The Colossal Mark Twain

A Review of Ron Chernow's New Biography

(This is from my review in Modern Age magazine of the new Ron Chernow biography of Mark Twain.)

There’s a war going on. No, not the war in Ukraine, nor even the one between Israel and Iran. I mean the one between word processors and the TikTok generation. Since personal computers appeared in the 1980s, writers have been showing less and less discipline with respect to the length of their compositions. Yet readers are less and less capable of sustained attention.

That latter trend was exemplified by the reception of Thomas Piketty’s seven-hundred-page Marxist economic treatise Capital in the Twenty-First Century. While some people no doubt purchased it to demonstrate to their friends how serious and thoughtful they were, data taken from Amazon’s Kindles showed that its average reader stopped at page twenty-six. The conundrum is equally obvious in movies. Ask yourself the last time you watched a movie that was more than two hours long that wouldn’t have benefited from judicious cutting.

To read the rest, go to: https://modernagejournal.com/the-colossal-mark-twain-ron-chernow-review/253598/