The New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction Bestseller List- One Year into the War in Ukraine

I pretty much always find a look at the New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller list a nauseating experience.

My look at the list of February 26, 2023 was no exception.

Of the fifteen books, at least a dozen may be counted as giving the byline to celebrities or other public figures who did not "make their names" as authors of any type, whether as popular writers, scholars, scientists or anything else of the kind who have managed to reach a wider public through the salience of their work. Rather they were, and owe the salability of their names to, their having been the subject of the news.

Indeed, no fewer than seven of the fifteen are officially "by," if one counts "reality" stars and the British royalty who perform much the same function in their home country, Hollywood celebrity-type folks--while the figure would be nine if we add in Hollywood-loving Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey.

As one might guess, most of what appears to be on offer here, from the Hollywood types and others, is gossip, narcissism, self-justification--some of it mixed with self-help. The theme continues to some extent through the other books, as with Gabor and Daniel Matè's study of The Myth of Normal (concerned as it is with health). In other cases the self-justification is mixed with current affairs (as with the memoir of Mike Pompeo).

This leaves two books about anything and everything else approached in any and all other ways in all the great wide world. These might be classed as "history." One is a book by Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch about a supposed Nazi plot to assassinate the heads of the "Big Three" allies. The "Meltzer" name by itself set off my crypto-history alarm (one of the riders of the post-Dan Brown wave of crypto-historical thrillers, he used to host a show on what people have come to joke about as the Used-to-Be-About-History Channel), and what I have seen of the reviews confirms to me that it was not a false alarm. The other book is The 1619 Project--which in the view of several prominent Civil War historians (who seem to me to actually know their subject area, unlike innumerable other experts), has no more foundation in history than Meltzer's attempt to offer up Jack Higgins' The Eagle Has Landed as history rather than fiction.

That's it, that's what the country is supposed to be reading, and it gets only more appalling on closer examination. I, for one, am disgusted by "Prince Harry's" public wallowing in self-pity (in this case, the word is entirely deserved), and more absurd and obscene behavior (like publicly bragging about the body count he thinks he personally racked up in a manner more like that of an XBox player than a soldier who has actually been to war). I am astonished that the story of a young woman known to the world mainly for playing a character on a pair of Nickelodeon children's sitcoms that ended almost a decade ago has been on the list for 27 weeks (and still at #2 after all that time!), and that other people are not as weary as I am of hearing from and about Viola Davis (whose book has been on the list for the same length of time).* That anyone still cares about the guy who played Chandler on Friends also astonishes me, and that the book by and about Dazed and Confused actor Matthew McConaughey has been on the list for 86 weeks is positively mind-boggling.

A few of the books seem to merit the benefit of the doubt. The book by the Matès at least sounds as if it offers something more than the usual claptrap, and--even if I admit to generally finding it harder to be annoyed with her than many of the others discussed here, it does genuinely seem to me to be the case that Pamela Anderson may have something more, and more challenging, to say than people may expect given that she has taken her activism beyond the usual "safe" topics (veganism, etc.), and stood her ground in the face of shameless, thuggish bullying on national television. But on the whole the picture is pretty bleak.

Considering this situation it seems only fair to acknowledge that it did not "just happen." We all know that in spite of the ubiquity of the lame cop-out that the consumer is king and the purveyors of trash are merely "giving people what they want," in publishing as elsewhere it is the oligopolistic producer who is king and the consumer who takes from what they are prepared to offer them--while the consumer did not always take it, exactly. As if the crass and politicized gatekeeping and the advertising dollars were not enough, it is now common practice to buy a book's way onto the bestseller list--with Forbes reporting that Mr. Pompeo's Political Action Committee spent $42,000 on books the day his memoir came out.

Still, even allowing for all that I find very little hopeful here--certainly from the standpoint of testimony to the intelligence of the general public, or its being mentally equipped to confront the issues of our era of polyrcisis. Indeed, never have I had more reason to hope that the bestseller list, which has ever been a highly imperfect measure of the public's book-buying, is wide off the mark in regard to what it is actually reading, let alone thinking.

* I remember some time ago citing a couple of episodes of Sam & Cat in a blog post about the techno-hype of the mid-'10s and wondering if it wasn't too obscure to have been worthwhile. I suppose I need not have worried.