See who best put the printed page to use throughout history

Bibliophiles love to read about books and authors as much as we like to read the authors’ books themselves. If you’re one of us, then I’ve found your tome for the year. Defining Moments in Books is the equivalent to E! True Hollywood Story or VH1 Behind the Music for the literary world.

“This is both a story of the century’s books and a picture of the century through its books,” writes general editor Lucy Daniel, an expert reviewer and critic of 20th century literature.

Organized by decade, the compendium of literary achievements begins with the publication of The Time Machine in 1895 and ends with the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature award going to Orhan Pamuk. Between these two entries are well over 1,000 fascinating blurbs about authors, stories, scandals, feuds, movements, and breakthrough prose.

More than 100 professors, reviewers, and critics chime in with their opinions and perspectives on the last century’s most noteworthy contributions to published works. As diverse as the subjects they write about, these sub-editors share no agenda nor display any predilections for high-brow, low-brow, or medium-brow literature. Leo Tolstoy gets as much respect as Philip K. Dick; Carl Hiaasen’s reputation receives as much attention as Ernest Hemingway.

Authors are notorious for living lives oftentimes as entertaining as their books. Defining Moments dishes the dirt on our favorites, from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s doomed foray into Hollywood to Jonathan Franzen’s much-publicized dissing of Oprah Winfrey’s book club.

Most impressive is the way the collection spans the globe while not neglecting the nooks and crannies of our own country. South Texas native Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands (La Frontera) is appropriately recognized as “a key moment in the long struggle for cultural recognition of Hispanic people in the United States.” Mercedes’ own Rolando Hinojosa is crowned “the granddaddy of the Chicano movement,” and his Klail City Death Trip series is described as “unlike anything else in modern literature.” Such high praise comes from the book’s general editor herself. “Despite radical adventures into new territories, the series entertains both as separately enjoyable novels and one coherent entity.”

The book’s editors recognize children’s literature with the importance it deserves, praising Where the Wild Things Are as “a richly atmospheric picture book, which has endured through decades and generations and retained its singular power to intrigue and disturb,” and including profiles of Roald Dahl and J.K. Rowling among others.

Horror, science fiction, poetry, memoir, and plays are all included in this encyclopedic collection of entries dedicated to bringing to light the contributions of many rather than bickering over who’s more important. The editorial work of providing an equal plane for all writers is refreshing in a field of criticism that often takes itself far too seriously.

The cinematic power of bringing the written word to life is taken seriously as well, with hundreds of photographic stills from film versions of notable books. Author portraits both visual and written provide the reader with a book that you can return to again and again like an old friend whom you don’t ever tire of hearing the same stories because that’s what they’re best at — telling stories.

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Martin Winchester is a book critic for The Monitor. He is an English teacher at IDEA College Preparatory in Donna. Send comments to mwinchester@ideapublicschools.

Lucy Daniel

General Editor

Defining Moments in Books

PUBLISHER: Cassell Illustrated

PRICE: $24.95

PAGES: 800

4 out of 5