Making the List; A Cultural History of the American Bestseller 1900-1999

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Publishing veteran Michael Korda came up with a coaster of an idea for his book Making The List: A Cultural History Of The American Bestseller 1900­1999. Roughly half of his 200 pages are devoted to reprinting the year-end bestseller lists for each year of the 20th century; the other half present a decade-by-decade analysis of what appeared on the lists when, and why. Even that scant analysis is fairly effort-free. Korda writes in the introduction that he "deliberately refrained from drawing any major conclusions in advance," but apparently he also refrained from reading over his own comments before moving between one decade's list and the next. Korda continually repeats the same points: 1) No matter the advances in technology, people continue to buy books; 2) Many once-popular books are long forgotten; 3) The same types of books continue to be bestsellers; and 4) A better quality of book makes the list than most cultural critics would contend. Which is not to say Korda says nothing of value. His observations on the ways Americans have dealt with crises by reading about their problems leads to some of the "cultural history" that his title promises. And when he gets to 1958, when he began working at Simon & Schuster, Korda offers useful reminiscences about what happens in New York publishing offices on the day the bestseller lists are revealed, and discusses his firsthand experiences with hanging around avowed leftists during the McCarthy Era, and with the ways books dealt (and didn't deal) with the social changes of the '60s and '70s. But the author doesn't appear to have done much research beyond his own immediate impressions. He gives minimal information about trends and perennial bestselling authors whose particulars are lost to time, and while it's fun to read about the persistent popularity of cookbooks, about the sudden interest in religion and child-rearing after WWII, or about the dominance of celebrity authors in the '80s and '90s, Korda adds little that couldn't be gleaned from merely glancing at the lists. Which means that the best parts of Making The List were untouched by the author's hands.

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