Omnivoracious: Old Media Monday (on Tuesday): Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

Sunday Book Review cover: David Kamp on Conversations with Woody Allen by Eric Lax: "This makes for a book that’s plenty entertaining as a flip-through read but ultimately lacking in drama. 'This Is Orson Welles' benefited from the tragic dimensions of its subject’s life: Welles’s early success as a boy wonder, his bitter rejection by Hollywood, his peripatetic later existence, his reduced circumstances, his unfulfilled dreams. Allen, on the other hand, just keeps hitching up his corduroys and going about his business."
Janet Maslin on Born Standing Up by Steve Martin: "Even for readers already familiar with Mr. Martin’s solemn side, 'Born Standing Up' is a surprising book: smart, serious, heartfelt and confessional without being maudlin. Decades after the fact he looks back at a period of invention and innovation, marveling at the thought that his efforts might have led absolutely nowhere if they had not wildly succeeded."
Rich Cohen on Mafia: The Government's Secret File on Organized Crime: "With the publication of 'Mafia,' the Bureau of Narcotics files have been made public for the first time: hundreds of documents, mug shots and criminal histories, like a twisted version of The Baseball Encyclopedia. The book, which is fascinating and huge, and must be taken in tiny, head-clearing sips, like moonshine, offers a panoramic view of the American underworld — the national face seen in a fun house mirror."
Jabari Asim on Blonde Faith by Walter Mosley: "His compact dialogue continues to sparkle, and his scene-setting is as skillful as ever. It could very well be that we critics fail to fully appreciate Mosley’s talents because his Rawlins mysteries appear to come off so effortlessly. They bring to mind a former N.B.A. All-Star’s modest attempt to explain his otherworldy playmaking to a group of ordinary mortals. 'If it looks easy,' he said, 'it’s not.'"

Washington Post:

Our own Jeff VanderMeer (!) on Zeroville by Steve Erickson: "Over his entire career Erickson has challenged readers with a fiercely intelligent and surprisingly sensual brand of American surrealism that can, at times, seem impenetrable. For this reason, it surprised me that almost everything in Erickson's new novel Zeroville entertains so readily without seeming watered down or slight. Zeroville is funny, sad and darkly beautiful, built around short chapters that allow the author to capture the essential moment and move effortlessly through time."
Pauline Maier on Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution by Woody Holton: "Woody Holton is not out to trash the Constitution. Its success, he says, is almost impossible to exaggerate. But his lively, provocative book -- a finalist for a National Book Award -- disputes the idea that the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution to protect civil liberties. They wanted, he says, to make the United States more attractive to investors, and for that reason consciously made American government less democratic than it had been."

Los Angeles Times:

Jane Smiley on Portraits and Observations by Truman Capote: "Hard as it is to believe after reading this volume, TC is dead now. His voice, in every one of these pieces, is so immediate that he just seems to be away on vacation (he loved to go on vacation).... The evidence here is that Capote was drawn to the eternal within the ephemeral. He was good at letting people speak for themselves, good at witnessing the human. He may have had an eye for the zeit, but his great loyalty was to the geist."

Globe & Mail:

Andrew Nikiforuk on The Secret History of the War on Cancer by Devra Davis: "Let me warn comfortable readers here and now. This courageous and altogether horrible book is about as unsettling as it can get. It painstakingly documents such a persistently foul pattern of deceit and denial that I often wanted to throw it against a wall and scream." [I should note the reviewer mistakenly mourns the death of actress Andrea Martin, whom I saw onstage as Frau Blucher just a few months ago, confusing her with the late breast cancer activist of the same name.]
Claire Cameron on Erickson's Zeroville: "What makes this book exceptional is that Erickson is able to push an unconventional story with new ways to look at the world, while also delivering one that is satisfying and complete. Zeroville is not always easy, but it is brilliant and accessible - like getting slammed over the head with a food tray, once you regain your senses, you'll thank the attacker for the wake-up."

The Guardian:

Andrew Motion on Ezra Pound: Poet, Vol. 1, The Young Genius by David Moody: "Pound's life is so vast in its energies, so richly international in its reach and so bedevilled by controversies that it has taken more than 30 years - since Pound's death in 1972 - for A David Moody's book to arrive on the scene. The first volume of this grand opus is a significant event."

The New Yorker:

James Wood on Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's new translation of War and Peace: "Alive, and very much so,' Tolstoy’s diary entry for November 19, 1889, begins. That is how it feels to be caught up in the bright sweep of Tolstoy’s 'War and Peace': alive, and very much so. It is to succumb to the contagion of vitality. As his characters infect each other with the high temperature of their existence, so they infect us."

--Tom