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I always get a little suspicious of big nonfiction books arguing some big thesis that arrive with fawning reviews from all the right places and whose authors im
by api 3y ago
I always get a little suspicious of big nonfiction books arguing some big thesis that arrive with fawning reviews from all the right places and whose authors immediately get crowned as important public intellectuals.
These books often seem to have a life cycle: sensation, canon, “but wait a minute,” and then lastly forgotten.
I figure the initial splash might mean the author just knows the right people in New York. They seem like the nonfiction equivalent of what someone I know once called a “tobadny” which stands for “trendy overhyped book about dysfunctional New Yorkers.” These are the occasional literary fiction sensations about… well… dysfunctional New Yorkers that arrive with gushing reviews in The New Yorker.
A merely very talented author outside the New York scene usually has to wait until they are dead to be noticed.
In our scene the equivalent would be an overhyped overfunded startup run by someone who knows the right people in the Valley that is the hot thing for five minutes. Meanwhile someone in Nebraska who invented a working Alcubierre Drive will never get funding.
- FrustratedMonky 3y agoThis seems more like sour grapes. Is "A Brief History of Time" in this category? Who's to say. There are a ton of non-fiction books that are written for popular audiences that do not make it big. If they are all equal, than all the ones that don't make it should also end up being wrong. That doesn't seem right, why is it only the ones that do become popular must turn out wrong. This seems more like moralizing on the public being idiots, and so if a book is popular it must be wrong.
- perardi 3y ago“A Brief History of Time” is a standout here, as it’s dealing with really well-defined, well-studied, well-tested physics theories. (Well, except for Grand Unification stuff.) But Diamond’s work, and other authors that are in this middle-brow reviewed-in-The New Yorker mold, deals with really complex sociology and psychology, which aren’t reducible to equations. (There’s no Lorentz transformation for colonialism.) Malcom Gladwell really comes right to mind here—lot of pop-sci stuff which gets in all the right publications and then ends up being just wrong in all the ways.