Thus are books constructed from essays.
Cao Nanlai, a Chinese anthropologist, published a book, Constructing China's Jerusalem, about the town's particular social dynamics, with its Christian bosses devoted to both conquering new markets and converting their workers.
Consider: LYDIA: That book is constructed so brilliantly.
The book is constructed around four ripped-from-the-headlines case studies, involving "recent cases of perjury by people at the pinnacle of their fields": Martha Stewart, Lewis Libby, Barry Bonds and Bernard Madoff.
The book is constructed of alternating chapters, contemporary ones detailing the Class of 1969's 31st college reunion and flashbacks detailing the formative events that shaped the characters in the intervening years.
The book is constructed not as a narrative of the scandal, but as a series of dispatches centered on her meetings with various firsthand participants, including a compelling, if ultimately unsatisfying, jailhouse interview with England.
Overall, though, her book is constructed as American journalism - she's a Newsweek correspondent - as a sequence of interviews: "he told me", "she told me", the time and place, and the appearance of the interviewee, ritually remarked on.
But Ms. van Lamsweerde said that the book was constructed to show that these distinct genres matter less and less, at least for globally in-demand photographers like them.
John, who narrates much of the book, is constructed with just enough personality to make him interesting, but not so much as to interfere with the all-important "audience identification" (in which the reader is pulled into the story by seeing it through a character's point of view).
The book is constructed as its hero's seriously belated attempt to see the shape of his life and to understand the reasons for his self-slaughter, but it also becomes, in the end, a kind of love story, one-way and unrequited, between the dead and the still living.
