Martin Schneider writes:
A couple of hours ago I had a very interesting conversation with four intelligent and well-informed twentysomethings (that is, people a good deal younger than myself), none of whom rely on books as a significant source of information, inspiration, and so forth.
I hasten to add that this is not in any way meant as a criticism or even something to sigh about. I know plenty of people who are really into books, and I know plenty of people who are not; these just happened to be some of the ones who are not.
If it is not implied in my presentation already, it may need to be stated explicitly that the non-book people are not in any material way (I would venture) less informed than the book people; they simply rely more on television, blogs, podcasts, magazines, and the like for their information.
We were talking about safety standards or some such topic, and someone mentioned Ralph Nader’s 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed, which did so much to bring the subject of automotive safety into the public discourse. Then someone made a trenchant point: In the postwar era there were quite a few non-fiction books that had a profound impact on society, of which category Unsafe at Any Speed serves as an excellent paradigm. What are those books for our era?
We had a fairly difficult time thinking of more than about two.
This basic situation, the feeling that there used to be many books profoundly influencing society and the apparent reality that there are no longer very many such books, can lead further discussion in a few different directions.
To start with, is it really true? Perhaps it is worth making a kind of inventory of serious, ground-breaking non-fiction books for the different eras. Presuming that it is true, what does it mean? Perhaps it means that change occurs through different channels today, primarily computing technologies. Does it mean that intellectuals have smaller sway than they once did? Does it mean that change is less “top-down” than it once was? Are the books that are truly generating change for some reason not making much of an impact on the best-seller lists? (This is not as implausible or contradictory as it might at first sound.) Is it a sign that society required certain truly major adjustments after about 1960, and that the societal changes that we today require are but variations on those earlier upheavals? Is it just that we lack perspective on, say, 1995 in way that we do not lack perspective on 1965?
I’m not sure what I think about any of those questions. I have some ideas, to be sure, but they all seem rather tentative. Before we continue, it may be helpful to list some of the books that constitute the “canon” of major non-fiction books that played a significant role in American social and political movements in the 1955-1975 period. After that, I’ll throw out a few contenders for the 1990-2010 period.
An excellent resource for this task is Daniel Immerwahr’s “Books of the Century” project, which lists the top ten New York Times best-sellers (fiction and non-fiction) as well as a short list of notable books for each year from 1900 to 1999. It would be more helpful if the project extended to 2010, but it doesn’t.
Here’s my list of important, change-inducing books from 1955 to 1975:

Edward Bernays, The Engineering of Consent (1955)
William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (1956)
Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (1957)
John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (1958)
William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick, The Ugly American (1958)
Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative (1960)
Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd (1960)
Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (1960)
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962)
Michael Harrington, The Other America (1962)
T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963)
Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can’t Wait (1964)
The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)
Ralph Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed (1965)
Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (1968)
Timothy Leary, The Politics of Ecstasy (1968)
Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying (1969)
Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (1970)
Boston Women’s Health Collective, Our Bodies, Ourselves (1971)
Thomas Harris, I’m O.K., You’re O.K. (1971)
Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1971)
Alex Comfort, The Joy of Sex (1972)
Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (1975)
Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (1975)

A few notes before moving on. I think this is a very solid list of genuinely influential non-fiction books for this period. I also think that a person perusing Mr. Immerwahr’s list might plausibly want to add a few more to the list (and perhaps remove a couple). I have intentionally tried to be narrow in my choices, however. I wanted to choose books that left an authentic imprint in social and political movements, and in my opinion the standard for inclusion has to be a legacy in the form of major legislation or a lasting political bloc. Or at least within shouting distance of such a legacy.
Therefore, if you can answer “yes” to the question “Did this book serve as a call to arms for a group with a particular identity or cause or grievance?” then the book should certainly make the list.
But the books’ influence should not primarily be artistic, scientific, academic, aesthetic, or temporal in nature.
Therefore, if you can answer “yes” to any of the following questions, then the book (I think) should not make the list:
Is the book’s primary importance restricted to those in the scientific community or academia?
Is the book a work of cultural criticism?
Is the book important because it blends fact and fiction or otherwise offers a stylistic tour de force?
Is the book a work of reportage?
These questions rule out names like Kael, Sontag, Capote, Styron, Halberstam, Theodore White, Wolfe, Chomsky, Bouton, etc., etc., and I think properly so. All of those individuals wrote fine and important books, but none of them truly alerted the broadly educated class of some wrong that required righting or of some worthy mode of expression that had thitherto gone unexpressed.
I will concede that even my parsimonious standard may have included a few books too many; I’m not sure whether, for instance, Growing Up Absurd or The Hidden Persuaders qualify, but somehow I feel they are probably close enough. Similarly, Kuhn was writing for academics, but his eventual impact was just barely diffuse enough as to avoid seeming parochial. But hey—it’s just a list. I’m quite ready to admit that this or that title doesn’t really count.
I also note that there are no works primarily about homosexuality in the list (I think), but I’m not sure what I can do about that.
Let us now turn to the 1990-2010 period. What books since the end of the Cold War had a similar societal impact? Well,

Rush Limbaugh, The Way Things Ought To Be (1992)
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (1992)
Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father (1995)
Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations (1996)
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997)
Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation (1998)

Thus endeth our involvement with the helpful Mr. Immerwahr’s list. Here is a fairly expansive list of additional candidates, with a good deal of help from Wikipedia and without the years listed:

Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth
Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation
Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone
Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point
Naomi Klein, No Logo
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine
Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed
David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise
Bernard Goldberg, Bias
Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma
Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life
Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital
Bill McKibben, Maybe One
Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, The 100-Mile Diet
Chris C. Mooney, The Republican War on Science
Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Nudge
Sarah Palin, Going Rogue
Robert Bly, Iron John
Dave Foreman, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior
Derek Humphry, Final Exit
Ronald Numbers, The Creationists
Peter D. Kramer, Listening to Prozac
Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
Cornel West, Race Matters
Michael Moore, Downsize This!
Paul Krugman, The Great Unraveling
Al Franken, Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot
John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
“Anonymous,” Imperial Hubris
Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit
Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter With Kansas?
Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You
Ron Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine
Worldchanging.org, Worldchanging

Have I been unfair to anybody? Is anyone left out, unjustly named? I do not think that either list misrepresents the basic situation by very much. (By the bye, what are the major works of either period addressed to homosexuals, Latinos, Muslims? Anybody know?)
Now—unlike the 1955-1975 group, the 1990-2010 list resembles a brainstorming session, for which the standards for inclusion were far looser. By the standards of the first group, I count only eight titles that would definitely qualify, and just to keep the subject interesting I’ll keep that list to myself.
Conclusions? I’m loath even to venture any. But here’s a modest one: Everyone reading this knows that the 1960s plus a few years on either side were the great liberal expansion in the United States. And we all know just as clearly that the years since were a difficult time for the keepers of the liberal flame. The movements that thrived in more recent years were more pinched, more selfish, more inward, more “personal,” and more wary. With a couple of notable exceptions, even the liberal manifestos seemed to wilt or founder, in this sometimes churlish and fractious land, too often steered by money and reaction and spite. These lists show that, I think.
They also, maybe, point to a modest decline of the hardcover tome in the grand scheme of things. For the second period also contains the rise or apotheosis of goth culture, rave culture, guido culture, furry culture, lad culture, grunge, New Sincerity, metrosexuals, simple living, needlepoint, the EFF, the open-source movement, flash mobs, improv comedy, steampunk, feng shui, body modification, peer-to-peer file-sharing, hipsterism, emo, perpetual travelers, transhumanism, and three dozen other lifestyles and innovations I’m way too old to know much about.
Most of those subcultures aren’t as important as the civil-rights movement, but each did represent some new way of thought or expression, and even the courageous furries had to learn to become a properly recognized group, with the rights and rites that define a capital-C community. How many of the items in the last paragraph were sparked in any measure by a big, attention-getting non-fiction book? Darn few, methinks.

Martin Schneider writes:
Here’s the lede from “The Death of the Slush Pile,” by Katherine Rosman, in the Wall Street Journal:

In 1991, a book editor at Random House pulled from the heaps of unsolicited manuscripts a novel about a murder that roils a Baltimore suburb. Written by a first-time author and mother-to-be named Mary Cahill, “Carpool” was published to fanfare. Ms. Cahill was interviewed on the “Today” show. “Carpool” was a best seller.
That was the last time Random House, the largest publisher in the U.S., remembers publishing anything found in a slush pile. Today, Random House and most of its major counterparts refuse to accept unsolicited material.

What I love about this is that the name of the company is Random House.
(After I wrote the above, it occurred to me that I should find out how Random House got its name. According to Wikipedia, “Random House was founded in 1927 by Americans Bennett Cerf, Christopher Coombes and Donald Klopfer, two years after they acquired the Modern Library imprint. Cerf is quoted as saying, ‘We just said we were going to publish a few books on the side at random,’ which suggested the name Random House.”)

Martin Schneider writes:
A couple of weeks ago I caught the final show in John Waters’ Christmas Tour, which ended at B.B. King’s. He was vastly entertaining. Afterwards, he made his way to the bar area and greeted a few of the diehards who opted to hang around (it was after midnight), of which I was one. A fun experience.
In connection with this event, I was talking to my young companions (a good fifteen years younger, as it happens) about the concept of Camp, and mentioned Susan Sontag’s famous 1964 essay. Not very surprisingly, neither of my friends had ever heard of it, a circumstance for which mere youth is not the full explanation. Now, in 2010, it suddenly popped into my head to give it a look. Now that was a terrific idea.
The form of jottings, rather than an essay (with its claim to a linear, consecutive argument), seemed more appropriate for getting down something of this…. etc.
1. It’s the best-written thing I’ve read in months. Months.
2. The astonishing variety of references in the essay are a clue to a problem that was never much of a problem anyway. That is, since Sontag later became a symbol of a certain kind of highly refined left-wing thinker and aesthete (nothing of the kind ever really happened to Pauline Kael, for instance, despite her quasi-apocryphal “Nixon” remark), to what extent was Sontag occupying a necessary role in society, one that someone else might just as well have occupied, and to what extent was she an original?
It’s safe to say that Sontag was really very original indeed. The references show the wide range of her intellect, curiosity, and perhaps most important, pleasures, and that sort of thing is not readily reproducable. Sontag forged a path that led to a place only she could have reached.
3. Is there anything that any hipster has ever done, anywhere, that would have surprised Sontag? I doubt it. This is the reason there is no “Notes on Hipsterism.” There isn’t any point, Sontag had already gotten there.
4. This doesn’t make her infallible. I think punk might have perplexed her a bit, or even maybe Devo or Kraftwerk. The article coincides with the arrival of the Stones and the Beatles, so she could not have ventured any thoughts on rock or used rock bands as examples (jazz seems to occupy that slot in her cosmology). Does anyone know if she ever had any serious “take” on rock music?
5. Sontag seems to have been the first and possibly most perfect example of a type that is relatively common nowadays, the intellectual who enjoys high and low culture with equal avidity. Sontag is more “perfect” because her choices include opera, high art, and the entire gamut of high modernism. Her latterday incarnations are far, far less likely to know Richard Strauss and Jean Genet, although they probably enjoy Jane Austen and chop-socky movies about equally.
6. The essay has not dated in any material way.

Martin Schneider writes:
Oh boy, my favorite parlor game…. also called “How Emdashes generates posts.”
1. Last night I saw Jason Reitman’s movie Up in the Air, and I enjoyed it very much. It certainly did seem like a movie that teed up its subject perfectly and then whacked it, which I’m not sure is quite the same thing as being a great movie, but … I’m quibbling, it was very good. I’ve spent a lot of time in airports recently, so I had to see it before all that useless knowledge wore off.
Connection: The movie was based on a book by Walter Kirn, who had a story published in The New Yorker in 1997.
2. Lou Reed and Ben Syverson designed and programmed an iPhone app called Lou Zoom. I installed it on my iPod Touch. What does it do, you ask? Why, it takes your Contacts list and renders it in much larger type. This accomplishment does rank below revolutionizing American avant-garde rock and roll, but not many things are as monumental as that. Plus it has to be the coolest way ever to tell the world, “I’m OLD! I can’t read this small type anymore!” (And you know, I think the app is very good. I do prefer looking at it to the default Contacts app.)
Connection: The New Yorker published excerpts from Lou Reed’s tour diary in 1996.
3. Oh man, is this picture great:

Connection: The New Yorker hardly ever misuses apostrophes, making this sign the anti-New Yorker.

Martin Schneider writes:
It was quite a spree.
My involvement with Emdashes recently has been minimal, but purely for logistical reasons. I’ve been traveling a tremendous amount and also was not getting the physical magazine shipped to me, and under such circumstances it becomes increasingly difficult to stay engaged with the magazine and feel as if one has anything worthwhile to say. Fortunately, the first problem (constant movement) is now solved, and the second (delivery of magazine) is being remedied even as I write this. I expect to be more engaged in the near future.
I did, however, want to take a moment to lavish praise on Platon’s recent gallery of world leaders. I saw it linked at Jason Kottke’s glorious weblog, and—well, I was really blown away by it. I can’t say that I’ve seen any work of Platon’s that struck me as anything less than excellent, but I don’t think I realized just how good the man is until I clicked on all forty-nine snapshots and listened to all forty-nine of his individual comments. If you haven’t done so, I urge you to spend a quarter-hour looking at the pictures with some care. The results are fairly astonishing.
The comments are about what you would expect—he generally praises everyone and then makes an observation about each subject’s personality and/or physiognomy and sometimes reflects on the circumstances of the meeting or the technical approach he chose for the subject. Most of the pictures are black-and-white facial portraits, but some are in color and some feature the subject’s body to some degree. I must say I found it quite impossible to question his judgment in almost any of the cases. They all seemed rather remarkably well done to me.
If Platon is the new Richard Avedon—am I the last person to figure this out?—then I must say The New Yorker made an excellent choice. I have made the transition from sympathetic observer to fan.