I'm binge eating popular non-fiction this week. I'm reading Gang Leader for a Day
today and plan on reading Bobos in Paradise
tomorrow.
Last week, I asked my buddy Suze why history books sell well, but not politics or other disciplines. She has been in publishing for twenty years and knows these sorts of things. She said that history books may be selling well, but nobody is reading them. People buy those books, because they look good on a coffee table. Or maybe they have really good intentions. They think they want to read a biography of John Adams, so they buy the book, but it ends up gathering dust somewhere. She said a book on feng shui is another story. They sell and people read them.
Steve buys history books and actually reads them. He gives five stars to his latest read, Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America
And congrats to Dan Nexon for the release of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton Studies in International History and Politics).
Apt. 11d 
I had to laugh about the “nobody reads history books” line. I have a sister-in-law who thinks it’s very important to look smart. She buys the John Adams biography or Ben Franklin or whatever, and she does seem to get through part of them, but you can tell her heart’s not in it. And she comes off looking a little silly. Me, I know better than to buy a book for looks, having done it in grad school a few too many times. I’m a non-fiction junkie as well. My latest, though, Sarah Vowel’s “The Wordy Shipmates” is languishing. It’s just not as good as I thought it would be. And now I have nothing to replace it with. Sigh.
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I used to read the history books I bought, but lately I haven’t gotten to the end of anything serious that doesn’t involve WWII.
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I agree with every bit of Tenured Radical’s review of Venkatesh. And boy do I wish I could enforce a moratorium on academics every referring to themselves as “rogue” anything ever again.
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There does seem to be a real business in publishing books very few readers are ever going to get to the end of (A Brief History of Time!). However, there’s a subculture of American readers who really do love history. The right history book can be positively electrifying and can completely change the way you see the world–for instance Matthew Sweet’s book on the Victorians or Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism. You may not like the latter, but people have actually been reading it.
The beauty of non-fiction is that you can learn something from reading only a page or a chapter, whereas with fiction, there’s always the danger that the novelist is planning to pull the carpet out from under you in the last chapter.
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Siobhan,
That’s quite the piece. I haven’t read Venkatesh, but I’m getting the Beauchamp-Jayson Blair vibe from his work (all these people with a single fictitious name, the project has been demolished, etc.). I think there’s at least a 25% chance that Venkatesh’s research was done without ever leaving Starbucks, particularly since he apparently fails to reference people who had covered similar ground in the past.
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To be fair to nonfiction, I have an even worse record of for finishing serious fiction (which I define as books without either a wizard or a detective). I still haven’t gotten past page 20 of Infinite Jest (as long it is on the floor by the recliner, I’m technically still ‘reading’ it and not just using it to keep my beer off the floor). I had the same problem with Tolstoy. Despite having them in the house, I’ve never even tried to read “The Corrections”, any Chabon, etc.
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OMG, Amy. That’s completely not true. It’s quite a leap to say that you have problems with the methodology to say that the guy made it up. He didn’t.
I actually am loving the book. It’s a page turner unlike the snore-fest in APSR. I totally disagree with Tenured Radical’s review. But I want to finish the book before I comment.
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Laura,
My question is, if you wanted to check up on Venkatesh’s work, would you be able to locate the people he talked to? Also, does he have any new insights? Tenured Radical’s commentors were suggesting that many of the conclusions that he comes to were already published by other people that Venkatesh doesn’t cite back in the early 70s. That may be grossly unfair, of course. Please do wade in and give your two cents.
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MH, Kavalier and Clay by Chabon is a total hoot. There are some serious bits, but they don’t get in the way of a very good book. The one Wallace book I read convinced me not to go near any other, and I haven’t tried Franzen.
But I’m another one of the funny ones who actually read much of the history that they buy. Admittedly, about seven years elapsed between starting The Prize and finishing it, and Albion’s Seed had a similar bought-to-read duration, but I wolfed down Orlando Figes’ A People’s Tragedy in about three weeks.
Laura, maybe you should ask your friend Suze for a little more structural analysis. Lots of politics books get marketed as Current Events. Some of them are good, some less so, but it’s a fairly distinct genre. There may be an open spot in the publishing ecology for something that is political and analytical, but accessible while not being as disposable as Current Events. Sort of like the way micro-history came along about a decade ago (Eye-Catching Title colon How X Changed the World), and how popular economics have done the last five. The publisher who creates this sub-genre makes mucho dinero.
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Doug, that’s what my wife keeps saying about Kavalier and Clay, so I’ll probably try it eventually. Apparently, I’m not reading Infinite Jest anymore. At least, I’m not allowed to keep it by the recliner anymore.
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Amy P, you _shouldn’t_ be able to contact those people, it’d be a gross violation of their privacy. Pretty much any IRB-approved project requires anonymity for all research output. Venkatesh seems to’ve (unethically) skipped that formality, but making it impossible to check up with his participants, that’s part of what they would have required.
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That sounds fair enough. What are the safeguards in place to make sure that there are such people and that they aren’t figments of the researcher’s imagination?
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“Pretty much any IRB-approved project requires anonymity for all research output.”
No. If you, the researcher, knows who the participants are, the IRB wants to know. If the topic is touchy, and the participants are anonymous to the researcher, then you can get away with not letting the IRB know who the participants are. But, if you know their names, the IRB will want to see a signed consent form. The IRB can and will show-up to audit your files. People aren’t supposed to be identifiable in the final output, but that’s another matter and the IRB will expect you to justify how you plan to do that.
And if you want to give people an incentive to participate, you’ve got to get their SSN and give them a W-2, and have them wait for a check. Giving someone a bus pass to get to the clinic is not a straight-forward task in some cases. I can remember handing out twenty-dollar bills to pay participants on the spot.
IRBs are a formality the way Jersey barriers are a suggestion that you don’t cross the median.
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Kavalier and Clay turned me on to good fiction again (as opposed to the trashy novels I’m addicted to). I’m with Doug.
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I enjoyed Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, so Kavalier and Clay has definitely moved up on my to-read list.
Apropos the original post: If you buy a book on feng shui but don’t read it, how do you know which table to leave it on?
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Dictyranger, it depends on which way the tree in the forest falls…
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Identifiable to the IRB, MH, yes, but not to the public. (That’s why I did say output, and it seems to be what Amy P had in mind). The identifying info is generally required to be kept in a locked file in an office to which only the researchers have access.
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I once tried to put ‘Iron-clad lock box’ in the data control section of a proposal.
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“I once tried to put ‘Iron-clad lock box’ in the data control section of a proposal.”
What happened?
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Others writing the grant had a laugh and took it out.
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