Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Richard Holbrooke on One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War: "Any new entry in the crowded field of books on the 1962 Cuban missile crisis must pass an immediate test: Is it just another recapitulation, or does it increase our net understanding of this seminal cold war event? By focusing on the activities of the American, Soviet and Cuban militaries during those tense October days, Michael Dobbs’s 'One Minute to Midnight' passes this test with flying colors. The result is a book with sobering new information about the world’s only superpower nuclear confrontation — as well as contemporary relevance."
• Kakutani on America America by Ethan Canin: "There are some wonderful, deeply affecting moments here, detailing the relationship between the narrator, Corey Sifter, and his family, but they are unfortunately submerged in a bloated, maladroit narrative that relies on clumsily withheld secrets for suspense and that encumbers the story of Corey’s coming-of-age with ponderous and unconvincing meditations on matters like noblesse oblige, the responsibilities of privilege and working-class resentment of the rich."
• Emily Mitchell on Two Kinds of Decay by Sarah Manguso: "Manguso was already a writer when she became ill, and her obsession with words, their capacities and limitations, permeates her book.... As much as anything, this book is a search for adequate descriptions of things heretofore unnamed and unknown. Manguso concludes her account with questions — and an exhortation to the reader to pay attention. Through her own attentiveness, Manguso has produced a remarkable, cleareyed account that turns horror into something humane and beautiful."
• Leah Hager Cohen on Cost by Roxana Robinson: "Robinson has been perennially and somewhat reductively tagged a chronicler of WASP life. This designation, while factually accurate — as is the observation that her stories regularly address parenting and marital issues — doesn’t do her justice. These subjects — WASP life, domestic life — are often used as code for 'small,' in the sense of both trivial and mean, and Robinson’s fiction is neither. In writing about characters whose lives are constrained, she makes them loom large."

Washington Post:

• Jonathan Yardley on The Spies of Warsaw by Alan Furst: "Furst is that rarity, a writer of popular fiction who is also a serious novelist. This is the third of his novels that I've reviewed, and the steady growth of his achievement almost can be measured with calipers. At times his prose can get a little strained, as he reaches a little far for effects, but it's now much more controlled than it was a dozen years ago in The World at Night. Like a handful of other writers who have turned espionage fiction into something approximating art -- John le Carré, of course, and Charles McCarry -- Furst combines the craft of entertainment with the exploration of important themes, and in no way does the entertainment diminish the themes."
• James G. Hershberg on Dobbs's One Minute to Midnight: "As the pages fill with memorable characters in extraordinary circumstances and exotic settings, and as the drama steadily builds, One Minute to Midnight evokes novelists like Alan Furst, John le Carré or Graham Greene -- a reminder that footnote-laden history need not take a backseat to fictional thrillers. Dobbs's vivid narrative brings the crisis alive not only in the rarefied inner sancta of politicians, bureaucrats and revolutionaries in Washington, Moscow and Havana but also among the grunts in the superpowers' vast, unwieldy military machines, from the tropical Caribbean to the frigid Arctic."
• Ron Charles on More Than It Hurts You by Darin Strauss: "If you don't belong to a book club, Darin Strauss's bitter and brilliant new novel is reason enough to start one. You can always disband afterward, and in any case your discussion of More Than It Hurts You may be so heated that you'll never talk to those people again."

Los Angeles Times:

• Martin Rubin on The Forger's Spell by Edward Dolnick: "When it comes to forgery and its ability to fascinate, the bigger the better, and the greater the audacity the more compelling. In the story of a two-bit Dutch painter, Han Van Meegeren, who had the nerve to take on that most rarefied of his artistic compatriots, Johannes Vermeer, author Edward Dolnick has hit the mother lode. And as if this tale of unparalleled chutzpah were not good enough, it takes place amid the tumult of the Nazi occupation of Holland and the competitive plunder of its -- and much of Europe's -- art treasures by Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering. Dolnick more than does it justice, drawing on his knowledge of a wide range of subjects, including scientific process, politics and the gullibility and herd-instinct of the art market."
• Geoff Boucher on Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko by Blake Bell: "For students of comics history, there are few names that strike the ear and the imagination quite like Ditko's. In a field defined by brilliant oddballs, embittered journeymen, penniless geniuses and colorful hacks, Ditko is the strident hermit king.... Ditko's life, like that of R. Crumb or Harvey Pekar, has enough obsessive oddity and outsider struggle to be a tale told wide. But Bell goes the opposite direction, getting as narrow as the lines Ditko used to restrain the action in the old Marvel and Charlton comics."

New York Sun:

• Adam Kirsch reconsiders Robert Lowell's Life Studies: "It would be unfair, however, to lay the blame for so much bad writing at Lowell's door. Just as Marx was not a Marxist, so Lowell was not really a confessional poet.... In the confession booth, all that matters is honesty and sincerity. In a poem, even the most heartfelt recital remains inert if it is not brought to life with cunning artistry. And nothing could be more artful than the way Lowell, in his masterpiece, turns the pain and risk of his own life into the catharsis and consolation of great poetry."

Globe & Mail:

• Kevin Chong on Breath by Tim Winton: "Breath isn't as much about the joys and sorrows of youth as it about the long shadow it casts into our adulthood. Our younger, former selves, Winton suggests, might be callow and inexperienced, but they're also more attuned to an essential paradox: The moments we feel most alive are also those when our own lives are most at peril - when the next breath might not come."

Times Literary Supplement:

• G.S. Smith on Diaries (Vol. 1 and Vol. 2) by Sergei Prokofiev: "Far from being aide-memoire jottings of dates, people and places, Prokofiev’s diaries offer carefully wrought, polished narrative prose, put together with a sense of pitch and timing reminiscent of his best music. And on the whole they bustle along with the same cocky gait; there is occasional high seriousness, and a sense of occasion when the occasion merits, but there is never any pontificating.... Prokofiev was always impatiently striving forward; the only retrospective activity he seems truly to have enjoyed, it has to be said, was writing and rereading his own diary."

The New Yorker:

• Pankaj Mishra on Beijing Coma by Ma Jian: "What comes through most strongly and often repetitively is Ma Jian’s own alienation from his country, and while there is much to agree with in his dire prognosis for China, its very comprehensiveness feels too limiting for a novelist. A dissident writer’s pessimism, you suspect, can be as relentless and simplistic as a socialist realist’s optimism."

--Tom