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Carefully selected by Your Crack staff of news sleuths

Column Editor: Bruce Strauch (The Citadel, Emeritus) <bruce.strauch@gmail.com>

Coffee Table Books … or not?

Some claim coffee table books are still relevant, mostly designers and those who sell them. They argue the books are a legitimate way to project the owner’s intellectual passions.

The contrarians says they’re just something to collect dust and other objects including spilled food. While they ought to be regarded as significant repositories of knowledge, mostly they’re used by Instagram influencers as background props.

See: Ruby King, “Are Coffee Table Books Still a Relevant Way to Decorate Your Home?” The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 9-10, 2021, p.D8.

The Zen of Encyclopedia Management

Jimmy Wales went to a one-room schoolhouse outside Huntsville, AL. No, he’s not that old. Wales was a co-founder of Wikipedia. His mother ran House of Learning which was an experimental school with four kids in each grade. They all mingled and taught each other.

Back before that, at age 3, his mom bought a children’s World Book Encyclopedia from a traveling salesman. He began reading early and a lifelong habit of dabbling in whatever interested him at the moment. Later, it was college, a Ph.D., and futures trading in Chicago. He envisioned Wikipedia as something where he could dabble forever.

His childhood encyclopedia set has disappeared. Mom says they sold it; Dad says it’s in a shed. Of course his kids use iPads.

See: “House Calls: Educated in a One-Room Schoolhouse,” The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 8, 2021, p.M8.

newspaper = Value of real Estate

If America’s press didn’t have enough survival problems, it is being aggressively bought by vulture capital firms mostly based on the sale value of the real estate. The mighty Chicago Tribune Building is sold and the paper now produced on an industrial estate in a space the size of a Chipotle.

The buyers gut the staff, raise subscription prices and run the remnant until it dies.

What I think the article is missing is the Boomers are the last to read print. The natural life of most newspapers is the length of Boomer longevity.

See: McKay Coppins, “The Men Who Are Killing America’s Newspapers,” The Atlantic, Nov. 2021, p.33.

The Cocktail geek

You’re a Yalie with graduation looming and suddenly are stricken with the terror you don’t know how to drink like an adult. A decade ago, the Elis turned to classmate Brian Hoefling to host a seminar which then led to The Cocktail Seminars (Abbeville, 376 pages, $24.95).

Boola-boola.

See: Eric Felten, “Here’s to Growing Up,” The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 18-19, 2021, p.C12.

Obits of note

Gary Paulsen (1939-2021) YA reader’s Hemingway won Newberry honors with Dogsong (1985) and Hatchet (1987), tales of an Inuit in the tundra with a dogsled and a plane crash survivor in the Canadian wilderness.

A child of violent alcoholics, he would escape into the woods of northern Minnesota. One day, he went into a library to get warm and was given a library card, a notebook and pencil by a librarian. Was told to read everything and write down your thoughts. It was a life-saver.

He served in the army, wrote Westerns, lived off the grid, competed three times in the Iditarod. He considered humanity a mess and young adults the only hope. “Name the book that made the biggest impression on you. I bet you read it before you hit puberty.”

See: “The young-adult author who told wild tales of survival,” The Week, Oct. 21, 2021, p.35.

Robert Bly (1926-2021) went to Harvard determined to devote his life to poetry. He founded an avante-garde literary magazine The Fifties and got a reputation as a poet with fiery anti-war poems in The Light Around the Body (1967). But it was Iron John: A Book About Men (1990) that became a best-seller and made him a cultural phenomenon. He felt men had lost initiation and guidance into manhood because of absent fathers. He drew on Jungian philosophy, myths and religions. This led to weekend retreats where — yes, there was beating on drums.

See: “The anti-war poet who launched a men’s movement,” The Week, Dec. 10, 2021, p.39.

Editor of Professional Tastes

At the age of 4, Robert Gottlieb became an obsessed, crazed reader. His parents made him stand outside their building for an hour each day so he would do something else.

Gottlieb became the legendary editor of Simon and Schuster and then Alfred A. Knopf. In his mid-20s he labored with Joseph Heller over Catch-22 and published The Chosen after persuading Chaim Potok to cut 300 pages. He convinced Toni Morrison to quit her day job. John Le Carré and Michael Crichton all sang his praises.

He reads submissions and answers the author right away, saying it’s “cruelty to animals to keep them waiting.”

See: Emily Bobrow, “Robert Gottlieb: A ‘crazed reader’ who became a legendary editor,” The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 4-5, 2021, p.C6.