Notes From the Bookroom

June 27, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (8)

I think Peter Ackroyd started it in 2001 with London: The Biography: that is, the idea that places and things have biographies rather than histories or, more simply, stories.

American publishers, as is their wont, have latched on to the formula. In recent months I’ve had Philip Ball’s Universe of Stone: A...Read More

June 20, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

What’s in My Bookbag: The Forever War (Knopf, Sept. 17). New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins’s account of his time as a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq promises to be one of the year’s major books on America’s war on terror. It could be the Imperial Life in the Em-erald City of the fall season. PW’s review will appear in the June 30 issue.

Whether going through the detritus at the  bombed-out al-Qaeda camp in Tora Bora (“I picked up a paperback book with seared pages that was the size of the New York phone book. It was Al-Qaeda’s training ma...Read More

June 6, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

Met with Brenda King from Yale yesterday to go over the press’s fall list.The press turned 100 this year, and its upcoming lead title is by noted bibliophile Nicholas Basbanes: A World of Letters: Yale University Press, 1908–2008.

But the book on Yale’s list that I’m most looking forward to is Joseph Epstein’s on Fred Astaire for the Icons of America series.

Still, the title they’re most optimistic about saleswise is Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Com-mander’s War in Iraq by Peter R. Mansoor. Previewing fall university press books on inside-highered.com, ...Read More

May 23, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (1)

What’s in My Bookbag: Al Silverman’s The Time of Our Lives: The Golden Age of Great American Publishers, Their Editors, and Authors (Truman Talley, Aug.). From his perch at the once-mighty Book-of-the-Month Club, where he spent 16 years as editorial director and then president, and later as publisher at Viking/Penguin, Silverman had an unparalleled view of the publishing industry during the second half of the 20th century.

Happily, this book is not just his own memoir (“Too many people are writing memoirs,” he says)—it is the collective memoir of the many editors and authors Silverman interviewe...Read More

May 9, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (4)

What’s in My Bookbag: Benny Morris’s just-published 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (Yale Univ.), in honor of Israel’s 60th anniversary (celebrataed yesterday). To some, it might seem a strange celebration to read a book that relates horrors committed by Israelis as well as Pal-estinians. But for me, this tale embodies. But Israel’s conflicted story is deeply ingrained in me. 

T...Read More