September 4, 2007
Steve Wasserman on the decline of coverage of books
The Columbia Journalism Review has published a consideration of book reviewing by former Los Angeles Times Book Review editor Steve Wasserman, the cover story from its September/October 2007 issue, online. (Wasserman is now a literary agent with Kneerim & Williams.) It is a long, thoughtful piece, more levelheaded than many of the ruminations published recently in newspapers, magazines, and on the Internet.
The terrible irony is that at the dawn of an era of almost magical technology with a potential of deepening the implicit democratic promise of mass literacy, we also totter on the edge of an abyss of profound cultural neglect. One is reminded of Philip Roth’s old aphorism about Communism and the West: “In the East, nothing is permitted and everything matters; in the West, everything is permitted and nothing matters.” In today’s McWorld, the forces seeking to enroll the populace in the junk cults of celebrity, sensationalism, and gossip are increasingly powerful and wield tremendous economic clout. The cultural conversation devolves and is held hostage to these trends. The corporate wars over who will control the technology of newsgathering and electronic communication and data and distribution are increasingly fierce. Taken together, these factors threaten to leave us ignorant of tradition, contemptuous of the habits of quality and excellence, unable to distinguish among the good, the bad, and the ugly.But perhaps this is too bleak a view. After all, 96 million readers is a third of the country. As John Maxwell Hamilton, a longtime journalist and commentator on Public Radio International’s Marketplace, writes in his irreverent and trenchant book, Casanova Was a Book Lover, “People who care about books care profoundly. What they lack in numbers they make up for in passion. A typical mid-1980s study illustrates the fidelity of readers to reading. Only half of the American public, the study found, had read at least one book in the past six months. Of those ‘readers,’ however, almost one-third devoured at least one book a week.”
And the book itself—compact, portable, sensuous—has yet to be bested as our most important information-retrieval system.
This essay is sure to receive much response. Click here to track it via Technorati, and here via Google BlogSearch. CJR will convene a panel at Columbia University at 7PM on September 18th; details can be found at The Elegant Variation.
UPDATE, September 6: Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle, has posted an interview with Steve Wasserman about the ideas discussed in his article.