Reviews for Reading Books : Essays on the Material Text and Literature in America

The average rating for Reading Books : Essays on the Material Text and Literature in America based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-03-08 00:00:00 Edgar Lopez This was good as anthologies go, though it was more than a little surprising to see how the novelty of studying a book's material aspects as a way of interpreting its meaning --so important to the premise of this collection-- has grown de reigeur. The introduction does a nice job of giving a broad brush strokes to the earliest of book history approaches, and is accessible and comprehensive in accounting for many of the early moves in the field (probably something that gets left out of many accounts today, but worth knowing nonetheless). Other chapters are interesting and all do a nice job of using textual evidence alongside more traditional literary analysis as interpretive tools. In this way, the essays are nice models of how you might take a specific case study and material evidence as part of your interpretive strategy. However, as most of the essays in question use fairly obvious examples of material texts, none of them truly go beyond common interpretations of texts. Rather, they manage to successfully add materiality to the ways of analyzing a previously circumscribed canon.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-06-09 00:00:00 Barbara Litt A story beautifully told, Peter Grose's biography of Allen Dulles is one of the most accurate books ever written concerning the birth of modern espionage. Compelling, accurate, non-fiction books on intelligence are rare, and this particular piece of work is one of the few that pass historians' tests. The book follows an urbane member of the American Establishment on his romantic quest to create the most sophisticated espionage organization the world has ever known. The grandson of a Secretary of State, and brother of a Secretary of Defense, he quite possibly made more of an impact on the current shape of our world than either, without a public profile. An incurable romantic, he brought Kipling's Kim with him on the night he went into the hospital to die. Peter Grose was the ideal biographer for so elusive a subject.