Robert McParland

Since this was another book I found in the library, I had high expectations for this particular book. As I mentioned in previous reviews, I am a sucker for books that explain other books or anthologize things.

Author Robert McParland argues that Bestsellers reflect our society. Some of them are timeless and could refer to any time in our history, while others are very much products of their time and fade just as quickly as they rise. He tells us about different genres and how they developed along with how different publications come to their ratings and placements. It also discusses one of my pet peeves; namely, the Brand Name Author. You know what I mean, you want to try to get into a book by Stephen King or Danielle Steele or some other author you don’t usually read and all they have on the back of the book is a picture of the author. They don’t have a synopsis because who needs to know what the book is about? All you need to know is that Stephen King wrote it. It doesn’t matter if he wanted to do something other than a spooky lamp story, but I digress.

Bestseller is organized by decade. It covers the cultural legacy of a book more than anything else. Sometimes, popular worries leak into our entertainment and become something that the masses worry about. Take the story of the Wizard of Oz, that charming book about adopting Silver as a standard backing for the United States Currency. You might have heard of it, it had some film adaptation that became a massive classic. So Bestseller talks about the books it covers in some detail. It seems to jump around a bit, to its detriment, but I don’t know how else you would organize a book that covers this subject. So when it talks about a decade, the book discusses events that happened in the decade and how the world reacted. It discusses other things too, like that the first Ford assembly line was developed 1913, the same year that Grand Central Station was completed. It is really interesting how it puts these events into context.

Bestseller goes further by giving backstories to the development of certain novels and other books, and how they were received. Take Gone With The Wind, the perennial classic depicting the antebellum south. It discusses how the author wrote it after her husband challenged her to do so. In a different vein, the book talks about The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, a book that received a mixed reception based on where it was sold.

Bestseller was published in 2019, making it quite recent as far as this review goes. It covers all the way up to 2018, making it really interesting.… (meer)