How To Fail At Prose Communication: American Caesar by William Manchester

The movie The Post is one of the most baffling failures in the history of cinema. Released in 2017 hot on the heels of Trump’s election, it had all of the ingredients present for a masterpiece. The story centered around the Washington Post’s efforts to hunt down the Pentagon Papers, the outcome of which led to the Watergate scandal. It was basically a prequel to All The President’s Men. Directed by Steven Spielberg, starring Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep, written by Josh Singer (hot off his Best Picture win for the masterpiece that was Spotlight) and scored by the inimitable John Willams, The Post should have been a shoo-in for one of the best movies ever made.

And yet, it is one of the driest, most infuriating bores ever filmed on a camera. Meryl Streep as Katherine Graham will annoy anyone who dislikes passive female characters, the cinematography is filled with grey colors that are unpleasant to look at, the plot was incoherent because it couldn’t find a main character and there isn’t a classic John Williams melody to save the day either.

What went wrong? In short: everyone wasted their talents because it was rushed and trying to fit the zeitgeist. It also failed that most basic of tasks: tell a good story written by a first-class writer, directed by a first-class director and feature a rich cast of talented actors.

When I read the subject of today’s book review, I found myself saying almost exactly the same lines as written above. All the ingredients were there, what went wrong?

This is American Caesar by William Manchester.

Overview

American Caesar is a one-volume biography of famed World War II general Douglas MacArthur. Written by William Manchester and published in September 1978, the book is a hefty 793 pages so it leaves little by the wayside.

Before I go any further, I have to mention a few things about the author. William Manchester is one of the strangest characters in the history of American letters. Born in 1922, Manchester served in the Pacific Theater during World War II, eventually seeing combat at the Battle of Okinawa. After the war, he entered journalism and academia. He would become a prolific author of fiction and non-fiction. American Caesar is among his notable works, but two other Manchester books are interesting because of the story around them.

Manchester knew President John F. Kennedy and after the president’s murder, the Kennedy family commissioned him to write an official account of the assassination. But then the president’s widow Jacqueline and his brother Robert Kennedy then backed out and sued to block publication. The Death of A President as the final book was called came out in 1967, but one wonders what Manchester excised…

The other Manchester book worth bringing up is his final, posthumous work, The Last Lion, a three-volume biography of Winston Churchill. Manchester only completed two volumes before writer’s block and failing health prevented the completion of the last book. Per Manchester’s request, journalist Paul Reid—who’d never written a book I hasten to add—was brought on to finish the project based on Manchester’s notes. It took nine years and was a strange read when it came out. When I heard this story, I had many questions for the publisher: Reid is a nice man and a good journalist, but he was absolutely unqualified to write a biography of Winston Churchill despite him being Manchester’s handpicked choice. Why not overrule the now-dead famous author?

William Manchester’s colorful life and eccentric author bio are clues to the shortcomings of American Caesar…

The Review

Ostensibly, this should have been a book that wrote itself. Douglas MacArthur was the consummate American soldier at the turn of the 20th century. Son of a famed Union general and distinguished service in France during World War I, MacArthur’s considerable military talents led him to The Philippines in 1935. For those unfamiliar, The Philippines was a de facto American colony in the Pacific until its independence in 1946. For the remainder of the 1930s until the outbreak of the Second World War, MacArthur was Field Marshal of The Philippines. And because the country wasn’t independent, MacArthur was as close to a Roman pro-consul the United States ever had, hence the title of Manchester’s biography.

Of course, when World War II broke out in the Pacific, the Japanese duly kicked MacArthur out and MacArthur famously vowed to return to liberate the country. In October 1944, he kept his promise and launched a successful invasion. After the Japanese surrender, MacArthur was appointed Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, an understated title given the power it awarded him. From 1945 until 1951, MacArthur effectively ran Japan and rebuilt it to considerable success.

Then, just when his star couldn’t burn any brighter, he overreached himself. When the Korean peninsula became a war-zone in 1950, President Truman called on MacArthur’s considerable military experience to rescue America’s beleaguered ally. He initially succeeded, but then he began criticizing President Truman’s policies. As this is expressly forbidden in a country whose armed forces are run by civilians, MacArthur was relieved of his command despite his enormous popularity with the American people.

He died in 1964 with a complicated legacy to say the least.

Manchester covers everything I just summarized but the problem is the way he did it.

Biography is not Literary Fiction

Reading American Caesar is a slow, laborious experience because Manchester tried to write his book the same way F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby, which is to say as a literary novel. Don’t believe me? Take a look at this excerpt of age 203. I’ve copied it out exactly in line with the paragraph breaks as printed on the page.

‘We picture him on his favorite balcony as sundown in the late afternoon of Sunday, December 7. Here it is the blue hour, but nine thousand miles away at For San Houston Brigadier General Dwight Eisenhower’s watch reads 3:00am. He is asleep, and still unknown to the American public; a recent newspaper caption has identified him as ‘D.D Ersenbeing.

‘MacArthur reaches one end of the balcony, wheels, and steps out briskly in the opposite direction.

‘Below him, in the spacious palm-lined hotel lobby, newspapermen have finished polling one another on the chances of peace; all but one are convinced hostilities are very close. In the bar Sid Huff, having just finished a round of golf, is in very good spirits. He has three torpedo boats afloat and two almost ready for christening; presently John “Buck” Bulkeley will join him and they will discuss combining PT forces. In the nearby hotel pavilion Torso’s popular band is tuning up. The hotel ballroom is preparing to receive the Twenty-seventh Bombardment Group, twelve hundred airmen who are throwing a party for Brereton. The committee of officers making the arrangements has promised ‘the best entertainment this side of Minsky’s and among those in the audience will be the crews of the seventeen B-17s still at Clark Field. Twice have been ordered to Mindanao, where they would be out of the range of enemy aircraft, but they have stalled and temporized with this evening’s festivities in mind. The guest of honor will be leaving early—he is scheduled to fly to Java in the morning—but the rest of the fliers, including the Flying Fortress crews, won’t start breaking up until 2am Manila time. That will be 8am, December 7, in Hawaii.

‘At the far end of the balcony the General finishes another leg in his endless journey. He turns and steps off again.

‘Some 4,887 miles to the east of him, north of the Phoenix Islands, eight U.S. ships packed with planes, tanks, and American infantrymen are plunging through heavy seas towards Manila, shepherded by the heavy cruiser Pensacola.

‘MacArthur halts, pivots.’

I stopped the excerpt there, but it goes on like that until the end of the chapter on the next page. If you got annoyed reading that excerpt, then congratulations: you’re an astute reader of non-fiction with excellent taste.

There are three problems in this excerpt that should be obvious to anyone who is dimly aware of how the biography genre works.

First is the bourgeois, self-indulgent phrase ‘we picture him…’ Actually, Manchester, we don’t picture him. Why? Because we have no documentary evidence that what we’re ‘picturing’ actually happened in the way you said it did on December 7th 1941. Unlike a fiction novel, where you can have a fictitious character based on MacArthur darkly brooding over the harsh premonitions of war, a biography demands a narrative based on concrete evidence. As there’s none, this literary rumination should have been cut.

Second, notice the bloated, turgid paragraph that comes afterward. Manchester devotes an entire third of the page to completely useless information. I get what he was trying to do: that in the hours before America changed forever, a scene of normalcy existed in Manila. That’s nice, but it is still completely irrelevant for a biography of Douglas MacArthur. It also should have been cut.

Third and most egregiously, after indulging in literary imagination and narcissistic purple prose, Manchester immediately jumps back to focusing on MacArthur. The whiplash is so severe that he’s in danger of breaking the reader’s neck. The paragraphs where we ‘picture’ MacArthur are in fact single sentences where the slow, slow action takes place in extremely real time. Those are in turn followed by a huge paragraph of purple prose before alternating back to the extremely slow action focused on MacArthur.

It’s an exhausting experience to read and all of it should have been deleted at a stroke.

Much of the book suffers from the three problems listed above, but Page 203 managed to cram all of these failures of prose communication into one excruciating page. Throughout the book, a pseudo-literary character with pseudo-shakespearean character flaws is running parallel to the life of Douglas MacArthur, leaving the reader with little understanding of this most American of generals.

Conclusion

Biography is not literary fiction. A good biographer would reject the literary detours polluting American Caesar as inappropriate and wasteful. Literature has all the space to indulge the writer’s wildest ambitions for improving the craft of the novel (though not really but that’s a story for another day). By contract, non-fiction is confined by the facts. The biographer’s job is to place chronology on these events and write smart prose that vividly moves the action along so the reader’s enlightenment widens. Manchester did neither.

The life of Douglas MacArthur is on the shortlist of one of the most fascinating in military history. A real historian not trying to prove a point should take another shot at this subject.

Two Books About The Same Subject, Upsides, Downsides and Commonalities

In my review of William Shirier’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, I mentioned how scores of books have been written about that subject. I should have made a slight emendation to that claim: scores of books have been written about The Second World War, and there always will be new ones. As the most momentous conflict in human history, the information fit to print might well be limitless.

As such, readers looking for a basic yet comprehensive overview of World War II might be unsure where to look. Sure you can watch Saving Private Ryan, but cinema and television are no substitute for books. Like it or not, you’ll need to a consult a learned and eminent historian.

I myself did just that as I read two books by two different experts back-to-back. Those books were The Storm of War by Andrew Roberts and The Second World War by Antony Beevor.

Where They’re Similar

Both books deliver what they promise: one-volume histories of the entire Second World War. Their prose is clear and their narrative straight. Given the subject, what seems like a small compliment is in fact huge praise. But why? Answer: military historians often try to marry the descriptive history of the battle under study with the personal history of the heroes who partook in said battles. Unfortunately, such an approach does a disservice to both the heroes and the battle because the personal history of individual soldiers takes up space that should be devoted to explaining how the soldiers wound up in that battle in the first place. This means many learned books about the most famous battles in history—Dunkirk, Midway, Overlord, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa to name just a few—can be slow, arduous reads that leave little understanding in their wake.

Beevor and Roberts thankfully eschewed this traditional military history template. Instead, they limited themselves to describing the events as they happened and how key military and political leaders responded. 20/20 hindsight is unobtrusively employed by both authors to keep strict context and never to smugly moralize, which is always tempting with these sorts of books. Therefore, the reader will walk away with a firm understanding of what happened, how it happened, and why it happened. As such, both books earn a high recommendation and a five-star rating.

Readers should purchase both and they should quickly read both because the differences between the two books are just as revealing as their similarities.

Different Intentions

The largest divider between The Storm of War and The Second World War is each author’s intention when covering their subject. This abstract concept matters when reading any book because what the author sets out to do shapes the reader’s experience just as much as the story on offer. Furthermore, if the author is corrupted by interest, they will do demonstrable harm to the reader because an author putting their ideological perspective before their subject will give the reader a wholly false view of the world. Reading two books about the same subject unmasks this otherwise obscure inequality between author and reader because the identical subject matters acts like a controlled variable in a science experiment. If the subject is held constant, what else affects the outcome? Answer: the intention of the author. Thankfully, both Beevor and Roberts are pure of heart, so their differing intentions are ultimately benign.

With that out of the way, what is each author’s intention?

In The Second World War, Beevor’s intention is simple: cover everything that happened in World War II beginning from June 1939 when the first scuffles between the Soviets and the Japanese (I bet you forgot that part of the war) snowballed into a world war and ending in September 1945 with the surrender of Japan. In chronological order, all theatres of the conflict are described in a book of 750 pages. Beevor’s personal opinions are confined to the Introduction and Conclusion while editorial sprinkles join together otherwise unconnected events. The final result is a book that reads like a narrator’s script for a World War II documentary series. Modern historians do not make an appearance in Beevor’s text, giving the reader an unobstructed view of the events and the full range of emotions they evoke.

By contrast, Andrew Roberts comes to The Storm of War with an altogether different intention: to demonstrate Germany lost a potentially winnable war because of Hitler’s Nazi ideology. The Germans, corrupted by National Socialism, made so many ludicrous military decisions that the stupidity staggers the imagination even today. Ostensibly, this intention seems like Roberts is playing with a less favorable hand compared to Beevor. Wouldn’t proving a thesis contradict the book’s subtitle (‘A New History of The Second World War’)? The answer is no because Roberts’ central idea emerges from the evidence on offer rather than him concocting a harebrained theory and then mucking with the evidence to prove it. We see this play out as Roberts outlines the entirety of the conflict while subtly highlighting the instances where his thesis becomes self-evident fact. In my opinion, this is a historian’s foremost job responsibility: to spot patterns in history to provide deeper understanding. The Storm of War is a first rate example of a historian fulfilling said job description.

Though these intentions are clearly different, they both serve their respective text. Nevertheless, trade-offs to each author’s intention are made apparent by reading the other work. Beevor’s book leaves no corner of the conflict untouched and resolutely moves its narrative forward. The downside is there’s also no room for him to spot a pattern other historians might’ve missed or to focus extensively any one part of the conflict. His intention also constricts his writer’s voice to that of an omniscient narrator, which isn’t the most exciting of writer voices.

On the other hand, Roberts’ book solves some of the aforementioned downsides because he’s highlighting a particular through-line of the full history. Why the war started in 1939 as opposed to 1943 or some other date, for example, can be traced back to Hitler’s neurotic worldview and pathological impatience. Furthermore, Roberts’ arriving with something to say means his author voice has more room to express itself, the pleasant byproduct being his book is the wittier of the two works. But, and there’s always a but, Roberts’s having a central thesis at all means some parts of the conflict are squeezed out of his field of vision. Pretty much any part of the conflict occurring east of Istanbul is given one full chapter at best while the European theatre is comprehensively covered.

Or as the economists say, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Conclusion

The Second World War and The Storm of War are masterpieces written by two of Britain’s foremost historians. Two lifetimes of scholarship are available to anyone with the twenty-five bucks to pay for them. It’s a far better use of your money than a KFC bucket meal.

No doubt other books attempting the same mission exist and are of comparable quality. Yet whether someone reads these two books or another twenty-two World War II books, what matters here is the author’s intention. What the author sets out to do directly affects your reading experience. One should keep that in mind if they suspect a charlatan is in their midst.

In the meantime, enjoy not one, but two supreme works of history.

My Favorite Non-Fiction Book Ever: The Undoing Project

On March 26th, 2024, readers of leading newspapers and magazines like the New York Times and Forbes learned that cognitive psychologist Daniel Kahneman passed away at age 90. Few, I suspect, gave his obituary much thought. His name meant little to the general public with two notable exceptions: cognitive psychologists and Michael Lewis fans.

I’m firmly in the latter category and because Daniel Kahneman was the subject of my favorite book of all time, I figured I’d write it up on the blog.

This is The Undoing Project.

Summary

The Undoing Project is a biographical sketch of Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. In 1969, the two men met on the campus of Hebrew University, where their staggering differences yet curious similarities resulted in a collaboration and friendship as powerful as Lennon-McCartney. Their joint psychology work in the 1970s knocked down much of classical economics, pioneered the new field of behavioral economics, and discovered inherent flaws and biases in human reasoning that ran completely counter to what the eggheads assumed.

But given their shockingly different personalities, their friendship came unspooled in a process their respective wives found to be “worse than a divorce.”

Tversky passed away in 1996, leaving Kahneman as the surviving partner to pick up the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 (Nobels are not award posthumously). Kahneman’s award is even more impressive when one realizes he was a psychologist with little knowledge economics…

In this book, Michael Lewis chronicles this extraordinary friendship as only Michael Lewis can.

Why I Love It.

The appeal of Michael Lewis’s books are the fascinating people at the heart of his narrative They are characters richer than Natasha Rostov, Scarlett O’Hara, and Captain Ahab. Michael Lewis always refers to them as ‘characters’ because pull on the imagination in the same way.

In my opinion, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky were the most interesting members in the privileged club of Michael Lewis characters.

Kahneman was a Holocaust survivor, growing up on the run from the Nazis in Occupied France before emigrating to the new state of Israel after the war. Because Israel wasn’t a fully functioning country, he taught himself psychology and revolutionized how the Israeli army selected officers for promotion. And since he was in the Army, he eventually saw combat in the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War. Unlike most academics, who have the luxury of thinking from the safe haven of academia, he actually went to the front lines. It turns out forcing theoreticians to shoot people in the Sinai desert is a good way to keep their theories grounded. With experiences like these, Kahneman’s early life led to a welter of insight into the human condition but also an endless reservoir of doubt. He frequently fell in love with an idea only to turn on it with equal vehemence. He might not have finished anything if it weren’t for the other academic in Hebrew University’s psychology department.

Amos Tversky was, according to every single person who met him, the smartest man in the world. So respected was he that his colleagues formalized their affection in what they called ‘the world’s shortest intelligence test’. It ran as follows: ‘the longer it took for you to figure out Amos Tversky was smarter than you, the stupider you are’. No person disagreed with that test, least of all Amos himself. Unlike the doubtful Kahneman, Tversky’s never lost confidence in himself or their ideas. And when his intellect wasn’t terrifying lesser minds, it was dispensing shards of wisdom his students clutched to their hearts forever. My personal favorite is: The secret to doing good research is to always be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.

Individually, Kahneman and Tversky are riveting to read about, but then they started working together. The collaboration between them, as mentioned, changed psychology forever. But their personal dynamic made for an even more exciting drama.

Or as Tversky put it in his sublime and succinct way: people aren’t so interesting; relationships between people are interesting.

Never has that been more true than with Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.

Conclusion

I was sad to learn of Kahneman’s passing last month. He outlived Tversky by almost twenty years, yet the work they did together inevitably outlived them. Michael Lewis did the world an inestimable public service by writing this book. Incidentally, Kahneman was a best-selling author in his own right; he summarized his life work in the riveting Thinking, Fast and Slow. It’s still the essential introduction to the field of cognitive psychology even if it’s a little dated. Yet that book only hinted at his compelling personality and the utterly entrancing relationship he enjoyed with Amos Tversky.

The biggest clue Kahneman left behind in his multi-million copy bestseller was the touching dedication to his long dead friend.

What Are You Doing For 800 Pages? Kissinger: 1923-1968 by Niall Ferguson

Apparently I’m on a losing streak with my new reads. In my last post, I talked about a book I hated from an author I enjoy. Well deja vu ladies because I ran into the exact same problem. I love the author but wasn’t wild about this book.

On the plus side, my dislike of this upcoming book is nowhere near as intense as my dislike for the book in the last review. On the downside, this book is about an important subject, so the fact it has tons and tons of problems is itself a huge problem.

This is: Kissinger: 1923-1968 by Niall Ferguson.

Background

Of all the controversial figures in Richard Nixon’s already controversial administration, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger wound up the magnet for the most heated debated. (Side note: President Nixon and I are not related.)

Right up until his death at the age of 100 in October 2023, Kissinger was continually called upon as an elder statesman and veteran diplomat while also being reviled by some as a war criminal for his conduct during his government service. Whatever one’s feelings about Kissinger, that he was important is incontestable. Naturally, such importance would make him a fascinating biography subject.

In the early 2000s, Kissinger granted acclaimed historian Niall Ferguson access to all his papers, many in his own hand and previously unpublished. Already, this is a promising start. Readers will know I’ve positively reviewed a Niall Ferguson book before. Given Kissinger’s prominence in public life, Ferguson elected to split the biography into two volumes, not an uncommon practice.

The first volume, the subject of this review, was first published in 2016 while the second is still unfinished (we’ll return to this). For now, Ferguson covers Kissinger’s birth in Weimar Germany, fleeing the Nazis, returning as an American GI in occupied Germany, going to Harvard and becoming a unique public intellectual with various stints in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. The book ends with the event that made Kissinger a household name: his appointment as Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor in 1968.

These first 45 years of Kissinger's life span some of the most significant events in world history, o how did Ferguson put it all together?

And here’s where the wheels come off…

As one puts on their Wellington boots and begins stomping through the marshes of Kissinger Volume 1, one fact will become staggeringly apparent: of the 800+ pages in this book, Kissinger is probably only in 60% of them.

The rest of the book, meanwhile, concerns everything else happening around Kissinger, so much so that Kissinger’s role in his own biography is ironically diminished. Each of the key events shaping Kissinger on the road to his most job appointment is given several pages of context, which demonstrate Ferguson did his research, but almost too much research. For example, when covering Kissinger’s arrival at Harvard, Ferguson devotes many pages in that section to Harvard’s middling status as an academic institution in relation to Oxford and what certain academics were doing to improve Harvard’s stature when Kissinger arrived.

Is it related to the main subject? Yes, so slicing it out wholesale wouldn’t necessarily improve the book.

But the problem is every massive historical drama Kissinger found himself receives Ferguson’s overpowered historian’s analysis. Among the other subjects in this volume include Weimar Germany, the Nazi seizure of power, how well Jews immigrated and assimilated in America, how the U.S. went to war in 1941, how the Allies managed occupied Germany, Harvard, the emerging Cold War, containment theory, The Korean War, and finally, the hideous quagmire of Vietnam. And none of that includes Ferguson’s work tracing Kissinger’s intellectual development, itself a massive and abstract theme.

And so, what starts as a biography of Henry Kissinger balloons into a schizophrenic history book that tries to keep the reader grounded in its time while also providing the relevant 20/20 hindsight. But that is the case for most biographies. As I talked about in this post, what makes the genre so effective is the powerful combo of using a person’s life to understand the history happening around them.

That is the case with Kissinger, but what turns that previous strength into a weakness is that this is merely volume one. If the book somehow included all of the above while squeezing in the rest of Kissinger’s life, then it would be among the most thorough, effective, and comprehensive biographies ever written. Instead, it runs the length of a full-biography while delivering only half the goods and recall that it ends before Kissinger’s most substantial role in government. If none of Kissinger’s service as NSA is present, it makes one wonder what Ferguson was doing for 800 pages.

Splitting a biography in two is by no means a deal-breaker. Some individuals, like Winston Churchill, live a life so significant that fitting everything into one book is impossible. In Churchill’s case, Martin Gilbert’s official biography runs no less than eight volumes along with twenty-three companion volumes. Given Churchill’s preeminence among history’s statesmen, I have no doubt such huge volumes were justified.

In terms of prominence, Henry Kissinger comes nowhere close to eclipsing Winston Churchill…and yet, there’s still a single-volume biography of Churchill just as authoritative as Gilbert’s work. That book is Churchill, Walking With Destiny, by Lord Andrew Roberts. Roberts somehow fit all of Churchill’s momentous life into 1000 pages while Ferguson fit half of Kissinger’s life into 800.

Conclusion

Is Kissinger: 1923-1968 a bad book? Not exactly. It is comprehensive and covers everything. But that’s precisely what makes it a slow reading experience.

It could easily have been one book.

Warning Signs of a Half-Baked Book: Fluke by Brian Klaas

Readers of this blog will know that I positively reviewed a book by the political scientist Brian Klaas. That book, Corruptible, enthralled me from start to finish. Every anecdote and data point reached a startling conclusion that really changed how I thought about the world.

So late last year, when I heard that Klaas had a new book coming out in January called Fluke, I was thrilled. I bought it immediately.

Unfortunately, I read it.

I’ll be blunt: this book was one of the biggest letdowns from an author I otherwise enjoy. I was completely taken aback. Confused reasoning, unclear examples, and pointless tangents dominated the entire book. Where was the lucid thinking, clear prose, and convincing arguments of his previous work? Klaas’s strikeout was so dramatic that I decided to perform an autopsy. What went wrong here? I enjoyed Corruptible because he examined the subject of power from every conceivable angle, including a few angles I didn’t even know existed. I will break down the mistakes and warning signs from this book in a similar manner.

Did The Author Screw Up?

As Klaas’s name is on Fluke, the answer is to some degree yes. Klaas did something wrong, but did he do something wrong because he’s a mediocre writer, because he just doesn’t suit my tastes or because of something else? As Corruptible shows, Klaas is a first-class non-fiction writer who can deliver the goods when the occasion demands it. We’re not dealing with a lack of innate talent or inadequate training. Similarly, this isn’t a matter of taste, at least not on my part. One more time for the folks in the back, I love his other books. So this isn’t a case of a ‘great writer’ that other people love who I just don’t get. Therefore, the problem is isolated to this book, but what part exactly?

Is The Thesis Feasible?

Klaas’s book is found in the ‘smart thinking’ section of the book store, which is a silly euphemism for ‘this author is arguing an idea he or she had’. As the title suggests, Klaas is making the case that flukes play a significant role in our lives and we ignore them at our peril. Okay! If you can summarize your idea in a single sentence, that’s a promising start. Furthermore, on the surface, there’s much to support this idea. Though I myself am nowhere close to an expert, I’m aware that a mix of decision theory, historical anecdotes, probability science and a few careful references to Albert Einstein’s early 20th century physics could support a thesis along the lines of what Klaas proposed. So the idea itself isn’t a non-starter.

But as the final book Fluke reveals, the idea did not survive the acid test of reality. This is a common occurrence. How many plans work on paper but spectacularly fall apart in practice? (Looking at you, Communism). Does that mean the idea was flawed from the beginning and Klaas just didn’t see it?

Not necessarily, but how could that be? I’ll give you an example. One of the most influential non-fiction books of the past decade is Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. Anybody who needs an intro to behavioral economics should at least pretend to have read this book. Kahneman essentially invented that field with a series of ground-breaking papers he wrote with his longtime collaborator Amos Tversky in the 1970s. Thinking Fast and Slow takes those ideas and presents them for a general audience. But important as that book is, Kahneman’s prose demands every ounce of your attention. It’s a bit dry, as are most books by academics attempting to reach the lay reader for the first time. Kahneman’s reputation and the significance of his contributions to psychology make the book a must read anyway, but it’s certainly not easy. Normally, that would be the end of the story, but five years after Thinking Fast and Slow came out, Michael Lewis released my favorite book of all time, The Undoing Project. That book is a biographical sketch of not just Kahneman but also his genius collaborator Amos Tversky. Lewis wrote about the same ideas in Thinking Fast and Slow but did so in a way that cleared out Kahneman’s academic clutter. Same ideas, different books, wildly different outcomes.

Or as Tversky himself said, ‘people don’t choose between things, they choose between descriptions of things. Change the description and you change the decision.’

Applying Tversky’s quip to Fluke and Klaas’s bewildering failure to deliver, the idea of a book about flukes isn’t itself a no-go for launch, it’s how that idea landed on the page that matters.

The True Cause. It’s Not A Causing B or B Causing A: It’s C Causing A and B.

If Klaas himself isn’t the problem and the idea itself isn’t the problem, then the true problem with Fluke is how Klaas thought about it…or, more specifically, didn’t think enough about it.

By the end of Chapter 2, it was obvious that Klaas was out over his skis. His understanding of the ideas was half-baked and he clearly didn’t think them all the way through because the application of the research material to his general thesis contorted the structure of the book beyond recognition. And as a result, Klaas failed the basic test I apply to all books: if you can’t understand a book, it is objectively bad. Worse still, bad books have a horrible tendency to slow your reading experience down, trapping you in their terribleness. In general, the faster a book reads, the more time the author has spent mastering the material. That wasn’t the case here.

So obviously the book was a bummer, but was it that unexpected? Did Klaas simply try his best but not succeed as we all do? Or were there clues available to Klaas and his publisher that indicated they needed to reconsider releasing this book?

The Clues

Of course there were signs. I’ve been at this game a while and clues that a book is undercooked can be found everywhere, and not just the text. Clues can even be found as early as the front-flap jacket.

1) Fluke’s Flap Jacket

The flap jacket of a hardcover book is used for marketing copy. Rather than pollute the back of the book with a summary or a sales pitch, it’s easier to hide that information in a dust jacket. Here is a key excerpt of this marketing copy for Fluke: “In the perspective-altering tradition of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan comes a provocative challenge to how we think our world works—and why small chance events can divert our lives and change everything, by social scientist and Atlantic Writer Brian Klaas.”

The publisher overshot their mark. How come? Because they compared this new book to The Tipping Point and The Black Swan. For those unfamiliar, those two books are some of the most famous books published in the last twenty years. The central ideas in those books reached a mass audience and became near essential reads. The problem is that comparing your new, untested book to some of the greatest in the field raises expectations to stratospheric levels which are rarely if ever met. It would be like if a record company released an indie band’s debut album and billed it as being on par with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Dark Side of the Moon. Furthermore, product comparison usually demonstrates the seller’s insecurity. Deep down, I suspect most advertisers know the public makes a product iconic, not the other way around. So the big comparison presenting itself before I even reached page one was the first clue that something was amiss.

2) Imagine All The People

Reading (or more accurately, slogging) through Fluke, you’ll notice a repeating word in Klaas’s prose: imagine. Frequently, Klaas implores the reader to imagine a hypothetical scenario or situation to get his point across. For example, this is the opening of Chapter 4: “Imagine two creatures: we might call them Truth Creature and the Shortcut Creature. The Truth Creature sees everything exactly as it is, able to visually perceive every molecule of oxygen, every stream of ultraviolet light, each atom within every bacterium lurking under each toenail. Every possible fragment of visual information is perceived and processed by the Truth Creature’s brain. Nothing goes unnoticed. By contrast, the the Shortcut Creature can’t see any of that detail, but instead only perceives and processes that which is most useful to it. All else is either ignored or invisible to that creature’s perceptions. As a result, the Shortcut Creature cannot sense most of reality.“

There are any number of problems with this paragraph including but not limited to the excessive amount of detail. Klaas could have sliced out the extra verbiage about Truth Creature at a stroke and just left it at “Truth Creature sees and perceives everything in the universe”. Excessive verbiage shows the central subject is too small for a book.

But the more problematic phrase is “imagine two creatures”. Pro tip for new writers: asking readers to imagine something for which there is no real world reference like a Truth Creature (what the hell even is that) leaves the reader adrift precisely because they lack the mental schema to make that imaginative leap.

And yet, that very problem crops up over and over again in Fluke. Making the problem even more insidious is the fact that Klaas is writing an argumentative book. By demanding the reader imagine something, it demonstrates Klaas lacks concrete, real world evidence for his thesis and gives the reader no recourse to challenge him on his theory. Even a paltry historical anecdote would be stronger than an imaginative exercise.

3) Ball-Busting The Fourth Wall

An incomplete thesis supporting imaginative examples are bad enough, but even more serious red flag is Klaas’s adventures into what Steven Pinker, in his book The Sense of Style, calls ‘metadiscourse’. By Pinker’s definition, ‘metadiscourse’ is ‘verbiage about verbiage’. What makes metadiscourses (and all related writing styles that are self-conscious and reflexive) so excruciating is they cognitively take up twice the load of a normal sentence. Klaas unabashedly indulges in such metadiscourses in Fluke which is shocking considering he successfully abstained from such perverse linguistic orgies in his previous book.

I won’t accuse anyone without proof so I’ll admit into evidence the opening of Fluke’s Chapter 9: “Motivational posters tell you that if you set you mind to it, you can change the world. I’ve got some good news for you: you already have. Congratulations! You’re changing it right now because your brain is adjusting slightly just by reading the words I’ve written for you. If you hadn’t read this sentence, the world would be different. I mean that literally. Your neural networks have now been altered, and it will—in the most imperceptible, minute way, adjust your behavior slightly over the remainder of your lifetime.“

This passage is a dereliction of writerly duty. For one thing, directly addressing the reader in that manner is inappropriate in the same way being sixty-years-old and asking a fourteen-year-old girl out on a date is inappropriate. Even if you’re not irritated by the way Klaas is addressing you directly, and I certainly was, him talking to you does nothing to advance the thesis on offer—a thesis that, remember, the burden is on him to prove. Adding to the sins of this and similar passages in Fluke is how Klaas’s explicit conversation with the reader distracts from the subject of the book. Another tip for new writers: deviations from the main subject or plot are to be removed. Always. What does that passage have to do with flukes or chance encounters? Breaking the fourth wall in movies is risky because doing so explicitly breaks the suspension of disbelief that is often essential to enjoying a story.

In the context of Fluke, Klaas’s constant use of the second-person doesn’t break the fourth wall, it ball-busts the fourth wall.

4) The Straw Man of We.

Another red flag in Klaas’s work is his reliance on the word ‘we’ to set up a premise. When making an argument, especially regarding how people feel about something, carelessly using the word ‘we’ makes the writer vulnerable to accusations that they’re building a straw man or drawing on an example that isn’t universally applicable.

For example, here’s another passage from Chapter 9 which uses this word inappropriately: “Yet, in modern life, many of use feel like easily replaced cogs in a vast, cold machine. As global corporations sprawl and we seek help from call centers rather than corner stores, many modern systems make us feel interchangeable. Workers robotically follow protocols, checklists, and scripts, engines of efficiency that strip us of our individuality. Humans begin to feel like robots who eat. It dehumanizes us. It doesn’t matter who turns the crank, so long as it gets turned. But what if that dystopian view is completely wrong?”

Who’s this ‘we’ he’s talking about? This passage makes assumptions about people’s behaviors (which has little to do with flukes I hasten to add) and not every reader can relate to it. The generalized use of the word ‘we’ should really be reserved for common truths, for example, “Today, we know Churchill and Roosevelt almost certainly knew more about the Holocaust than they were willing to admit’. Any person can join the generalized crowd of ‘we’ in that sentence because it’s not like the veracity of that information changes the moment someone else learns about it. Conversely, Klaas’s passage is not so common a truth. I, for one, don’t feel like a cog in a vast, cold machine. When I’m not writing this blog, I’m working as a lifeguard. The moment someone needs help in the pool, the protocols of my facility allegedly stripping me of my individuality kick in and start the process of saving someone’s life. And I doubt I’m the only person who feels that way. (Oh and Klaas’s final sentence—what if that dystopian view is wrong—only rubs salt in the wound because it signals to the reader ‘what you just read was pointless’. Paragraphs are meant to flow from one to the next, not exist in isolation like this one.)

Conclusion

All of these red flags come out in one circumstance: when the writer is not comfortable with their material. Brian Klaas is an expert in global politics, making him the ideal candidate to write about power structures as he did so beautifully in Corruptible. On the flip side, Klaas’s expertise in global politics gives him little training in chaos theory, cognitive science and the science of probabilities, leaving him ill-equipped to tackle the subject of flukes and random chance in history.

Writers and publishers who see these dangers in their books: ye have been warned.

5 Books That Will Make You A Better Traveller Despite Not Being About Travel

I’m a big advocate of reading on airplanes, and I’m a big advocate of travel guides. However, doing a listicle about travel guides feels really boring. After all, what’s the difference between a good travel guide and a bad one? That’s lame so let’s do something else.

Instead, I’m going to talk about 5 books that I believe will make you a better traveller. The twist? They have nothing to do with travel, like at all.

1 The New Urban Crisis by Richard Florida.

What It’s About: The New Urban Crisis is about the growing pain of cities in the 21st century. As an urban expert, Florida does a comprehensive rundown of everything that makes an urban economy function. From the spread of ideas to the growth of intellectual industry, the geography of cities is way more important than you think. Why do you think the movie industry only exists in Los Angeles? Why is country music the domain of Nashville? Anybody who has a humanities degree must read this book. Not only is it about the growth of cities, The New Urban Crisis is about the problems cities are causing people. As the world will be mostly urban in about 50 years, these problems matter a great deal. They include transport, zoning laws, gentrification and house prices. Why can’t you get that family flat in Brooklyn? Well, here’s the answer.

Why It Makes You A Better Traveler: The New Urban Crisis will awake you to the reality of why major metropolitan airports with all the cool amenities are in thriving urban spaces. Heathrow, Hartsfield-Jackson, LAX, JFK, Schipol, these airports are the major hubs of the world and they’re all located in big urban cities. But why is that? Answer: industries that require people to be in the same space need easy ways to put people in those spaces. So the natural market for airports are people going from city-to-city rather than country-farm to country-farm. If you’re planning any sort of air travel, you will need to at least pass through these cities if you don’t already live in one. Therefore, you might want to keep an eye on your urban planning knowledge. Otherwise, you’ll be baffled as to why you need to change planes in Atlanta.

2 Ego Is The Enemy, Ryan Holiday

What It’s About: Ryan Holiday’s major skill is turning the classical school of Roman Stoicism into a personal development tool for sports stars, executives, and techies in Silicon Valley. He’s written a dozen books on the subject while never exhausting himself of material. In theory, any of Holiday’s Stoicism-themed books will do for this entry but I’m giving the winner to Ego Is The Enemy. Holiday’s thesis is straight-forward: too often the biggest obstacle is you. ‘Ego’ in this context is defined as the colloquial version: a mixture of self-righteousness, arrogance, conceitedness, and narcissism. Page-after-page is just Holiday finding examples of historical figures, business leaders, and sports stars who thought too much of themselves and caused untold problems for their livelihoods and other people. This book is a practical advice guide just as much as a list of cautionary tales: Have some humility, be grateful for small things, love your enemies, and so on. If you have no ambition to be a sports star or a great leader, the advice works in everyday life.

Why It Makes You A Better Traveller: We all see, know, and hate with our living guts that guy at the airport who screams at the desk agent about the plane being late. “Who do they think they are?” we practically hear this person bellow, “don’t they know who I am? I’m special!” You don’t want to be that person, nor do you want to be near that person. Air travel is particularly susceptible to people’s egos coming out in force because of the lack of autonomy inherent to flying. Here’s an incomplete list of things you do not control while flying: the queue to check-in, security, the plane leaving on time, turbulence, bag space, legroom, the weather, maintenance on the plane, the weather at your destination, the conditions of the runway, another passenger becoming ill, your seat mate, the inflight entertainment system’s selection of movies and the food. Some people cope with these stressors well, others do not and devolve into children by demanding the universe treat them differently because they’re them and everyone else is not. Get your ego in check, sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride.

3 Civilisation: How The West Came To Dominate The Rest, Niall Ferguson

What It’s About: Civilisation has an ambitious goal because it tries to explain a huge fact about human history: how is it that Westerners (basically Europeans and Americans) came to take over the world. Why not the Chinese? Or Indians? Or anyone else? Instead, Western Europeans became healthier, wealthier, and so advanced that they wound up dominating most of the world’s locales and populations for 500 years. Why is this? Unlike other books seeking environmental explanations, Ferguson posits that Western cultures had six ideas, ‘killer apps’ he calls them, that gave them an enormous edge over other peoples. They are: Competition, Science, Medicine, Property Rights, Consumerism, and Work Ethic. Together, these ideas made Western cultures economic and military powerhouses in ways that affect the balance of power to this day.

How It Will Make You A Better Traveller: This book gives you an idea of the bedrock principles moving history in the direction it did. People wouldn’t be flying in a metal tube without a serious understanding of physics, metallurgy, and a host of other scientific applications I can’t even pronounce let alone explain. You’ll understand why several airlines are sending you promotional emails hoping to entice you into flying with them to Dallas-Fort Worth. You’ll understand why you won’t die of several diseases that killed your great-grandparents whilst travelling abroad. You’ll understand why your role as a consumer generates wealth in unusual ways and why you might just want to get that co-branded airline credit card. And of course you’ll understand why European countries are richer, but more expensive, places to visit. European countries didn’t become twenty times richer than the average Asian civilisation because they had the mandate of heaven and someone else did not. It was more complicated than that, and this book will help explain why your travel destinations are the way they are.

4 The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey.

What It’s About: A short text on how to become a better tennis player, Tim Gallwey makes the case that it’s not just your form that matters in the world of tennis: it’s also your mindset. Many tennis players Gallwey coached would often have difficulty playing, not because they lacked the fundamentals but because there was a nagging voice in their head judging them for their performance, which would cause further performance problems. Coach Gallwey offers an unusual solution with this book: master the “inner game” of tennis. The “inner game” involves making non-judgemental observations and relaxed concentration to improve one’s tennis-playing skills while removing that judging voice from one’s head. Don’t overthink, just focus on the tennis ball in front of you.

Why It Makes You A Better Traveller: The genius of this book is how Gallwey rarely if ever gets bogged down in the specifics of tennis, which has the simultaneous effect of widening his readership and making the lessons applicable to almost any situation one finds themselves in. Indeed, Gallwey’s subsequent books would take the concepts first articulated in this book and apply them to other domains like golf and music. Unfortunately, there’s no Inner Game Of Travel, but fear not because you can do that yourself. It’s easy for you to judge yourself when flying for doing all sorts of things. “Crap, I should have gotten an aisle seat, I’m too cramped, what an idiot I am!” Gallwey’s book will help you reorient your mindset during travel by teaching what he calls relaxed concentration and non-critical observation. “Hmm, there seems to be a long line at security, I need to use my TSA Pre-check.” Your attention will narrow to what’s right in front of you. “The gate agent needs my boarding pass and my passport”. You’ll be less fazed when a flight cancellation occurs and more confident in your trip planning. Freeing your mind of thoughts and judgements while traversing the airport and flying on a plane will make the experience more enjoyable and less stressful.

5 Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress by Steven Pinker

What It’s About: The worst times ever! Wars, pandemics, poverty, inequality, and recession of liberalism. Surely we’re screwed, right? Not so fast, says Steven Pinker in this upbeat book on the progress made throughout history. For five hundred pages, Pinker crunches vast datasets and long-acting statistical trends to reveal a surprising picture about today’s world: we’ve never had it better. We’re wealthier, healthier, and living higher quality lives than at any point ever in human history. Before I go any further, here’s the common strawman that people make (and then torch) when talking about Steven Pinker’s books: "Pinker says everything’s gotten better, therefore everything’s amazing and there are no problems anywhere on earth and there never will be again.” That’s nonsense because nowhere in the book does Pinker ever say “job well done, chaps, we can all sit back and relax”. If anything, Pinker makes the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress to ensure these positive trends continue.

Why It Makes You A Better Traveller: Once Pinker shows you how drastically our lot on this earth has improved in the last half-century or so, you’ll look at air travel quite differently. If you’re of a certain age, you’ll be able to recall when planes didn’t have fancy inflight entertainment systems or automatic check-in processes or digital boarding passes or any of the other little conveniences that make flying less annoying than it once was. Planes are more advanced and quieter than ever before. In the old days, long-haul planes like the 747 needed four engines to truck across the ocean. Now, the 787 can do it with just two engines that are more powerful and are more sustainable than the old ones. Some planes like the Airbus A380 still require four engines, but that’s only because they’re full-length double-decker airplanes that can seat more people than a 747. Flying itself is safer, as Pinker points out. Spectacular planes crashes like the Tenerife runway collision are more than forty years in the past. Now, we’ve reached the point where some years go by with exactly 0 deaths due to plane crashes. The systems are smoother, the rewards are cooler, and you can travel for leisure more than your parents did. That trip to Disney World used to be a once in a lifetime trip but now you probably take your kids several times a year. Enlightenment Now shows you why you can travel so much so frequently.

Conclusion

Reading these books will make you a better person and a better traveller simultaneously. Just be sure to read them before you get to the airport.

Book Quality Test Part 2: Lord Andrew Roberts and The Importance of Being A Social Butterfly

In just about every book published by a commercial trade publisher, you will find the following items in addition to the contents themselves: the title pages (authors sign here), an obverse copyright page, a dedication page, an acknowledgements section of people the author would like to thank, and, if non-fiction, and endnotes and bibliography section.

In this blog post, I’m going to focus on the acknowledgements section, why they’re important, and how they’re responsible for serious books. Of the many authors I’ve read, nobody has perfected the art of the acknowledgements section like Lord Andrew Roberts, Baron of Belgravia.

Who Is Andrew Roberts?

For those unfamiliar, Andrew Roberts is a historian, journalist and, since November 2022, a Life Peer in the House of Lords. He has been publishing major works of history for more than 30 years to critical acclaim. His most significant works include an epic biography of Napoleon Bonaparte, a 1000 page single-volume biography of Winston Churchill that somehow contained new information despite it being the 1010th biography of the man (yes really), and a book on modern warfare co-authored with America’s leading military man, General David Petreaus.

That little summary surely does not do justice to Andrew Roberts’s many achievements, but for all the prizes and acclaim he’s earned, I know for a fact that he’s never been given an award for something far more remarkable.

And The Winner of Best Acknowledgements Section Goes To…

Andrew Roberts’s books always begin with his acknowledgements section. And it’s a good thing too, because they’re always more interesting than the fascinating subject matter he’s so laboriously worked on. To demonstrate, allow me to quote, verbatim, sections of the 10(!) pages stapled atop his acclaimed Napoleon biography.

“Having now spent longer researching and writing this book than Napoleon himself spent on St Helena and Elba put together, I’ve collected a disconcertingly large array of people for whom I would like to thank for their unfailing generosity, good nature, time and help. They include President Nicolas Sarkozy for his insights into the state of thinking about Napoleon in France today; David Cameron and Rodney Melville for allowing me to research the Napoleon correspondence at Chequers…”

WHOA, WHOA, TIME OUT! Most acknowledgement sections last half a page and barely go beyond the author’s parents and their copyeditor. Mr Roberts, on the other hand, starts by thanking the President of France and the Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, both of whom were serving in office when this book was being written. I don’t know about you, but if I were writing a book about Napoleon, having access to the President of France would make my job significantly easier. Ditto for the Prime Minister of Napoleon’s greatest foe, Britain.

Other names might not mean anything to the typical person, but add significant weight to the book. Take this example: “Mervyn King for his thoughts on French and British debt-financing of the Napoleonic Wars…”

You might be justified in thinking “who the hell is Mervyn King?”. Well that’s Lord Mervyn King to you, Baron King of Lothbury. Lord King is only the School Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics. So yeah, I think he knows a thing or two about the economic data Andrew Roberts needed. But of course, there are hundreds of economics professors, what else is special about Mervyn King? Well, he served ten years as the Governor of The Bank of England. So if you’re looking for someone who knows the ins-and-outs of overseeing the finances of an entire country, Lord King is your guy. So his comments on “French and British debt-financing” almost certainly are second to none.

Other names who popped up in Andrew’s list of names for providing general thoughts and insight include this nobody: "Dr. Henry Kissinger for his thoughts on the Congress of Vienna…” Love or hate the late Dr. Kissinger, to deny he was an influential person in American foreign policy would be completely absurd. And yeah, I bet his thoughts on the Congress of Vienna were extremely interesting.

Still other names coming and going throughout this mini-treatise include “Caroline Dalmeny for lending me a lock of Napoleon’s hair, which has sat on my desk throughout, inspiring me…” As an avid collector of things, I can say I’ve never had something as weird or as interesting as a lock of Napoleon’s hair. Then of course, there’s this little ditty: “I would also like to apologise profoundly to Jérôme Tréca and the staff of Fontainebleau Palace for setting off the burglar alarms in Napoleon’s throne room no fewer than three times.“

At this point in the acknowledgments (I’m on page 2 of 10), you might think Lord Roberts is just showing off. However, just beneath his confession to (unintentional) attempted burglary is a revealing comment that shows how and why Lord Roberts earned all the prizes he’s won.

“A military historian who doesn’t visit battlefields is akin to a detective who doesn’t bother to visit the scene of the crime. In the course of researching this book I have visited fifty-three of Napoleon’s sixty battlefields, most of them in the company of distinguished military historian John Lee…In the sixty-nine archives, libraries, museums and research institutes that I’ve visited in fifteen countries during the course of my researches, I’ve met with nothing but helpfulness and friendliness and I would in particular like to thank:”

What follows is a list of a list of person and places that assisted Lord Roberts on his journey to write the sprawling epic biography of Europe’s most distinguished statesman. He breaks it down by country, all fifteen of them.

Interesting Trivia, But So What?

Andrew Robert’s acknowledgements section is a case-study of what I talked about in the last post vis-a-vis writing what you know. In order to have sufficient knowledge to produce competent material, these are the lengths an author must go to in order to fully grasp their subject. All of your senses as a writer must be engaged. Sight, sound, and smell can’t be replicated in a library or by being, oh lord, stuck in Lodi again.

But a further observation about Andrew Roberts’s acknowledgements section is the importance of having people who will say yes to you. The list of people mentioned spans into the hundreds. If any one of them declined Andrew’s request for help, it would have been to the book’s severe detriment. Had Andrew Roberts been unable to speak with those people or visited those places, the book would have been laughable if it could have been written at all.

Though few subjects are as huge as Napoleon Bonaparte, I believe Lord Roberts is the gold standard for what an author must to prepare their material, even if their book is children’s fiction. How do I mean? For example, if you’re setting a book in Italy, you need to go there and marinate in the culture for a while even if all that comes out of it is a 160 page middle-grade novel set in Italy. Your author voice would have little to no credibility without it. For writers who are creating their own fictional world, they might not be able to book a visit to their fantasy land, but they can do the next best thing by visiting hundreds of other authors’ fantasy worlds first.

Conclusion

Lord Andrew Roberts’s sprawling acknowledgment sections are a) a work of art and b) a firm rejection of the idea of “solitary genius”. Just because one person’s name appears on the book cover does not mean one person is wholly responsible for the book. Keith Richards once said that songs written by two people are better than songs written by one person. Every book is like that.

The more people who helped the author, the better the book will almost certainly be.

Book Quality Litmus Test Part 1: Write What You Know and Why I Changed My Mind

Aspiring writers are bombarded with pathetic platitudes to kickstart their writing skills. On this list of general snoozers is “write every day” and “read as much as you can”. Tips and tricks like these work to be sure but the one I really changed my mind on was the cliché “write what you know”.

What Is It and What Was My Position?

The logic behind the advice “write what you know” goes as follows. “If you’re just starting out as a writer, draw on what you know in your life and use that as inspiration in your writing.” So if you’re a new writer and wondering how you could possibly write about a fictional world where everything takes place underwater, for example, perhaps you shouldn’t start there. It might be a better idea to base your characters on people you know or on things that have happened to you.

I understood where this advice came from, but I always had a problem with it. Namely, it struck me as wildly unimaginative. Why limit myself to writing about stuff that happens in my life? My life, apologies to friends and family, is boring. As a writer, boring is a sin worse than adultery. Your obligation as a writer is to find the most interesting, compelling, and fascinating stories and characters. Sometimes they’re fictional, sometimes they’re not. If what you know is boring, I reasoned, what’s the use in writing about it?

Furthermore, I wasn’t the only one who had qualms with this advice. One of my favourite essays of all time is the late Tom Wolfe’s “Stalking The Billion-Footed Beast”. This essay, first published in 1989, was a manifesto calling for a rejection of the absurdist nonsense novels of the 1960s and 1970s in favour of what Wolfe called “Realist” novels, which chronicle society writ large in the vein of The Grapes of Wrath and Anna Karenina. To achieve this aim and to prevent the novel from becoming an irrelevant art form, Wolfe prescribed journalistic-style reporting as the cure for the baleful Neo-Fabulism dominating American fiction. In doing so, he had the following to say:

“That task, as I see it, inevitably involves reporting, which I regard as the most valuable and least understood resource available to any writer with exalted ambitions, whether the medium is print, film, tape, or the stage. Young writers are constantly told, “Write about what you know.” There is nothing wrong with that rule as a starting point, but it seems to get quickly magnified into an unspoken maxim: The only valid experience is personal experience.”

In Wolfe, I found an unwitting like-minded thinker. Taking “write what you know” to its farthest conclusion means young writers are limited to writing autobiographies because that’s the only thing they could possibly know about.

Where’s the interest in that?

Letters From A Comfy Bristol Jail

For the first several years of my writing career, including the effort to make this blog, I studiously ignored the whole “write what you know” spiel as I drafted stories of private detectives running around London (a city I’d never visited at that time) and spending their clients’ money with cheerful abandon. I wasn’t too concerned about trying to get these stories published; just writing them satisfied me enough. I certainly wasn’t writing what I knew.

My thoughts changed in my second year of graduate school where one of my tasks that year was to, ironically, write a dissertation on based Tom Wolfe’s essay.

For context, in the 2021 spring semester, I was under virtual house arrest in Bristol, England. Covid lockdowns were very much in force, so I couldn’t do much outside my apartment, let alone explore the University of Bristol’s campus and library system. I was assigned three classes, all with the same final assignment: a 4000 word essay.

As I was used to drafting 2500 word chapters in my novel-writing phase, getting 4000 words on the page would be child’s play…or so I thought. The first two essays came easily enough, though still with plenty of the usual challenges. But the third essay was an unmitigated disaster.

Nothing clicked and for the first time in my life, I had writer’s block. I remember the book I based my essay on: George Lamming’s In The Castle of My Skin. Rest assured I burn it in effigy every day. I didn’t have a lot of options and this one came with the benefit of being set on a Caribbean island. Otherwise, it was full of the usual impenetrable prose and postmodern bullshit that I regard as a crime against humanity and civilisation.

Needless to say, I struggled to write anything about it. Words came out like ketchup in a glass bottle. I didn’t know anything about George Lamming. George who? We never covered him in high school (it seems my high school teachers had a dose of common sense after all). I had no knowledge of the modernist tradition he was writing in, no knowledge of post colonial literature, and I couldn’t even find the island of Barbados on a map. In short, I came into that essay with nothing and had no idea where to look for the relevant information to make something.

The Invisible Science Experiment

I didn’t realise it then, but the Spring 2021 semester was a science experiment testing the hypothesis “can you write about things that you don’t know”. I had to write three essays, all with the same length and the same academic requirements. The only variable for each essay was the topic. On one essay, I knew the topic fairly well, on the second I knew a little about the topic, and on the third I knew less than my dog did. Unsurprising, the more I knew about the topic, the easier time I had writing the assigned essay.

Clawing words out of the air for that third essay was a withering repudiation of the idea that I could write about things I don’t know about. As such, I’ve changed my mind. “Write what you know” isn’t just clichéd starter advice; it’s the only way to produce compelling material. Period.

But if that’s true, then what about Tom Wolfe’s position that “write what you know” is bullshit and what about all the times I easily drafted novels taking place in a city I’d never been to involving characters working in a profession I knew nothing about? And what about all the novelists who write fantasy? Clearly there’s something to Wolfe’s position as well.

So how do I reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable thoughts?

My answer is quite simple: expertise and foundational knowledge.

Even Better Than Journalism

As we’ve discussed in previous posts about books that don’t have material backing them, a writer needs a mountain of paper to make their new project work. Without said mountain, the writer’s ability to put material on the page is severely handicapped.

This isn’t a hard-and-fast rule, but in general, I believe that for every chapter a writer produces, they ought to have consumed ten other books worth of material before the chapter is satisfactory. Do not take this to mean writers must literally read 10 books before writing a chapter. The key word in there is “consume”, not “read”. That might mean consuming the ten books worth of material by simply doing their day job, interviewing sources, and researching specific items.

You can see this in the biographies of some of the most famous writers. The story of their lives and the stories they produced have strong echoes with each other. To be sure, they’re not writing one-to-one copies, aligning with Wolfe’s position that write what you know can go too far. Nevertheless, there’s more than enough evidence to link the author bio and their stories together. For example, John Grisham was a lawyer for 10 YEARS before he published his first novel. Dan Brown’s first novel was set in Seville, where he just so happened to study as a student. And even Tom Wolfe’s case study, John Steinbeck, set most of his stories in California…the state he just so happened to live most of his life. I could go on ad infinitum, but the message is the same: these writers all had foundational knowledge of the material they were putting on the page before putting their imaginations to work.

In other words, they were writing what they knew. Ironically, this was lost on Tom Wolfe, who tried to put his own position on realist novels into practice.

In 2004, Wolfe published I Am Charlotte Simmons, a novel about the status-seeking and sordid relationships going on at elite colleges. Wolfe was fascinated by the hook-up culture of then-contemporary colleges and, in the spirit of his journalistic beliefs, attempted to capture this part of society in his characters. To prepare and to make sure he knew what he was talking about, he spent considerable time on elite college campuses taking notes.

The book received mixed reviews and even won a dubious “Bad Sex in Fiction Award”. I myself was not a fan of the book and found it hard to read for two reasons. First, Wolfe’s firm literary views obstruct his material. His narrative voice is so distinct that it constantly steals attention from the plot he’s telling. The plot, at least if one reads the Wikipedia summary, is a searing indictment of campus hook-up culture, but that never comes across on the page because Wolfe’s narrative voice is constantly getting in the way. But a second, lesser discussed reason is Wolfe’s familiarity with the subject…or lack thereof I should say. Wolfe was in his SEVENTIES when he began prowling around campuses to conduct research. He wasn’t some college student frustrated by the degrading hook-up culture who had the literary technique to turn it into a novel. In order for the plot of I Am Charlotte Simmons to work, the author needed to be someone who lived it rather than merely studied it. Wolfe did his best, and his best is superior to that of most writers, but I suspect his observations were tainted by the fact his research subjects surely noticed the septuagenarian in a dandy white suit curiously observing their every move.

In other words, Wolfe wasn’t writing what he knew.

Conclusion

My position on “Write What You Know” has completely changed. While I’m still with Wolfe that one shouldn’t take the advice so literally that they only write about themselves, I do believe one must have more than a passing knowledge of the material they’re hoping to commit to book-form. Office dramas should be written by people who’ve worked in drama-filled offices. Legal thrillers should be written by people who’ve had some kind of legal training.

Sure that isn’t the ONLY thing one needs. The wide amount of reading required of authors doesn’t somehow disappear because the writer is familiar with a subject. Writers still need to build a mental model of what makes a good novel in their mind and that only comes from reading the best novels as opposed to personal favourite books.

But of one thing I am sure: without the solid bedrock of foundational knowledge, a book cannot stand.