On Today’s Bookshelf (XVIII)

The past week has been a very busy week. Clients have inundated me with new work that needs to be done on a short schedule, and thus at a higher-than-normal pay rate. More importantly, I have been forced to do something I loathe doing — I’ve had to turn away a fair number of projects.

I thought with the close of the week such “troubles” would end, but that was/is not to be. Two clients have informed me that I should plan on next year being a repeat of this year. Of course, there are no guarantees, but based on their prognosticating efforts, next year will be very busy again for me. (I had to prepare my financial reports for my accountant for the third quarter tax filings and I was pleased to note that business was up a little more than 50% over last year.)

Finally, the weekend came and I thought I could devote some time to preparing an essay for An American Editor. Alas, when I opened my e-mail Saturday morning, I had a request to submit a bid for editing work. The problem was/is that this work would be year-long and would range in size from 20,000 to 200,000 manuscript pages. Accompanying the request to bid were several lengthy documents that detailed the editing requirements. Combine the need to prepare the bids with my desire to enjoy my weekend, and I decided it was time for another On Today’s Bookshelf article.

These are easy substitutes for me because books are added to the list as I acquire them; I do not need to sit with a blank canvas. There will be at least one more On Today’s Bookshelf before the holidays, in case you are looking for ideas of books to buy as gifts — whether for yourself or someone else.

Here are some of the books that I have acquired and added to my to-be-read pile since the last On Today’s Bookshelf post, either in hardcover or in ebook form:

Nonfiction –

• The Pope’s Daughter by Caroline Murphy
• Empires of the Sea by Roger Crowley
• “Non-Germans” under the Third Reich: The Nazi Judicial and Administrative System in Germany and Occupied Eastern Europe, with Special Regard to Occupied Poland, 1939-1945 by Diemut Majer
• The Marcel Network: How One French Couple Saved 527 Children from the Holocaust by Fred Coleman
• Believe and Destroy: Intellectuals in the SS War Machine by Christian Ingrao
• The Dreyfus Affair: The Scandal That Tore France in Two by Piers Paul Read
• The Great Dissent: How Oliver Wendell Holmes Changed His Mind — and Changed the History of Free Speech in America by Thomas Healy
• Desperate Sons: Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, John Hancock, and the Secret Bands of Radicals Who Led the Colonies to War by Les Standiford
• Why We Fight: Congress and the Politics of World War II by Nancy Beck Young
• A Secession Crisis Enigma by Daniel W. Crofts
• The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era by Douglas R. Egerton
• A Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert, and the Death That Changed the British Monarchy by Helen Rappaport
• The Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg by Helen Rappaport
• Daily Life During the French Revolution by James M. Anderson
• The Psychology of Lust Murder: Paraphilia, Sexual Killing, and Serial Homicide by Catherine Purcell and Bruce A. Arrigo
• The Mad Sculptor: The Maniac, the Model, and the Murder that Shook the Nation by Harold Schechter
• The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise D’Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon by Veronica Buckley
• Intelligence in War: The Value–and Limitations–of What the Military Can Learn about the Enemy by John Keegan
• The First World War by John Keegan
• Divine Fury: A History of Genius by Darrin M. McMahon
• Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman by Robert L. O’Connell
• Sun Tzu at Gettysburg: Ancient Military Wisdom in the Modern World by Bevin Alexander
• The Grand Chorus of Complaint: Authors and the Business Ethics of American Publishing by Michael J. Everton
• Snow-Storm in August: Washington City, Francis Scott Key, and the Forgotten Race Riot of 1835 by Jefferson Morley
• Hitler’s Spy Chief: The Wilhelm Canaris Betrayal: The Intelligence Campaign Against Adolf Hitler by Richard Bassett

Fiction –

• End Game by John Gilstrap
• Frozen Moment by Camilla Ceder
• Soldier of God by David Hagberg
• Kingmaker’s Sword by Ann Marston
• American Coven by Amy Cross
• The Veiled Assassin by Q.V. Hunter
• Soul of Fire by Caris McRae
• Close Call: A Liz Carlyle Novel  by Stella Rimington
• Property by Valerie Martin
• Bye Bye Baby by Fiona McIntosh
• Beautiful Death by Fiona McIntosh
• My Real Children by Jo Walton
• Edge of Eternity: Book Three of The Century Trilogy by Ken Follett
• A Stranger in the Kingdom by Howard Frank Mosher

As usual, most of my acquisitions are nonfiction. What I find is that much of fiction is the same. I do not mean the presentation or the delivery, but the general pattern: boy meets girl (or girl meets boy), love ensues, they live happily ever after (replace this pattern with another appropriate pattern such as scientist stumbles on plot, tells authorities who ignore scientist’s warnings, scientist decides to save world, scientist turns out to be the new James Bond and saves world). Same theme, different characters, but essentially the same storyline. I do not mean to imply that I do not enjoy well-written fiction, because I do. This is just an explanation of why my primary interest runs to nonfiction.

Nonfiction tends to have greater diversity. There is so much of the world, of nature, of science, of history, of language, of philosophy, of many things that I have yet to discover that nonfiction can provide me with both knowledge and entertainment and keep my interest.

I suppose if I had to say what makes nonfiction books unique as a form of entertainment, it is that it always has surprises, it is not formulaic, and it is not predictable except in the sense that we already know the broad outlines (e.g., the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires ceased to exist or that the Great Depression was the bane of the 1930s).

I hope you find that On Today’s Bookshelf essays stimulate your reading interests. Please add your contributions to books by naming books you think colleagues would be interested in reading.

Richard Adin, An American Editor

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On Today’s Bookshelf (XVII)

Here is a list of some of the books that I am reading (or acquired or preordered and added to my to-be-read pile since the last On Today’s Bookshelf post) either in hardcover or in ebook form:

Nonfiction –

• A Scream Goes Through the House: What Literature Teaches Us About Life by Arnold Weinstein
• The Borgias and Their Enemies by Christopher Hibbert
• The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale
• American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee by Karen Abbott
• Our One Common Country: Abraham Lincoln and the Hampton Roads Peace Conference of 1865 by James B. Conroy
• A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 by G.J. Meyer
• Stalin’s Genocides by Norman M. Naimark
• Plotting Hitler’s Death by Joachim Fest
• An Artist in Treason by Ando Linklater
• Imperial Spain 1469-1716 by J.H. Elliott
• The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century by Jurgen Osterhammel
• The Road to Black Ned’s Forge by Turk McCleskey
• Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language by Steven Pinker
• The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by Steven Pinker
• Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad by William Craig
• Tears in the Darkness by Elizabeth Norman and Michael Norman
• The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses by Kevin Birmingham
• Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time by Ira Katznelson
• The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World by Lincoln Paine
• Blood Libel and Its Derivatives: The Scourge of Anti-Semitism by Raphael Israeli
• Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre by Jonathan Israel
• The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II by Denise Kiernan
• Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750-1790 by Jonathan Israel
• Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752 by Jonathan Israel
• Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 by Jonathan Israel

Fiction –

• The Purity of Vengeance by Jussi Adler-Olsen
• A Foreign Country by Charles Cumming
• Darkfire by C.J. Sansom
• The Innocent by Ian McEwan
• The Oracle Glass by Judith Merkle Riley
• Final Witness by Simon Tolkien
• Red Cell by Mark Henshaw
• Signora Da Vinci by Robin Maxwell
• The Devil’s Elixir by Raymond Khoury
• HHhH by Laurent Binet
• Limits of Power by Elizabeth Moon
• The Street Philosopher by Matthew Plampin
• Beautiful Assassin by Michael White
• The Director: A Novel by David Ignatius
• Eye for an Eye by Ben Coes
• A Journeyman to Grief by Maureen Jennings

As you can see, much of my summer has been spent acquiring (or preordering) and reading nonfiction books.

I am particularly looking forward to reading the last three in the nonfiction list (the trilogy by Jonathan Israel). The books have been favorably commented on several times in the past few months by reviewers in reviews of Israel’s newest book, Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre, which I also purchased. Unfortunately, that book wasn’t so well reviewed and had I read the reviews before purchasing the book, I might have thought twice about buying it. But now that I own it, I will eventually read it and decide for myself.

One of the books on the list that I am currently reading is The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses by Kevin Birmingham. Although I have not quite finished reading the book, I can whole-heartedly recommend it. It is a fascinating look at censorship in the United States during and following World War I and how federal and state governments turned over the role of censor to private antivice groups.

Of even greater interest to me is the revelation of how Joyce was perceived by his contemporaries. Ulysses, a book I have never thought much of, was considered by many, including Sylvia Beach, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway, to name just a few, to be the greatest written work of all time. And Joyce received patronage to enable him to write. One admirer gave him what would be £1,000,000 today to sustain him as he wrote.

In many ways, Joyce was a tragic figure. Were he writing today, I doubt that he would have had the support he was given then. But it is worth reading how Ulysses was suppressed, was smuggled into the United States, and, ultimately, with the backing of Bennett Cerf, founder of Random House, was found not to be obscene. If you read just one book about books this year, this should be the book.

What are you reading? Do you have any recommendations to share?

Richard Adin, An American Editor