The Promise and Perils of Book TitlesBecause I’m Way Too Busy With the Start of the Term to Blog About Anything Useful.

25 January 2011, 1620 EST

Thanks to Erik Voeten, I have just discovered a fabulous blog, Better Book Titles:

This blog is for people who do not have thousands of hours to read book reviews or blurbs or first sentences. I will cut through all the cryptic crap, and give you the meat of the story in one condensed image. Now you can read the greatest literary works of all time in mere seconds!

Some of my other favorites from the site:

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the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime
the very hungry caterpillar, and
the elements of style.

And both Erik and Jeff Ely have a little more to say about the political economy of book titles, especially in academic publishing.

And Kieran Healy is collecting suggestions for a political science contribution to the Better Book Titles site, where Friday entries are submitted by readers. I’d love to come up with a snappy version of Dan Drezner‘s new Theory of International Politics and Zombies, which I’m supposed to roast at the International Studies Association Conference in March. [“I Am Too Funny For My Half-Eaten Shirt,” perhaps. Or “I Will Claim To Describe IR Theory While Completely Ignoring Feminism, Post-Colonialism and Critical Theory. Bwa Ha Ha!!”]

Add in your own suggestions for this or other books below.

Charli Carpenter

Charli Carpenter is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She is the author of 'Innocent Women and Children': Gender, Norms and the Protection of Civilians (Ashgate, 2006), Forgetting Children Born of War: Setting the Human Rights
Agenda in Bosnia and Beyond (Columbia, 2010), and ‘Lost’ Causes: Agenda-Setting in Global Issue Networks and the Shaping of Human Security (Cornell, 2014). Her main research interests include national security ethics, the protection of civilians, the laws of war, global agenda-setting, gender and political violence, humanitarian affairs, the role of information technology in human security, and the gap between intentions and outcomes among advocates of human security.