Crooked Timber

Oh yeah, I forgot about the “changed the world” thing.

For others who have successfully forgotten this sad piece of history, the joke is explained here.

Ha! if I believed in purgatory, I’d believe Ezra won his soul a long time out of it with that.

7: no, no. Resurrect the extremely long title, eg “On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”.
On this model, MY’s book would have the infinitely superior title “An Examination of the Failings and Malfeasances of the Republican Party in the Field of Foreign Policy in General and the Middle-East in Particular, to which is adjoined a Criticism of the Inabilities of the Democratic Party in the same Arena” and would be referred to as “Yglesias’ Examination“.

Possibly relevant erudite pun: “arena” means “sand” in Latin.

By the way, the link to Ezra Klein goes to the old blog rather than the new one at Prospect.org.

The movie version, when it is released, will no doubt be titled “Hiding Liberty” or “Asking Yglesias” or “Deriding Jonah”. We have standard cultural forms for titles, not just of pop-academic books, but also feature films.

The movie version, when it is released, will no doubt be titled “Hiding Liberty” or “Asking Yglesias” or “Deriding Jonah”.

These titles are double the length they should be. Maybe even “Screwups” would be too long.

We should add “the secret history….” to the list of bad subtitles. Because each book you read like that is the FIRST book ever to be written about the subject “in such detail and care”.

I personally make it a point to resist buying and reading any book with “how” or “why” in the subtitle. If the author can’t come up with something better, I doubt it’s going to be a good book. Even if the publisher forces them to put it in,that tends to say that the book can’t speak for itself. I do wonder if publishers force these subtitles on authors so that in bookstores, conservatives can quickly decide which books they might like to read and liberals can find theirs. Heaven help us if we opened up a book we didn’t agree with and stopped having our books preach to the choir.

I base my dislike after having read many of these books in my free time at college, and though they tended to be about Iraq or 9-11, I found most of them to tend to be polemics, sometimes thoroughly researched but often enough not. They tend to be written by journalists who although well informed in their fields, are rarely a source of unique insight or true expertise. My little theory, I think, draws some legitimacy from the fact that two of the best books in recent years by journalists were “Assassins Gate” and “Fiasco.” Neither had a “how or “why” subtitle.
The one counterexample of a good book with a crappy subtitle is “Ghost Wars – The secret history of…” by Steve Coll. I think journalists in particular need to use these subtitles because often they are communicating their own reporting knowledge combined with summaries from academic experts and think tank “experts”. In the end, I think its better to read the history that is directly written by historians: Taylor Branch for Civil Rights or David Kennedy for 20th Century American history generally, or Daniel Yergin’s “The Prize”. I tend to enjoy those well-written history books (Though the prize isn’t that well written, just a good book…) much better than any journalistic pseudo history, which “Heads in the Sand” sounds like (even if I will agree with it). Did Matt Yglesias do any original research? Did he interview administration players never before heard from? Doubtful. He’s probably putting his astute blog commentary into book form. Whatever. I get real annoyed when people read a few books, usually the definitive ones in the area, and then feel they have expertise. I’ve read many of those same books. I’m not an expert, and I don’t play one in the blogosphere. Unless you’ve actually sat down and gone through THOUSANDS of primary documents and interviews and the vast secondary literature on a subject, you’re not an expert. I’m looking at you Jonah Golberg, and your doughy pantload of a book.

(blogwhore moment) Well, that puts me in my place.

Serious comment: Do you really think that’s a positive blurb? “A very serious, thoughtful argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care” translates in the browsing reader’s mind as “G-d that was long and boring, even if you care about such things.”

Oh, the ‘or’ titles are something we should bring back

But isn’t the part of the title following “or”, effectively a subtitle?

“But isn’t the part of the title following “or”, effectively a subtitle?”

Effectively, yes. But it sounds like you couldn’t make up your mind which always inspires confidence in the work product.

I can’t be the only one who finds Klein’s blurb juvenile, can I? I know book-jacket blurbs aren’t exactly the salon culture of our time, and I know grownups make stupid jokes when blurbing their roommates’ books too, but surely we can do better than Family Guy as a model for ‘intellectual’ allusion. Ha ha it’s only a blog joke and like twenty people will get it (and won’t they feel involved) and yes no one expects greatness from these guys, but the mutual-masturbatory style of the Klein/Yglesias blog circle is exceeded in tackiness only by the taunting-schoolboy childishness that passes between partisan camps.

[...] the Sand: How Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats draws an appreciative glance from Kieran Healy for the way it combines praise for a well respected liberal blogger with a bitch slap for a winger [...]

#11: “Yglesias’ editor” belongs on one of those worst jobs lists, right up there(!) with “Britney’s gynecologist”.

“Nonsensical Phrase Drawn From Primary Source: Random Word, Random Word, and the Actual Topic of this Book”

Genius. I blame the journals for this, though, which encourage a standard “memorable hook: a collection of searchable keywords” structure. When you’ve written half a dozen of those and come to publish your book project, you’re expected to punch it up a bit, and there’s your result.

When I come to write my own books I plan to use HOWTO structures, like: “HOW TO build a world-girdling empire with nothing but slaves and slave-like labor relations” or “implanting and nurturing false consciousness in colonial workers: a beginner’s guide.”