Bookplanet: short books on big things

From the NY Times:

Big Ideas, Little Books: What a Concept! by William Grimes

For the last 12 weeks a highly unusual book has been roosting in the nonfiction best-seller list compiled by this newspaper. The title includes a mildly vulgar synonym for "nonsense" and cannot be printed here. But the title is beside the point. It's the length that interests me. "On Bullshit," by Harry G. Frankfurt, runs a grand total of 80 pages. It shines like a beacon of hope to overburdened readers bombarded with nonfiction titles that routinely weigh in at 300 to 400 pages, no matter how inconsequential the subject. It dares to say that short can be good.

Two books stare at me from my bookshelf. One is "The Command of the Ocean," the middle volume in N. A. M. Rodger's authoritative history of the British Navy. It is 907 pages long. When I pick it up, my wrist buckles. Standing next to it, like Laurel next to Hardy, is the winsome "Waterloo," by Andrew Roberts. At 143 pages, it barely counts as an appetizer, but as a reading experience it more than holds its own with its heftier shelfmate.

Both books deal with momentous events. Both are admirably researched and stylishly written. But "Waterloo" demands, at most, a couple of hours of reading time. It delivers the maximum amount of information, and pleasure, in the minimum number of minutes - an unbeatable deal.

There are a lot of these junior-sized books out there at the moment. Some are slim by design, like the whippet-thin volumes that Paul Strathern, a British academic, has been turning out with machinelike regularity. His various series on great authors, great philosophers and great ideas ("Nabokov in 90 Minutes" is one title) promise to get readers up to speed on, say, Wittgenstein, in 100 pages or so with no dumbing-down.

Some books, for whatever reason, simply happen to be thin. Subject matter has nothing to do with it, either. There are short books on pared-down topics, like "American Gothic," Steven Biel's "biography" of Grant Wood's famous painting, and short books on hugely important, world-changing subjects, like "Auschwitz," by the German historian Sybille Steinbacher, due out from Ecco in August.

It's worth pointing out that long books can seem short, and vice versa. "Command of the Ocean" runs long but reads short. The author has a vigorous, economical writing style and a rare gift for packaging his facts tightly. "American Gothic," with only 156 pages of text, has as much sag and bag as a Thomas Wolfe novel.

All books should be exactly as long as they need to be. There is no ideal length. But like mainstream Hollywood films, nonfiction books have shown a tendency to expand in recent years, for no particular reason. Directors cannot bring a film in at 90 minutes anymore. Likewise, my shelves are overloaded with nonfiction titles that, 30 years ago, would have been 225 or 250 pages. I'm not sure why. Fatter spines do look more imposing, and readers may feel, subconsciously, that $30 should buy them a thick, substantial volume. But time and again, I find, the extra weight comes from empty calories.

My candidate for the most impressive entry in the less-is-more category is "In My Brother's Shadow: A Life and Death in the SS," by the German novelist Uwe Timm. Like all the books discussed here, it runs less than 220 pages of actual text. Far less, in fact. In a mere 150 pages, Mr. Timm roams, in a series of disjointed meditations, over most of 20th-century German history.

His starting point is a cryptic diary left by his brother, an SS soldier who fought and died on the Ukrainian front. But jumping back and forth in time, he also touches on the traumatic aftermath of the First World War, in which his father served; the bombing of Hamburg, his hometown; and the "economic miracle" of the 1950's. Sensitively translated by Anthea Bell, "In My Brother's Shadow" is equal parts German history and family history, a profound rumination on the way history shapes and breaks private lives.

I. B. Cohen, the founder of Harvard's history of science department, died in 2003, but he left behind a brief, lively and highly entertaining little book, "The Triumph of Numbers: How Counting Shaped Modern Life." Cohen's grand theme is the rise of "number consciousness," or the acceptance of numbers as a regulating power in human affairs, a slow process that did not really get going until the 16th and 17th centuries.

Many curious facts appear along the way. For years, the English and their colonial offspring resisted counting their populations in a census for fear of committing "the sin of David." In the books of Samuel and Chronicles, King David orders a census of Israel and Judah, an act that, for mysterious reasons, is deemed evil and for which David and his people suffer fearful punishment. If nothing else, the Puritans knew their Bible. John Winthrop, the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, estimated rather than counted the population, explaining in a letter that "David's example stickes somewhat with us."

Cohen, in following his numerical trail, always takes time for detours. He examines the rise of life insurance in the 17th century and Benjamin Franklin's shrewd demographic calculations, which influenced Britain's decision to acquire Canada rather than Guadeloupe after the French and Indian War. Special attention is devoted to Adolphe Quetelet, a numbers-mad Frenchman who applied statistics to predict, among other things, when lilacs bloom and when playwrights are most likely to produce their most successful works.

Spontaneously slim books like these come like a bolt out of the blue. Others spring from the minds of clever publishers. James Atlas, who has carved a niche in the short-book market, has two series in production. Eminent Lives, published by HarperCollins, matches writers like Christopher Hitchens with subjects like Thomas Jefferson, or Paul Johnson with George Washington, to take two current examples. Great Discoveries, published by W. W. Norton, applies the same matchmaking approach to the history of science, with excellent results in the two most recent titles to roll off the assembly line: "Miss Leavitt's Stars," by George Johnson, and "Lavoisier in the Year One," by Madison Smartt Bell.

This brief-lives format can be found throughout the publishers' catalogs. Oxford University Press has its Lives and Legacies series, the most recent being "Roger Williams," by Edwin S. Gaustad. The British novelist Peter Ackroyd has just embarked on a series of short biographies, Ackroyd's Brief Lives, which began with Chaucer earlier this year and will include J. M. W. Turner and Isaac Newton.

Times Books is well into the American Presidents, a first-rate series, overseen by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., that offers well-edited, sharply written lives in a uniform format. For those of us who dozed through the administrations of Polk, Taylor and Arthur in school, this is a golden opportunity to make amends. Some of the author-subject matchups are intriguing. Mr. Schlesinger has paired E. L. Doctorow with Abraham Lincoln, Louis Auchincloss with Teddy Roosevelt and Gary Hart with James Monroe.

Not every president cooperates. Ted Widmer recently delivered a surprisingly bouncy, entertaining account of Martin van Buren that makes the case, rather persuasively, that the Little Magician should be regarded as the author of modern party politics. Charles W. Calhoun, on the other hand, does not have a lot to work with in Benjamin Harrison, unless tariffs and currency policy happen to set your pulse racing.

Travel and ideas have also been downsized. Oxford cleverly drafted a motley group of seven authors to pick one of the deadly sins and hold forth, briefly. In Crown's Journeys series, writers like Christopher Buckley, Edwidge Danticat and Roy Blount Jr. have devised idiosyncratic travel guides intended for the pedestrian.

The matchmaking game is a roll of the dice. Wendy Wasserstein on sloth is a delight. Francine Prose's "Gluttony" reads like a class assignment. "Washington Schlepped Here," a tour of the nation's capital by Mr. Buckley, is so perfunctory that it might have been written on a napkin during lunch. Even worse, it's a bureaucrat's view of Washington: rarely has a city seemed so boring. By contrast, Mr. Blount's tour of New Orleans, "Feet on the Street," delivers the goods - it's a wild, unpredictable ramble up and down the streets of a wild, unpredictable city.

Reaktion Books, a small press with a very high brow, recently initiated a series called Critical Lives that focuses on leading figures in modern culture. Franz Kafka, Pablo Picasso and Jean Genet have been given the treatment so far, and this may be everyone's last, best chance to get a handle on Michel Foucault before he disappears from the radar screen. In "Michel Foucault," David Macey does the job in about 150 pages.

Even more compressed is a promising new series from Norton, due out in September, called How to Read. The subjects range from Shakespeare to Hitler, but the approach is uniform. Each author presents about 10 extracts from the writer under discussion and subjects them to a close critical reading. These key texts serve as entry points to the mind and the work of figures like Freud and Wittgenstein.

The Modern Library, in its Chronicles series, expands the short-take concept to just about everything. It has included titles by A. N. Wilson on London, Jeffrey Garten on globalization, Colin Renfrew on prehistory and Pankaj Mishra on the rise of modern India. My introduction to the series came with "The Company," the snappily told history of an idea that today rules all our lives. The authors, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, who both work for The Economist, begin with simple barter exchanges in ancient Mesopotamia and in a little less than 200 pages arrive at their final destination, the multinational corporation. In a couple of hours, the reader travels through all of recorded history and comes out the other end, stuffed with valuable information and pointed toward the future.

Give me more. I mean, less.

Books mentioned:
'THE COMMAND OF THE OCEAN: A NAVAL HISTORY OF BRITAIN, 1649-1815,' by N. A. M. Rodger. 907 pages. W. W. Norton. $45.
'WATERLOO: JUNE 18, 1915: THE BATTLE FOR MODERN EUROPE,' by Andrew Roberts. 143 pages. HarperCollins. $21.95.
'NABOKOV IN 90 MINUTES,' by Paul Strathern. 120 pages. Ivan R. Dee. $8.95.
'AMERICAN GOTHIC: A LIFE OF AMERICA'S MOST FAMOUS PAINTING,' by Steven Biel. 215 pages. W. W. Norton. $21.95.
'AUSCHWITZ: A HISTORY,' by Sybille Steinbacher. 168 pages (in uncorrected proof). Ecco/HarperCollins. $23.95.
'IN MY BROTHER'S SHADOW: A LIFE AND DEATH IN THE SS,' by Uwe Timm. 150 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $18.
'THE TRIUMPH OF NUMBERS: HOW COUNTING SHAPED MODERN LIFE,' by I. B. Cohen. 209 pages. W. W. Norton. $24.95.
'THOMAS JEFFERSON: AUTHOR OF AMERICA,' by Christopher Hitchens. 188 pages. Atlas Books/HarperCollins. $19.95.
'GEORGE WASHINGTON: THE FOUNDING FATHER,' by Paul Johnson. 126 pages. Atlas Books/HarperCollins. $19.95.
'MISS LEAVITT'S STARS: THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE WOMAN WHO DISCOVERED HOW TO MEASURE THE UNIVERSE,' by George Johnson. 162 pages. Atlas Books/W. W. Norton. $22.95.
'LAVOISIER IN THE YEAR ONE: THE BIRTH OF A NEW SCIENCE IN AN AGE OF REVOLUTION,' by Madison Smartt Bell. 214 pages. Atlas Books/W. W. Norton. $22.95.
'ROGER WILLIAMS,' by Edwin S. Gaustad. 150 pages. Oxford University Press. $17.95.
'CHAUCER,' by Peter Ackroyd. 188 pages. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. $19.95.
'MARTIN VAN BUREN,' by Ted Widmer. 189 pages. Times Books/Henry Holt. $20.
'BENJAMIN HARRISON,' by Charles W. Calhoun. 206 pages. Times Books/Henry Holt. $20.
'SLOTH,' by Wendy Wasserstein. 114 pages. Oxford. $17.95.
'GLUTTONY,' by Francine Prose. 108 pages. Oxford. $17.95.
'WASHINGTON SCHLEPPED HERE: WALKING IN THE NATION'S CAPITAL,' 159 pages. by Christopher Buckley. Crown. $16.
'FEET ON THE STREET: RAMBLES AROUND NEW ORLEANS,' by Roy Blount Jr. 143 pages. Crown. $16.
'MICHEL FOUCAULT,' by David Macey. 160 pages. Reaktion Books. $16.95.
'THE COMPANY: A SHORT HISTORY OF A REVOLUTIONARY IDEA,' by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. 227 pages. Modern Library. $13.95.