Brick

The Democrat-Gazette pub­lished today my review of What Orwell Didn’t Know: Pro­pa­ganda and the New Face of Amer­i­can Pol­i­tics, Andras Szanto, edi­tor. I was so excited by this book, even though it was dis­ap­point­ing, that I wrote three Bricks refer­ring to George Orwell. Two of them were on rev­e­la­tions about today from his 1949 novel 1984, one con­sid­er­ing tor­ture and the other more or less on cre­ation­ism. The third pro­vided an oppor­tu­nity to apply Orwell’s pre­scient opin­ion on the military-industry com­plex, that war is good for everyone.

Full-fledged book reviews are tough to write well. Sur­pris­ingly they have not got­ten eas­ier. The dif­fi­culty here was of direc­tion. The fair way is to give a good para­graph on most if not all of the essays it con­tained. That’s the point, right, for a col­lec­tion, to review the points of view? This book had 18 essays, that’s 18 para­graphs, and what’s pub­lished today is only 22. Doesn’t sound like much, but my review as pub­lished is almost too long by news­pa­per stan­dards. In fact, it has been cut by about a third (I was grat­i­fied that my per­mis­sion was requested and that the dele­tions sound) — most of which com­prised thoughts on indi­vid­ual pieces.

The other way to review a book like this is to pro­vide an overview: What is the book about over­all and to what extent does it suc­ceed. Inter­spersed dur­ing those two dis­cus­sions is back­ground mate­r­ial. If I had the space the New York Review of Books allots, I could have got­ten it all in. It’s tempt­ing to pub­lish the dele­tions here: how each of the main essays struck me, plus a too-personal rec­ol­lec­tion of 1984’s impact on me as a young teen. I chose overview, with the item-by-item the con­clud­ing sec­tion, which made it clearly excisable.

I see reviews of any­thing, movies and albums and the rest, as a con­sumer ser­vice first then enter­tain­ment. How­ever, a num­ber of crit­ics see what they do as a lit­er­ary genre. Bully. Bet they wouldn’t inter­rupt sound rea­son­ing with an orig­i­nal nurs­ery rhyme:

Georgie Porgie, Porgy and Bess,
Hated Big Brother, Oh what a mess.
Porgy decides to New York he’ll blow,
Such tales “Ain’t Nec­es­sar­ily So.“
Copy­right 2008 Ben S. Pollock

A write-up should advise the reader whether they should read the book, see the show or lis­ten to the CD. That requires sum­mary and analy­sis. Enter­tain­ment comes in when the reader enjoys the piece.

Con­fes­sion: When I read book reviews — and this does not apply to any other form — I also want to come away with enough knowl­edge that I do not have to read the book. Some­times, I will click from an online write-up to the library and put the book on reserve because it sounds like some­thing I want to spend many hours with. The rest of the time the knowl­edge gained just from the sum­mary is enough to use and even to share. Yes, this applies only to non-fiction. It’s how I got so smart. You can’t grasp from a squib, how­ever, the artistry of a short-story or poetry col­lec­tion or a novel — just if the lit­er­a­ture is to your taste or, bet­ter, worth expand­ing your inter­ests to. Which is the point. –30–