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Category Archives: Non-fiction
Neglected library
If my translation software is right, these are photos of a ruined technical library in Russia. I wonder if these books could not find a use somewhere. (via Books, Inq.)
Everyone’s Favorite
A Harris poll has tried to ferret out America’s favorite book by asking 2,513 people.
How Novels Work
John Mullan, senior lecturer in English at University College London and using material from his “Elements of Fiction” column in The Guardian, has a book on novel called How Novels Work, from Oxford UP.
How Novels Work explains how the pleasures of novel reading often come from the formal ingenuity of the novelist, making visible techniques and effects we are often only half-aware of as we read. It is an entertaining and stimulating volume that will captivate anyone who is interested in the contemporary or the classical novel.
Nice Cover
I thought Susan Wise Bauer was working on an ancient history series, but somehow she squeezed in a modern history book called, The Art of the Public Grovel. Her publisher sent her an image of the cover. Eye-catching. Who is man? I know I’ve seen him somewhere recently.
Selling Your Book
Terry Whalin keeps talking about one of his books and answering Why Novelists Need Book Proposals That Sell. A great story isn’t all you need to sell your book.
The Great Comic-Book Scare
Terry Teachout reviews a history book on cultural splash some comic books made a while back. The book is The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, by David Hajdu. (via Abe Greenwald)
Tags: comic books, horror comics, culture, American history
Back in the Saddle
She’s on the road again. She’s back in the driver’s seat. She’s, uh, she has returned. Anyway, Sherry’s blogging again, and she points out an interesting book by Peter Kreeft, commented on Pascal’s Pensees. It’s called Christianity for Modern Pagans. Good thoughts.
Simplistic, Terrible History
Mr. Holtsberry has a lineup of reviewers criticizing a World War II book by Nicholson Baker called, Human Smoke.
- Tom Nagorski says, Mr. Baker leaves the impression — one cannot say that he “believes,” since he is never quite explicit — that Roosevelt’s preparations for war with Japan were as bellicose in character as Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and that the Allied failure to help Jews in the early years was as bad as the Nazis’ dispatching them to the gas chambers.
- Adam Kirsch calls the book perverted. “A book that can adduce Goebbels as an authority in order to vilify Churchill has clearly lost touch with all moral and intellectual bearings. No one who knows about World War II will take Human Smoke at all seriously. The problem is that people who don’t know enough . . . Already a reviewer in the Los Angeles Times has praised it for ‘demonstrating that World War II was one of the biggest, most carefully plotted lies in modern history.'”
- William Grimes writes: “Did the war ‘help anyone who needed help?’ Mr. Baker asks in a plaintive afterword. The prisoners of Belsen, Dachau and Buchenwald come to mind, as well as untold millions of Russians, Danes, Belgians, Czechs and Poles. Nowhere and at no point does Mr. Baker ever suggest, in any serious way, how their liberation might have been effected other than by force of arms.”
Racial Ideas and American Conservatism
The Washington Times has these two reviews:
- A new Randall Kennedy book called, Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal
- A history of political publishing by a man who trudge against the current, publisher Alfred Regnery’s book, Upstream: The Ascnedance of American Conservatism. Reviewer Goulden writes:
“Upstream,” in essence, is a Baedeker guide to the men and ideas behind conservatism. The underlying theme for the movement was a strong belief in individual freedom and personal responsibility. The task was tough. As Mr. Regnery astutely notes in his opening pages, in the early 1950s “few people would admit to being conservatives at all, and those who did were thought to have lost their minds.”