What is your opinion on Carl Sandburg?

[davg2000]

Rob,

You ask if reviewers have a duty in their review of a book to consider whom the author is writing for. I do think reviewers should consider the author's audience. I do know from teaching composition for a long time that any writer who hopes to be read needs to understand his audience. No one writes for everyone. An awareness of his readers will strongly influence not only what a good writer says, but also how he chooses to say it. So...if a writer does think that footnotes or end notes will bore or alienate his popular reader, and chooses to omit them out of consideration for that reader, it hardly seems fair to criticize him for that choice. But it's also fair to recognize this author's effort as not academic. So we come back again to the reader--one who demands such documentation and one who doesn't care.

You mention James Swanson's book. I agree that the notes aren't much, but he is far better, I think, with his discussion of sources. And he's a pretty good writer. Another author, who wrote three enormous volumes on the Civil War, and who gave nary a note, is Shelby Foote. At the end of each volume, Foote briefly discusses his sources, but in no way is this an annotated bibliography. But Foote, who is such a good writer, and stresses that he is a novelist, told such a good story that I didn't care about those omissions.