Joy of Books - Hardcover

Burns, Eric

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1573920045 ISBN 13: 9781573920049

Publisher: Prometheus, 1995

Synopsis

Burns's compelling yet accessible history of the reading experience rejoices in the diverse motivations and methods in the developing relationship between readers and writers even as he voices concern at the powerful forces of ignorance and censorship that seek to keep them apart.

About this title

About the Author

Eric Burns is a uniquely varied man of letters. His first play won the Eudora Welty Emerging Playwrights Completion. As an NBC News correspondent, in addition to being an Emmy winner, he was named one of the best writers in the history of television news. And as an author, he has twice won the American Library Association's "Best of the Best" award (for The Spirits of American: A Social History of Alcohol in 2004, and The Smoke of the Gods: A Social History of Tobacco in 2007). He has also written 1920: The Year That Made the Decade Roar, chosen by Kirkus Reviews as one of the best non-fiction books of 2015. He lives in Westport, Connecticut.

From the Back Cover

In The Joy of Books, Eric Burns, a passionate lifelong reader, offers us an engaging, informal history of books and reading, beginning with the first clay tablets and continuing on to the latest John Grisham legal thriller. This history, which is humorous in the most surprising places, reveals the power books have always had to delight and entertain, and, more seriously, to enlighten, educate, and "raise possibilities". But the story of reading contains many dark chapters on bookburning and censorship: from Plato's suspicion that books can "tell lies" to the concerted efforts by fundamentalists and others to ban or bowdlerize the classics of world literature. There are other enemies as well: the corrosive effects of "political correctness", the "dumbing down" of education, and the growing indifference to the printed page in a culture overrun by electronic media, in which too many young people proudly wear their aliteracy like a baseball cap turned backward. Are we in danger of becoming merely passive spectators in the marketplace of ideas? Is the special union between readers and authors doomed? Has indifference set in; do separation and divorce seem likely? The Joy of Books is for all who believe otherwise, who will delight in learning of the storms that readers and writers have weathered in the past, and who will take heart in the future from Burns's compelling vision.

Reviews

"People don't read much anymore," laments former TV newsman Burns (Broadcast Blues) in this modest but wide-ranging set of musings on reading and writing. A self-described amateur in the best sense, Burns earnestly surveys the foundation of the oral tradition and the rise of censorship in the ancient world and, more recently, a Midwestern book burning he witnessed. He delves into the motivations of such writers as Benjamin Franklin and William Faulk-ner, proffering his own thoughts on the inspiration behind writers he favors, for example, Kazuo Ishiguro and Tom Wolfe. While Burns rightly bemoans "aliteracy"-the unwillingness of so many people to read-his criticism of higher education and literary deconstructionists is more curmudgeonly than thoughtful. Serious readers, Burns observes, always have a refuge; indeed, after an account of his young son's path to reading, he concludes with a list of 581 books-classic and contemporary, fiction and nonfiction-that he has enjoyed.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Prometheus
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1573920045
• ISBN 13: 9781573920049
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 218