Letters

Taking Issue

Alexandra Fuller's review (Book World, July 6, 2008) of Rick Bass's Why I Came West spent more time talking about the heroic work of Nigeria's Ken Saro-Wiwa than about Bass's book. Saro-Wiwa's legacy is clearly something the world should honor, and Fuller's review probably alerted people like me to his courage and his cause. However, a book review should tell readers about the book. Indeed, if the book being reviewed is really not all that significant, then it shouldn't be reviewed at all, and I had the feeling that what Fuller was telling readers was that the writing that mattered was in fact Saro-Wiwa's. If so, that should have been stated openly at the beginning of the review.

-- TOM HONE

Newport, R.I.

I was disappointed that Alexandra Fuller's review of Rick Bass's book Why I Came West relied so heavily on the premise that nonfiction is for serious thinkers and activists, while fiction and poetry are for the less ambitious. She linked fiction to frivolity in her indirect quote of Ken Saro-Wiwa ("I once heard [him] lament that he would have liked to write something frivolous and fictional"), applauds Bass's sacrifice of the "ordinary enjoyments of fiction . . . for the lonely, unpopular work of prophet," and implies that Bass's "refusing to disengage" has to do with his choice to write nonfiction rather than fiction. As an avid reader of fiction and poetry -- and of Book World, where these forms are regularly paid their due respect -- I am dismayed that such an ignorant assumption was allowed to form the central thesis of a review. It is vital that we honor the many politically minded novelists and poets -- William Blake, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Gwendolyn Brooks and Chinua Achebe, to name a very few -- whose works have shaped minds in powerful and daring ways.

-- LIS FOGT

Washington, D.C.

Author Jeff Sharlet of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (reviewed in Book World, July 13) says he spent a month at the Family's estate in Arlington, and he notes how fascinated the group is with Hitler. Is it any coincidence that during the 1960s the headquarters of the American Nazi Party, headed by George Lincoln Rockwell, was also located in Arlington?

-- NANCY HARDING

Unionville, Va.

The Editor replies:

Indeed, the headquarters of the American Nazi Party was for a time in the early 1960s at 928 North Randolph St. in Arlington, Va. Eventually, it moved to 2507 North Franklin Rd., in a location that is now a coffee shop. George Lincoln Rockwell's "Stormtrooper Barracks" was in the Dominion Hills district of Arlington at 6150 Wilson Boulevard, but the house was razed to make room for Upton Hill Regional Park. Rockwell was killed by a gunman in the Dominion Hills Shopping Center in August 1967.

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