…as Explicitly as Possible
Any chance of this annoying, intelligence-insulting fad for non-fiction books subsiding soon?
What, reading non-fiction books is intelligence-insulting? Surely you can’t mean that. The last book I read (last weekend) was non-fiction. Fascinating and funny, it was. (Ron Jeremy: The Hardest (Working) Man In Show Business). (Speaking of explicit. 
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I’mnot sure whatyou are taling about. By the way have you seen Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan or as it is discussed in Cafe Society (B:CLoAfMBGNoK).
I think the OP means things like Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. I don’t find it annoying until I have to put the book into a bibliography.
Yeah, I see it’s creeping into films (both Anchorman and Talladega Nights seemed odd for using that convention).
And what do you mean you don’t know what I’m talking about - come on, this fad is basically a rule these days. Look at this hourly updated list of bestselling non-fiction books on Amazon.
EDIT: I see garygnu has already helped me out.
Yeah, it really pisses me off when someone uses a title like:
Medusa: Solving the Mystery of the Gorgon
Do they think we’re so stupid we don’t know who Medusa is, or what?
Wow, that Amazon list is downright creepy.
I enjoyed reading two recent non-fiction books with this type of title–
**
Inside Out: How Corporate America Destroyed Professional Wrestling**–by Ole Anderson and Scott Teal
and
The Cowboy and the Cross: The Bill Watts Story by Bill Watts and Scott Williams.
But…nobody in the niche audience ever calls the books by the actual title (which I may have misquoted–at work now, and my copies are at home). It’s usually called Ole’s book, or Watts’s book.
This thread cannot go by without mentioning the famous:
A Hand in the Bush: the Fine Art of Vaginal Fisting
This is by no means a new phenomenon. I can’t think of examples off the top of my head right now, but a lot of non-fiction (and some fiction) books dating back to the 19th century and possibly earlier were like this
Academic Colonitis
Academic Colonitis: the Propensity of the Educated to Spill Their Guts
BTW, from observation, I think it comes the other way round. The cumbersome title is the actual title, then the author comes up with a clever pun to describe it; but they are obliged to include the ponderous one as well.
Isn’t this actually a return to a more Romantic tradition?
Clarissa, or the History of a Young Woman
The Hobbit, or There and Back Again
I seem to recall that Tom Jones, The Turn of the Screw, and other well known classics have subtitles that are more descriptive, too.
On edit: I see Fat Bald Guy made this point already.
This is ubiquitous in academic publishing, especially in the social sciences. The short title is as attention-grabbing as possible, sometimes almost tabloidish, and the subtitle deflates any expectations aroused by the main title. My favorite example is Manslaughter, Fornication and Sectarianism: Norm-Breaking in Finland and the Baltic Areas From Medieval to Modern Times. It’s not the most lurid main title I’ve seen, but I like it; I just wish I could make it scan to “My Favorite Things”.