Category Archives: The Book World

Scraping the boots of history

If you don’t know already, Powell’s puts a new review each day from a magazines and online sites. It’s great because they put up Atlantic pieces, which generally aren’t available to non-subscribers. Today’s review is especially worth reading. Charles Taylor reviews Deborah Lipstadt’s History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving. Irving is the “historian” who brought a libel suit against Lipstadt when she published a book accusing him of falsifying his work to favor his thesis, mainly that the Holocaust never happened. Taylor provides an insightful review not only of the book, but of the dangers of dismissing the whole story as a case of a disagreement of two historians. The story is larger than that and more important. Anti-semitism should never be dismissed lightly and that Lipstadt’s charges weren’t taken seriously by other prominent historians says something about how far we’ve come (which is not far enough). Giving Irving credit as a good “researcher” says that he has a valid point in his crackpot argument. It validates his point of view. Read Taylor’s article and you will see what I mean. Plus it has one of the best endings ever.

Foer is cooler than I thought

Deborah Solomon has a really nice long article/interview with Jonathan Safran Foer at the NYT. He sounds very nice. Not at all like I thought he would. I imagined him to be pretentious for some reason. Maybe because I imagine all talented people are pretentious. “Why do I write? It’s not that I want people to think I am smart, or even that I am a good writer. I write because I want to end my loneliness. Books make people less alone. That, before and after everything else, is what books do. They show us that conversations are possible across distances.”

Return rant

Doug Seibold has a really passionate article at the Book Standard about the age old practice of returns. Returns let a bookstore feel comfortable ordering large quantities of new titles without fear of being stuck with them. But it hurts the smaller publishers, who have to give discounts of 40% or more to even compete with the larger conglomerates in the first place.
He has some good points, but obviously as a indpendent bookseller, I have problems with the idea of eliminating returns entirely. “As for independent bookstores, their competitive advantage is, and will remain, their ability to find and promote the books their customers are most interested in reading.” Okay, I agree with this statement. We here at Harvard Book Store try to really promote good, solid books, not the latest hyped nonsense. “So perhaps they would be able to take the staff hours they now devote to packing and unpacking boxes of unwanted titles and convert them to more hours spent discovering good books worth hand-selling to customers.” Uhm, what do you mean here? Do you think we actually have time to read at work or something? Handselling is important, but not that many customers want that anymore. Our staff is busy from the time they start their shifts, shelving books, running the registers, answering questions at the info desk. So not unpacking boxes won’t exaclty help you, the small publisher out. At least not here.
I realize I am ranting a bit. And I have no solutions to the many problems of the publishing. Obviously the bookstores need the publishers and vice versa.

Hope for the faithful and faithless

Usually people with a deep-felt religion make me want to clap my hands over my ears and sing ‘la-dee-da-dee-da’ loudly. But Jim Wallis, author of God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It, sounds okay in my book. He talks about inclusive religion with the folks at Alternet (as opposed to the exclusive relgion of our nation’s leaders).

Lincoln got it right. We don’t claim God’s blessing on our politics and policies. We don’t claim that God is on our side. We worry, we pray, we just always examine ourselves to see if we are on God’s side. And if Lincoln got it right, I think Martin Luther King did it best. With that Bible in one hand and the Constitution in the other hand, he really didn’t pronounce, he persuaded. He didn’t shut people out; he invited everybody in to a moral discourse on politics. And he said we can do better. We can do better than this by our democratic values, by our religious values.