Friday, February 25, 2022

The often-underrated index …


There is a whole sub-history of writers trying to defy the Washington read, including Richard Ben Cramer, whose classic account of the 1988 presidential election, “What It Takes,” has no index. “For years,” Cramer said in an interview after its publication, “I watched all these Washington jerks, all these Capitol Hill, executive-branch, agency wise guys and reporters go into, say, Trover bookstore, take a political book off the shelf, look up their names, glance at the page and put the book back. Washington reads by index, and I wanted those people to read the damn thing.”

1 comment:

  1. Wow, Trover has been gone a while.

    I must confess that when I read the postwar volume of Victor Klemperer's diaries, The Lesser Evil, I went straight to the index to look up "Auerbach, Eric", since in the first one Klemperer had beefed about Auerbach beating him out for the job in Turkey. Give him his due, Klemperer was suitably impressed (awed) by Mimesis.

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