Ann Douglas (1) (1942–)

I read this book several years ago, and I made notes as I was reading. Out of my notes: "Terrible Honesty"--well, Ann Douglas got it at least half right. I renamed the book: "Terrible, Honestly."

From the standpoint of writing and organization, this was a terrible book. I read every word, and it was uphill all the way. Douglas seems to have had some confusion about what audience she was writing for; she needed to decide who that audience was and write for them. She was wordy and her bloated vocabulary didn't help her to get her point across. For example, by page 100 she had used the word "insouciant" or a variant at least three times. She probably just needed a better editor. "In his hatred for all things American, Freud, by the dynamic of repression he himself explicated, protested too much." Throw the cow over the fence some hay why don't you. The book is filled with sentences like that, and after a couple of hundred pages or so, I was ready to throw the book out the window.

Additionally, I didn't understand her organizational plan; worse, however, I don't think Douglas did either. Somewhere I read that she spent 15 years on the book. The book reads as if she wrote a piece now and then, stuck it in a drawer for awhile, wrote another piece, and then when she was finished, she sort of stuck all the pieces together. She has three parts to the book: Part One, Setting the Stage; Part Two, War and Murder; Part Three, Siblings and Mongrels. How do those titles relate to each other?

If the subject weren't so interesting to me, it wouldn't have been worth plowing through her convoluted prose and ragged organization. The book is a good starting point for getting a broad overview of the period, but it shouldn't be used as a final resource and certainly not as a single resource.… (meer)