Book Review: Booknotes

A Book You Can Buy From Me

Book Title: Booknotes


Author: 215 writers respond to interviews by Brian Lamb

Date: 1997

Publisher: Times Books / Random House

ISBN: 0-8129-3029-0

Length: 397 pages of text plus index, appendix, and two photo inserts

Quote: "Although this is a book about writing, there wasn't a lot of writing to be done [by Brian Lamb]...We have omitted my questions and edited the interviews for length and clarity."

The difference between this book and other books about twentieth-century books and writers is that Lamb interviewed these authors on C-SPAN, the cable TV channel that exists mostly to broadcast speeches made in Congress. Naturally, that meant he selected a special kind of authors. They all got onto C-SPAN by writing serious books about history and government. Most of them were recognized as having seniority and expertise in Washington, where many of them lived and worked. Some of them aren't pompous people and have written fiction or comedy, but nobody goes on C-SPAN to talk about fiction or comedy. If you are or want to be an historian, a government official, or a diplomat, then reading these people's serious books is your job and reading their C-SPAN chat is your entertainment. If you enjoy browsing at Kramerbooks, you'll love Booknotes.

Otherwise, you might find Booknotes on the heavy side. Some of the authors tell some funny or emotional stories, but this book shows all of them, even Bill Buckley and Bob Tyrrell, acting serious and formal enough (William F. Buckley Jr. and R. Emmitt Tyrrell) to fit into a crowd that included the sitting President and assorted visiting heads of state.

The names really say it all. The "storytellers" in this book are historians and biographers. The "public figures" are not actors or athletes; mostly they're heads of state, although two activists, Betty Friedan and Melba Patillo Beals, are included. If you can imagine cozy chats with Margaret Thatcher, Mikhail Gorbachev (and translator), Norman Schwartzkopf, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Al Gore, that's the kind of "public figures" included in this book.

Some of them do get a bit chummy. Daniel Boorstin, one of whose early books I reviewed on Yahoo, spends half of his page space in Booknotes expressing appreciation of his wife. In fact, several of the older writers mention the benefit of a successful marriage. Why is this important rather than mundane? Because American writers who are currently over forty were told, when we were young, that according to Freud we had to choose between having "creative" satisfaction or sexual satisfaction, that one channel for our energy was going to block the other...and we're still rejoicing in the news that Freud was wrong. You can have both literary success and a successful family, in the same lifetime. The two things conflict only while the babies are new.

Some of the authors talk about each other. Christopher Hitchens spends a good deal of his space venting his envy of P.J. O'Rourke (whose book about Adam Smith might have rated an interview in this book, too, if he'd only written it ten years earlier). Neil Sheehan, Malcolm Browne, and Peter Arnett talk about their war reportage and each other's. Shortly after Tyrrell sneered in Boy Clinton that Bill Clinton hadn't published a Real Book before his presidential campaign, Clinton published Between Hope and History and told Brian Lamb, "I loved Thomas Wolfe and...William Faulkner...A friend...said...that I was a great writer and I should just keep writing" (that's on pages 339-343 of Booknotes). Several authors commented on Robert McNamara before he appeared on the show, and in Booknotes, to discuss In Retrospect.

Other authors prefer to focus on more distant historical events. David McCullough confides, "I'd started working on a book about Pablo Picasso. I quit...because I found I disliked him," and when an editor suggested that he write another book about Franklin D. Roosevelt he said, "If I were going to do a twentieth-century president...it would be Harry Truman.'" Shelby Foote shares how growing up in an area full of Civil War battlefields attracted him to the history of the Civil War period. Doris Kearns Goodwin tells how her view of the Roosevelt-Roosevelt marriage, in No Ordinary Time, differs from Joseph P. Lash's view in Eleanor and Franklin.

Booknotes is definitely for grown-ups who enjoy long serious books. (Yes, every author's name that shows up in colored type here should link to the Amazon page for one of that author's books.) Brian Lamb is still living, at latest report, and will receive $1 if you buy Booknotes from me for $10; click here.