Big ideas in little books

For the last 12 weeks a highly unusual book has been roosting in the nonfiction best-seller list compiled by the New York Times. On Bullshit, by Harry Frankfurt, runs a grand total of 80 pages. But the title is beside the point. It's the length that interests me. It shines like a beacon of hope to overburdened readers bombarded with nonfiction titles that routinely weigh in at 300 to 400 pages, no matter how inconsequential the subject. It dares to say that short can be good.

Two books stare at me from my bookshelf. One is The Command of the Ocean, the middle volume in N.A.M. Rodger's authoritative history of the British navy. It is 907 pages long. When I pick it up, my wrist buckles. Standing next to it, like Laurel next to Hardy, is the winsome Waterloo, by Andrew Roberts. At 143 pages, it barely counts as an appetizer, but as a reading experience it more than holds its own with its heftier shelfmate.

Both books deal with momentous events. Both are admirably researched and stylishly written. But Waterloo demands, at most, a couple of hours of reading time. It delivers the maximum amount of information, and pleasure, in the minimum number of minutes -- an unbeatable deal.

There are a lot of these junior-sized books out there at the moment. Some are slim by design, like the whippet-thin volumes that Paul Strathern, a British academic, has been turning out with machinelike regularity. His various series on great authors, great philosophers and great ideas (Nabokov in 90 Minutes is one title) promise to get readers up to speed on, say, Ludwig Wittgenstein, in 100 pages or so with no dumbing-down.

Some books, for whatever reason, simply happen to be thin. Subject matter has nothing to do with it, either. There are short books on pared-down topics, like American Gothic, Steven Biel's "biography" of Grant Wood's famous painting, and short books on hugely important, world-changing subjects, like Auschwitz, by the German historian Sybille Steinbacher, due out from Ecco in August. It's worth pointing out that long books can seem short, and vice versa. Command of the Ocean runs long but reads short. The author has a vigorous, economical writing style and a rare gift for packaging his facts tightly. American Gothic, with only 156 pages of text, has as much sag and bag as a Thomas Wolfe novel.

All books should be exactly as long as they need to be. There is no ideal length. But like mainstream Hollywood films, nonfiction books have shown a tendency to expand in recent years, for no particular reason. Directors cannot bring a film in at 90 minutes anymore. Likewise, my shelves are overloaded with nonfiction titles that, 30 years ago, would have been 225 or 250 pages. I'm not sure why.

My candidate for the most impressive entry in the less-is-more category is In My Brother's Shadow: A Life and Death in the SS, by the German novelist Uwe Timm. Like all the books discussed here, it runs less than 220 pages of actual text. Far less, in fact. In a mere 150 pages, Timm roams, in a series of disjointed meditations, over most of 20th-century German history.

His starting point is a cryptic diary left by his brother, an SS soldier who fought and died on the Ukrainian front. But jumping back and forth in time, he also touches on the traumatic aftermath of World War I, in which his father served; the bombing of Hamburg, his hometown; and the "economic miracle" of the 1950s. Sensitively translated by Anthea Bell, In My Brother's Shadow is equal parts German history and family history, a profound rumination on the way history shapes and breaks private lives.