Some literary types (see here for example) are upset about movie marketing invading the book world. Well, let me admit something: the marketing must have worked on some level because I purchased the book (of course the 30% off helped).

I guess I don’t understand the problem. Do marketing gimmicks ruin a good book? Are they somehow illegitimate? It seems to me if the book is good, how it is marketed is beside the point. Of course, if the marketing works and more people read a good book, then great. If the book is bad and people are suckered into reading a bad book, well such is the price of having choices.

I for one found the “The Matrix meets Alias” tag intriguing, but it reminded me more of The Highlander. I have no illusions that this is some grand work of literature for the ages, but can’t one enjoy a little fun? If The Traveler becomes the next Da Vinci Code or Harry Potter I don’t see the harm.

The New York Times ran a front page story today on the acquittal of Richard Scrushy, former CEO of Health South. Despite the testimony of numerous former lieutenants, Scrushy walked. It broke the government’s winning streak against malfeasant executives. The trial was set in Birmingham, Alabama, Mr. Scrushy’s hometown. During his days running Health South, Scrushy was a cornerstone of Birmingham society, throwing lavish parties, giving big gobs of cash to charities. I think we can anticipate a book deal and possible movie of the week tie-in. Judith Regan comes to mind as the ideal publisher for Scrushy. Fortunately for all concerned, ReganBooks is still in New York. Birmingham is just a few hours by air from the throbbing heart of Bookdom. This won’t be easy to pull off from Los Angeles for several reasons: all flights originating in the South begin and end in Atlanta. If your travel plans don’t include Atlanta, you’d better drive. (2) Sarbanes-Oxley forbids loans to corporate officers. Travel advances may or may not be construed as loans. Ask your financial advisor; they’re in Atlanta. (3) Congress is considering legislation limiting the number of exploitative books each publisher may produce in a given year ( fiscal year). Special allowances are made for members of Congress, their memoirs, works of scholarship, and the quarterly Beige Book issued by the Fed. If you’re looking for a copy of the Beige Book, there’s one in the Atlanta Public Library.

Let’s hope there are plenty of marketing toys to go with the Scrushy book. One idea is to have Pamela Anderson on the cover. There are no other ideas. All I can say is, make mine a Scrushy.

A couple of weeks ago I discussed Paul Johnson’s very brief volume on George Washington. In that review I noted:

Johnson’s take on Washington is popular history (see here for more). If one is looking for tightly argued scholarship and debates about the latest paper this is not the place.

This is apparently more true than I had thought. In the current issue of the Weekly Standard Gordon S. Wood reviews both the Johnson and the Christopher Hitchens bio of Thomas Jefferson. Wood, who is a brilliant historian and fully capable of writing engaging popular history himself, takes Johnson to task for repetition and historical inaccuracies:

With only 30,000 words or so to work with, the authors of these little biographies should not want to waste any. But unfortunately Johnson does. He repeats himself several times, telling us more than once that George III never left Britain and never saw the sea until he was 34, and doing the same with the story of Washington addressing his officers at Newburgh in 1783, fumbling with his glasses and telling them that he had grown nearly blind in service to his country. Such repetitions are nothing, however, compared with Johnson’s many mistakes and unreliable statements, which suggest that the book was hastily written and poorly edited and vetted . . . One or two serious errors might be forgivable, but with so many mistakes and exaggerated statements the reader’s confidence in the reliability of the biography is undermined.

Not being an expert on George Washington I obviously didn’t notice the errors, but I admit I am disappointed in Johnson for his sloppiness.

Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Blowhard said some very nice things about this blog, and I want to thank him, especially for noting our story contest, which you can still enter for the opportunity to win a signed copy of Michelle Herman’s Dog. He writes:

It seems to me that the cheeriest and most enterpreneurial of the book-blogs is Kevin Holtberry’s Collected Miscellany. The CM posse — Kevin, David, Phil and Jeff — are nothing if not devoted readers and book-lovers, and their reviews and tips reflect a lot of brainy experience and sensible thinking. Energy, too: Kevin and the boyz publish q&a’s, for instance — and they’re open-minded and down-to-earth enough to recognize that the book-thang ain’t just about the writers.

Forgive me, Kevin, if you saw this before and sided with humility against posting a reference. I’m encouraged by it.

One of the Southern writers I admire and want to learn from, Shelby Foote, died yesterday. He had a strong mind and good literary voice, being compared to William Faulkner in positive ways.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

Foote worked on the Civil War history for 20 years, using his skills as a novelist to write in a flowing, narrative style.

“I can’t conceive of writing it any other way,” he once said. “Narrative history is the kind that comes closest to telling the truth. You can never get to the truth, but that’s your goal.”

Though a native Southerner, Foote did not favor South in his history or novels and was not counted among those Southern historians who regard the Civil War as the great Lost Cause.

Read the rest of this entry »

Close readers of this blog will not be surprised to hear that I completely agree with William Grimes on the blessing of smaller books. In the New york Times Grimes approvingly makes note of the wide variety of slim but potent books being packaged today. This is in contrast to the seeming bulge of so many books - fiction and non-fiction alike. Grimes is not against larger volumes per se but is happy with the sub trend of less is more:

All books should be exactly as long as they need to be. There is no ideal length. But like mainstream Hollywood films, nonfiction books have shown a tendency to expand in recent years, for no particular reason.

And he notes that size doesn’t always equal readability: “It’s worth pointing out that long books can seem short, and vice versa.”

I have found myself attracted to these smaller works (I have five of the works listed in Grimes’s sidebar) because I simply don’t have the time and dedication that larger works require. If one is to tackle a 500 plus page tome you have to have sizable chunks of time available to do it justice. Reading a few pages a night isn’t going to get you much. With the smaller volumes you can dedicate less time and still get the satisfaction of finishing the story. With the non-fiction side you can still brush up your history or enlarge your knowledge base without feeling like you are returning to grad school (I also happen to love book series that are well designed and packaged). In my estimation the ease with which one can write has not necessarily resulted in improved prose but rather longwindedness at almost all levels. Same with movies and music in many instances. So I am with Grimes: “Give me more. I mean, less.”

Since I seem to be asking questions these days, let me throw this out there: Do you find yourself attracted to smaller works? Or do you dive in based on subject/author rather than length? Are you turned off from books like The Historian, for example, by its length (656 pages)?

***Hat Tip: Booksquare

Interesting review over at Books and Culture. Elissa Elliot reviews the recently released memoir of Sean Wilsey - an editor at large for McSweeney’s quarterly. Her conclusion is that “Wilsey’s book has all the elements of a good memoir.” She goes on to define what she means:

A good memoir is filled with wit, humor, and wisdom. A good memoir is honest-searingly so-and redemptive. A good memoir is not an easy weekend read; it causes considerable discomfort-that you, too, have done all these things, or might have, in similar circumstances; that you, too, have hurt people this badly. A good memoir says, “Here’s the scumbag I was, but by the grace of God, look what happened!” The proof lies in the final, conciliatory pages, which say, I am what I am because of these people, my family. Thank you.

Two questions for the audience:
1) Do you even read memoirs? Or would just as soon not see another memoir/autobiography published?
2) Is Elliot’s description of a good memoir accurate? Is that what you look for?

I saw this on Sherry’s blog tonight, and I joined in, answering for Brandywine Books where asked. It’s a demographic survey of bloggers with some relational technology questions.

MJ Rose’s The Halo Effect is now available in paperback. As MJ points out on her blog Buzz, Balls, & Hype, the book is $6.99, a reasonable price by any standard. She would like all of you to buy her book, so get out there and grab a copy.

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova has been a big hit for Little, Brown and a source of nagging guilt for your reporter. I received this hefty tome from Time Warner Books, but I’m not a big vampire guy and Vlad the Impaler would be more interesting if he were, say, Speaker of the House. Nevertheless, my cultural shortcomings are vividly displayed by my inability to crack this book open. I feel the same way about David Sedaris and Hillary Clinton.

Lost in the summertime shuffle is Thirty Three Swoons by Martha Cooley. This is a doppelganger novel divided between Greenwich Village in the Seventies and St. Petersburg shortly before the Bolshevik Revolution. Maybe the Lit Blog Co-op will nominate Martha Cooley next time around. She deserves some ink, some audience share.

I’m an avid reader of Tod Goldberg and his blog…Tod Goldberg. Tod teaches creative writing at UCLA and he never fails to expand my vocabulary along with my horizons. His brother, Lee, also runs a good blog about the travails of television writing ( Monk, Murder, She Wrote.) Stop by.

Maybe Buffy spoiled me for vampires. The theory weakens as I realize I’ve rarely watched the show. Didn’t Vlad play for the Lakers?

I have a lot of “irons in the fire” these days (I am not really sure why I choose these silly cliches to denote my business, but oh well) so I thought I would share a couple of links for your Monday reading pleasure.

- Interesting book roundtable on over at Redstate. Three of the editors discuss How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilizationby Thomas Woods. Although they in some ways share Wood’s persepctive on the lack of historical knowledge regarding the Catholic Church and its impact on Western History, they are dissappointed by the author’s lack of clear argument and his sloppy historiogrpahy. Here is Josh Trevino:

“How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization,” by Thomas Woods, PhD, is a book masquerading as a necessary corrective that reveals itself as an inadequate one; and a serious work of history marred by some deeply unserious historiography. The author’s stated intent is to counter much of the calumny which has befallen the institution of Catholicism in the modern era — specifically the calumny that it is and has always been an anti-modernist, anti-science, anti-humanist force — and in this, his approach makes the fatal errors of answering the critics on their own terms, and adopting Catholic historical prejudice to a degree that weakens his broader argument.

- Speaking of history, over at National Review Online Michael Ledeen reviews a book I was tempted by at the bookstore this weekend: The Pirate Coast: Thomas Jefferson, The First Marines, and the Secret Mission of 1805 by Richard Zacks. Ledeen thinks Zacks got the story right:

The Pirate Coast is the truly cinematic story of the American response to the trafficking of American and European slaves by the Bey, or Pasha, or Bashaw (the Arabs don’t pronounce the letter “P” so “Pasha” became “Bashaw”) of Tripoli in the early 19th century. Even those who fancy themselves well educated in such matters will, I fear, be astonished at how much has been Hollywoodized and even falsified in the popular press and the children’s texts. The real tale is at once more entertaining, more believable, and far more instructive than the mythology most of us have been fed. Just for starters, you will no doubt be surprised to learn that the first Marines - a mere eight of them - to see foreign combat did not actually make it to “the shores of Tripoli,” but fought their way across the Libyan desert to a less celebrated location, and then were forced to leave the matter in the hands of our diplomats.

More literary links, commentary, and reviews to follow as I get up to speed.