I can’t tell you how many people sent me James Wolcott’s New Republic review of Gail Poole’s Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America (University of Missouri). From Wolcott I went to Orwell, and from Orwell to Heidi Julavits at The Believer. Somewhere in between I read a review of John Updike’s book of essays, Picked Up Pieces, by Anatole Broyard, and the September Library Journal article by Barbara Hoffert called “Who’s Selecting Now?” Finally, there was Elizabeth Hardwick’s obituary.

Elizabeth Hardwick co-founded the New York Review of Books in 1963 with her husband of the time, poet Robert Lowell. Twenty years later, I discovered the NYRB when a certain pompous boyfriend of my mother subscribed to it. What a revelation! It became the perpetual annual Christmas present and I had it sent to me for years in Mexico. I felt it was all I needed to stay on top of art, politics, ecology, science, history, and, yes, literature. In lieu of books, there was the book review.

At ForeWord, the service we provide is not quite the elimination of the book itself. (Sorry NYRB, but that is, after all, why I love you.) Our readership is librarians and booksellers, and our mission is to entice them to buy books for their collections, great books.

But everybody’s strapped for time. The Library Journal article referenced above was all about librarians contracting their selection process to vendors like Baker & Taylor. Heavens! What does that mean? Who selects the books at Baker & Taylor? What are the criteria? I’d hate to think that someone could pay to have his/her book placed in a library, that money could buy position…

On the other hand, I understand the librarian’s dilemma. So many books, so little time. What with blogging and analysis and stacking and managing, who’s got time to select books? Who’s got time to read?

We do. That’s what we do. Often, particularly in the afternoons, everyone in this office is reading a book, printed on paper, with ink.

All right, so we read. Lots of people read. What makes us special?

What can I say? Heidi Julavits, editor of The Believer, says in her article “REJOICE! BELIEVE! BE STRONG AND READ HARD,” “If I were to write an essay about reviewing, it would make sense to admit that I have biases; I have opinions; I have some assertions to make about the current state of affairs.”

I admit that I have plenty of biases and opinions and assertions. So do Whitney and Alex and Maryann and Gene and each and every one of our reviewers. But what we also have is a selection process that takes into consideration popular interests, national and international concerns, trends and breakthroughs in science and medicine, new ideas in history, and new voices in prose and poetry. All that plus our own personal biases, opinions, and assertions.

Let’s look at the selection process here at ForeWord. And, I might add, that one of Gail Poole’s principle recommendations for improvement of the book review’s reputation in the world is: "First, and most essentially, I think we need to devise better means of choosing books for review."

How do we select? First of all, I open the mail. I know, it’s kind of crazy, and maybe there are better ways of employing an editor’s time, and maybe I’ll find those ways… But for now, I prefer opening the mail to receiving a pile of unsorted stuff on my floor. Like laundry, it gets cold and wrinkled. So, I open, and sort, and yes, it’s a little like Christmas: most of it you could live without, quite a bit is completely unnecessary, once in a while you get great jewelry. (FYI, the mail consists of books both solicited and unsolicited. And the sorting consists primarily of publication date separation.)

George Orwell says, inimitably: “The reviewer, jaded though he may be, is professionally interested in books, and out of the thousands that appear annually, there are probably fifty or a hundred that he would enjoy writing about. If he is a top-notcher in his profession he may get hold of ten or twenty of them: more probably he gets hold of two or three. The rest of his work, however conscientious he may be in praising or damning, is in essence humbug.” (“Confessions of a Book Reviewer”)

After the initial sort, the piles go to the various offices for close review. Close review means reading. Of course, no one here reads the whole book unless they’re going to write the review as well, but enough gets read to judge whether or not the book is worthy of sending it off to a reviewer.

Orwell says, “…indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash—though it does involve that, as I will show in a moment—but constantly INVENTING reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feelings whatever.”

Worthy is the key word at this step. And that’s where the third pair of eyes comes in. The reviewer, who has expertise in the subject, decides, ultimately if the book is good enough, great enough for a review.

“Nearly every book is capable of arousing passionate feeling, if it is only a passionate dislike, in some or other reader, whose ideas about it would surely be worth more than those of a bored professional. But, unfortunately, as every editor knows, that kind of thing is very difficult to organise.”

Ah, but we do organize it. And that’s what we offer our librarian and bookseller readers:
A book selection process by people who are excited about ideas and stories.
Worthy submissions sent to reviewers with expertise.
Great books chosen and evaluated by people who love to read.

I don’t know about you, but I give away books for the holidays. Here are three that deserve some gift-wrapping.

DUST STORM

A Grave in Gaza by Matt Beynon Rees (Soho Press, 352 pages, hardcover $24.00, 978-1-56947-472-3)

Omar Yussef, principal of a school in Bethlehem, hasn’t been to Gaza since he “had nice curly hair and…could carry an overnight case without breaking into a sweat.” He arrives with a Swede, Magnus Wallender, and meets a Scot, James Cree at the border. Both of them work for the UN While Yussef’s visit is to inspect UN schools, it takes all of five pages to sidetrack him into a rescue mission. The very dangerous rescue mission of a teacher taken into custody after discovering the sale of university degrees to the members of one of the two dueling security (is that the word?) agencies. The next day, it starts to blow, and the murkiness of Gazan politics gets down and dirty as well.

This is the second in Rees’ series, and the writing is superb. As is the pacing. And as improbable as Yussef’s passion is to get to the bottom of things—to go where even angels, gangsters, and corruption fear to tread—he’s a character with humor, strength, and depth. I read this one on the way to New York and back and found, at the end, that I’d formed a great attachment to the brave, portly do-gooder. This is a series I’ll keep up with.

“DON’T BLOW BUBBLES OF DESPAIR.”

This book sits face up on a shelf in my office. Always a step ahead, New Directions published this new edition of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Poetry as Insurgent Art as a hardcover, without a dust jacket. Smart. And fun. Hence the title. This book is full of wonders, wits, and wisdoms, like:

Poetry the shortest distance between two humans.

Great poets are the antennae of the race, with more than rabbit ears.

Oh my, and this:

Be a dark barker before the tents of existence.

Great for the purse, car, bathroom, or hanging by its ear from the Xmas tree. (978-0-8112-1719-4)

ALL THE REST IS NOISE

In Praise of Flattery by Willis Goth Regier (University of Nebraska, 23 illustrations, 232 pages, Softcover $21.95, 978-0-8032-3969-2)

This one’s been sitting in a pile for months. I just couldn’t get to it, and I couldn’t let it go either. Good thing, as I finally cracked it open a couple of days ago and spent a couple of hours laughing. I’m a sucker for this kind of stuff. Yes, in a way, it’s much like Ferlinghetti’s book above, but better, because there are notes and illustrations and quotations from Tacitus and La Rochefoucauld and Saint Simon and anon, etcetera. To La Fontaine, “Flatterers thrive on fool’s credulity.” Samuel Johnson said Dryden was the paragon of “meanness and servility of hyperbolic adulation.” Shakespeare called it “the monarch’s plague.” But instead of just throwing out aphorisms, Regier has numbered RULES. One hundred twenty-eight of them. Here’s one:

RULE 2: Praise must please.

If it does not please, it’s noise....

And another:

RULE 5: To stand out, flattery must fit in.

When flattery is misplaced it is fatal to a flatterer. A flatterer must be able to work a crowd or flatter a target in the midst of one. The audience needs to be taken into account, not just the persons flattered, and not only the present audience but possible future ones. “Holbien, according to legend, so flattered Anne of Cleves that Hery VIII married her on the strength of the likeness, with the result that as soon as the King saw the original the painter had to fly the country.” [Bowen]

Or,

RULE 13: Flattery is a science. [Colton]

Flattery needs to be carefully calibrated. It improves with education, it advances through close observation of cause and effect, and it is based on repeated experience. Among fine-tuned people, flattery requires almost atomic precision.

Last one.

RULE 27: Flattery adapts to all emotions.

Percy Shelley wrote that pity, admiration, and sympathy are “flattering emotions.” There are more. If you doubt yourself you flatter your intelligence. If you blame yourself you flatter your conscience. Love flatters lovers, fear flatters bullies. Apologies flatter. Twilights flatter. Flowers flatter. Oils and alcohol flatter. Words flatter better than anything else, except, on occasion, rapt silence (Rule 66)….

RULE 66: Silence flatters.

“Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise,” says the Proverb (17:28)….

See now, wasn’t that too much fun.

Comes the season of Christmas stories, and now that Thanksgiving is past and my tree is up, I feel that I can brightly bring them forth with comfort and joy.

Lucy’s Christmas, written by Donald Hall and illustrated by Michael McCurdy (David R. Godine, 978-1-56792-342-1) is the story of Donald Hall’s mother, Lucy, a stove, and a rural Christmas in 1909. Beautifully illustrated by scratching away the black to reveal bright colors beneath, this book is a gem, particularly for families whose traditions include church.

Another story based on a family story is Eli Remembers by Ruth Vander Zee and Marian Sneider, illustrated by Bill Farnsworth (Eerdmans Books, 978-0-8028-5309-7). A more apt title might have been, Eli Finds Out, for the boy discovers why his grandparents are so sad on Rosh Hashanah. A journey to Lithuania and the Ponar Forest provide the answer. Unsentimental and yet full of feeling, from the texture of the illustrations to the layout of the text, this is a good book for introducing history within the family.

The Sheltering Cedar by Anne Marshall Runyon (Portal Press, 978-1-933454-02-3) mostly takes place on Ocracoke Island, one of the Barrier Islands off the North Carolina coast. On the island, an old cedar tree, bent from the fierce nor’easters, shelters the creatures of the beach, just like a harbor shelters boats and a house shelters people. Cardinals, plovers, beetles, and toads decorate the pages of this book’s Christmas pages.

Kate DiCamillo, Newberry Medal winner, joins with illustrator Bagram Ibatoulline to create the story of Frances, a little girl in Cincinnati whose father is away, fighting in World War II. DiCamillo doesn’t actually tell the reader this, but through the carefully crafted illustrations in Great Joy (Candlewick, 978-0-7636-2920-5), Frances’s concern for an organ grinder strike a chord. This is a wonderful story about the spirit of Christmas, so often lacking in our contemporary commercial holiday.

Finally, I can’t resist this The Night Before Christmas by Clement C. Moore (Candlewick, 978-0-7636-3469-8). The inky illustrations, reminiscent of 19th century cut-outs, are both crisp and frothy. Every single ornament on the Christmas tree sparkles and intrigues! At least as delightful is the biography of the illustrator, Niroot Puttapipat, who is the son of a Thai princess. This new version of an old favorite perfectly combines nostalgia and high-tech, with its two-dimensional graphics and its three-dimensional pop-ups.

Back in early summer, a Sony Reader came through the office. Actually, it had been in the office for some time, but was hidden in a cupboard. Ignoring the obvious insinuation of its abandonment, I snatched it up, eager to download some free books from Project Gutenburg. This will be great for traveling, I announced to the office. Uh huh, they replied, without conviction.

Luddites, I thought. Remember when the first digital typewriters came out? You could see about 16 characters on a tiny screen embedded just above the keyboard, and as long as you made changes there, it wouldn’t print on the special coated paper. Sounds laborious and nitpicky nowadays, but I was so happy to be rid of the Olivetti; its racket, its physicality. The digital was like a whisper of footsteps accompanying the smoke from my cigarettes.

All right, so I take the Sony Reader home, I download a couple of Sherlock Holmes stories from Gutenberg.org, I plug the Reader into my Mac…. Hah! I should have known better. No Mac support.

But, I’m used to this kind of stuff. I’ve had Macs since 1989. Easy enough to Google “mac support for sony reader” and download some free software. (What gets me is, if it’s so easy (free), then why don’t these gadget-makers include it in their software package in the first place?) That done, I’m hooked up… But can I upload my new books from Gutenberg? No. Need more freeware for that. Finally, I’m all loaded and ready to test drive.

Huge disappointment. Sherlock Holmes is visible on the Reader, but only barely. The type is miniscule no matter how much I magnify. This means that I’m stuck with the partial books that came loaded on the Reader, or I’ve got to go to Sony website and pay for their exclusive product. But wait! I can’t, because it doesn’t support Macs.

A couple of weekends ago, I was in a BestBuy with my thirteen-year-old. I needed a powercord for my iPod and he was browsing. He liked the new Sony PSP where he could play games, listen to music, watch movies. But can he move his iTunes files over to the PSP? No. Can he even plug the thing into a Mac? No.

Honestly, I don’t understand this intolerance and exclusivity among gadget makers. Google seems to have the right idea with the announcement a couple of weeks ago of its Open Handset Alliance software that will run on any phone, and will, I presume, make every cellphone a mini pc. With the obvious trend in electronics moving away from in-home, in-office, physical gadgetry and storage, it seems to me that the first guy to market a device that runs everything wins.

Who wants a collection of movies taking up space when there’s NetFlix and InDemand? Who wants to buy a whole album when you can cherrypick? Why do I want to buy the brand new Amazon Kindle when I can already read papers and (expensive) books on my iPod, and email, watch TV, movies, listen to music? Why do I want another product that forces me to purchase their exclusive book product?

I don’t.

The first guy to market a device that runs everything wins.

An AP-Ipsos poll in August reported that 25% of Americans read no books in the last year. No books. None. Shocking!

But wait a minute. Take a step back. Last Sunday, I didn’t read a book. Not one. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t read. In fact Sunday is the day for combing the NYT Magazine—online. I also catch up on the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. Online. Every day I read the plain old New York Times and the Guardian online. I cancelled my subscription to the local paper over a year ago because the reading-to-waste ratio was too awful. Now, I scan the headlines—online—and my recycling box is a lot lighter.

The point here is that just because a poll says one thing, you can’t presume it says a whole lot of other things. Just because Americans aren’t reading books doesn’t mean that they’re not reading.

So a friend of mine stopped by a few days ago and gazed around the living room at the wall-to-wall books. He’s a musician, and his comment was: I have thousands of CDs, but I don’t want them taking up space in the studio anymore. I don’t need to be able to see them in order to access their information. My collection is digitized and accessible wherever, whenever from my iPod. How would you feel about having your entire collection of books in your pocket?

I admit that my reaction was visceral. It was that pain of loss when your organs shrink away from your skin. My books are so much more than a collection of words. They are more than mere devices that display text. They are—artifacts. Some of them smell like one place, and some like another. The old Jane Eyre that’s been through every major move of the last thirty years is so worn out it’s unreadable. Still, I wouldn’t dream of throwing it away. It’s an old friend. They’re all old friends. I know where I was when I read them first, or last. I know on what side of the spread memorable passages occur.

But wait a minute. Didn’t records used to be like this? I recall staring at Pink Floyd’s The Wall, prominently displayed, while listening to the same. Long before that hazy afternoon, however, 8-tracks were already in our family’s car, and by the time I was in college, cassette tapes had taken over. Good thing, we said, as we took off to Mexico with a stash of music in a shoebox instead of a crate. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve felt any physical connection to my music collection. Unlike with my books, I don’t know who’s sitting next to whom. I don’t care. The ease of accessibility has overwritten the pleasure of spatial conviviality.

Or is it that there’s no sense of loss because the records have been gone for so long?

The definition of artifact is, something created by humans for practical purposes. Records are no longer practical. CDs are no longer practical. Newspapers are no longer practical. And when the right, cross-platform, display device comes along, most books will no longer be practical.

All right, so books may no longer be artifacts, still, not all books are meant to be practical. On another recent Sunday, my youngest son woke up early, and finding himself in a quiet house, browsed the bookshelves nearest the floor. He found a hardcover first edition of Animal Farm—a hand-me-down from a defunct family library—and he sat on the couch under a blanket and read the whole thing before breakfast. I think he’ll remember the experience forever. The book of paper and ink may cease to be a tool, but it will never stop being a gift, a memento, or a treasure.

“Attention spans are getting shorter, thanks to clutter,” Seth Godin wrote in his blog a while back. “In 1960, the typical stay for a book on the New York Times bestseller list was 22 weeks. In 2006, it was two.”

Here are three books to draw out an afternoon. All of them would make superb gifts.

A Beautiful Book

Fifty Uncommon Birds of the Upper Midwest
Watercolors by Dana Gardner
Text by Nancy Overcott
University of Iowa Press
978-1-58729-590-4

This book is beautifully designed, beautifully written, beautifully illustrated. A wonderful gift for the birder by the winter fireside.

“The sparser the food, the farther south snowies migrate. When they reach as far as southern Minnesota, they are often starving, which was particularly true during an unusually early winter irruption in 2005. Whenever I see these magnificent creatures from the Artic in my area, I am aware that my opportunity comes at a hard time for the birds.”

An Undefinable Book

Unrecounted
Poems by W.G. Sebald
Translation by Michael Hamburger
Art by Jan Peter Tripp
New Directions
978-0-8112-1726-2

W.G. Sebald liked to illustrate his novels with blurry black and white photos, but he’s quite clear in his essay defending the art of Jan Peter Tripp, that realism does not equal superficiality.

Here the poetry does the illustrating. Sometimes humorous, sometimes devastating, Sebald’s words speaks to the gaze of Tripp’s portraits. “And painting, what is it, anyway, if not a kind of dissection procedure in the face of black death and white eternity?” —W.G. Sebald on Jan Peter Tripp

So, when the optic nerve
tears, in the still space of the air
all turns as white as
the snow on the Alps.
    —After Nature, W.G. Sebald


A Completely Amusing Book, in the Best Sense

Men of Letters, People of Substance
Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich
Preface by Francine Prose
David R. Godine
978-1-56792-338-4

“A letter is much more than a representation of a symbol, a letter depicts a time period, a certain mood and perhaps, in this book, the soul of the artist,” says Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich in his introduction. James Joyce, then, is represented with the font Baskerville, with its early industrial ironwork fancy. Tennessee Williams, born thirty years later, gets Bookman, a Baskerville with swagger. And look at Flaubert… Can’t you just hear him say: “I am Madame Bovary.”
 

This is a book for designers, writers, readers, and puzzlers. The last half is filled with word play, portraits that face off with titles like “Nice” and “Naughty,” “Passive” and “Aggressive.” (Hint: the “Passive” face has a baby’s butt for a nose.) Totally delightful and worthy of close in(tro)spection.

Kids in Crisis: A Workable Plan for Successful Parenting
Ross Wright with Dean Merrill
B&H Publishing Group
978-0-8054-4399-8

How did this get categorized as a book about religion?

All right, I see it. I went to the publisher’s website and this is what it says:

“From its original core of Bibles, textbooks, and reference titles, B&H has blossomed into a major publisher of Christian living, fiction, homeschool, youth, history, and other categories.”

I’m sorry to tell you B&H Publishing (and even sorrier to inform the author), that you’re shooting yourself in the foot with this knee-jerk categorizing based first and foremost on religion. Just because someone mentions a Psalm, does that make it a Christian book? Because someone doesn’t mention a Psalm, does that make it a non-Christian book? Just because a book is labeled Christian, does that make it acceptable to ALL Christians. How about books (the vast majority, to put it mildly) that don’t carry the Christian stamp of approval… Are they to be considered, by Christians, as bad or corrupting or simply off topic. As a non-Christian, is it impossible to gain understanding about, say, parenting, from a book found on the Religion shelf of a library or bookstore.

Of course not.

However, I’m not going to find a book about parenting on the Religion shelf of a library or a bookstore because I’m not going to look there. I’m going to look on the Parenting shelf, or as BISAC calls it, “Family & Relationships.”

And that’s what I mean about shooting yourself in the foot. Kids in Crisis is an interesting, thoughtful, and useful book based on experience, no matter what your thoughts on faith, and it’s destined for a quiet and uncommented death unless someone, like me, picks it up and reads it for the title instead of shelving it according to a rigid category stamped on its backside.

So, got that out of my system. Let’s talk about the book. As the parent of two ex-teens, believe me, I’ve been to the Parenting section of my library looking for hints on how to deal with -- even understand -- crisis.  Theirs and mine.

Here’s a question for you, then. Say your teenager comes home, alcohol on his breath, car keys in his hand. He’s left the headlights on, so you go out to turn them off, and discover the front fender smashed in. You march back inside, only to find him passed out and insensible to your calls. In the morning, to make matters worse, he won’t get up to go to school. He’s too tired.

Honestly, what’s your first reaction?

Honestly, mine was to shout and threaten, followed closely by slam, rattle, bang, etcetera.

It was almost always completely useless.

So right, say the authors. There is no quick fix (i.e. drugs and beatings won’t help). “If force could solve our issues with difficult kids, we would have achieved family peace a long time ago.”

The authors liken a child in crisis to a steel bar, and they note some of the different “hammers” families use -- like grounding and time-outs -- to reshape the steel bar. The problem is, that to shape steel, you need heat and pressure and time. Bashing the bar on the door isn’t going to do anything but create dents.

 “Discipline only works when you have total power and control,” say Wright and Merrill. And after a kid is about two years old, you do not have total power and control unless you’re willing to maim, imprison, or kill you kid for his misbehavior. Rules alone don’t work, they say; your job isn’t to beat the child at his own game, it’s to “organize the match and keep it flowing within proper boundaries.” To do this you need relationship and rules.

The authors quote Josh McDowell, a youth speaker. “Rules without relationship is a jail. Relationship without rules is a zoo. Relationship with rules if a home.”

And here’s the gist of the argument in Kids in Crisis: that discipline in the sense of overpowering a child does not have any real goal in sight beyond the immediate one of obedience. That a farsighted goal, and one that most parents truly desire for their children, is “emancipation” not rank obedience. Parents want their children to be able to be in control of themselves when they grow up -- to do the right thing because they want to not because they’ve been told to.

How do you achieve that? Read the book. Wright and Merrill have some very interesting things to say about what works, what doesn’t, and signs to watch out for.

Ross Wright is CEO and executive director of Hope & Home, a Christian foster care agency. Dean Merrill is a child psychologist and author.

The view out the north windows this morning is pedestrian. The sky flat and chalky. A cement gray band of lake stretches between two maples which have sullenly refused to color up this fall. The cars go back and forth, back and forth on the parkway. The river looks like cold tea. It’s gloomy. It looks too much like how it really is. I want to pull down the shades and let the lamplight transform reality.

On the other hand, out the east window I’m gazing over rooftops to the freshly painted face of the old Whiting Hotel. The bricks are café au lait and the window frames cherry. Beyond that, pigeons, gulls, and starlings whirl around the copper peak of the Park Place. The clouds are darker on this side, more dramatic. This could be somewhere else. This could be the view of not home. This could be a café.

And I could be writing a letter to a dear friend. Or finishing a poem. Or jotting down metaphors of yesterday’s landscape.

When did I stop writing in cafes? Easy enough to say it happened when I got a fulltime job, but that’s not the case. I spent six years independent contracting, and never once – not one single time – did I opt to trade my desk at home for the downtown cafes. Maybe it’s that the personality of cafes has changed. In the old days of Northern Michigan, there weren’t “real” cafés with leather couches and fake fireplaces and espresso machines. There were diners and Big Boys, unselfconscious places, perhaps because we were using them in a manner to which they were not intended. Like a beach rock holding open a door.

Next month, Toby Press is bringing out a memoir by Aharon Appelfeld called A Table for One. One of Israel’s most celebrated novelists, much of his work was written at different tables in different Jerusalem cafes. In this new book, he talks about the unselfconscious kind of cafes, not

…a nexus, a point of transition, a place where you wait impatiently…. Real cafes are inviting, they tempt you with fresh coffee and a cake straight out of the oven, and offer the chance to spend a precious hour or two alone with yourself.

Appelfeld also talks about the people who frequent cafes:

Those who sit in cafes are generally people who find their own homes cramped, or for whom loneliness is a frequent companion, people from foreign parts who have gathered so they can speak their native tongue and share memories.

But mostly, he talks about his café education:

Cafe Peter was my first school for writing. There I learned that simple words are the precise ones, and that daily life is our most true expression.

At Café Peter I learned how to listen to speech, to distinguish between what was spoken and what was unspoken; about what it was possible to speak of and about what was forbidden. At Café Peter, I became aware of myself and the people around me.

Aware but not self-conscious, for a café may offer coffee and cake, but there is so much more.

There are times I feel that a café is a port to which all gates of the imagination are open. You sail toward distant lands, you are again with people you loved. Toward evening, a café can resemble a secular prayer house in which people are immersed in observation.

I bow my head to early winter afternoons and small cafes and a book, empty or not.