By the Numbers
Great Nonfiction for Grown-Ups
Barbara A. Genco -- School Library Journal, 12/1/1999
Barbara A. Genco is director of collection development at the Brooklyn (NY) Public Library.
After a year of reading through the adult nonfiction lists, I again offer my own short list of good reads, organized by Dewey category. My list makes no claim to "best" or "notable." This is quite simply a list of books I've enjoyed and want to recommend to you. As you browse, please remember these words from Mona Simpson, one of the contributors to For the Love of Books, who writes: "Every list of great books should be called Some Great Books or My Great Books because, like people, books are not something we can all agree on. We fall in love with books the way we fall in love with friends, irrationally, often permanently, not always wisely.... Deeply embedded in the beauty and vulnerability of what we do is the fact that if you can read...you already own the right to love or hate a book."
000s
Shwartz, Ronald B.
For the Love of Books: 115 Celebrated
Writers on the Books They Love Most.
297p. Grossett/Putnam. $24.95.
ISBN-0-399-14466-8
In compiling this clever, satisfying survey, Shwartz contacted 115 English-language writers and asked them to identify three to six books "that have in some way influenced or affected" them deeply. The result: a fascinating smorgasbord of reading choices and insights into the passions of some great writers.
One way to approach this book is to start at the beginning and read straight through, from scientist and former poet Diane Ackerman (who cites the poetry of Dylan Thomas and Randall Jarrell), to Herman Wouk (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Don Quixote and Trollope's Autobiography). I, however, started with the essays by my favorite writers, eager to see if we shared the same favorite books or if they could help me discover new ones. I then browsed through writers I don't consider my favorites and found some wonderful surprises. Finally, I ended with those contributors I doubt I'll ever read--though some of their choices might prompt me to change my mind.
Much of the pleasure in this book comes from seeing connections you'd expect between writers. Of course playwright Wendy Wasserstein names The Cherry Orchard, while the glib, edgy satirist Christopher Buckley loves H.L. Mencken and Tom Wolfe. But there are unexpected, and equally wonderful, pairings. Poet Rita Dove, for instance, says one of her favorite books is Harold and the Purple Crayon. It was "great for me," Dove writes, "because it showed me the possibilities of traveling the line of one's imagination."
100s
Wheelis, Allen.
The Listener: A Psychoanalyst Examines His Life.
256p. Norton, $25.95
ISBN 0-393-04783-0
Now in his 80s, this noted psychoanalyst turns his finely honed technique on himself. Wheelis is a fluid writer, yet some of his subject matter--his still-powerful sexual fantasies; his mother's pain-racked death--doesn't always make for easy reading. He knows his approach is risky: "Since I intended in this work the utmost honesty, the reader, if I am successful, cannot in the end think well of me. If he or she does, I will have failed."
Wheelis vividly describes the key elements that shaped his life: his father's wasting death from tuberculosis; his intense relationship with his mother; a painful experience in his 20s of trying, and failing, to write a novel; and his analytic training at the Menniger Clinic. He learned during his training that "the heart of analysis is to look elsewhere--to be presented with experience which the patient means to be understood at one level" while the truth may "lie at another level...[in an] area the patient does not want you to notice."
The reader sometimes wants to scold Wheelis for his pessimism, as his wife, Ilse, does: "A shadow falls for one moment across a beautiful day," she tells him. "You seize upon the shadow, will not see the sunshine. Why do you do that?"
Wheelis isn't sure, wondering himself how others "do" this thing called life. "There must be a secret, some simple solution.... Always and forever the student and still I don't know how. Are there no classes in living?"
200s
Rubenstein, Richard E.
When Jesus Became God: The Epic Fight over
Christ's Divinity in the Last Days of Rome
267p. Harcourt. $26.
ISBN 0-15-100368-8.
Few 20th-century Christians know of the intense religious, social, and political struggle surrounding the Arian Controversy, which spanned 60 years of the 4th century. But Rubenstein, a scholar specializing in the analysis of violent religious and social conflict, explains that the elements of this theological struggle reflected a monumental historical shift: Christianity, once a persecuted sect, became the Roman Empire's official religion, and the Church councils decided once and for all that Jesus was fully divine--to believe otherwise became heresy.
The Arians believed that Jesus was "the holiest person who ever lived, but not the Eternal God," explains Rubenstein. On the other side were followers of Athanasius, who believed that Christ was fully God. After much strife, the Church adopted the Nicene Creed, which settled the matter in favor of Athanasius and made the Arian belief heresy.
The decision resonated long afterward, Rubenstein writes, leading to the break between the western and eastern Catholic church and to centuries of distrust between Christians and Jews. Before the conflict, "Jews and Christians disagreed strongly about many things, but there was still a closeness between them. They participated in the same moral culture." When it ended, "when Jesus became God--that closeness faded. To Christians, God became a trinity and heresy became a crime. Judaism became a form of infidelity."
300s
Paley, Vivian Gussin.
The Kindness of Children.
129p. Harvard. $18.95.
ISBN 0-674-50358-9.
The author of such inspirational books as The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter and You Can't Say You Can't Play, focuses here on the power of stories to transform children's lives.
Paley, a MacArthur Award-winning teacher, presents a series of intertwined tales. The first is Teddy's. On a visit to a British kindergarten, a profoundly disabled child named Teddy is offered a starring role in a classroom drama. "Pretend you're the puppy and you didn't learn to walk yet," Teddy's playmates urge. While the teachers focus on Teddy's disability, his classmates home in on his ability to participate in acting out their story.
Back home in Chicago, and still moved by Teddy and his classmates, Paley repeats the story to her frail, 97-year-old mother, who lives in a nursing home. Paley's mother says the actions of Teddy's classmates remind her of the "mitzvah," or good deed, so honored in Judaism. She, in turn, shares Teddy's story with another nursing home resident, a retired teacher. They, too, connect through Teddy's story and begin their own friendship.
Paley urges those who work with children to help them create and act out stories. In a classroom, "spontaneous storytellers create little homes for one another where everyone can imagine playing a role and no one is left out." Paley argues that when children listen to, act in, and record their stories, these actions transcend isolation and heal. "If... in the process of pretending to be someone or something else, children learn, even for a moment, to walk in another person's footsteps, could this be the supreme mitzvah of all?"
400s
Elster, Charles Harrington. The Big Book of
Beastly Mispronunciations: The Complete
Opinionated Guide for the Careful Speaker.
426. Houghton. $15.
ISBN 0-395-89338-0
Contending that a laissez-faire ("rhymes with guess way there") approach to English language pronunciation is not acceptable, this appealing guide awakens readers to the sad truth that "lots of people mispronounce words every day and plenty of people notice." Host of National Public Radio's A Way with Words, Elster has expanded and extensively revised his three previous books--including There's No Zoo in Zoology--into one delightful pronunciation guide that is not just for the cognoscenti ("KAHN-yuh-SHEN-tee").
The list of words ranges from "a"--"uh (as in ago)" or "ay (as in ate)"--to "zydeco"("rhymes with try to go"), but Elster goes way beyond a simple list of correct pronunciations. His explanatory essays refer to a wide array of research and reference tools, including dictionaries, etymologies, and such guides as the NBC Handbook of Pronunciation.
Some may dismiss Elster's efforts as Sisyphean ("SIS-uh-FEE-in") or his compilation too anal ("AY-nal"). But he presents his entries with such aplomb (the second syllable "rhymes with Tom or bomb") and affection for the double entendre ("DUHB'L ahn-THAN-druh") that one cannot demur ("Pronounce mur as in murder not mural").
500s
Gleick, James.
Faster: The Acceleration of Just About
Everything.
324p. Pantheon. $24.
ISBN 0-67-40837-1
How long has it been since you used a crockpot or set out bread dough to rise? Do you know anyone who defrosts anything without a microwave? New York Times science writer Gleick quicksteps the reader through the escalating "compression of time" that has characterized our century. Each essay is just long enough to give its topic a fair shake yet short enough for even the most driven multitasker.
Gleick offers here the same clarity and thoughtful explication he displayed in Chaos: The Making of a New Science. Some subjects he covers? The nearly imperceptible way that phone companies record and speed up a typical 411 caller's voice. The "fuzzy logic" that will allow elevators to climb ever-higher buildings and even to move horizontally through them. And the fact that many elevator "door close" buttons are mere placebos: "with no function but to distract... those riders to whom 10 seconds is an eternity."
Computers only intensify our time obsession, Gleick writes. "Connectedness has brought a glut" of undifferentiated information that has made reading e-mail "feel like a forced march though a shadeless landscape." Gleick advises us to continue and retain meaningful time-consuming activities. "Forming an opinion is one process," he writes. "Extracting it is another. Sometimes we do best to let one process mature before the next begins."
600s
Kincaid, Jamaica.
My Garden (Book).
229p. Farrar. $23.
ISBN 0-374-28186-6
Kincaid blends a fertile inner life, botanical and colonial history, gardening lore, and her long gardening experience to create a rich, rewarding read.
She contrasts the colonial specimen plants of the botanical garden of St. John's, in her native Antigua, with the wild, unruly garden she's created at her current home in Vermont. This garden, says Kincaid, reflects her passions and interests. "When it dawned on me that the garden I was making... resembled a map of the Caribbean and the sea that surrounds it... I only marveled at the way a garden is for me an exercise in memory, a way of getting to a past that is my own."
Kincaid is a hopeful, imaginative gardener who lazily pages through catalogs during the long Vermont winters and plans trips to China, Giverney, and Sissinghurst to further feed her passion for plants. "I wanted a garden that looked like something I had in my mind's eye, but exactly what that might be I did not know. And this must be why: the garden for me is so bound up with words about the garden, with words themselves, that any set idea of the garden, any set picture, is a provocation to me."
Is her ideal possible? "I shall never have the garden I have in my mind but that for me is the joy of it; certain things can never be realized so all the more reason to attempt them."
700s
Schama, Simon.
Rembrandt's Eyes
640p. Knopf. $50.
ISBN 0-679-40256-X
In this fresh, detailed biography, Schama directs our gaze to the famed painter Rembrandt Harmennszoon van Rijn. Rembrandt left a considerable body of work, especially self-portraits. "No other painter before the twentieth century, perhaps no artist ever, has left us with such an exhaustive archive of his face," Schama writes. His painting career was "a forty-year soliloquy, and its inexhaustible, bravura quality inevitably led to the adoption of Rembrandt as the archetype of the self-obsessed artist."
Schama explores the painter's complicated life: his birth, marriage, real estate deals, commissions, mistresses, bankruptcy, poverty, and death. But at the center is Rembrandt's obsession: to surpass the Flemish master, Peter Paul Rubens. In his early years, "Rembrandt was utterly in thrall to Rubens... Rembrandt was haunted." But by his career's end, "Rembrandt ended up being the kind of painter Rubens could not even have imagined, much less anticipated."
Schama's close examination of a huge body of drawings, etchings, and paintings reflects an extraordinary gift for contextual analysis: we learn not only about Rembrandt's work but about his contemporaries and their art. The book's most vivid passages are set in the studio, where Schama brings to life the materials and techniques of 17th-century oil painting. Though a painter of his age, Rembrandt transcended it: "It's impossible to look at his strongest work, either in painting, drawing, or etching, and still not be struck by the simple truth that he achieved things which, as Durer wrote in another context, 'could not in his day be found.'"
800s
Korda, Michael.
Another Life: A Memoir of Other People.
530p. Random House. $26.95.
ISBN 0-679-45659-7.
At a time when, to quote Calvin Trillin, "the shelf life of the average book is somewhere between milk and yogurt," a 41-year publishing career is an achievement. Intelligent, fast paced, and witty, this is a highly readable insider's account by the ultimate insider. After 30-plus years as editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster's adult trade division, Korda has an acute literary sensibility, a gift for the telling detail, a zest for corporate gamesmanship, and the market savvy of a Wall Street trader.
Korda began his career in an age of erudite book men, of family-held firms with distinguished backlists. This picaresque memoir traces the ebb and flow of that career as he rode the wave of change that transformed publishing into a bottom-line world of mergers, multinational corporations, million-dollar advances and million-copy first printings.
Korda tells his story through the lives of others, in this case, industry executives, colleagues, agents, publicists, and, most of all, authors. His stories are marvelous: they include visits to eccentrics Will and Ariel Durant; power lunches with superagent Irving "Swifty" Lazar; encounters with the brash and foul-mouthed Harold Robbins; signing an obscure UCLA anthropology professor, Carlos Castenada, for his book about a Yaqui shaman named Don Juan; publishing both All the President's Men and Richard Nixon's memoir; and a close encounter with Ronald Reagan's "selective," sometimes "invented" memories.
Korda allows us to peer over his shoulder at an extraordinary career.
900s
Postman, Neil.
Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century:
How the Past Can Improve Our Future.
213p. Knopf. $24.
ISBN 0-375-40129-6
In this wide-ranging call to action, Postman, author of such impassioned books as The Disappearance of Childhood and Amusing Ourselves to Death, offers us the chance to ground our discussions of the 21st century in the historical and philosophical bedrock of the 18th.
Postman is certainly no victim of technolust--he has no e-mail, no PC, and writes his manuscripts in longhand. Those Luddite tendencies notwithstanding, Postman says he is not against technology but wants it viewed as merely a tool. He cautions that, in the words of Thoreau, "our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end.'" The philosophers and scientists whose works and thoughts he invokes include Goethe, Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Smith, Paine, Franklin, and Jefferson. These worthies focused much attention on the technological developments of their times and all the resulting philosophical, social, political, and spiritual ripples.
None of these thinkers "could possibly have embraced... the idea that technological innovation is synonymous with moral social and psychic progress." Yet today, too many e-mail postings and boardroom discussions--corporate, school, and library alike--begin with that certainty. Postman asks and tries to answer the core questions: "What is progress? How does it happen? How is it corrupted? What is the relationship between technological and moral progress?" And at center: "What is the problem to which technology is the solution?"
