Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover (Chinese fiction issue): Jonathan Spence on Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out by Mo Yan: "Although one can say that the political dramas narrated by Mo Yan are historically faithful to the currently known record, 'Life and Death' remains a wildly visionary and creative novel, constantly mocking and rearranging itself and jolting the reader with its own internal commentary.... From the start, the reader must be willing to share with Mo Yan the novel’s central conceit: that the five main narrators are not humans but animals, albeit ones who speak with sharply modulated human voices.... Such a brief summary may make the book sound too cute when it is, in fact, harsh and gritty, raunchy and funny."
• Pankaj Mishra on Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong: "The author’s preoccupation with his Chinese audience may not be the only source of frustration for foreign readers of Howard Goldblatt’s generally fluent translation. Jiang Rong seems to have barely attempted to transmute his experiences and epiphanies into fiction; his book reads like an extended polemic about the superiority of nomadic people and the dangers of a triumphant but brutishly ignorant modernity."
• David Margolick on 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War by Benny Morris: "The history of the 1948 war desperately needs to be told, since it’s so barely understood or remembered and since so many of the issues that plague us today had their roots in that struggle.... No one is better suited to the task than Benny Morris, the Israeli historian who, in previous works, has cast an original and skeptical eye on his country’s founding myths. Whatever controversy he has stirred in the past, Morris relates the story of his new book soberly and somberly, evenhandedly and exhaustively. Definitely exhaustively, for '1948' can feel like 1948: that is, hard slogging. Some books can be both very important and very hard to read."
• Maslin on Audition by Barbara Walters: "If any single thing keeps 'Audition' from achieving the stature of Katharine Graham's 'Personal History,' the book that set the high-water mark for memoirs of the politically and socially well-connected, it is the excess decorousness built into Ms. Walters’s conversation. That is not to say that she lacks sharp elbows or that she is shy about remembering grievances or settling scores.... A little more barbed frankness would have gone rather far in a book that uses 'rather' as its favorite modifier."
• Maslin on A Wolf at the Table by Augusten Burroughs: "When Augusten Burroughs wrote 'Running With Scissors,' he regaled readers with hilarious tales of the domestic craziness he endured while growing up. Now in another family memoir Mr. Burroughs makes a crazy move of his own. 'A Wolf at the Table' is a portrait of the author’s apparently maniacal and Augusten-hating father. Determinedly unfunny, awkwardly histrionic and sometimes anything but credible, it repudiates everything that put Mr. Burroughs on the map."

Washington Post:

• Michael Dirda on Trauma by Patrick McGrath: "Beautifully crafted and paced, Trauma can be viewed as either a superb psychological thriller or as a masterly evocation of modern alienation and despair -- assuming, of course, there is any difference.... McGrath eschews splatter or gruesomeness, instead relating Charlie Weir's story in clear, quick-flowing prose, as if Dick Francis had rewritten Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier. Trauma is, in short, a terrific literary entertainment, one that will keep you on edge, worried and guessing for 200 pages."

Los Angeles Times:

• Tim Rutten on Counselor by Ted Sorensen: "'Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History' is not only a fascinating memoir but also this election year's most important political book. Despite the subtitle's characteristic modesty, part of what makes "Counselor" so important is that its author was at the very center of so much that was important in American history and politics during the second half of the 20th century.... Sorensen's willingness to draw lessons concerning the current political situation from his experience is one of the several things that make "Counselor" such remarkably pleasurable and instructive reading." 

New York Sun:

• Otto Penzler on Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith: "This superb novel does not fit into any subgenre of the mystery.... It is a thriller because — trust me on this — you will find your pulse racing in scene after scene. It is also a political novel because no book I have ever read, fiction or nonfiction, ever illustrated with such unequivocal clarity what it was like to live in the hopeless, fear-filled Stalinist era of repression.... It is impossible in only one column to do justice to this masterful first novel, as there are so many scenes of excruciating suspense, unexpected decisions by fully realized characters, and a complex plot in which, ultimately, every piece fits perfectly. It is, to use the most overused word of the decade, awesome."

Globe & Mail:

• Chris Scott on Angel of Vengeance by Ana Siljak: "Angel of Vengeance has tremendous narrative drive, combined with an epic, Tolstoyan scope. Ana Siljak ... draws the provincial life of Russian nobles of the second rank with rare skill. She uses a novelistic touch to evoke their rituals, hierarchies and politesse, their clothes, their food, their physical and moral furniture. Pre-revolutionary Russia's contradictions, its freedoms and constraints, are superbly drawn. Such deftness is rare in an academic historian. So too is the author's sense of humour. Angel of Vengeance is a very good book."

The Guardian:

• Blake Morrison on The Three of Us: A Memoir by Julia Blackburn: "If you grew up behind lace curtains in the suburbs, you probably envy people whose childhoods were arty and Bohemian: all that freedom and unpredictability, all those exciting visitors and animated dinner table debates. But to judge by Julia Blackburn's experience, having a poet for a father and a painter for a mother would be enough to turn most of us into accountants. Defying the odds, Julia became a writer, her career already under way at the age of six when she wrote a letter that began 'Dear Daddy I hate you.'"

The New Yorker:

• Nicholas Lemann on Walters's Audition: "'Audition' is, for its genre, an unusually ambitious and successful book. It’s long and suffused with an emotional intensity—mainly about the ups and downs of Walters’s career—that keeps it from being dull even as it covers a lot of ancient ground about network-news executives and the formerly famous. Walters knows how to put on a show. Although nothing in 'Audition' comes as a shock—Walters doesn’t turn out to be a stamp collector, or to have learned Aramaic—it belongs to a part of American culture that Walters helped invent; it has just the right number of personal but not icky revelations, and they enrich, rather than spoil, a sense of intimacy."

--Tom

Comments

[Jan Twardowski on May 06, 2008 at 12:39 PM]

Thanks for summarizing all those book reviews. It's a big help in picking out the latest worthwhile reading. But why do you omit the Wall Street Journal's reviews? I find them quite reliable and useful, often more so than the uniformly left-slanted reviews in the NY Times, New Yorker, etc. Sometimes it seems those "standard" reviewers concentrate on books that were written for a dozen readers who live on the Upper West Side.
Thanks again . . . Jan Twardowski, Gig Harbor, WA

[Michael Czobit on May 06, 2008 at 12:45 PM]

My guess why the Journal's reviews are omitted is that you must subscribe to the website to read most of site's content.

[Tom on May 06, 2008 at 02:30 PM]

Yes, thanks, Michael and Jan. I'd love to include the WSJ in my roundup, but their reviews, or most of them at least, are subscriber-only. Maybe Mr. Murdoch will change that.

Tom (writing from a lot closer to Gig Harbor than the Upper West Side...)