Books in Brief
Small World: A Microcosmic Journey by Brad Herzog (Pocket, 394 pp., $13). Any travel writer worth his salt can churn out a few lines extolling the virtues of New York, London, or Tokyo. It’s much harder, however, to produce interesting prose about places where there is apparently nothing to see: Mark Twain, William Least Heat-Moon, John Steinbeck, and, most recently, Brad Herzog have pulled it off. In his new book, Small World, freelance writer Herzog spends fifty days crisscrossing the United States to visit small towns that share names with major world metropolises–Prague, Nebraska, for instance, and Bagdad, Arizona.
Although Herzog is a left-leaning Ivy-League-educated Californian, the book’s underlying message isn’t quite what one would expect from a person with his background. Indeed, Small World is an enthusiastic embrace of middle-American places, people, and values. “Disregard for the nation’s flyover spaces,” he writes, “has become such a coastal and urban reflex that America has become merely a patchwork quilt of stereotypes and rumors.” The real America, Herzog argues, is “defined not by the broad strokes of mainstream media and metropolitan muscle but by the smallest dots on the map.”
Herzog, who previously wrote the travel memoir States of Mind (briefly a bestseller after he appeared on the television show Who Wants to be a Millionaire? at the height of the program’s popularity), spins out this narrative in readable, lyrical, bite-sized chapters. He’s occasionally a bit self-indulgent but never boring. Above all he knows how to listen: Even when the people Herzog meets are eccentric (a latrine collector in Amsterdam, Montana) or downright unattractive (a gaggle of unwashed hippies in London, Wisconsin), Herzog still presents them on their own terms.
Many of Small World‘s best sections read like good newspaper journalism: Herzog provides a fascinating tour of a grain elevator in Vienna, South Dakota, and a look inside a Hare Krishna compound near Calcutta, West Virginia. But he’s no romantic: Many of the small towns he finds are dead or dying, and many of the people he meets wouldn’t make pleasant dinner companions.
None of this means that the book suffers from a dearth of personal opinion. Along the way, Herzog offers a bevy of interesting observations on everything from billboards to small-town tourism slogans. In the end, it all blends together into an enthusiastic, affectionate, and honest portrait of a slice of America most elites never bother to think about.
–Eli Lehrer
Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons by Jonathan Rosenbaum (Johns Hopkins University Press, 460 pp., $35). Jonathan Rosenbaum grew up seeing movies at his grandfather’s chain of theaters in Alabama and later made a career of writing about them in the pages of the Chicago Reader and other publications. Essential Cinema is his attempt to wrestle the filmic canon out of the hands of Hollywood spin doctors, who control assumptions of greatness with large promotional budgets, and give it the academic weight it deserves. That means explaining why certain films and filmmakers are revered as geniuses, while simultaneously exposing the facile nature of the Hollywood publicity machine and the shoddy scholarship of critics who support it.
The book is made up of sixty essays, culled mostly from the Chicago Reader, and a list of Rosenbaum’s personal canon of a thousand films. Popularity is not a deciding factor for inclusion. Works such as the Russian film The Asthenic Syndrome (1989)–which had only one screening in Chicago–get star treatment, while some of the most popular films of all time are ignored altogether.
Nevertheless, even neophytes will find Rosenbaum’s mix of scholarship, survey, biography, and critical and visual analysis of the films accessible and interesting. That’s about all one can ask from this type of book.
–Gaby Wenig
