Recently in Books: News Category
I will address this more fully tomorrow when I have more time, but here are a couple of posts that lay out the two sides:
- Meagan McArdle offers ten reasons why she loves her Kindle
Interesting YouTube on author Donald Ray Pollock and his decision to get an MFA at Ohio State:
I hope to read Knockemstiff and maybe even interview Pollack soon.
Too big time lit bloggers made news this week. In case you missed it, Mark Sarvas's novel Harry Revised hit the books stores this week. And even as I type it is winging its way to me via the magic of online bookstores (I had hoped for a Kindle version, but alas will have to read it in dead tree version).
Mark also appeared on the Bat Segundo show for its 200 episode.
Congrats to both for their success. I look forward to reading Mark's novel and listening to their conversation. You would do well to do the same if you haven't already.
Here are some interesting book links that have come my way of late:
- A Christian America? A secular America? Steven Waldman argues the founders had in mind something else entirely.
- How to Save the Christian Bookstore (Hint: Stop making it so religious.)
- Channeling Norman Mailer by Liz Smith
Today in New York City a memorial service is being held to honor one of my heroes: William F. Buckley Jr. In remembrance of this occasion I wanted to try and put down some of my thoughts about how this great man impacted my life.
WFB - to use the shorthand - and I had little in common on the surface. He was a wealthy, Ivy League educated, world traveler with roots in the South and East Coast. I was born and raised in the Midwest in a Middle Class family, attended a small liberal arts college, and my only foreign travel was a trip to France in grad school.
He loved classical music and I barely know the difference between Bach and Beethoven. He loved to sail and sailed around the world. I have been a on a sail boat probably twice in my whole life. He was a master of the English language. I struggled with dyslexia as a child and still struggle with spelling and grammar. He was a lifelong Catholic and I am an evangelical protestant who grew up in small Bible churches.
In short, he was a sophisticated, highly intelligent, famous, and impactful person. I am not.
But it was his greatness - his goodness, his fundamental rightness - that called me to strive to be better, to know more, to communicate better, to make an impact.
For more keep reading.
It seems William Grimes didn't care Human Smoke either:
Muddled and often infuriating, “Human Smoke” sounds its single, solemn note incessantly, like a mallet striking a kettle drum over and over. War is bad. Churchill was bad. Roosevelt was bad. Hitler was bad too, but maybe, in the end, no worse than Roosevelt and Churchill. Jeannette Rankin, a Republican congresswoman from Montana, was good, because she cast the lone vote opposing a declaration of war against Japan. It was Dec. 8, 1941.
Mr. Baker’s title, a grim reference to the crematoriums at Auschwitz, effectively demolishes the edifice he tries to construct. 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.
[. . .]
Writers are free to take on any subject they please. But Mr. Baker’s decision to tackle World War II seems curious. By talent and temperament, on brilliant display in novels like “The Mezzanine” and “Vox,” he is an obsessive miniaturist, a painter wielding a brush with a single hair. In turning to nonfiction, it was completely in character for him to delve into the intricacies of library card catalogs and newspaper archives, the subject of “Double Fold.” War and peace are something else entirely.
He attacks it in little bits and pieces, an approach that allows him a few Bakeresque touches. He notes that a roundup of Italians in Britain netted, on one occasion, “the manager of the Piccadilly Hotel, the head chef of the Cafe Royal and two clowns in the Bertram Mills circus.”
Elsewhere, mordant humor fails him. The sneering identification of an Allied bomber pilot as “a former Australian sheep farmer” seems pointless. Is it absurd, or more reprehensible, if a sheep farmer rather than a dentist or a welder drops the bombs? Outrage sends Mr. Baker racing off in all directions simultaneously. The right emotional tone eludes him.
World War II was a deeply unfortunate conflict in which many lives were lost. Mr. Baker is right about that, but not about much else in this self-important, hand-wringing, moral mess of a book. In dedicating it to the memory of American and British pacifists, Mr. Baker writes, “They failed, but they were right.” Millions of ghosts say otherwise.
Better to be criticized widely than ignored, I suppose.
Adam Kirsch didn't like Human Smoke:
Even a book as bad as "Human Smoke" (Simon and Schuster, 576 pages, $30), Nicholson Baker's perverse tract about the origins of World War II, helps to confirm the continuing centrality of that war in our moral lives. Myths call forth debunkers, and the myth of "the good war" — that complacent phrase that camouflages the most deadly conflict in human history — has provoked Mr. Baker to remind us of some of the ways in which World War II was not good. There is nothing to object to in this: On the contrary, no one is more alert than the historians to the true ambiguities of the war. In particular, the terrible facts of the Allied bombing campaign — which inflicted unspeakable civilian casualties on Germany, without appreciably shortening the war — have been studied and debated more openly in the last few years than ever before.
The problem with Mr. Baker's book is that he is not interested in ambiguity, but in countering the received myth of the good war with his own myth of the bad war. Mr. Baker's ignorance, however, is much more disgraceful than the ignorance he seeks to combat — first, because he presents it as knowledge, and second, because World War II was, in fact, if not simply a good war, then an absolutely necessary one. In arguing the contrary, Mr. Baker is trying to convince his reader that false is true, and at times even that good is evil.
It seems he is not a fan of Baker's work in general:
Nor does Mr. Baker have any experience with writing about large historical and moral questions. On the contrary, he is known as a writer obsessed with trivia, and his novels are stunts designed to discover how narrow a writer's compass can become before it vanishes entirely. "The Mezzanine" is an interior monologue that takes place entirely during an escalator ride, as the narrator contemplates buying shoelaces; "Vox" is a transcript of a conversation between strangers on a phone-sex line. Mr. Baker's last book, "Checkpoint," was something of a departure: It was a dialogue about whether it would be morally acceptable to assassinate President Bush.
When such a writer turns to history, it is only to be expected that he will be hopelessly at a loss. Mr. Baker, in fact, does not even attempt to make a consecutive argument based on knowledge of all the relevant sources, the sine qua non of historical writing. Instead, he designed "Human Smoke" as a collage or montage — a series of short paragraphs, each of which presents a single incident or observation from the years up to and including 1941. (Each one is tagged with a portentous announcement of the date — "It was May 31, 1941," and so on — as though to give the impression of a newsreel or a rocket-launch countdown.)
And just to top things off, he thinks the book is dangerous:
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, and who enjoy the spectacle of a writer of apparent authority turning the myth of "the good war" upside down, will think "Human Smoke" is a brave book. 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." That people who think this way about the past will apply the same self-righteous ignorance to the politics of the present and future makes "Human Smoke" not just a stupid book, but a scary one.
Part of me want to read it to see if it really is this bad, but another part is not all that interested in a revisionist work on WWII from a pacifist perspective.
Martin Rubin reviews a book that is in my ever growing TBR pile: GOOD NEIGHBORS, BAD TIMES: ECHOES OF MY FATHER'S GERMAN VILLAGE By Mimi Schwartz. He notes that the author didn't want to write just another Holocaust book:
Sound like a fascinating read. Not suprising coming from the folks at the University of Nebraska Press.Holocaust historians warned her not to rely on what people told her but to concentrate on records. "But as storyteller, not historian," writes Ms. Schwartz, "I liked how one person's memory bumped another, muddying the moral waters of easy judgment."
The reader will indeed be glad that she did things her way, for the result is a fascinating picture, atypical of so much written on the subject. Blessed with good antennae and a skeptical mind, Ms. Schwartz is not an innocent abroad. Never gullible or credulous, but open to the evidence of her own eyes and ears, she is an ideal guide to her father's lost world, which for so long she resisted.
Oddly enough, considering what a relatively benign spot her father's hometown turned out to be, she has chosen to give it (and other associated places) fictional names. But perhaps the reason she found the people of Benheim (as she calls it) so forthcoming in talking to her was this sensitivity to their feelings.
"What will make your book different from other Holocaust books?" she is asked. "'It's not a holocaust book,' I say as I do to everyone who calls it that . . . . I'm really more interested in how good people lived through and with Germany's past.'"
[. . .]
It is a measure of her nuanced approach and refusal to settle for pat, simplistic answers that her book finds and genuinely values a rare point of light in that darkest of times without ever exaggerating its overall significance.
Tom Nagorski tackles Human Smoke in the Wall Street Journal:
They are among the uncomfortable truths of World War II: the anti-Semitism that infected certain Allied quarters; the failure of President Roosevelt to respond to the plight of European Jews; the civilian carnage inflicted by some Allied attacks with no obvious gains for the war effort. These and other counterweights to the notion of a "good war" -- none new, all disturbing -- are the building blocks for Nicholson Baker's "Human Smoke," a book that aims to answer a pair of questions. As the author poses them: "Was it a 'good war'?" And: "Did waging it help anyone who needed help?"
Mr. Baker, a novelist, tells us that roughly a decade ago he realized how little he knew about World War II. "Didn't understand the war itself -- it made no sense," he told an interviewer. So he began poring over archival newspapers, studying the period via the daily dispatches and absorbing the news as readers would have in the 1930s and 1940s. Having read the headlines for the bombings of Berlin and Tokyo, he began to wonder "how we got there."
"Human Smoke" is Mr. Baker's attempt to give an answer.
Nagorski seems to have found it an interesting thought experiment but one fundamentally off base:
The result is an often infuriating catalog of moral equivalency. 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.
If Churchill and Roosevelt are Mr. Baker's villains, his heroes are the pacifists who tried to stop war. Gandhi makes several appearances, certain in the belief that the German people would in time rebel against Hitler. "I want you to fight Nazism without arms," he wrote in an open letter to the people of England. Aldous Huxley weighs in: "We have all seen how anger feeds upon answering anger but is disarmed by gentleness and patience." Mr. Baker's implied lament is that such calls for restraint went unheard.
But of course Huxley and Gandhi were wrong. One can excuse them; they were, after all, making their case at the war's beginning. Many of Mr. Baker's pacifists -- Auden and Einstein, to take a famous pair -- had abandoned restraint by 1941. Even Gandhi, who abhorred violence in any circumstance, acknowledged that "if ever there could be a justifiable war in the name of and for humanity, a war against Germany, to prevent the wanton persecution of a whole race, would be completely justified." The difference for Mr. Baker, and the rest of us, is that we have the benefit of hindsight. We now know -- indeed we have known for six decades -- what effect "gentleness and patience" had on the enemy at hand.
Not sure I have the time or patience to wade through it based on the descriptions I have read despite its interesting subject matter and perspective.
Interesting article in the WSJ about Borders books:
In a radical move aimed at jump-starting sales, the nation's second-largest book retailer is sharply increasing the number of titles it displays on shelves with the covers face-out. Because that takes up more room than the traditional spine-out style, the new approach will require a typical Borders superstore to shrink its number of titles by 5% to 10%.
That makes the strategy a big gamble for Borders. Reducing inventory goes against the grain of booksellers' efforts over the past 25 years or so. Chains like Borders and Barnes & Noble Inc., the nation's largest book retailer, became household names with superstores that stocked as many as 150,000 titles or more. The rise of Amazon.com Inc., which offers a vast selection online, made it even more important for stores to offer deep inventories."We always had face-out titles on the shelves and on tables, but they were used as punctuation and tended to focus on popular titles," says Anne Kubek, senior vice president of Borders U.S. stores. "Today we're showing the front of books even when we only have two or three copies."
[ . .]
The new display strategy is the brainchild of CEO George Jones, who says he learned when he was a buyer at Dillard's Inc. early in his career that dresses sell better when the entire garment is shown rather than hung sleeve-out. So he recently decided to test sales of books shown with the cover visible at a newly built prototype store in Ann Arbor, Mich., where the company has its headquarters. Results were so encouraging after the first two weeks -- sales of individual titles were 9% higher than at similar Borders stores -- that all of the retailer's superstores have been told to adopt the new strategy.
"The concept store gave us the opportunity to start from scratch and do it exactly as we wanted to do," Mr. Jones says. As for what books to trim from inventory, he notes that the chain has many titles that sell only one copy per store in a year. "There are a ton of them out there," he says. Borders plans to launch its own Web site by May 3, giving the retailer the ability to offer online orders to shoppers who can't find what they want in a store. "We aren't cutting back on the promise of the superstore," adds Mr. Jones.
The retailer says customers throughout the country should be able to see the difference in displays within six weeks. While books shown face-out will still be in the overall minority, as many as three times the titles as in the past will be shelved with covers showing. Certain categories, such as books about food, cooking, travel, art and photography -- and children's books in particular -- lend themselves to the new approach, Ms. Kubek says.
Fiction book shelves will also feature more face-out titles, but fewer than other sections of the store. At its prototype store, Borders is also testing a special display that highlights covers of classics from Charles Dickens and Jack Kerouac, as well as movie tie-in titles such as Cormac McCarthy's "No Country for Old Men." "It's a way to offer you something if you don't really know what you want," says Ms. Kubek.
I have to say this makes a lot of sense to me. I am often first attracted to books by the cover or style of a book. If something grabs your attention you are more likely to buy it right? Make sense. If I were an author I would also be excited about the chance to have my book face out and more prominent instead of just the books on the front table.
But will this have a big impact on fiction or is it more aimed at other more graphically inclined books? What do you think: smart marketing or meaningless gimmick?
