I always get a little suspicious of big nonfiction books arguing some big thesis that arrive with fawning reviews from all the right places and whose authors immediately get crowned as important public intellectuals.

These books often seem to have a life cycle: sensation, canon, “but wait a minute,” and then lastly forgotten.

I figure the initial splash might mean the author just knows the right people in New York. They seem like the nonfiction equivalent of what someone I know once called a “tobadny” which stands for “trendy overhyped book about dysfunctional New Yorkers.” These are the occasional literary fiction sensations about… well… dysfunctional New Yorkers that arrive with gushing reviews in The New Yorker.

A merely very talented author outside the New York scene usually has to wait until they are dead to be noticed.

In our scene the equivalent would be an overhyped overfunded startup run by someone who knows the right people in the Valley that is the hot thing for five minutes. Meanwhile someone in Nebraska who invented a working Alcubierre Drive will never get funding.