Category: Books

The Real (Literary) America

by Craig Fehrman, posted in All History is Local History, Books, Features

[The Millions]

Over at The Millions, you’ll find my “dispatch from the Borders-land,” where, basically, I ask a bunch of shoppers about their relationship to books. Lit blogs tend to take an isolated view of the literary world, and I wanted to push back against this (and also to satisfy my own curiosity). The week I did the interviews—this was back in December, and the story’s delay stems mostly from my incompetence—the New Yorker debuted another excerpt from DFW’s The Pale King. I remember being extremely excited to read the short story, then noticing that the magazine’s newsstand appendage thingy didn’t even mention Wallace. Different worlds, different priorities—and yet, among the people I talked to, fiction seems alive and well.

One caveat: I wanted this dispatch to be short and I wanted to devote most of it to the interviews, so if it seems like I’m totalizing “real” or “average” readers (or relegating them to scare quotes), that’s why. With more space, I would have liked to talk about the geographic and socioeconomic aspects to reading audiences. For example, Connecticut Goodwills tend to offer some pretty interesting books (in the last year, I’ve picked up an early edition of JFK’s Profiles in Courage and a paperback of William Vollman’s Europe Central). I don’t recall Indiana Goodwills even selling books.

Did I Inadvertently Predict the Gilbert Arenas Incident?

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books, Sports

Howard Zinn is dead and Gilbert Arenas is making news for some decidedly right-wing behavior—in other words, my review of Dave Zirin’s A People’s History of Sports (2008) is newly relevant!

Here’s how the review starts:

Last month, Gilbert Arenas, an NBA All-Star, wrote the following on his blog: “Since I’ve been in the NBA I’ve been in the upper class so I’ve been a Republican. If you have any type of money, you’re a Republican, period.”

You can read the rest of it here. (Note: I found it shocking how many people fawned over Zirin’s book; I’ve never felt less guilty about writing a negative review—and for a book I couldn’t wait to read.)

Cheshire’s Library Controversy

by Craig Fehrman, posted in All History is Local History, Books, Features, The Media

[New Haven Advocate]

In this week’s Advocate, I’ve got a story on Brian McDonald’s In the Middle of the Night, a true-crime take on the horrific Cheshire home-invasion case from a few years back. The story ended up focusing on the reaction to McDonald’s book as much as the book itself—especially when local residents started calling for the library to ban the book and launching ugly personal attacks at the head librarian. As I write in the story:

Let’s be clear: The only real villains in this mess are Komisarjevsky and Hayes, and, even three years later, it’s impossible to consider Petit’s tragedy without feeling fear, sympathy, and regret. But this tragedy occurred in and was assimilated by a culture that loves lurid details, easy-bake opinions, and petty personal concerns. And, in the reaction to McDonald’s book, you’ll find this culture’s usual suspects—duplicitous lawyers, lazy journalists, small-town politicos, quickie cash-in publishers, and a whole lot of people who’d rather react than read.

One thing I couldn’t work into the story was more on McDonald’s own career, which is fascinating. He described himself to me as “a reluctant true-crime writer” who took on In the Middle of the Night (and a previous entry in St. Martin’s True Crime Library series) “simply because I needed the work.” But McDonald’s far from a hack. He’s written three other books, including My Father’s Gun, a well-reviewed memoir about his family’s three-generation history with the NYPD. And I’d argue that, other than its poor pacing and organization, In the Middle of the Night also demonstrates his talents—as I say in the story, it’s a solid entry in the true-crime canon.

Of course, the only way you’d know that is if you actually read McDonald’s book.

Gladwell Agonistes

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books, The Media

[x-posted at The Rumpus]

I’m not sure why Malcolm Gladwell’s fourth book, What the Dog Saw, which collects 19 of his New Yorker essays, has been the one to incite a riot of review-essays. Were the first three books not successful enough? Was something in Gladwell’s methodology not previously clear? Were his best and worst traits not yet delineated?

Whatever the reason, the last few weeks have seen a lot of meditations on Gladwell. I’d like to draw your attention to two, one admirable (Steven Pinker’s “Malcolm Gladwell, Eclectic Detective,” the cover review in this week’s New York Times Book Review), one not (Maureen Tkacik’s “Gladwell for Dummies,” in The Nation).

Tkacik begins with a smart point: “That success is in the eye of the unsuccessful would seem to be the great unspoken dilemma dogging critics asked to consider the work of the rich and famous author and inspirational speaker Malcolm Gladwell.” It all goes downhill from there, as she unloads almost 8,000 words of nastiness—a number generously padded by phrases like “Gladwell began studiously scrubbing his sentences of the mildew of the old, liberating his readers from references to anything that might dirty undiluted all-newness with the dourness of precedent.” Tkacik does a fine job summarizing Gladwell’s critical reception (though I’m not sure we really needed that), but, by the end, she seems to be writing a screed against the people who like Gladwell as much as against Gladwell himself.

Then, 180 degrees away, we have Pinker’s essay. It offers all the payoffs of a good review: engaging summaries, sharp observations (e.g., that Gladwell-the-essayist is much better than Gladwell-the-author), and a great sound bite (“The themes of the collection are a good way to characterize Gladwell himself: a minor genius who unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning and who occasionally blunders into spectacular failures”). When it does come time for a reckoning, Pinker damns Malcolm with his own muffed details; his catch of Gladwell’s “igon values” is enough to make any writer cringe at the thought of reaching for a fact ever again.

Best of all, Pinker does this in only 1,400 words. Together, his and Tkacik’s reviews serve as a nice reminder that two takes on the same thing can reveal not only different conclusions—Tkacik describes Gladwell’s “recurring straw man” as “misguided evangelism . . . [for] fringe causes,” whereas Pinker finds “the Straw We . . . a kind of populism” that unites Gladwell’s work—but also different impetuses.

“The Grateful Dead Approach to Intellectual Property”

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books, Features, Hoosiers

[NUVO]

That quote came from Moira Smith, the librarian for folklore and ethnomusicology at Indiana University. I interviewed Moira for my NUVO cover story on Google Books’ basically unnoticed foray into Indiana, and one question I asked was whether she worried that, by digitizing her books, she would undercut one of her university’s great strengths. IU’s Folklore Collection, you see, has historically attracted NEH grants, prestigious visiting scholars, and all kinds of summer programs. “We think it’s going to have the reverse effect,” Moira continued. “It’s going to be fully searchable, and, from a librarian’s point of view, that’s the best research tool you can have.”

That’s the kind of selfless, access-driven talk the Google Books debate could use more of. As I write at the end of the story:

By digitizing information, Google hopes to democratize it. In this future, it wouldn’t matter if you live in New York or Bloomington, Indianapolis or Elkhart. You could access any book—even, or especially, the one you didn’t know existed.

Anyway, if you’re interested in Google Books or the Indiana arts scene, read the whole thing. Here are a few things that didn’t make the cut:

  • First, three tech tangents I couldn’t fit in: Google Books doesn’t necessarily mean the death of print. The Espresso Book Machine, which is showing up at more and more bookstores, lets you you order any public domain title from Google Books; four minutes and eight bucks later, you’re holding a 300-page book. Another interesting aspect is “character recognition.” Even the best computer programs can’t translate images of text into text as accurately as humans, so Google and its competitors farm this out—each time you complete one of those annoying antispam tests (say typing out the distorted letters at Ticketmaster), you’re actually helping scan books. Finally, just a fact I liked: when Stanford University, in the late 1990s, digitized its card catalog, the number of books checked out increased by fifty percent.
  • If you want more intellectual background on the Google Books settlement, start with Robert Darnton’s great essay in the New York Review of Books. Darnton’s actually pretty anti-Google—under his aegis, Harvard pulled out of the scanning program—so you’ll want to balance him with some Google apologists. I reccomend these essays from The Big Money’s Mark Gimein.
  • “That some kind of systematic indexing of this vast accumulation should be undertaken has been long realized. Though several beginnings of such a work have been made during the past century, no plan has been completed with sufficient thoroughness to warrant general acceptance.” That’s Stith Thompson in the preface to his 1957 revision of his Motif-Index, but the same thing could be said today, of Google’s mission. Many of the academics who criticize Google Books seem to push past this big picture in order to wallow in smaller issues—Geoffrey Nunberg’s essay is a good example of this. In that NYRB essay, Darnton worries about Google Books price-gouging university libraries in the same way that scientific journals have inflated their subscription fees. This makes more sense than most Google Books criticisms, but, as IU’s librarians like to point out, Darnton omits the fact that many of these journals are now struggling with a nasty backlash.
  • Finally, there’s this incredible interview with Michael Hart, the affable, offbeat guy who founded Project Gutenberg in 1971, when they had to type books by hand. (Scanning didn’t start until the late 1980s.)