Re: What Have You Read Lately? (2024 Edition)

[apl68]

Citizens:  A Chronicle of the French Revolution, by Simon Schama.  Having read about the French Revolution recently, I decided to re-read Schama's work.  Since it's Schama, the usual account of the political twists and turns of the Revolutionary period are accompanied by a great deal about the ideas, personalities, images, and other aspects of the culture that the French Revolution stemmed from, and that it produced in turn.  This approach does a lot to bring the whole period vividly to life. 

Apologists for bloody revolutions like to say that one must regrettably break eggs to make an omelet.  Schama finds that far too many "eggs" were broken for the results obtained.  The French Revolution was driven by violence from the beginning, and yet in the end, in Schama's telling, all it really did was accelerate cultural and economic trends that would have continued anyway.


Having gotten on something of a French history kick, The Course of French History, by Pierre Goubert.  Goubert was an eminent Annales historian who helped to pioneer demographic approaches to history.  The title of his classic Louis XIV and Twenty Million Frenchmen gives an idea of his approach.  Here, late in his career (1980s), he tries to cover the whole sweep of France's history.  It's brisk and concise and, certainly in English translation, very readable.  It's the sort of book that would make a good general college history textbook, if colleges still, you know, actually taught history.  Book and historian are now old enough that some of it is perhaps dated.  It's still quite good.

Goubert avowedly finds his sympathies with the French Left who tried and failed to create additional revolutions at intervals during the 19th century.  He has a good deal to say about the egg-breaking tendencies of the violent reactions that suppressed these revolutionary efforts.  That's fair enough--the French reactionary Right had a good deal to answer for, especially in its treatment of religious minorities.  After reading Schama on the savagery of the 1790s revolutionaries whom the later Left kept citing as their forbears, though, one can understand why their opponents were so deathly afraid of them.  They must have felt that they had to suppress the new revolutionaries with the utmost ruthlessness before the revolutionaries had them all "shaved by the National Razor."

[Langue_doc]

Slightly off-topic, but still about books.

Not Your Usual Secondhand Book Sale
Bibliophiles and film fans leafed through hundreds of books that once belonged to the eminent editor Robert Gottlieb.

The first few paragraphs:

Robert Gottlieb didn't just edit books. He voraciously read and collected them.

On Saturday, a portion of his personal library — his books on show business — were sold at a fair in the lobby of the Metrograph theater on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

When Mr. Gottlieb, who died last June at 92, wasn't heartlessly lancing thousands of words out of Robert Caro's biographical volumes or marking up the manuscripts of Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie, he loved watching movies. Along the course of his career, he built a vast collection of books on Hollywood's golden age.

His family was unsure what to do with the collection until earlier this year, when they started talking with Metrograph, a two-screen cinema that is a pillar of the downtown art house scene.

Visitors lined up to buy "My Life with Chaplin," "Fasten Your Seat Belts: The Passionate Life of Bette Davis," "Little Girl Lost: The Life & Hard Times of Judy Garland" and hundreds of other books. When they opened them, they found a stamped seal reading "From the Library of Robert Gottlieb." The books were priced around $15 to $40.

Reinaldo Buitron, 28, a documentary filmmaker, flipped through a book about the Italian director Roberto Rossellini.

"Being able to touch the same books Gottlieb had in his own home is surreal," he said. "I see we admired the same films, and that makes me think we might have gotten along. That we could have sat for dinner and talked cinema and about his opinions on semicolons."

"People don't think like Gottlieb did anymore," he added. "Whether film or publishing, it's all about the algorithm now, and not taking risks. The world needs more Gottliebs."

The article goes on to note:

Will Regalado Succop, 21, a budding writer from Brooklyn, said he was working on his first short stories but had yet to publish anything. "It's romantic to me that Gottlieb and his writers bickered over semicolons," he said.

As the day waned, the inventory depleted. Choice offerings like biographies of Joan Crawford and anthologies of Pauline Kael's reviews for The New Yorker grew scarce.

John Gillen, 32, an aspiring filmmaker who secured a copy of "Hollywood Be Thy Name: The Warner Brothers Story," offered a less misty-eyed view of things.

"If a writer needs to work on a sentence for three weeks, then they need to work on a sentence for three weeks, and I respect that," he said. "But people also have to eat. You can't just say you always want to be making Michelangelo's David."

David Fear, 53, an editor and film critic for Rolling Stone, snagged a copy of Dwight Macdonald's "On Movies."

"If you believe that a comma put in the right place is the work of the divine, then what Gottlieb represented isn't antiquated," he said. "But I also think everyone mourns the era they missed. The idea of writing off an entire generation of young writers just because they can't have editors like Gottlieb is foolish."

"The online beast needs to be fed now," he added. "The idea of wrestling tooth and nail over paragraphs just isn't practical anymore."