Omnivoracious: Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

Sunday Book Review cover: Kathryn Harrison on Real World by Natsuo Kirino: "As Dostoyevsky did in 'Crime and Punishment,' Kirino pushes her antihero to murder as a means of philosophical statement and communicates an authorial anxiety that contemporary social ills will destroy humanity. But while Dostoyevsky sets up a contest between Christian love and a pernicious nihilism that inspires barbarity, Kirino’s 'Real World' offers no possibility of god or redemption."
Maslin on The Condition by Jennifer Haigh: "As she demonstrated in 'Mrs. Kimble' and particularly in 'Baker Towers,' Ms. Haigh has a great gift for telling interwoven family stories and doing justice to all the different perspectives they present. She is subtle and intuitive about the whole McKotch household, which in 1976 is based in Concord, Mass. And when the family ruptures — because, even in an uncommonly good version of the tragic-family-secret book, it inevitably will — she does justice to each McKotch’s way of absorbing that change."
Howard Hampton on Heavy Metal Islam by Mark LeVine: "'Heavy Metal Islam' gets trapped by its good intentions whenever it attempts to shoehorn the headbangers’ intransigence into preconceived political slots. Metal music, however you parse it, is dystopian in the extreme: hyper-aggressively embracing the death instinct, regimented chaos, deliriously fetishized morbidity. Call it cathartic, sure, even a way of keeping sane in an insane world (as one performer here says, 'We play heavy metal because our lives are heavy metal'), but don’t confuse it with 'If I Had a Hammer.' Unless it’s a hammer of the nihilist gods aimed at your forehead — not to hammer out justice or a warning or 'the common struggle for democracy and economic equality,' but to crack your skull open, scrape out your pulverized brains and feed them to the wolverines."
Marilyn Stasio on The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale (hot on the heels of its Samuel Johnson Prize last week): "Summerscale accomplishes what modern genre authors hardly bother to do anymore, which is to use a murder investigation as a portal to a wider world. When put in historical context, every aspect of this case tells us something about mid-Victorian society, from prevailing attitudes about women ('prone to insanity'), children ('full of savage whims and impulses,' according to one 19th-century physician) and servants ('outsiders who might be spies or seducers') to the morality-based intellectual constructs that codified such views of human behavior."

Washington Post:

Martha Sherrill on The Eaves of Heaven by Andrew X. Pham: "Poised to inherit everything, Thong Pham instead lost it all, as Andrew X. Pham, his son, recounts in this gorgeously written book. But this is not ultimately a story of loss and upheaval, nor is it simply a retelling of Vietnam's war-torn history from a Vietnamese point of view. Many other books have ably covered that ground. The Eaves of Heaven is something entirely new: an effort to recapture the moments of beauty and transcendence that emerged from these events."
Maureen Freely on We Are Now Beginning Our Descent by James Meek: "I was able to look out over the same seas and islands that featured in Kellas's thoughts. I was so gripped by the story that I carried the book open in my hand through passport control and customs. I am full of admiration for Meek's precise and lyrical prose, for his mapping of the political landscapes through which his characters drift and for his evocation of the strange, torn geometries of the life in the global news stream. But what I most treasure in this novel is its generosity. We carry the flaws of the world inside us. But -- however difficult, desperate and demented its manifestations -- there is also love."

Los Angeles Times:

Gideon Lewis-Kraus on How Fiction Works by James Wood: "As the burden of the novelist is to give her readers reason to keep reading, the burden of the untethered critic (as opposed to the academic one, whose authority is institutionally granted) is to offer enough gratuitous pleasure and intelligence that he is taken seriously. Reading Wood, no matter the book under review, provides enormous pleasure; his prose is at once buoyant and momentous, his judgment swift with imperial grace."

New York Sun:

Adam Kirsch on Paradise Lost: Smyrna, 1922 by Giles Milton: "As Mr. Milton damningly shows, the British, the Americans, and the other Western powers refused to act, fearful of getting mixed up in the Greek-Turkish war.... The result was a horrifying massacre — all the more horrifying because it was entirely predictable and, indeed, often predicted. Drawing on the memoirs of survivors, most of whom were just children at the time, Mr. Milton conjures the nightmarish scene.... After a century of ethnic cleansing, Smyrna deserves to be remembered as, if not a paradise lost, at least a martyr to the human capacity for hatred."
Michael Rubin on A Path Out of the Desert by Kenneth Pollack: "Ultimately, there is very little new in the 'grand strategy' Mr. Pollack suggests should replace the failed policies of the past. Indeed, while he describes himself as a liberal internationalist, 'A Path out of the Desert' is little more than a neoconservative manifesto uncorrupted by the bluntness of Richard Perle or the arrogance of Douglas Feith.... If Mr. Pollack's grand strategy gives the Bush doctrine a second wind, both the Middle East and long-term American national security will be better for it."

Globe & Mail:

Jason Rotstein on My White Planet by Mark Anthony Jarman: "Each of the 14 episodes traces the same trajectory in describing the ways our planet is spiritually and morally 'damaged,' 'scorched' and beyond repair. But Jarman infuses each new episode with startling examples of life recorded in heavily stylized, idiomatic rhetoric. It's as if Jarman is saying he won't let the world go down without a fight. And language is his fighting tool." [Ed. note: I say this every time his name comes up, but reading Mark Anthony Jarman for the first time was the highlight of my years as our Canadian editor. Time to publish him down here, somebody!]
Stephen Lewis on The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of AIDS by Elisabeth Pisani: "The sad, sad truth about the Pisani book is that the rude language and controversial nostrums will allow it to be dismissed by policy makers at all levels. But it should be mandatory, not voluntary, reading: Pisani is lucid, colourful, insightful and impatient. In her last chapter, she says quite plainly that we know what to do and we're just not doing it. She's right. The worst thing that's happened to AIDS is that the same tired, intellectually ossified bureaucrats in international aid agencies, in many governments, in multilateral financial vehicles and above all in the United Nations, are calling the shots. Elizabeth Pisani is a far straighter shooter than most of them put together."

The Guardian:

Kate Kellaway on Morality Tale by Sylvia Brownrigg: "This novel is like a single intake of breath. It has a taut, first-person narrative and one reads it avidly, without a break, wondering what relief - what oxygen - its ending may bring. It is no surprise to see, in an afterword, that the book came 'straight from the dark solitary heart of the middle of the night'."
Patrick Ness on Jamaica by Malcolm Knox (not available in the US yet): "Jamaica is still a remarkable book: witty, psychologically acute and muscularly well written, a summer read that could very well blindside you.... Alongside Tim Winton's Breath, this is the second excellent novel in as many months to examine masculinity and male friendship in Australian sport, a subject that might seem of limited intrinsic interest. But it's not the song, it's how it's sung, and if Winton is an aria, Knox is early Rolling Stones. If you're looking for something meatier for the beach, something accessible to read but also engaging for your brain and heart, then pack both in your luggage and enjoy the trip."

The New Yorker:

James Wood on The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon: "He is a fabulist but not really a postmodernist; or, rather, he is a postmodernist who has been mugged by history. When he 'lays bare the device' (an old Russian Formalist phrase for the technique of playful fictive self-consciousness), he opens a wound.... [T]he narrator’s mother remarks, 'The trouble with the Hemons . . . is that they always get much too excited about things they imagine to be real.' The formulation is canny: a good proportion of reality consists of what we freely imagine; and then, less happily perhaps, we discover that that reality has imagined us—that we are the vassals of our imaginings, not their emperors or archdukes."

--Tom