Even though I’m well aware Victorian society wasn’t as prim and respectable as many people imagine, Thomas Boyle’s Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead: Beneath the Surface of Victorian Sensationalism still made fascinating reading. Boyle’s book looks at the popularity of 19th century sensation novels (so called because they slapped the reader with intense sensations of horror and shock) and the popularity of nonfiction and fiction about murder, crime and scandal. Beyond that, he looks at Victorians looking at the same trends and worrying that the English middle and upper classes did not really embody perfect rationality and morality (hence the title, one 19th century writer’s metaphor for the dark impulses lurking under the surface).
What I could have done without though, is Boyle periodically injecting himself into the narrative, explaining how he interviewed a particular expert or dug some fascinating tidbit out of a collection of old newspapers. He’s entitled to be proud of the effort he put in, but it doesn’t enhance the narrative he’s telling — instead it distracts from it. If he was determined to discuss his personal efforts, I wish he’d left them in an introduction or afterword rather than the main body of the book.
A lot of nonfiction writers love to talk about themselves in their work; unless it’s a memoir or autobiography, it rarely works for me. Sometimes, like 
Boyle, it’s about how they researched their subject; in other cases it’s just pointless personal anecdotes. Ruth Kassinger’s A Garden of Marvels does a very good job chronicling scientists’ efforts to understand plants — where were their stomachs? Where were the brains? Can they get up and walk? — but every so often she’ll throw in a story about herself and her kids gardening. I glazed over at the first couple because whatever her goal was (building a connection with the readers, maybe?), she didn’t achieve it. I skipped the rest (but the stuff about plants still made the book worth reading).
Jetpack Dreams: One Man’s Up and Down Search (But Mostly Down) For the Greatest Invention That Never Was by Mac Montandon suffers from the same problem, only worse. I snatched up the book because for my generation, jetpacks were as inevitable as having a lunar colony by the end of the millennium — so what happened? Why isn’t the Rocketeer a real thing?
The answer is depressingly simple: carrying enough fuel to power anything longer than a short, brief flight would make a jetpack too heavy and potentially explosive to be practical. That limited history was barely enough to fill couple of chapters, which may be why Montandon padded the book with so much personal stuff. We learn he wrote the book as a cure for his midlife crisis, and we get way too much wordage on family vacations at jetpack-enthusiast conventions and the wacky oddballs he meets there (it doesn’t help that they’re generic — you could find identical people in any oddball subculture, differing only in the subject of their obsession). I’m sure it was fun writing off his trips on his taxes but it wasn’t fun to read about.
Still, at least the jetpack cons had some relevance to the topic; other writers can’t even manage that. For instance, some years back I bought a book on bread’s role in cultures and cuisines around the world. I bake bread myself so this intrigued me, but I put it down unfinished when the chapter on Jordan turned out to be pure travel writing. We have quirky translation problems, quirky taxi drivers, quirky hoteliers, oh and the author ate bread with someone, then went to smoke a hookah. That is not what I bought the book for.
Sometimes personal perspective is justified. In Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators, his efforts to expose Weinstein and the obstacles he ran into (his bosses at NBC killed the story but New Yorker jumped at it) make the narrative stronger. John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood does the same in his efforts to report on Elizabeth Holmes’ phony tech company Theranos; so do Mike Hertenstein and Jon Trott in Selling Satan, their exposé of fake Satanist and corrupt minister Mike Warnke,
Most nonfiction writers are not investigative journalists and their efforts at research are not fascinating. If there’s not a compelling reason, people, keep yourself out of your writing.
#SFWApro. Swamp Thing cover by Bernie Wrightson
Little to do with the topic, but I hate seeing Disney’s name attached to the Rocketeer, since they pretty much dumped it out there and ignored it, once it was released. Some nice theater displays aren’t enough to actually get people to notice a really great film. The marketing of this was about as creative as using a piece of paper to sell a ballpoint pen.
I wasn’t aware of that — it was more than enough to hook me — but I’ve heard of them doing that often enough to believe it.
Disney did the usual trailers and had stand-up displays, with the original poster image (a deco profile, of Cliff in flight), in some theaters (which looked cool); but, they didn’t really go out of their way to promote it, like they would the animated features or some of their other films. It seemed like they got cold feet, either due to test audiences, execs or whatever. I like the film, though I wish they hadn’t sanitized Betty/Jenny so completely. It kind of took the personality out of her, though Jennifer Connely did a fine job with what the script gave her.
Disney just didn’t do much in the way of merchandizing or other promotion, didn’t push it in their parks and just kind of let it slip into and out of theaters, though it broke even in theaters. Probably would have done better with a bigger push and one that really sold the “gee whiz” adventure factor more. Their trailers needed more of a Raiders feel to really capture things and Jenny needed more oomph.
They made sure to hang onto the property, though and there has been talk of a new version, with an African-American female lead. There is some historical precedence; but, it sounded like they didn’t really have much of a concept, beyond that idea.
Jennifer Connolly always does great but yes, she’s quite different from the woman in the comic.
A shame about the advertising because it’s such a fun film.
Looks like it was more than talk, Jeff:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8068852/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_3
If they want to add some “flavor” to their stories/books/instructions, then they should just do some annotations. I really love annotations people, just put things in there in theback of the book, at the bottom, wherever you want. I would love if more writers used annotations to do this. More annotations in general, please
Slightly OT, a friend of mine is mentioned in one of the annotations in Gardner’s Annotated Alice.
The genre where You probably find most of the culprits are books about music. I have a three-digit number of books about bands/music-genres/sub-sub-genres (some of which I´ve actually read) and in a lot of them the writer needs to collect coolness-points by sharing personal anecdotes about how well he (at least 95 % are male) knows the artists to get at this inside informion i.e. gossip. Very rarely is it necessary. Most of the time it reminds me of a colleague who was constantly name-dropping in every discussion of music about his good friend xyz from band so-and-so and his old buddy Waclav who was this pioneer of an industrial-polka-outfit that only released a demo tape back in the middle ages. You get the idea.
Anyway, keep the personal connection to the foreword, that´s enough.
I don’t read much on music but I know the kind of thing you’re talking about. And yes, annoying.