Books—broadly defined as any kind of written or printed document—are the primary means by which civilizations are constructed, memories are preserved, ideas are communicated, wealth is distributed, and power is exercised. To understand any human society, you must read its books. And as Winston Churchill said, “Books last forever.” The physical structures of civilizations eventually crumble into ruins, but the books they leave behind are immortal.
Censors can be astonishingly intelligent readers. For them, discernment and insight are essential job skills. Aleksandr Nikitenko (1804-77) hated and loved his work for the same reason: "Only the censor has the opportunity to read everything being written in our country." He adored Byron ("his poetry is like a storm playing an Aeolian harp") and scolded Russians for not appreciating Shakespeare. And he fully recognized the "downright absurdity and contradiction" of the system.
He tried to reason with Orthodox clerics who demanded the suppression of historical articles on the Reformation, which, they believed, might inspire a Russian Martin Luther. The minister of war insisted that an expose of army atrocities be recalled from Moscow bookstores: "This book is particularly dangerous because there's truth in every single line of it."
Nikitenko won some battles, heading off attempts to expurgate Pushkin and block John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. But the government created a new office to double-check books that had been approved: in effect, a censor who censored the censors. This translation by Helen Saltz Jacobson of Nikitenko's diaries is the self-portrait of a humane mind trapped in a Gogolesque farce.
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Before it launched the modern environmental movement, Silent Spring (1962) had to run a formidable publication gantlet. Rachel Carson challenged the prevailing scientific consensus about pesticides, a subject most magazines wouldn't touch for fear of losing ads. The chemical industry threatened legal action and mounted a PR campaign against Carson. But she had several strong cards to play.
She was already a best-selling author. She was firmly backed by her editor, Paul Brooks of Houghton Mifflin, then an independent family firm with a tradition of publishing nature writers. The book was serialized in the New Yorker, and President Kennedy plugged it at a press conference. On CBS, Eric Sevareid gave Carson equal time with an industry spokesman, though some corporations pulled their commercials. As Brooks predicted, "A future social historian will be writing his Ph.D. thesis on the career of Silent Spring—just you wait!"
Priscilla Coit Murphy builds a gripping account of the obstacle course that troublemaking books must run. It leaves one wondering whether anything so controversial could reach the public today.
In 1962 the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring sparked widespread public debate on the issue of pesticide abuse and environmental degradation. The discussion permeated the entire print and electronic media system of mid-twentieth-century America. Although Carson's text was serialized in the New Yorker, it made a significant difference that it was also published as a book. With clarity and precision, Priscilla Coit Murphy explores the importance of the book form for the author, her editors and publishers, her detractors, the media, and the public at large. Murphy reviews the publishing history of the Houghton Mifflin edition and the prior…
More than a century before Oprah, emancipated African Americans organized their own book clubs. They studied mainly the Western classics but also emerging black writers.
While Booker T. Washington emphasized vocational training, more militant black leaders demanded the right to read the same authors taught in elite white academies: One of their syllabuses included Milton, Spenser, Homer, Aeschylus, Longfellow, Dryden, Pope, Browning, Pindar and Sappho. Those poets, said one reader, inspired the "hope [that] the great American epic of the joys and sorrows of our blood and kindred, of those who have gone before us[,] would one day be written."
And that's exactly what happened. A young Ralph Ellison read everything in the segregated branch of the Oklahoma City library; Malcolm X was profoundly affected by Paradise Lost; and Toni Morrison minored in classics at Howard University.
Over the past decade the popularity of black writers including E. Lynn Harris and Terry McMillan has been hailed as an indication that an active African American reading public has come into being. Yet this is not a new trend; there is a vibrant history of African American literacy, literary associations, and book clubs. Forgotten Readers reveals that neglected past, looking at the reading practices of free blacks in the antebellum north and among African Americans following the Civil War. It places the black upper and middle classes within American literary history, illustrating how they used reading and literary conversation…
Middlebrow was the deadliest insult Virginia Woolf and Dwight Macdonald could hurl at a book.
Until recently, that vast literary territory was ignored by scholars. Joan Rubin changed all that with a study that really deserves the overused label "groundbreaking." Middlebrow books, which dominated American culture between 1920 and 1960, strove to make challenging subjects accessible to a somewhat educated audience.
A legendary example was Will and Ariel Durant's 11-volume The Story of Civilization. Before literary criticism became a hermetic business of professors talking only to one another, every newspaper had a weekend book review section, where public critics like Irita Van Doren and Clifton Fadiman addressed general readers.
The proliferation of book clubs, reading groups, "outline" volumes, and new forms of book reviewing in the first half of the twentieth century influenced the tastes and pastimes of millions of Americans. Joan Rubin here provides the first comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon, the rise of American middlebrow culture, and the values encompassed by it. Rubin centers her discussion on five important expressions of the middlebrow: the founding of the Book-of-the-Month Club; the beginnings of "great books" programs; the creation of the New York Herald Tribune's book-review section; the popularity of such works as Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy;…
Modern American literature is inconceivable without Maxwell Perkins. As an editor at Scribner's, he probably saved that dustily respectable firm by dragging it into the 20th century. He nursed F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway and performed lifesaving surgery on the baggy manuscripts of Thomas Wolfe.
For all manner of authors, he had an unprejudiced eye for brilliance. He angled for Henry Roth's radical proletarian fiction and gave Winston Churchill the idea that eventually became A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. He advised Charles Scribner to grab Bruce Barton's The Man Nobody Knows, explaining that "it treats Christ as a supersalesman." (Scribner was scandalized, and another publisher made it a blockbuster.) He published the classy mysteries of S.S. Van Dine and capped his career with From Here to Eternity. And he gave every author unstinting time, attention, and labor.
Read this classic biography, and you'll understand why writers today regularly complain that there are no more editors like Max Perkins.
The National Book Award winner from Pulitzer Prize-winning author A. Scott Berg is now celebrating its 40th anniversary.
The talents he nurtured were known worldwide: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and numerous others. But Maxwell Perkins remained a mystery, a backstage presence who served these authors not only as editor but also as critic, career manager, moneylender, psychoanalyst, father-confessor, and friend.
This outstanding biography, a winner of the National Book Award, is the first to explore the fascinating life of this genius editor extraordinare-in both the professional and personal domains. It tells not only of Perkins's stormy marriage,…
Our book offers a global survey of the impact of books on human civilization, from the beginnings of written records to the twenty-first century. It presents the latest research on paper, printing, binding, scientific publishing, the history of maps, music, and print, the profession of authorship, and lexicography. It explores the many forms of the book, from the early clay tablets of Sumer, Assyria, and Babylonia to today’s burgeoning electronic devices.
The expert contributors delve into fascinating topics such as archives and paperwork, Arabic script, Slavic, Canadian, African, and Australasian books, new textual technologies, and much more. The book contains a wealth of illustrative examples and case studies to dramatize its exciting history. It is designed for academics, students, and anyone interested in the subject.
I’ve always been fascinated by group dynamics, large and small. Why things functioned well, why they didn’t. It’s possible my ability to empathize and use humor as a consensus-builder is the reason I was elected president of a homeowners association, a music production association, and even an agricultural group. Books were not particularly involved in this fascination! But in recent years, experiencing the breakdown of civility and trust in our political and cultural discourse, I’ve taken a more analytical view of the dynamics. These books, in their very different ways, have taught me lessons about life, understanding those with different beliefs, and finding ways to connect and move forward.
We’ve all experienced the overwhelming level of political and social divisiveness in our country. This invisible “virus” of negativity is, in part, the result of the name-calling and heated rhetoric that has become commonplace among commentators and elected leaders alike.
My book provides a clear perspective on the historical and modern-day causes of our nation's divisive state. It then proposes easy-to-understand solutions—an action plan for our elected leaders and citizens as well. Rather than a scholarly treatment of a complex topic, the book challenges us to take the obvious steps required of those living in a free democracy. And it…
Uniting the States of America: A Self-Care Plan for a Wounded Nation
Lyle Greenfield's "Uniting the States of America―A Self-Care Plan for a Wounded Nation" is a work of nonfiction and opinion. Incorporating the lessons of history and the ideas and wisdom of many, it is intended as both an educational resource and a call-to-action for citizens concerned about the politically and culturally divided state of our Union. A situation that has raised alarm for the very future of our democracy.
First, the book clearly identifies the causes of what has become a national crisis of belief in and love for our country. How the divisiveness and hostility rampant in our political…
