MULTIZ321
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ROYAL HOLIDAY CLUB RHC (POINTS)
The 100 Best NonFiction Books of All Time
By Robert McCrum/ Books/ The Guardian/ theguardian.com
"After two years of careful reading, moving backwards through time, Robert McCrum has concluded his selection of the 100 greatest nonfiction books. Take a quick look at five centuries of great writing..."
How I Chose My List of the Best NonFiction Books of All Time
By Robert McCrum/ Books/ The Guardian/ theguardian.com
"Some weeks into the compilation of our nonfiction classics list, one mischievous colleague with a penchant for the arcane posed this wild-card challenge: “So what are you going to do about Betty McDonald?”
“Who she?”
“Haven’t you read The Egg & I?”
In 1946, Betty McDonald’s whimsical autobiography was as popular as baked beans; now it’s almost completely forgotten, but, tellingly, still in print. Alas, after an hour or two with The Egg & I, it was excruciatingly obvious that Betty McDonald’s book is not a classic. On some weeks, there might be as many as five competing challenges for each nonfiction slot, but rarely as straightforward as this.
Literary classics cluster on the north face of Parnassus. For this vertiginous terrain there are different sherpas. Italo Calvino says that a classic is “a book that has never finished what it wants to say”. Ezra Pound identifies “a certain eternal and irresponsible freshness”; TS Eliot, much more astringent, observed in The Sacred Wood that “no modern language can hope to produce a classic, in the sense I have called Virgil a classic”. Alan Bennett wryly notes: “Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.”
Among nonfiction classics, the most treacherous category is that creature beloved of publishers – “the contemporary classic”. A second cousin to that notorious impostor is the “instant classic”. Such books will have been judged by slippery criteria: popular and literary critical fashion, a changing marketplace and new technology, bestseller lists and hype. In the past 100 years, a familiar palette of blurbish adjectives has given shape and colour to a moving target: provocative, outrageous, prophetic, groundbreaking, funny, disturbing, revolutionary, moving, inspiring, life-changing, subversive…"
Clockwise from top left: James Baldwin, Barack Obama, Oliver Sacks, Germaine Greer, George Orwell, Tom Wolfe, all of whom feature in Robert McCrum’s list.
Richard
By Robert McCrum/ Books/ The Guardian/ theguardian.com
"After two years of careful reading, moving backwards through time, Robert McCrum has concluded his selection of the 100 greatest nonfiction books. Take a quick look at five centuries of great writing..."
How I Chose My List of the Best NonFiction Books of All Time
By Robert McCrum/ Books/ The Guardian/ theguardian.com
"Some weeks into the compilation of our nonfiction classics list, one mischievous colleague with a penchant for the arcane posed this wild-card challenge: “So what are you going to do about Betty McDonald?”
“Who she?”
“Haven’t you read The Egg & I?”
In 1946, Betty McDonald’s whimsical autobiography was as popular as baked beans; now it’s almost completely forgotten, but, tellingly, still in print. Alas, after an hour or two with The Egg & I, it was excruciatingly obvious that Betty McDonald’s book is not a classic. On some weeks, there might be as many as five competing challenges for each nonfiction slot, but rarely as straightforward as this.
Literary classics cluster on the north face of Parnassus. For this vertiginous terrain there are different sherpas. Italo Calvino says that a classic is “a book that has never finished what it wants to say”. Ezra Pound identifies “a certain eternal and irresponsible freshness”; TS Eliot, much more astringent, observed in The Sacred Wood that “no modern language can hope to produce a classic, in the sense I have called Virgil a classic”. Alan Bennett wryly notes: “Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.”
Among nonfiction classics, the most treacherous category is that creature beloved of publishers – “the contemporary classic”. A second cousin to that notorious impostor is the “instant classic”. Such books will have been judged by slippery criteria: popular and literary critical fashion, a changing marketplace and new technology, bestseller lists and hype. In the past 100 years, a familiar palette of blurbish adjectives has given shape and colour to a moving target: provocative, outrageous, prophetic, groundbreaking, funny, disturbing, revolutionary, moving, inspiring, life-changing, subversive…"
Clockwise from top left: James Baldwin, Barack Obama, Oliver Sacks, Germaine Greer, George Orwell, Tom Wolfe, all of whom feature in Robert McCrum’s list.
Richard