We Should All Be Friends

Abstract

In the October 2006 issue of Technology and Culture, John Lauritz Larson asks: are we doing wrong, that we cannot get the of books to sell the ones in place of the at time when more people (against all prediction) buy books than at any time in history? By vendors Larson chiefly means publishers, and he makes clear that good books, by and large, are written by academics, while bad ones are written by popular authors. The particular target of his ire, and the inspiration for his jeremiad, is Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of Great Nation, by Peter L. Bernstein, published in 2005 by W. W. Norton. Larson calls Bernstein ill-informed and his book derivative, a wobbly volume of warmed-over reminiscent of the History Channel or, worse yet, Fox News. I have never met or dealt with Peter Bernstein, and while I think his book is competently done, I would not call it the best ever written on the subject. The writing is facile in places, and in casual reading I noticed few minor errors; if I knew tenth as much as Larson does about the period, I'm sure I would have found more. Overall, though, I'd say Bernstein has done decent job on very complicated subject. Still, let's assume that Larson is correct in calling Wedding of the Waters poorly written. Was he inspired to dash off rueful essay for Technology and Culture merely because book he doesn't like sold lot of copies? If everybody did that, this journal would have room for little else. No, that's not the real problem. What bothers Larson, as he makes clear, is that writers of popular history are getting rich off the labors of academic historians, coarsening and often misstating their findings in the process. Ideally, he writes, the numerous academic books that combine rigor with readability would be marketed to the public, instead of pallid glosses on them. It is instructive to look at the books Larson cites as examples of this sort of scholarly yet accessible writing. For superior general history of the canal, he recommends Ronald E. Shaw's Erie Water West (1966). He goes on to list