Martin Schneider writes:
I’m finding the April 26 issue of The New Yorker (green cover) kind of delightful. In no particular order:
1. Hendrik Hertzberg’s Comment is excellent and also clarifies a subject that I’d pretty much missed, President Obama’s recent successes on the nuclear proliferation front. If you think you might have missed it too, do check it out.
1a. Hertzberg quotes Obama’s “Dmitri, we agreed” comment to Medvedev that apparently sealed the deal in the end.
The line possesses … an odd echo* of some of the most delicious dialogue in Dr. Strangelove, which movie Hertzberg cites in the beginning of the Comment, when President Merkin Muffley, played by Peter Sellers, is on the phone to the Russian premier to tell him that the United States is about to destroy the USSR for no good reason:

Well let me finish, Dimitri. Let me finish, Dimitri. Well, listen, how do you think I feel about it? Can you imagine how I feel about it, Dimitri? Why do you think I’m calling you? Just to say hello? Of course I like to speak to you. Of course I like to say hello. Not now, but any time, Dimitri. I’m just calling up to tell you something terrible has happened. It’s a friendly call. Of course it’s a friendly call. Listen, if it wasn’t friendly, … you probably wouldn’t have even got it.

So, so good.
The other thing that struck me about “Dmitri, we agreed” is that it may be the most quintessentially Obamanian statement of any importance he has ever uttered as president. That statement is wholly consistent with the person I supported as early as 2007, voted for in 2008, and haven’t seen quite enough of since.
2. Dana Goodyear’s article on the restaurant Animal in Los Angeles (not available online) is a sheer delight, and towards the end takes on an almost fictive quality. A great subject, and she did the most with it.
3. The letter Saul Bellow wrote to Philip Roth on January 7, 1984 (not available online), is pretty fantastic, even if his appellation for the poor journo who crossed him, “crooked little slut,” is a bit unfortunate.
4. Billy Kimball’s list of rarely heard complaints about the iPad is very funny.
===
* Update: Somehow I missed that Hertzberg quoted a different part of Muffley’s telephone monologue to start off his Comment. Kudos to Hertzberg for spotting this echo long before I did.

Martin Schneider writes:
By now, everyone who cares knows that Pavement has reunited and is touring. They’ve got several dates at Central Park in September, tickets to which cost Lord knows how much, and they’re playing some festivals, including Coachella and Pitchfork. So far, the word is positive: the band sounds good and they’re motivated (always a problem with Pavement).
I belonged to the original cadre of Pavement geeks. I fell for them hard in 1993, when I first heard their first album Slanted and Enchanted, and I bought everything they released until they broke up. Pavement was my first serious musical obsession as an adult, and for many years they were the band that most defined my taste and outlook. I was really into them. Still am. They’re a great band.
I saw them four times in the 1990s, and those shows were mostly transcendent experiences, the kind of shows that only happen when a true favorite is performing, the kind of shows you look forward to for weeks.
The question arises: should I see Pavement a decade after their original incarnation? I’m certainly tempted, but … what exactly would I be getting out of it? I still love the tunes and the players remain likable and the general group exultation of the event would certainly be fun. A friend who runs a prominent mp3 blog was telling me recently that Pavement is much, much bigger now than they ever were when they were still putting out albums, and to experience that level of public approbation (finally) would be a fine thing.
But—on the other hand, I did experience them the first time around, and it’s a little unclear what I, as an original Pavement obsessive, stand to get out of the deal. The tickets are pricey, and I don’t exactly have to validate my fandom; that already happened long ago. I never saw the Pixies, but if I were to see them today, my incentive would be to see a legendary band I never got to see. I don’t have to do that with Pavement.
You may find these musings neurotic or almost enjoyment-averse. I understand that reaction, and yet the basic conflict remains. I’m not averse to aesthetic or cultural pleasure in the least, as any of my friends will attest with alacrity. I’m just confused what I’d be getting if I pay to see Pavement play their back catalog in 2010.
Be that as it may. To this quandary, add a truly perplexing article by Jon Dolan in the latest issue of SPIN, which also happens to be the 25th anniversary issue. I don’t think it’s too much of an exaggeration to say that this article makes the best possible case for staying away from these Pavement shows. It left such a bad taste in my mouth that I think it made my mind up for me.
Since Pavement is so doggedly … deconstructionist, for want of a better word, Dolan adopts a strategy (“Pavement always made a certain realism a centerpiece of their appeal,” after all) of addressing the monetary factor involved in Pavement’s decision to reunite, to a degree that is a little bit nauseating. Quotation is my friend:

You become a rock star when you can get onstage without adding anything new to your artistic legacy and still make thousands of people lose their minds. It’s adulation as ritual, expectations met as a matter of course.
…
Yet, despite singer-guitarist Stephen Malkmus’ semi-pooched voice (he’d been fighting off a cold), Pavement were the same pretty-decent live band they were 15 years ago — sorta distant, kinda ramshackle — plowing through a catalog that feels as obliquely poignant as ever.
…
The economics of what Malkmus calls “these nostalgia things” has long been formalized, as every one from the Pixies to Polvo comes back to cash in on legends that have ballooned in the band’s absence, as oldsters entreat youngsters to do their history homework. Provided a band can go through the paces without dredging up any old grudges or hurting themselves, the offers get pretty hard to refuse.
“If the band likes hearing people cheer, and getting a check, as is the case with us,” says Malkmus, “then it usually ends up working out, even if they’re just ham-and-egging out the same old chords.”
After five years on the reunion circuit, the Pixies’ Black Francis recently came out with the maxim for the moment: “Forget the fucking goddamn art. Now it’s time to talk about the money.” (Let’s: A New York-based booking agent estimates that indie bands that were lucky to pocket $7,000 a night in the mid-’90s can now command mid-six figures for a single festival date and low-six figures for one show at a large theater.)
The 43-year-old Malkmus is acutely aware of what he calls the “dialectical materialism” of these events, but for him, grandstanding like Francis’ seems redundant: “If you’re 40, and you leave your family and fly to Australia to do shows, and you’re doing it for the art, that seems kind of weird. If you’re doing it for the art, stay home with your family.”

Enough. It’s good to be told that there are no illusions here. I’m not expected to pay for “art” or even a good musical experience, although Dolan does sprinkle in some compliments between the references to Malkmus’s shot voice, their “pretty-decent” live chops, and their “plowing” through their old hits.
In the last paragraph Dolan writes, “There’s a deeper realism at work here. … With the global economy in the toilet, the ambivalence toward capitalism that Pavement exemplified seems like an outmoded luxury. In 2010, indie-rock fans should take some solace that there are still paychecks for nostalgia acts that only had theoretical hits.”
Lucky me! I helped Pavement become the eccentric indie heroes in their original stint—I’m talking hard cash here—now it’s my turn to be part of their grassroots 401(k) plan too! Gosh, it’s good I can take some solace that Pavement can still calculatedly fleece their newer fans and provide an authentic veneer of credibility—yes, the contradiction inherent in that phrase is intentional—even if most bands have a hard time making ends meet.
Why I should be supporting Pavement, and not those hard-up bands…. that part isn’t explained so clearly. I know I might come off as harsh and bitter; truly, I’m more annoyed or fatigued than bitter. But more to the point, I don’t see why this reaction is wrong on the merits.
I’ll always root for Pavement on some level, and I’m delighted that they have found a new audience that was probably in diapers the first time around. That’s awesome, it’s a validation of my twentysomething instincts, and I’m glad their albums have a fair shot at lasting a good deal longer than the albums of most of their contemporaries. They’re great albums.
But the concerts? I’ll leave those to others to enjoy.

Martin Schneider writes:
There’s been an interesting back and forth on the New Yorker blog pages about Adam Gopnik’s decision to forsake baseball. To recap: Gopnik announced that he no longer much likes baseball, Richard Brody and Ben McGrath responded, then Gopnik wrote again, and so forth. The exchange may not even be over. The best way to follow it all may be to go to the Sporting Scene section and read them in order.
All parties have been intelligent in their advocacy, and I write not so much to correct Brody and McGrath as to supplement them. I find Gopnik’s line of thinking not very convincing and even a bit disingenuous, and since I am a big baseball fan, I thought I would explain why.
Yesterday I attended the home opener for the Cleveland Indians in Progressive Park. The Rangers beat the Indians, 4 to 2, in 10 innings, alas. I was there with three friends, and we had a good time in our outfield seats. Along the way we discussed the unkillable “problem” of baseball losing popularity.
How shall I say this: unlike any endeavor I can think of, baseball is littered with testaments to why baseball is no longer what it once was and also attempts to understand why it will soon not be what it now is. That is to say, baseball fans are constantly telling you that baseball today sucks, and there are two possible offshoots to that premise: first, that the speaker is newly disenchanted (Gopnik); and second, that future generations may not sustain the passion for the sport that we are currently displaying.
I find such worries, to say the least, overdetermined. My position is, to put it bluntly, baseball is still a fine game, its problems are vastly overemphasized, and who really cares if you or some future generations don’t like it so much.
Baseball is incredibly popular. This is a fact. Millions of people attend the games, and millions of people watch the games on television. Millions of people play fantasy baseball (I do), and millions of people pay close attention to the pennant races, playoffs, and World Series. I heard it said on WFAN last week that the revenues for MLB recently passed those for the NFL for the first time in many years.
If this is failure, then I say, Three cheers for failure.
But even if there were serious flaws in the game that were to drastically diminish its popularity short of—I can’t believe I’m writing this phrase—threatening its existence, why should that bother anybody, really? I am not the Treasurer or Accountant for Major League Baseball, and if baseball were to suffer a profound decline in popularity/ratings/revenues of, say, 20 percent, I find it difficult to understand why this would affect me—since I would almost certainly still enjoy the game and derive pleasure from following it.
A hypothetical comes to mind. I am not a serious Star Wars fan. I was seven years old when the first one came out, I had a fairly normal childhood admiration over the first trilogy, and as an adult I’ve come to dislike the whole project quite a bit—yes, the whole thing. Call me the Gopnik of Star Wars, our positions here are probably pretty analogous.
Now, let’s say you, reading this, are a huge Star Wars nerd. What if I were to tell you that, for some imaginary reason, the 1977 gross receipts for Star Wars were, shall we say, 10 percent less impressive than anybody realized at the time? I would essentially be telling you that you have this picture in your mind that Star Wars had Impact X on our culture, and that you, if you were being scrupulous about the truth, would henceforth be forced to downgrade that Impact to something like 90 percent of what you had originally supposed.
Would you find this news distressing? I can certainly imagine that many people would be distressed by that news. The question I have is: Why? If you enjoyed the movie and its sequels as a child, and if you enjoy them today, I don’t really see what difference it makes that a few hundred thousand strangers did not like it as much as you had once thought. The whole concept is alien to me.
Baseball is not your favorite indie band that nobody you know has ever heard of. In that example, it’s sensible to root for the popularity of the project, because its very existence depends entirely on a spike in popularity. Baseball is not in that position.
When we raise the issue of pessimistic prospects for baseball, or investigate one individual’s decision to abandon the sport’s allures, that’s pretty much the situation we’re in. If baseball loses popularity in 2020, 2030, 2040 and there are still strong reasons for my interest to hold steady, I don’t really see what the fact of some unnamed demographic group deciding they like something else better has to do with me. It’s very likely that baseball will still be pretty popular in thirty years, and my desire to watch the World Series, no matter who is playing, will probably also remain. Similarly, I don’t really see why Adam Gopnik’s decision, at the age of 54 or so, to abandon what is after all a child’s game, should interest anybody, in and of itself.
Are we supposed to regard Gopnik’s decision as a canary in the coal mine? I think that is the unmistakable point of Gopnik’s first post, and let’s just say that I disagree with him that the post is actually serving that purpose in any meaningful way.
Having written “around” the problem of Gopnik’s manifesto for several paragraphs, let’s take a closer look at Gopnik’s first post. I don’t want to go through the argument or anything like that, but I did want to hit a couple of quick points.
Start with the opening line: “I am eager to become a baseball fan again.” Frankly, I don’t believe Gopnik when he writes this. The situation that baseball finds itself in is, in my opinion, not so dire that anybody genuinely wanting to love it would truly be barred from doing so. Furthermore, the statement is belied by the rest of what Gopnik writes, which smacks of rationalization, or, as McGrath puts it in the service of a slightly different point, “the use of the statistical record as a kind of moral ballast for what are essentially emotional arguments.”
Be that as it may. Let us now turn to the closing lines of Gopnik’s first post: “The dance of shared purpose and loyalty may be merely a mime—but what else but dancing and miming do we go to games for?”
I understand that it is unpleasantly bracing to realize that athletes are also businessmen, that the teams’ owners are not altruists, that fandom and commerce are intertwined. These are difficult things for an adult to accept about a fondness gained in childhood.
But I must ask: exactly how does Gopnik know that this “mime” is absent, or is being enacted to some insufficient degree? I have an image in my mind, from November of 2008, of a fellow—let us call him a “businessman”—named Chase Utley on a stage in the center of Philadelphia, proclaiming the Phillies the “World Fucking Champions,” to the cheers of many thousands of the city’s citizens.
I must say, his “mime,” which certainly seemed to express a level of jubilation over having won a championship, was a particularly shrewd bit of PR/mime/lying, that would probably have a positive impact on the portfolio of Chase Utley Inc.
But wait—could there be another explanation? Could it be that Utley meant it? Could it be that Utley was sincere in his joy? Is it actually possible that Utley takes pride not so much in his bank account but in his athletic prowess? That the kinship he felt with the other regulars of the “World Fucking Champion” 2008 Phillies was genuine? What if it wasn’t a mime at all?
Gopnik seems to rule out the possibility. Because if he did accept that premise, that Utley is first and foremost an athlete who desperately desires/desired a championship, and not first and foremost a businessman who coolly desires a robust array of assets, then I don’t see how he could have written what he did.
In 2007 I saw Gopnik on stage at the New Yorker Festival, debating with Malcolm Gladwell about the future of the Ivy League. I know from that experience that Gopnik has a subtle mind and can argue creatively and persuasively. For some reason, baseball has a singular tendency to cloud people’s ability to argue cogently. I look forward to a more tough-minded explanation for Gopnik’s new distaste for baseball and its relevance to baseball fans at large.

Martin Schneider writes:

A few days ago, on slender justification, I concocted a post about J.D. Salinger out of a news report I happened to see about the (either cancelled or postponed) premiere of a TV game show about child prodigies. The implied connection was fatuous—and yet it sparked a thought.
Until today I have shielded myself from the response to Salinger’s death (although expect a roundup post on same anon), so I would have no way of knowing if the import of this post is trite or profound. I did notice that Garth Risk Hallberg at The Millions made the case that Salinger shifted the center of American literature from “manly” attributes like courage and honor to something more urban and intellectual—it doesn’t take much imagination to trace that particular lineage. In the broadest sense Jonathan Lethem, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Ames, David Foster Wallace, and even Philip Roth are in Salinger’s debt.
So okay—the intellect, add to it the focus on adolescence. That’s two big parts of the puzzle, obvious ones at that. But I want to draw attention to another one.
As a commenter named “liza” reminded me, “It’s a Wise Child” was based on a real radio show called “Quiz Kids” (curiously, the Wikipedia entry does not mention Salinger, as it surely should).
So what does that tell us about the Glass siblings? In short, in addition to being neurotics and prodigies and suicides, they were celebrities. I speak only for myself, but in thinking about Buddy, Franny, Seymour, and the rest of them, I tend to forget this fact—partly because Salinger’s skill, whether in dialogue or the “panoramas” of “Zooey,” keeps us so firmly in the present tense.
One of the big stories of the postwar era is the rise of fame itself as a subject for contemplation. Salinger may have been the first American writer to explore it with any thoroughness. Who else did it, before Salinger?

Martin Schneider writes:
I didn’t know until today that Fox has a show in the works that sounds for all the world like the modern-day version of the radio show that made the young Glass siblings national celebrities. Look:

Fox executives said the premiere of “Our Little Genius,” originally scheduled to debut Tuesday after “American Idol,” had been postponed and possibly cancelled over concerns about the integrity of the concept. The quiz show was supposed to pit super smart six to 12-year-old kids against Ivy League professors.

[snip]

The show’s premise allowed the kids’ parents to decide whether they keep answering expert-level questions to win up to $500,000 in prize money.
[snip]
The sudden withdrawal of the program so close to its debut has raised eyebrows about whether the contestants were either given the answers in advance or put under intense pressure to prepare for the program. The show had already come under pressure for putting stress on such young contestants vying for “life-changing money,” according to the Fox advertising campaign
Fox made a big push for “Little Genius” billing it as a new spin on Burnett’s popular Fox series “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” which pokes fun at adults who can’t answer elementary-school age questions.
Prior to the announcement Burnett acknowledged that the kids on the show—who he found through nation-wide casting calls—may not have a normal social lives. One potential six-year-old contestant is enrolled in college-level classes.
“I do believe that these genius kids probably have a little more difficulty socially in peer groups,” Burnett said last month.

Didn’t any of these people read “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”?

Martin Schneider writes:
I cannot top Pollux’s exemplary writeup here, so I won’t try.
Instead I wanted to make two points about Salinger, one of which will be made many times in the days to come, and the other of which might well get missed in the hubbub.
1. Like many people, I read Salinger with great enthusiasm when I was in high school and college, and I haven’t thought about him much in several years. I believe it became somewhat fashionable in recent years to dismiss Salinger as a what — “minor author” or the like? — and I never found that to be an astute or fair assessment. Salinger was the real deal, comfortably in the first rank of postwar American authors, and it would take a lot of very clever and sustained argumentation to swerve me from that view. If American letters today saw a 1 percent increase in Salinger’s skill at narrative, dialogue, theme development, wit, and subtlety, the critics would never stop proclaiming this a Golden Age of American Literature. It’s pretty much as simple as that.
That’s the point I think won’t get lost in the shuffle. But what about this?
2. In writing this post about the, er, Golden Age of the Big Nonfiction Book, I spent quite a while studying this wonderful page by Daniel Immerwahr.
One thing that becomes very clear very quickly is that it is rather rare for truly top-notch writers to crack the annual top ten list. They probably make the weekly top ten list with some frequency. But for a whole calendar year? That is uncommon.
Salinger placed two books in the annual top ten list, and one of them (Franny and Zooey) was popular enough to make the list in two completely different years. (The other one was Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenters.) Neither of these, of course, is the monumental novel for which Salinger will always be remembered.
Compare the totals for a few other major postwar authors:
Mailer: 1
Roth: 1
Bellow: 2
Updike: 2
Heller: 1
Vonnegut: 3
Irving: 1
We all know that Salinger sold a great many books, and quickly became a cultural phenomenon. I think we still risk underestimating the sheer bookselling power—and, obviously, popularity—that Salinger represented even before he became a long-term icon known for his seclusion. Salinger published four books—how many did Bellow and Updike write?
Posit that every serious American author craves that ineffable combination of critical recognition and a readership numbering in the millions.
Nobody, but nobody, combined those two things like J.D. Salinger.

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.