Date Posted:19:53:53 10/21/03 Tue Author: Mt. healthy Mountaineer Subject: ANHOW Review of Books: A comparison - or - How not to make a coffee table book
This time out I've got two books:
#1 "America's Heroes: Inspiring Stories of Courage Sacrifice and Patriotism" by SP, L.L.C. Published in 2001. T(This book is about 9/11)
#2 "Dale Earnhardt: Always a Champion" by Triumph Books. Published in 2001.
For those of you who don't know what a coffee table book is - it is an oversized book full of glossy color photos with minimal text that is intended for light perusing. Usual topics include the Civil War, nature subjects, NASCAR, etc.
Both of these books follow the same editorial plan - memorialize the tragic event (9/11 and the death of Earnhardt) with reprints of newspaper articles and lots of color photos.
The 9/11 book is well done. It is not particularly enlightening, but it is a nice retrospective of all of the events. The stories are placed in a logical order and are short and to the point. The pictures are poignant.
The Earnhardt book is a disaster. The articles are repititive (nearly all of them are taken from sports columnists who wrote just after his death - some are touching but they all essentially cover the same ground and how many times can you read the same thing over and over? Well, these editors seem to think that a dozen would be a good number.), the pictures are often poorly chosen (for example, when discussing his early career it would be very appropriate to include pictures of his early cars or at least of him in the early days. Nearly every picture is of him in the last 2 years before his death. Almost every picture of his famous black #3 is from the year preceding his death - including every one of the pictures that accompany the individual pages that highlight each of his 7 championships. Why would you include a picture of his year 2000 car on the page discussing his 1980 championship - especially when you consider that it had a different number, a different sponsor, different colors and a different owner?
On top of that, there are two timelines in the book and both cover essentially the same information.
The only attempt at a biography of his career is so poorly written that you have to consult one of the timelines to sort it out.
It is like the "editors" just gathered all of the research for the book and did not edit it - just threw it all in there.
So - here are the grades:
"America's Heroes" - "B"
"Dale Earnhardt: Always a Champion" - "F-"
P.s. - you may be wondering why I'm reading coffee table books. The 9/11 book was given to my wife when she gave blood. The Earnhardt book was given to me by my mother-in-law who knows I'm a NASCAR fan (although not really an Earnhardt fan)
ANHOW Review of Books: A comparison - or - How not to make a coffee table book