysicist who responded to Glenna Nowell's queries for her annual "Who Reads What?" list in time for National Library Week, April 2-8.

Their responses ranged from the nice _ Rosalynn Carter's favorite is the Bible _ to the naughty: dirty joke books favored by writer Piers Anthony.

Nowell, a silver-haired retired librarian, started writing to celebrities in 1988 for her annual list. She searches the Internet for her eclectic collections of names, based on suggestions from friends and people who e-mail her.

A sizable share of responses come from writers, who are voracious readers by nature. A few contact Nowell out of the blue. Nowell tries to mix up her lists, getting people of all political parties and from varied backgrounds. She even seeks names that are scattered about the alphabet.

With an impish smile, she said she chose Allman because she wanted someone with a last name starting with A.

This year, she got responses from two Hollywood veterans: Jane Russell and Eva Marie Saint.

Russell, who played opposite Marilyn Monroe in the 1953 movie "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," looks to the heavens these days for her literary inspiration, citing "Hearing God" by Lory Basham Jones. While Saint, who won an Academy Award for her 1954 film debut in "On the Waterfront," lists "The Year of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion and "Elia Kazan: A Biography" by Richard Schickel, about the director of "On the Waterfront."

Many of the titles deal with more mainstream material. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg expressed her joy in reading a biography of a giant of the high court's past, "John Marshall: Definer of a Nation," by Jean Edward Smith. But she also recommends retired justice Sandra Day O'Connor and H. Alan Day's "The Lazy B," the story of a girl who grew up to become a Supreme Court justice.

Writer Sue Grafton was amused by the "dry and sly British observations" in Julian Fellowes' "Snobs." Writer Nadine Gordimer wrote that "In Search of Lost Time" by Marcel Proust, which she first read at age 15, "has been a revelation of human relationships and literary genius, all my life."

Medieval murder mystery writer Michael Jecks replied with a variety of favorites but found too little space to mention all of them.

"Yes, sadly there are so many good books that picking one or two is almost criminally shortsighted," the English writer wrote. Some of Jecks' favorites: "The Hobbit" by J.R.R Tolkien; "Pickwick Papers" by Charles Dickens and "The Day of the Jackal" by Frederick Forsyth.

Harvard University astrophysicist Margaret Geller, who sees the world from a truly universal perspective, is down to Earth in her choices for literature. Geller lists "The End of Poverty," Jeffrey Sachs' book about the possibilities for a poverty-free future, and "A Bed of Red Flowers: In Search of My Afghanistan" by Nelofer Pazira as her favorites.

Politicians often turn out to be eager readers, as evidenced by this year's list. New York Gov. George Pataki, who likes to end his day by reading biographies, historical volumes or best sellers, said he was engrossed in Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln." Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack recommends "The World Is Flat" by Thomas Friedman.

Over the years, two consistent favorites have been the Bible and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." Mark Twain's classic is one of three favorites listed this year by biographer Kitty Kelley, who also lists "Gentleman's Agreement" by Laura Hobson and "Strange Fruit" by Lillian Smith.

___

On the Net:

Gardiner Public Library: http://www.gpl.lib.me.us/



Celebrities List Favorite Books for 2006

The National Review 100

"Earlier this year, Random House announced that it would release a list of the 100 best non-fiction books of the century. The publisher had enjoyed success (and controversy) with its 100 best novels; now it would do this. Here at National Review, we decided to get a jump on them by forming our own panel and offering our own list. Under the leadership of our reporter John J. Miller, we have done so. We have used a methodology that approaches the scientific. But-certainly beyond, say, the first 40 books-the fact of the books' presence on the list is far more important than their rankings. We offer a comment from a panelist after many of the books; but the panel overall, not the individual quoted, is responsible for the ranking. So, here is our list, for your enjoyment, mortification, and stimulation."

THE PANEL:

Richard Brookhiser, NR senior editor
David Brooks, senior editor of The Weekly Standard
Christopher Caldwell, senior writer at The Weekly Standard
Robert Conquest, historian
David Gelernter, writer and computer scientist
George Gilder, writer
Mary Ann Glendon, professor at Harvard Law School
Jeffrey Hart, NR senior editor
Mark Helprin, novelist
Arthur Herman, author of The Idea of Decline in Western History
John Keegan, military historian
Michael Kelly, editor of National Journal
Florence King, author of Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady
Michael Lind, journalist and novelist
John Lukacs, historian
Adam Meyerson, vice president at the Heritage Foundation
Richard John Neuhaus, editor-in-chief of First Things
John O'Sullivan, NR editor-at-large
Richard Pipes, historian
Abigail Thernstrom, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute
Stephan Thernstrom, historian
James Q. Wilson, author of The Moral Sense.


1. Churchill, Winston S. The Second World War.
Brookhiser: "The big story of the century, told by its major hero."

2. Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I. The Gulag Archipelago.
Neuhaus: "Marked the absolute final turning point beyond which nobody could deny the evil of the Evil Empire."

3. Orwell, George. Homage to Catalonia.
Herman: "Orwell's masterpiece -- far superior to Animal Farm and 1984. No education in the meaning of the 20th century is complete without it."

4. Hayek, F. A. von. The Road to Serfdom.
Helprin: "Shatters the myth that the totalitarianisms 'of the Left' and 'of the Right' stem from differing impulses."

5. Orwell, George. Collected Essays.
King: "Every conservative's favorite liberal and every liberal's favorite conservative. This book has no enemies."

6. Popper, Karl. The Open Society and Its Enemies.
Herman: "The best work on political philosophy in the 20th century. Exposes totalitarianism's roots in Plato, Hegel, and Marx."

7. Lewis, C. S.. The Abolition of Man.
Brookhiser: "How modern philosophies drain meaning and the sacred from our lives."

8. Gasset, José Ortega y. Revolt of the Masses.
Gilder: "Prophesied the 20th century's debauchery of democracy and science, the barbarism of the specialist, and the inevitable fatuity of public opinion. Explained the genius of capitalist elites."

9. Hayek, F. A. von. The Constitution of Liberty.
O'Sullivan: "A great re-statement for this century of classical liberalism by its greatest modern exponent."

10. Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom.

11. Johnson, Paul. Modern Times.
Herman: "Huge impact outside the academy, dreaded and ignored inside it."

12. Oakeshott, Michael. Rationalism in Politics.
Herman: "Oakeshott is the 20th century's Edmund Burke."

13. Schumpeter, Joseph A.. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy.
Caldwell: "Locus classicus for the observation that democratic capitalism undermines itself through its very success."

14. Weber, Max. Economy and Society.
Lind: "Weber made permanent contributions to the understanding of society with his discussions of comparative religion, bureaucracy, charisma, and the distinctions among status, class, and party."

15. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Caldwell: "Through Nazism and Stalinism, looks at almost every pernicious trend in the last century's politics with stunning subtlety."

16. West, Rebecca. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.
Kelly: "For its writing, not for its historical accuracy."

17. Wilson, Edward O. Sociobiology.
Lind: "Darwin put humanity in its proper place in the animal kingdom. Wilson put human society there, too."

18. II, Pope John Paul. Centissimus Annus.

19. Cohn, Norman. The Pursuit of the Millennium.
Neuhaus: "The authoritative refutation of utopianism of the left, right, and points undetermined."

20. Frank, Anne. The Diary of a Young Girl.
Helprin: "An innocent's account of the greatest evil imaginable. The most powerful book of the century. Others may not agree. No matter, I cast my lot with this child."
Caldwell: "If one didn't know her fate, one might read it as the reflections of any girl. That one does know her fate makes this as close to a holy book as the century produced."

21. Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror.
Herman: "Documented for the first time the real record of Stalinism in the Soviet Union. A genuine monument of historical research and reconstruction, a true epic of evil."

22. Muggeridge, Malcolm. Chronicles of Wasted Time.
Gilder: "The best autobiography, Christian confession, and historic meditation of the century."

23. Einstein, Albert. Relativity.
Lind: "The most important physicist since Newton."

24. Chambers, Whittaker. Witness.
Caldwell: "Confession, history, potboiler -- by a man who writes like the literary giant we would know him as, had not Communism got him first."

25. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

26. Lewis, C. S.. Mere Christianity.
Neuhaus: "The most influential book of the most influential Christian apologist of the century."

27. Nisbet, Robert. The Quest for Community.

28. ed., 11th. Encyclopedia Britannica.
Helprin: "The infinite riches of the world, presented with elegance, confidence, and economy."

29. Mitchell, Joseph. Up in the Old Hotel.

30. Chesterton, G. K.. The Everlasting Man.
Lukacs: "A great carillonade of Christian verities."

31. Chesterton, G. K.. Orthodoxy.
O'Sullivan: "How to look at the Christian tradition with fresh eyes."

32. Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination.
Hart: "The popular form of liberalism tends to simplify and caricature when it attempts moral aspiration -- that is, it tends to 'Stalinism.'"

33. Watson, James D.. The Double Helix.
Herman: "Deeply hated by feminists because Watson dares to suggest that the male-female distinction originated in nature, in the DNA code itself."

34. Feynman, Richard Phillips. The Feynman Lectures on Physics.
Gelernter: "Outside of art (or maybe not), physics is mankind's most beautiful achievement; these three volumes are probably the most beautiful ever written about physics."

35. Wolfe, Tom. Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers.
O'Sullivan: "Wolfe is our Juvenal."

36. Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays.

37. Banfield, Edward C.. The Unheavenly City.
Neuhaus: "The volume that began the debunking of New Deal socialism and its public-policy consequences."

38. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams.

39. Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

40. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man.

41. Becker, and Ethan. Joy of Cooking, Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker.

42. Hofstadter, Richard. The Age of Reform.
Herman: "The single best book on American history in this century, bar none."

43. Keynes, John Maynard. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.
Hart: "Influential in suggesting that the business cycle can be modified by government investment and manipulation of tax rates."

44. Jr., William F. Buckley. God & Man at Yale.
Gilder: "Still correct and prophetic. It defines the conservative revolt against socialism and atheism on campus and in the culture, and reconciles the alleged conflict between capitalist and religious conservatives."

45. Eliot, T. S.. Selected Essays.
Hart: "Shaped the literary taste of the mid-century."

46. Weaver, Richard M. Ideas Have Consequences.

47. Jacobs, Jane. The Economy of Cities.

48. Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind.

49. Sowell, Thomas. Ethnic America.

50. Myrdal, Gunnar. An American Dilemma.

51. Freud, Sigmund. Three Case Histories.
Gelernter: "Beyond question Freud is history's most important philosopher of the mind, and he ranks alongside Eliot as the century's greatest literary critic. Modern intellectual life (left, right, and in-between) would be unthinkable without him."

52. Wilmot, Chester. The Struggle for Europe.

53. Parrington, Vernon Louis. Main Currents in American Thought.
King: "An immensely readable history of ideas and men. (Skip the fragmentary third volume-he died before finishing it.)"

54. Huzinga, Johann. The Waning of the Middle Ages.
Lukacs: "Probably the finest historian who lived in this century. "

55. Pannenberg, Wolfhart. Systematic Theology.
Neuhaus: "The best summary and reflection on Christianity's encounter with the Enlightenment project."

56. Tyng, Sewell. The Campaign of the Marne.
Keegan: "A forgotten American's masterly account of the First World War in the West."

57. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
Hart: "A terse summation of the analytic method of the analytic school in philosophy, and a heroic leap beyond it."

58. Lonergan, Bernard. Insight: A Study of Human Understanding.
Glendon: "The Thomas Aquinas of the 20th century."

59. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time.
Hart: "A seminal thinker, notwithstanding his disgraceful error of equating National Socialism with the experience of 'Being.'"

60. Blake, Robert. Disraeli.
Keegan: "Political biography as it should be written."

61. Babbitt, Irving. Democracy and Leadership.
King: "A conservative literary critic describes what happens when humanitarianism over takes humanism."

62. White, William Strunk & E. B.. The Elements of Style.
A. Thernstrom: "If only every writer would remember just one of Strunk & White's wonderful injunctions: 'Omit needless words.' Omit needless words."

63. Burnham, James. The Machiavellians.
O'Sullivan: "Burnham is the greatest political analyst of our century and this is his best book."

64. Pobedonostsev, Konstantin P.. Reflections of a Russian Statesman.
King: "The 'culture war' as seen by the tutor to the last two czars. A Russian Pat Buchanan."

65. Berlin, Isaiah. The Hedgehog and the Fox.

66. Genovese, Eugene D.. Roll, Jordan, Roll.
Neuhaus: "The best account of American slavery and the moral and cultural forces that undid it."

67. Pound, Ezra. The ABC of Reading.
Brookhiser: "An epitome of the aging aesthetic movement that will be forever known as modernism."

68. Keegan, John. The Second World War.
Hart: "A masterly history in a single volume."

69. Parry, Milman. The Making of Homeric Verse.
Lind: "Genuine discoveries in literary study are rare. Parry's discovery of the oral formulaic basis of the Homeric epics, the founding texts of Western literature, was one of them."

70. Wilson, Angus. The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling.
Keegan: "A life of a great author told through the transmutation of his experience into fictional form."

71. Leavis, F. R.. Scrutiny.
Hart: "Enormously important in education, especially in England. Leavis understood what one kind of 'living English' is."

72. Gaulle, Charles de. The Edge of the Sword.
Brookhiser: "A lesser figure than Churchill, but more philosophical (and hence, more problematic)."

73. Freeman, Douglas Southall. R. E. Lee.
Conquest: "The finest work on the Civil War."

74. Mises, Ludwig von. Bureaucracy.

75. Merton, Thomas. The Seven Storey Mountain.
Neuhaus: "A classic conversion story of a modern urban sophisticate."

76. Zweig, Stefan. Balzac.
King: "On the joys of working one's self to death. The chapter 'Black Coffee' is a masterpiece of imaginative reconstruction."

77. Lippmann, Walter. The Good Society.
Gilder: "Written during the Great Depression. A corruscating defense of the morality of capitalism."

78. Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring.
Lind: "For all the excesses of the environmental movement, the realization that human technology can permanently damage the earth's environment marked a great advance in civilization. Carson's book, more than any other, publicized this message."

79. Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Christian Tradition.
Neuhaus: "The century's most comprehensive account of Christian teaching from the second century on."

80. Bloch, Marc. Strange Defeat.
Herman: "A great historian's personal account of the fall of France in 1940."

81. Douglas, Norman. Looking Back.
Conquest: "Fascinating memoirs of a remarkable writer."

82. Adams, Henry. Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres.

83. Jarrell, Randall. Poetry and the Age.
Caldwell: "The book for showing how 20th-century poets think, what their poetry does, and why it matters."

84. Rougemont, Denis de. Love in the Western World.
Brookhiser: "What has become of eros over the last seven centuries."

85. Kirk, Russell. The Conservative Mind.

86. Gilder, George. Wealth and Poverty.

87. McPherson, James M.. Battle Cry of Freedom.

88. Edel, Leon. Henry James.
King: "All the James you want without having to read him."

89. White, E. B.. Essays of E. B. White.
Gelernter: "White is the apotheosis of the American liberal now spurned and detested by the Left (and the cultural mainstream). His mesmerized devotion to the objects of his affection-his family, the female sex, his farm, the English language, Manhattan, the sea, America, Maine, and freedom, in descending order-is movingly absolute."

90. Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory.

91. Wolfe, Tom. The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test.

92. Behe, Michael J.. Darwin's Black Box.
Gilder: "Overthrows Darwin at the end of the 20th century in the same way that quantum theory overthrew Newton at the beginning."

93. Foote, Shelby. The Civil War.

94. Wanniski, Jude. The Way the World Works.
Gilder: "The best book on economics. Shows fatuity of still-dominant demand-side model, with its silly preoccupation with accounting trivia, like the federal budget and trade balance and savings rates, in an economy with $40 trillion or so in assets that rise and fall weekly by trillions."

95. Wilson, Edmund. To the Finland Station.
Herman: "The best single book on Karl Marx and Marx's place in modern history."

96. Clark, Kenneth. Civilisation.

97. Pipes, Richard. The Russian Revolution.

98. Collingwood, R. G.. The Idea of History.

99. Manchester, William. The Last Lion.

100. Starr, Kenneth W. The Starr Report.
Hart: "A study in human depravity."

Books to Chew On
By BLAKE ESKIN

FOR certain voracious readers, April 1 has become a red-letter day: It's the one time of the year when they get to eat books. They won't eat just any book, only those prepared especially for the occasion, known as the Edible Books Festival and celebrated in libraries, bookstores, galleries and private homes around the world. Judith A. Hoffberg, a California librarian, came up with the concept over Thanksgiving dinner back in 1999 and decided it would be best observed on April Fools' Day, which also turns out to be the birthday of the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, author of "The Physiology of Taste" (1825). Hoffberg describes the festival as a low-key affair: "From 2 to 4 p.m., one looks at the books, and takes photographs, and oohs and aahs. And at 4, you serve tea and serve the books."

Now in its seventh year, the Edible Books Festival has spread to 28 states and 15 other countries. In past years, much of what's been served (pictures can be found at books2eat.com) is book-shaped cake. Other edible books might not go so well with tea, but at least you can turn pages made of sliced bread, seaweed, cold cuts, pea pods or thinly sliced rutabaga. Every once in a while, edible books get political: one West Coast environmentalist incised earth-hugging quotations into leaves of heritage lettuce, and a women's collective from Chiapas used native dyes to write "hunger" on a bunch of tortillas. Most, however, respect the foolishness of the day. Last year, Carolyn Weigel, a librarian at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania, arranged strips of bacon in the shape of France — a tribute to Francis Bacon, who wrote, "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested."

Bacon wasn't actually telling his readers to eat books, any more than Weigel, Hoffberg or other librarians taking part in the festival would suggest a patron wolf down an item from their collection. As a metaphor, book-eating (or bibliophagy, to use the five-dollar word) has flourished over the centuries, invoked by everyone from Elizabeth I, who nourished her soul on "goodlie greene herbes" plucked from the New Testament, to the television chef Tyler Florence, who titled his latest cookbook "Eat This Book." It's an attention-grabbing title (and a popular one, shared by everything from a campy 1980's diet manual to a forthcoming dispatch from the competitive-eating circuit), but Florence lets his fans off the hook. "You don't actually have to eat this book," he writes in his introduction, a point I assumed would be obvious until I read the introduction to "Don't Eat This Book" (2005) by the director of "Super Size Me," Morgan Spurlock: "We put so many things in our mouths, we constantly have to be reminded what not to eat." Fast food, sure, but books? People don't eat books — they're bland and dry, plus the cellulose fiber in paper is indigestible. Or do they?

There are two instances of bibliophagy in the Bible. The first comes in Ezekiel, when a heavenly hand offers the prophet a scroll covered on both sides with "lamentations, and moaning and woe." God commands Ezekiel to eat the scroll, and he reports that "it was in my mouth as honey for sweetness." Revelation, Chapter 10, has a variation on this theme: an angel hands John a scroll to eat, telling him it will taste like honey but also "turn your stomach sour." According to the theologian Eugene H. Peterson, the author of yet another "Eat This Book" (2006), the scroll became the source of John's apocalyptic vision: "The book he ate was metabolized into the book he wrote." For Peterson, this episode illustrates lectio divina, a spiritual mode of reading "that enters our souls as food enters our stomachs, spreads through our blood, and becomes holiness and love and wisdom."

Peterson stops short of telling Christians to snack on the Bible, and some ministers tell the cautionary (and spurious) tale of Menelik II, the Ethiopian king who supposedly self-medicated with a few pages of Scripture whenever he fell ill and eventually died from an overdose of I Kings. Some religions, meanwhile, do quite literally put words in their followers' mouths. Tibetans ingest printed or written mantras as a treatment for epilepsy, or as a preventive measure akin to a multivitamin. And when ultra-Orthodox Jewish boys are about to start school, they undergo a ritual in which the 3-year-old initiate licks honey off a slate showing the Hebrew alphabet, then eats a cake adorned with a quotation from Isaiah and a hard-boiled egg inscribed with the aforementioned verse from Ezekiel.

Of course, nobody needs to teach children how to eat books. "A young child's attitude toward a book is not unlike that of a cannibal toward a missionary," wrote A. S. W. Rosenbach, the noted book collector, who cited bibliophagy as one reason that so few first editions of early children's classics have survived. It's probably too early to tell whether my year-old son's propensity to gum the board books in his library will develop into a refined literary palate, but there's hope. Margaria Fichtner, The Miami Herald's former book critic, once recalled how as a child she had gobbled a few pages of "Johnny Had a Nickel" "because I became so absorbed in whether the hero was going to buy an ice cream cone," and Maurice Sendak remembers cutting his teeth on "The Prince and the Pauper." An "Eat This Book" for children appeared in 2002, with potato-starch pages and a food-coloring pen, but the paper has an unpleasant, artificial-vanilla flavor that lingers in the mouth. No wonder it's fallen out of print.

Bibliophagy seems to become less common after elementary school. A recent episode of "Grey's Anatomy" featured a frustrated novelist who ate an unpublished manuscript that had to be surgically removed. A layman's search of the medical literature, however, yielded only a solitary French article from 1951 that defined la bibilophagie as a psychological disorder that manifests itself by reading "anything, anywhere, anyhow." The British bibliophile Holbrook Jackson, in "The Anatomy of Bibliomania" (1930), says he searched in vain for "any serious study of the dietetics of literature, or any evidence of research into this curious subject."

But Jackson apparently never stumbled upon the work of Carlo Mascaretti (1855-1928), an Italian editor who wrote a column under the anagrammatic pseudonym Americo Scarlatti. He devoted an entire column to bibliophagy and provided several historical examples. The 17th century, in particular, seems to have been a golden age of coercive bibliophagy: the Danish author of a denunciation of Sweden staved off beheading by eating his book boiled in soup; the Duke of Saxony forced the satirist Isaac Volmar to eat his lampoon of the duke raw; the German jurist Philip Oldenburger suffered through a whipping that ended only when he had polished off every morsel of a pamphlet that offended a prince. Peter Greenaway presented a gory vision of this literal-minded punishment in "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover," but if this form of torture persists today, it's not exactly a major concern for PEN or Amnesty International.

In 1966, John Latham, a British artist who often used books — intact, painted, cut-up, burned — as materials in his work, invited his art-school students to a happening called "Still and Chew." They chewed up pages of Clement Greenberg's "Art and Culture," taken from the school library, then spat his influential essays into a flask, where they were mixed with sulfuric acid, baking soda and yeast. Months later, when an overdue notice arrived, Latham turned in a glass vial filled with the fermented results. He lost his job, but the documentation of his experiment, from the Greenberg grappa to his letter of dismissal, is enshrined in the permanent collection at MoMA. And last month in Discover magazine, Homaro Cantu of the Chicago restaurant Moto — which prints its menus in soy ink on Parmesan-flecked rice paper — shared his vision of "dispensing vitamin-enriched edible books in regions where people suffer from malnutrition."

But for now, eating books remains a stunt, a punishment, an act of devotion, a habit of infants and other members of the animal kingdom — bookworms, rodents, goats and at least one fish, caught in 1626 off the coast of England. It had supposedly swallowed the writings of John Frith, a Protestant martyr, which were subsequently republished as "Vox Piscis, or the Book-Fish containing Three Treatises, which were found in the belly of a Cod-Fish in Cambridge Market on Midsummer Eve." Then there is "The Great Green Squishy Mean Bibliovore," a creature envisioned by the children's songwriter Monty Harper. The bibliovore — a cross between a dinosaur and a bookworm — invades a library, where a brave librarian domesticates him by teaching him to read. The bibliovore's fate? According to the lyrics, "Today he makes a living writing book reviews."

Blake Eskin is the author of "A Life in Pieces" and the editor of Nextbook.org.



Books to Chew On - New York Times

ITW's First Award Nominees Are In!

You may not have been at Left Coast Crime in Bristol, but that doesn't mean you're out of the awards' loop.

At a dinner on Friday, March 17th, 2006, the co-presidents of ITW, Gayle Lynds and David Morrell, announced the nominees for the new International Thriller Awards (or more simply "The Thrillers").

Over three hundred titles were reviewed by our judging committees, along with a slew of screenplays by our film panel. And as stipulated in ITW bylaws, no one on the board of directors, nor myself as chair of the awards, was eligible to compete. Each judging committee was selected to balance men and women, authors and reviewers, while also incorporating an international flare with judges from beyond US borders. Operating under a strict code of silence and isolated from prejudicial interference, they have deliberated for the past several months to pare down the towering pile of submissions to the nominees listed below.

So with great pride and delight, and congratulations to all, here are the nominees (listed alphabetically by writer) for the first International Thriller Awards.

The Thrillers

BEST NOVEL
PANIC by Jeff Abbott (Dutton)
CONSENT TO KILL by Vince Flynn (Atria)
VELOCITY by Dean Koontz (Bantam)
THE PATRIOTS CLUB by Christopher Reich (Delacorte Press)
CITIZEN VINCE by Jess Walter (Regan Books)


BEST FIRST NOVEL
IMPROBABLE by Adam Fawer (William Morrow)
THE COLOR OF LAW by Mark Gimenez (Doubleday)
COLD GRANITE by Stuart MacBride (St. Martin's Minotaur)
PAIN KILLER by Will Staeger (William Morrow)
BENEATH A PANAMANIAN MOON by David Terrenoire (Thomas Dunne Books)

BEST PAPERBACK ORIGINAL
SLEEPER CELL by Jeffrey Anderson (Berkley)
PRIDE RUNS DEEP by R. Cameron Cooke (Jove)
UPSIDE DOWN by John Ramsay Miller (Dell)
THE DYING HOUR by Rick Mofina (Pinnacle Books)
EXIT STRATEGY by Michael Wiecek (Jove)

BEST SCREENPLAY
MATCH POINT, screenplay by Woody Allen
SYRIANA, based on the book by Robert Baer, written by Stephen Gaghan
CACHE (Hidden), screenplay by Michael Haneke
OLDBOY, screenplay by Jo-yun Hwang, Chun-hyeong Lim, Joon-hyung Lim, and Chan-wook Park; story by Garon Tsuchiya
MUNICH, screenplay by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth; based on the book by George Jonas

James Rollins
ITW Awards Chair