Stephen Koch (1941–2026)

In 1938, a seventeen-year-old called Herschel Grynszpan shot and killed a German embassy official. Grynszpan, naive and possibly bipolar, did so in the hope that his desperate action would call attention to the increasing plight of Jews in his native Germany. Gryn­sz­pan was not only successful, but he was used as a scapegoat by the Nazis to commit Kristallnacht. The Nazis intended to put him at the centre of a massive show trial, but this never came to pass and Grynszpan's fate is show more ultimately unknown, although he almost certainly died in a concentration camp.

Stephen Koch does a good job of using the scant available source material to bring the lonely, hot-headed Grynszpan back to life, although at times his ruminations on Grynszpan's character get a bit florid for me. Overall, an interesting exploration of a historical event which often gets relegated to the footnotes, although I felt that some more contextualisation of l'affaire Grynszpan within the history of show trials and political theatre might well have made this a stronger book—and one whose resonances with the present day were even more apparent. show less

3.5
I was inspired to read this book by the off-broadway play Spain, which examines the interplay between art and propaganda in making the documentary The Spanish Earth, a film about the then-ongoing Spanish Civil War. The Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens was a frontman for the KGB, and his handlers wanted Ernst Hemingway to be the writer/ narrator. Ivens and his partner used John Dos Passos to lure Hemingway.

I knew nothing of this incident but was intrigued when I learned about Stephen Koch's show more nonfiction book The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of Jose Robles. The book provides the historical context lacking in the play and shifts the focus to the battle between the Stalinists and the independent left during the Civil War. The Stalinists' murder of Jose Robles, Dos Passos's close friend, leads to his disillusionment and break with Hemingway. Like Orwell, whom he befriends, he leaves Spain a changed man.

The book provides an in-depth and complex portrait of the war and the famous writers who traveled to Spain to cover it in the international press. It is thoroughly researched and reads like a novel. I recommend it to anyone interested in this period. show less

By far the best book on writing a story/novel I've read.

It not a beginner's book, though. You need some mileage behind you to extract significant value from it, else you'll end up with too much information to process which will bog you down.

My least best chapter was Inventing Your Style. This felt a bit arm-wavy, though it provides plenty of examples and stresses the importance of style. The chapter redeems itself with a short section on readability at its end. "What really makes for show more readability is not clarity but attitude."

The most valuable chapter I found to be Working and Reworking; a lecture on early drafts and the techniques of revision. It's also the most prescriptive part of the book, and, for anyone who has wrangled a first draft into submission (or failed to!), the most instructive.

Koch's knowledge and experience is evident on each page, as is his steady, encouraging, relaxed voice. The book is a masterclass that every writer will benefit from reading. show less

I'm an absolute beginner who had this book recommended.

It seems to be full of wisdom that makes sense in retrospect or maybe summarizes intuitions that an intermediate-writer might have been struggling to make, and I think an intermediate writer might get a lot more out of this than I did.

As an actual total beginner, though, it's a little all over the place. I was able to get a few really nice solid stand-alone tips out of it, but I feel like it was lots of tips for problems I haven't show more encountered yet as opposed to 'how to begin'.

Still, it is deeply encouraging (except for a random chapter close to the beginning which is deliberately discouraging for 'realism') and full of the writer's personal musing so you kind of get the idea of what he's feeling and has felt while engaging in writing and generally seems positive. show less