Reading Copy Book Blog

Paper Cuts, the New York Times Blog, is features 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others That Didn’t Help.

The top 10 were:
“The Communist Manifesto”
“Utilitarianism”
“The Descent of Man”
“Beyond Good and Evil”
“The State and Revolution”
“The Pivot of Civilization” (by Margaret Sanger)
“Mein Kampf”
“The Future of an Illusion”
“Coming of Age in Samoa”
“Sexual Behavior in the Human Male”

We did our own feature a few months back on Books that Changed the World (for better or worse), which shared some of the same titles.

We have a new feature on AbeBooks to mark the 75th anniversary of the Nazi book burnings on 10 May 1933. We’re not celebrating this anniversary, we’re simply remembering that it happened and examining its impact. Aside from revealing some of the books and authors who were banned and burnt by the Nazis, we have interviewed three experts on book burning.

Matt Fishburn is a rare bookseller in Sydney, Australia - he’s also the author of a soon-to-be published book called Burning Books. Here’s his blog. Rebecca Knuth is a professor at the University of Hawaii and the author of two books on book burning. The third interviewee is Shaun Bythell, who runs The Bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland’s Book Town. I got to know Shaun a couple of years ago when he conducted a book burning to promote Wigtown’s festival - it worked as he walked into several major UK papers. Shaun has a completely different perspective on book burning - he’s a dealer and looks at books rather differently because they become inventory and have a monetary value.

Have you ever tried to burn a book? I’ve tried to burn an old telephone directory and it didn’t burn easily. You’d think it would go up in flames very quickly but oxygen can’t fuel the fire unless you start ripping out chunks of pages. It’s a beautiful irony that books, paper-based objects, are tough to burn.

You can watch Shaun’s Wigtown book burning on YouTube. They clearly put a lot of work and thought into the event.

A few books about book burning…..
Books on Fire: The Destruction of Libraries throughout History, Lucien X. Polastron
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
The Book Thief, Markus Zusak
Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century, Rebecca Knuth
Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction, Rebecca Knuth
They Burned The Books, Stephen Vincent Benet

While attempting to research a biography on Louis XIV’s mistress Veronica Buckley stumbled upon the lost diaries of the former king of France. The problem was the diary was not written 282 years ago, but in 1998.

What Buckley quotes is in fact the work of François Bluche. In 1998 this French academic decided to imagine what the king’s journals might have been like, by piecing together information gleaned from myriad historical documents. The result was a book, Le Journal secret de Louis XIV, which Buckley got hold of and used as a primary source.

I think this brings the fraudulent or recalled memoir/biography count to four? or is it five? this year…

More in The Guardian

The Hitler Diaries, one of the greatest literary hoaxes of all time, was printed 25 years ago.

There are things you wish you’d never done. One of mine was to have held up the front page to the newsroom, saying: “Look at that. You’ll never see another front page like that as long as you live.”

American Nicholson Baker tosses out some fairly unique ideas about the Second World War, namely that the allies should have left Hitler alone.

His new book Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization will probably offend as many as it intrigues.

“In the worst case,” he says, “you would have had 15 years of the Third Reich at peace in Europe. That is an incomprehensibly bad thing, but, as long as the United States and England reopened their borders, millions of people would have survived. And I don’t care about British hon-our, I’m not interested in it. I’m interested in the people who were actually suffering at the bottom of the hierarchy in Germany – those were the Jews.”

His eyes are fixed on some distant, western point in the vicinity of Fenway Park or Cambridge. “I think even the absolute worst moment – which is allowing this idea of Adolf Hitler to be in charge of an entire sub-continent for the duration of his life, however long it was, and yet at peace – that that horrific idea would have allowed more beautiful things to survive everywhere (truth, public truth, beautiful buildings and human beings) than what actually happened.”

Full article in The Times

In the Telegraph, Poet Laureate Andrew Motion was commissioned to write a poem about 109-year-old Harry Patch, the last surviving soldier from WWI

The Guardian’s quiz about literature from 1968 just hammered me. My excuse for the low score - well, that was the year I was born. I wasn’t doing a whole lot of reading while the students were tearing up Paris.

Discover our expanded browse pages with author interviews, recommendations and bestselling lists. We have new browse content on Children’s Fiction, History Books and Cook Books, with more coming soon. Visit our browse often for new updates.

After 49 years in power, Cuban president Fidel Castro has officially stepped down leaving his brother Raul to continue in his place.

While his politics differ greatly from the American presidents he shadowed, some things are quite similar. They have all written lots and lots of books. Some of Castro’s contributions include:
History will Absolve me (1959),
Revolutionary Struggle (1972),
Fidel Castro: Nothing Can Stop the Course of History (1986),
Cuba: Against Terrorism and Against War (2001),
Fidel Castro: My Life (2008).

And that’s just a few… Castro has seen 10 US presidents come and go, from Eisenhower, JFK, Nixon, to both Bush’s, and everyone else in-between.

Love him or hate him that’s a long history.

A copy of the Magna Carta sold yesterday for £10.6 million, reports the BBC. The copy is from 1297, one of only 17 still in existence, and was bought by US businessman David Rubenstein.

If you are not a historian and wish to understand why the Magna Carta is such a big deal, then read this feature. As my old history teacher, Mr Kirby, hammered into us again and again, the Magna Carta helped establish the principle of Habeas Corpus which protects us from unlawful imprisonment by the state.

(Oh…while we are on the subject, did you know that a book of poety written by prisoners at the Guantánamo Bay detention centre is to be published?)

The Bodleian Library in Oxford put its four copies of the Magna Carta on display for a single day under very heavy security - The Guardian went along. They are worth around £100 million.

Seven months ago, I was standing at the AbeBooks booth at the Book Expo America event in New York when a man in suit walked up and said: “Ahh, you’re AbeBooks!”

His name was David Andelman and he is an executive editor at Forbes.com, and he had a story to tell. “I couldn’t have written my book without your site,” he said. “I love AbeBooks. I bought so many books from you guys to help with my research.”

A veteran journalist with extensive foreign affairs reporting experience, David had penned A Shattered Peace and it concerns the Treaty of Versailles - the post-World War I settlement between the world’s ruling nations. At school, I had extensively studied this period of European history so I knew Versailles had led to the rise of the Nazis in Germany and eventually World War II. David’s book explains how the treaty also set the foundations for many other modern conflicts - many of which are still raging today from Iraq to Palestine.

Here is our interview with David - best of luck to one of our finest customers.

A new movie set during the time of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire opened this weekend to damning orations from reviewers.  The Last Legion is based on the novel of the same title by Valerio Massimo Manfredi.  Manfredi has seen huge success with his Alexander trilogy and has written numerous historical novels including one called Spartan.  Perhaps it was thought that The Last Legion would draw on Manfredi’s literary popularity and the success of the movies Alexander and Frank Miller’s, The 300. 

Saying that, Alexander and The 300 also met with mixed reviews but did make decent amounts of money at the box office.  (I personally like The 300 but that might have a lot to do with the shirtless Gerard Butler!) Perhaps The Last Legion will experience the same – I have seen comments of praise blogged by Average Joe Public.  Either way, Manfredi’s books seem well worth a read – his Alexander series garnered him the Man of the Year award from the American Biographical Institute in 1999. 

Read the Reuter’s movie review.Read a review of the book The Last Legion.

Last week, in response to a diminishing presence of Australian authors in literary curriculum in Australia, a roundtable was hosted by The Australia Council of the Arts to further examine this issue.  Following the path set by last year’s History Summit which determined it was the right of young Australians to learn of the country’s past as recorded by historians, it was deemed their right to see that history through the imaginations of authors.

Lack of study of Australian literature in that country is also seen as a contributor to the demise of “cultural memory” and as a detriment to up-and-coming Australian authors.

Read more on the blog at The Australian.

Filed under “because we love you,” AbeBooks is offering up a pair of Weekend Passports to the Steinbeck Festival and two night’s stay (August 3&4) in a hotel just a stone’s throw away.

This year’s festival them is John Steinbeck and the 1960s - A Culture of Discontent, and takes place from August 2-5 in Salinas, California, the heart of Steinbeck Country.

All you have to do to enter is visit our Steinbeck Festival Contest page and tell us which Steinbeck novel began with the line “The Salinas Valley is in Northern California. It is a long narrow swale between two ranges of mountains, and the Salinas River winds and twists up the center until it falls at last into Monterey Bay.”?

Contest closes July 26!