Booknotes: America's Finest Authors on Reading, Writing, and the Power of Ideas - Hardcover

Lamb, Brian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812928474 ISBN 13: 9780812928471

Publisher: Crown, 1997

Synopsis

For nearly a decade, Booknotes has been an oasis of book programming on television, the only place where Americans can regularly find in-depth, quality discussions of books.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

decade, Booknotes has been an oasis of book programming on television, the only place where Americans can regularly find in-depth, quality discussions of books.

Reviews

These excerpts from more than 150 of C-SPAN's weekly Booknotes interviews have all the conversational richness of the fabled Paris Review interviews. The informal pleasures of the spoken word distinguish this collection, in which Booknotes host and C-SPAN founder Lamb's questions are omitted, allowing interviewees' voices to take center stage. Unadorned, these authors reveal themselves with honesty and vigor; the interviews, divided into three sections, ``Storytellers,'' ``Reporters,'' and ``Leaders'' (this breakdown isn't as clean as it sounds; the reporters, of course, have plenty of stories to tell in their books, too). Among the best are biographers Stephen Ambrose and Robert D. Richardson Jr., and journalists Neil Sheehan and Stanley Crouch. The selections range from such well-known writers as David Halberstam and David McCullough to such lesser-known figures as Nicholas Basbanes, a chronicler of bibliomaniacs. For numerous reporters the civil rights struggle and the Vietnam war were defining experiences. Richard Nixon talks about the long view of history. Colin Powell describes signing 2,000 to 4,000 of his books at a sitting--one every 2.9 seconds. Doris Kearns Goodwin and John Keegan summarize their longhand writing methods, while Halberstam says using a word processor has probably doubled his productivity. Edmund Morris brazenly chides editors who ``love to obliterate,'' and Paul Kennedy celebrates the care given by his copy editor but laments that once his proofs have been read it's too late to change anything--``you're deep frozen in what you've said.'' Time and again these authors assert that writing is terribly hard work, and rarely fun; many just despise it; only a handful (George Will, famously) dare claim to love it. All would seem to agree with David Hackworth that ``writing a book takes a lot of your life.'' An often riveting insider's perspective on the writing life by some of our foremost authors. (16 pages photos, not seen) (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Some of the most enjoyable reading for habitual readers is reading about writing. This fat book is a font of such enjoyment. Since April 1989, the commercial-free information TV service C-SPAN has presented a series of interviews between C-SPAN CEO Brian Lamb and the authors of new history and public affairs books. "How did you get interested in this subject?" Lamb asks. "Where do you write?" "Who are these people you thank in the acknowledgments?" Responding to such quiet, personal questions, the writers wind up telling us about the human relationships, the lifestyles, the personal preferences, the practical considerations--the living that goes into the creating of books. Historians David McCullough and Shelby Foote, scholars Stephen Carter and Francis Fukuyama, journalists Anna Quindlen and Peter Arnett, and world leaders Margaret Thatcher and Jimmy Carter are a few who have answered Lamb, and the anecdotes and observations collected here, with which they and more than 120 equally prominent peers responded, are deeply amusing, absorbing, and affecting. Ray Olson

Edition details

• Publisher: Crown
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0812928474
• ISBN 13: 9780812928471
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 423