Loved it! Hated it!

July 23, 2009 7:57 AM

What do you love about popular books on society, history, and human sciences? What do you hate about them?

I'm preparing a proposal to write my thesis as a public anthropology book for this competition. I know that one of the most important things is the writing style, of course. I'm looking more for what you liked about structure, presentation, and themes.

(I can elaborate a little on what my book is about if that's important, but I want to keep it broad for now.)

posted by carmen to society & culture (19 comments total)

I think for me the winning quality is always being able to walk that impossibly thin line between being overly general/pedantic and too obscure for the general reader. I think its really important to know your audience to hit that level of discourse; if I was writing for a mass-market audience vs. writing for anthropology students vs. writing for academics generally speaking, etc.
For example, I hated Predictably Irrational because it was way to broad and general (to the point I felt like it was a bunch of wow! isn't that neat! instead of useful information). I think if you can engage and inform without insulting you will write something people will want to read.
posted by zennoshinjou at 8:15 AM on July 23

argh way too broad
posted by zennoshinjou at 8:16 AM on July 23

I do not like it when the writer presumes that their experience is the same as my own and so talks about societal things as if "everyone" agrees with the same set of premises. As soon as I find a segment in which my feelings are totally different than the author's and the author uses that sort of "Of course we all feel that..." language, they lose me.
posted by jessamyn at 8:30 AM on July 23 [1 favorite]

zennoshinjou has it exactly. I read popular nonfiction because want something written for people who want to read it rather than something that can get away with being bland, boring, or poorly written because the intended audience needs the information. That said, it's possible to do quality, engaging writing without treating one's audience like a bunch of dummies. I don't want "[Nonfiction topic] for Dummies," I want "[Nonfiction topic] for smart laymen."
posted by Meg_Murry at 8:30 AM on July 23

Lack of citations.
posted by goethean at 8:44 AM on July 23 [1 favorite]

Also: footnotes are way better than endnotes.
posted by goethean at 8:45 AM on July 23 [1 favorite]

Lack of citations and failure to present alternative hypotheses when the topic is controversial. Especially when the author tells me in advance that they don't like the other hypothesis so they're just ignoring it.
posted by immlass at 8:48 AM on July 23 [1 favorite]

Of course we all know that jessamyn is always right, and I agree with her.
posted by kathrineg at 8:52 AM on July 23 [2 favorites]

I've been thinking about this topic a lot more this morning. Some other thoughts.

- There are 2-3 authors I can think of who do the thing where they start telling you about their topic but then go off into a 50 page derail about the history of some tiny part of the topic so that by the time I've gotten back to the main thread, I've usually forgotten it. Most people do not do this well.
- Ditto footnotes. Too many footnotes makes you look either like you're repurposing your thesis or that you can't write a narrative in a linear fashion. I'm reading a popular history book now and there are endnotes on everything and it seems a little twee for a popular non-fiction book.
- References. Have a lot of them at the end in an easy to look up fashion. I'd die a happy person if I could access bibliographies and web links to this sort of thing online someplace.
- Trivia - I enjoy little trivia bits tossed in everywhere especially on a dry topic. I notice, however, if they're just rumors or unsubstantiated.
- Do not make your writing look like you are using a thesaurus for every different way to say "terrible" or "good" I know you're smart because I'm reading your book, I'd like to not wade through purple prose to get your points.
- If there are other books on this same topic, mention them but don't assume I've read them. Feel free to be subjective but not totally disparaging.
- Don't make fun of the people you're talking about. Stiff and Bonk do this and I swear I will never read anything that woman writes ever again.
- Making it a little personal sometimes lets people get a better more well-rounded idea of the topic. I notice this a lot on popular non-fiction.
- I know this is totally petty but I feel absurdly gracious when people don't toss generic male pronouns everyplace where they're describing a generic person of non-specific gender. Singular they, or mixing it up makes me happy.
posted by jessamyn at 9:39 AM on July 23

Here's a structure that I particularly like: each chapter of the book is titled after some member of a finite set (for example, the planets, the continents, the cardinal sins, etc.), and each chapter uses the thing it's titled after as a jump-off to discuss something that the reader could not have anticipated. Books like this keep me reading, because I'm always wondering something like, "ooh, I wonder what she's going to do with Jupiter?"

The Cloudspotter's Guide is a great example of a nonfiction book with this structure. It is also the structure of Joyce's Ulysses.
posted by painquale at 10:00 AM on July 23

The thing that is really beginning to annoy me is anecdotal chapter introductions that look as though the author has been somewhere, or done some reporting, or in some other way actually got off their ass to engage with non-abstract reality, only to reveal a few paragraphs in that s/he's working off a newspaper cutting to prove an abstract point and has no intention of delving any further into the story or characters s/he began with.
posted by game warden to the events rhino at 10:13 AM on July 23

Lack of dates and lack of citations both bother me. As a reader, I want to know where the information came from; I want to be able to distinguish between things the author got from source material and their own conjectures, pet theories, and flat-out lies.

(It's okay for an author to make a new conjecture about something, as long as s/he makes it clear that that's what it is. Citing source material and the opinions of other authorities is helpful too.)

Things I like: Good writing style; an informed enthusiasm for the subject; a sense that you're telling the story as opposed to re-telling it.

Books that I think get it right:

Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution, by Ruth Scurr
Oscar Wilde, by Richard Ellmann
Marlborough, by Richard Holmes
Byzantium (3 volumes), by John Julius Norwich
The House of Medici, by Christopher Hibbert
and anything by Claire Tomalin.
posted by Pallas Athena at 12:34 PM on July 23 [1 favorite]

This is great! Thanks so much. I'm surprised that people are so pro-citation (well, I mean, not in the sense of understanding where stuff comes from, but in the sense that it can be hard to read), but that's really encouraging to me, because I'd hate to feel like I have to cut out a bunch of stuff about the broader debates and such (although I hear you, jessamyn, on not making it sound like I'm repurposing my thesis).

I like the chapter title idea, too. I'm pretty terrible at titles, so I'll have to put some work into it :) How do people feel about chapter lengths? Academic writing tends to go for 40 page chapters (which I hate, but most of my recreational reading is fiction, and I understand why stuff gets written that way).

What about slightly esoteric subjects? This is going to be a case-study type of book about an ethnic group in Ghana, based primarily on a year and a half of my living and researching there. I feel like the research speaks to some broadly interesting themes, but I'm wondering if it would be better to sort of let those themes be implicit and focus on the interesting stories there, or to make it more explicit and try to tie it to issues "at home".
posted by carmen at 2:01 PM on July 23

Hm, more thoughts...

I don't think you need to tie the themes to issues "at home", but I prefer books that make their themes explicit. I dislike books that feel like they're just collections of stories without tying into some grander narrative (this is personal preference, of course). Ideally, it should feel like every story or example should be in its place for a reason and could go nowhere else. Shorter chapters are better for this reason. I find that books with long chapters can be well-structured on a chapter-to-chapter basis, but make me lose track of what's going on within the chapter. If you're going to have long chapters, use subsections with names that actually help describe the structure and aren't just short descriptions of what's going to come. The latter method is pretty common and I think it's totally arbitrary and annoying. Don't bother having subsections at all if they only serve as bookmarks and don't actively help the reader follow what's going on.

Something that is hard to do, only works with some topics, and is hated by some people, is to have a "shadow thesis" in addition to your main thesis that only gets revealed at the end. When this works out, it's great. Throughout the book, the author develops an idea X that was stated at the beginning, but then at the end, reveals that everything also supports the more interesting idea Y! The reason this works well is because if you don't explicitly tell the reader what you're doing in the beginning, the book comes across as a rambly and unconnected bunch of stories, but if you do tell the reader what you're doing, the reader's judgment of your evidence will influenced by her knowledge of what you are using it for; you lose the element of surprise. Having a shadow thesis keeps interest high while still letting you save a showstopper for the conclusion. And then the reader can revisit the information you've given and see it in a new light.

But while your showstopper should be surprising, keep it small. Don't have some overly grand, the-meaning-of-life-has-been-solved conclusion. Pop science writers do this all the freakin' time, and I hate it. I want to learn about the evolution of the language faculty, not your musings about deep insights into the nature of reality, thank you very much Steven Pinker.
posted by painquale at 2:33 PM on July 23

I may be in the minority on this, but I am driven crazy by two trends in popular nonfiction.

1. Constantly having to remind me why this topic is Interesting and Important!!!

Simon Winchester springs to mind as someone who picks terrific awesome fascinating topics, does a lot of research on them, but doesn't quite trust his audience to find the topics interesting in their own right. So every paragraph has to have explicit "this was the first time anyone ever had this thought!" "imagine his surprise when it turned out to be the most famous invention ever!" "but if you remember, I said he was crazy, so it's really amazing that he managed to do the project!" theatrics.

Just tell me the good and interesting things themselves. Give me the details that make them interesting and trust me to really be curious about some of the nitty-gritty.

2. Constantly inserting the author as a character.

"To find out more about the settlement of Cobb County, I found myself in the Library of Congress, staring at a dusty book. I had eaten a chili dog for lunch and let me tell you about the condiments I used on it. My ex-wife hated relish, and I've always had an immature streak, blah blah blah...so I learned a lot about myself that day..."

MOAR FACTS, PLZ. (A little of this is fine, but I think a lot of contemporary nonfiction goes overboard)
posted by LobsterMitten at 7:58 PM on July 23

Looking at your followup, in your case it sounds like inserting yourself as a character would actually be appropriate. So disregard my point 2, except to remember that people aren't reading it to find out about YOU (unless you write and market the book as an Oprah-ready journey of personal discovery, in which case, godspeed).
posted by LobsterMitten at 8:04 PM on July 23

Pet peeve in history books: "Would have." "Lucy would have surely felt gratified as she looked out the window and realized she was the best author ever," etc. I don't want to know what an author thinks a historical figure would have done. I want them to find out what they did, and get into the primary sources to elucidate.
posted by mynameisluka at 9:30 PM on July 23

I'd like to second writing an explicit theme. The esoteric case study book I really enjoyed reading that comes to mind is Civilizing Natures: Race, Resources, and Modernity in Colonial South India by Kavita Phillip. Most of the research details went over my head but I really appreciate the opening and closing chapters for providing an overview of the main themes. It's an academic work, but I read it as popular non-fiction since I wasn't familiar with the topic at all and checked it out of the library on a whim. I'm glad I did because a few of the main ideas she presents in it gave me perspectives that I wouldn't have had otherwise on other subjects I'm more familiar with. If there hadn't been a few sections devoted to explicating those themes, I don't think I would have been able to pick up on them. And if there hadn't been citations for primary sources related to those themes I wouldn't have been able to follow up to the same degree.

Detailed charting any one kind of information gets tedious really fast. I lose interest immediately when books start to outline genealogy in one clump, or organizational history through conference/co-coordinator milestones. Save it for the appendix or leave it out all together.
posted by dustyasymptotes at 10:59 PM on July 23

The best popular histories strike a fine balance between historical period, anthropology/sociology (including methods and sources), character, biography, theme and analysis. Personally, I like Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, Stillwell and the American Experience in China. In each of these books, I think Tuchman really hit a great balance in delivering history through story, which is vital for attracting popular readership, without neglecting scholarship. In each of these books, she constrains herself to a naturally bounded historical period (events and persons discussed enter and exit her story as matters of historical record) and the themes she develops from them overarch the entirety of the composition. She is less successful with Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour which simply considers too great a span of time, beginning in the pre-historical Bronze Age, and thus forces her to conjecture and invention to support her grander ambition, and weakens her scholarship and argument considerably. In a similar way, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, while an entertaining read, fails as popular history, for carrying too much of thematic burden.

"... This is going to be a case-study type of book about an ethnic group in Ghana, based primarily on a year and a half of my living and researching there. I feel like the research speaks to some broadly interesting themes, but I'm wondering if it would be better to sort of let those themes be implicit and focus on the interesting stories there, or to make it more explicit and try to tie it to issues "at home". ..."

To develop a book from a year and half of research case-study, unless you stuff it with a lot of mundane detail and personal anecdotes, is likely to result in either a regurgitation of your field notes, or a narrowly specific portrait of a part of the world that is, at best, tertiary to the interests of the broad popular audience. To write a popular history that is successful, you must treat broad, if not universal themes, and I think there is some school of ethics for research that argues that if you have the chance to put the stories of the third world before a mass audience, you owe it to those who help you research, and their future welfare, to do so. So I think that, to the extent that you can, without overarching or preaching, you should develop one to three broader themes that tie your research to the interests of popular readers in the larger world.

For example, if your experience illustrates, in some way, the efficacy or lack thereof, of first world economic aid in the people you studied, then you may want to tie your observations in some way to the larger current discussions about international aid to Africa, or the impact of massive Chinese investement there, or some such. As a second theme, you might explore how the opposite stream of effects, from your studied group, to the larger world occurs, if it does, and what effects are created in the larger world as a result.

Above all, however, I think every non-fiction work has an essential structure that follows from the facts it is built upon, and must deliver. Be wary of shaping your facts too hard. If you recorded the life of a village in your research notes, your story is tied to that village, and must naturally focus there. You can't, through artfice, make a Ghana village the setting for a G8 policy discussion, and remain true to your research.

Good luck, and enjoy your writing.
posted by paulsc at 1:11 AM on July 24