Great Books the Pulitzers Overlooked

The announcement of the Pulitzer Prize winners yesterday filled me with a certain amount of glee--my fellow New Havener Debby Applegate won the award for her biography of Henry Ward Beecher--while leaving me, at the same time, with the usual mixed feelings. It's always great to see talent recognized, and yet, as at the Oscars or the Grammys, there's an abiding sense that so much talent is ignored. After all, the only books that stand a chance are books that get some review attention, and with book-review sections shrinking (the L.A. Times being the latest paper to announce a diminishment of its Sunday book section), so much good work goes unrecognized, not to mention unrewarded.

I hope, in my posts to this site, to alert people to cultural achievements like books and movies that the mainstream media has ignored or given too little attention. Here, then, is a short list of books published in 2006 that deserved to receive much more attention than they did:

Murder in the Model City: The Black Panthers, Yale, and the Redemption of a Killer by Paul Bass and Doug Rae. In telling the story of Black Panther Warren Kimbro's participation in the murder of alleged Panther informer Alex Rackley in 1969, and the subsequent trial that threatened to tear apart New Haven, a local journalist and a Yale professor revise what we thought we knew about the Panthers--and tell a gripping detective story in the process. How this wasn't optioned by Hollywood is beyond me: there are at least three parts here for terrific black male actors.

A Writer's Life, by Gay Talese. He's one of the great living prose masters, he publishes a memoir, and aside from some too-short reviews nobody notices. It's our loss, not just his.

Splendor in the Short Grass: The Grover Lewis Reader, by Grover Lewis, with a foreword by Dave Hickey. Great magazine writers suffer a special obscurity: unlike book authors, their old works (from the 1970s, say) can't be found on the internet. Lewis was one of the most stylish writers of the early Rolling Stone magazine era, and at last we have a decent sampling of his work in print. This book came out in 2005, so I'm cheating a bit.

Call It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature, by Hana Wirth-Nesher. It's a book of literary criticism, it's from a university press, its jacket comes with no glamor shot of the author. But it's unusually smart, and if you care about Malamud, Roth, Bellow, and Ozick, you may enjoy a book that explains their achievements so scrupulously.

Divided Mind, by George Scialabba. Scialabba is an erudite, thoughtful critic, more widely read than nearly anyone else in the profession. Once a devout Catholic, still sympathetic to religion, but wise in the ways of Marxism and even (too much for my taste) Chomskyite theorizing, Scialabba published this little collection of his best essays last year. It sold out quickly, but it's now available to download as a PDF from Scialabba's website. Download it for his essays on Orwell and Christopher Lasch, for his essay on depression, for his wit, for his ability to make you wonder: "How is it that the New York Review of Books hasn't scooped this guy up?" You'll also want to read the profile of Scialabba by Scott McLemee

I took an airplane ride the other day, and it was the same depressing site: row after row of travelers reading James Patterson and Len Deighton. It's not that the books are bad (though they may be); it's that so many of us are reading so much of the same. Reading about awards like the Pulitzers should excite each us about the few books that get acclaimed--and make us wonder about the hundreds of equally worthy books that do not.