Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Charles McGrath on Thrumpton Hall by Miranda Seymour: "Her odd and oddly affecting book, beautifully written, is in part a story of house-love that borders on madness. It’s also the story of her father, and not the least of its accomplishments is that it instantly catapults him into the front rank of impossible and eccentric English parents — right up there with the overbearing Thomas Butler, nightmarish father of Samuel; with Evelyn Waugh, who wrote that 'I despise all my seven children equally'; and even with Lord Redesdale, Nancy Mitford’s 'Farve,' who once kicked a young man off the family estate just because he carried a pocket comb."
• Henry Alford on Collections of Nothing by William Davies King: "Part memoir and part disquisition on the psychological impulses behind the urge to accumulate, 'Collections of Nothing' is a wonderfully frank and engaging look at one man’s detritus-fueled pathology. King’s honesty and ambivalence about his pastime only increases his emotional connection to the reader. I wanted, by turns, to breast-feed and strangle him." [Ed: I love this book.]
• Tom Vanderbilt on Spiral Jetta by Erin Hogan: "I was never quite sure what Hogan was looking for when she set out — self-fulfillment or some new insights into what art is, or what it is for — or indeed whether she found it. But I loved the ride. In 'Spiral Jetta,' an unashamedly honest, slyly uproarious, ever-probing book, art doesn’t magically have the power to change lives, but it can, perhaps no less powerfully, change ways of seeing."
• Richard Eder on The Creator's Map by Emilio Calderon: "Like 'Da Vinci,' its mysteries are no more than mystifications. Unlike its exemplar, it is put together clumsily: an assemble-it-yourself kit enclosed with instructions in Korean.... A more skillful handling would frame it all as a running mystery; instead it becomes a creeping confusion. To succeed, a mystery smuggles its truth past the reader. Here, the smuggling is done so awkwardly as to spill out rattly chunks of hint, contradiction and clue while trying to get through."

Washington Post:

• Greg Myre on A Path Out of the Desert by Kenneth Pollack: "Pollack is persuasive in his new book, but it helps to have a touch of amnesia. Those with a working memory may recall that six years ago, Pollack said there was too much hand-wringing about the potential pitfalls of invading Iraq. 'Those who argue that the United States would inevitably become the target of unhappy Iraqis generally also assume that the Iraqi population would be hostile to U.S. forces from the outset,' he wrote. 'However, the best evidence we have suggests that the Iraqi people would be pleased to be liberated.'"
• Ron Charles on The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry: "Beneath all this hype is a moderately entertaining story of three generations in a setting rich with Wiccan wisdom and deadly misogyny.... If you're the kind of person who copies such sayings on index cards and sticks them on your refrigerator, you'll love these little ornaments, but if you're the kind of person who mocks those people, you may want to peer into the lace and see yourself reading a different novel."

Los Angeles Times:

• As you may have heard, the LA Times, as part of yet another round of newsroom cost-cutting by the Tribune Company, is shutting down their Sunday book review section and folding the remaining book coverage into their Calendar section. This Sunday's was the last edition of the review, and books editor David Ulin had a short note about the change. The NBCC's Critical Mass has been covering the coverage (and the general trend that may cause this column to run out of links before long): they link, among other places, to the letter of protest from four former Times book editors and to Scott McLemee's lament about the short-sightedness of newspapers abandoning the print culture they are a part of. For my part, I'll just say that of the dailies I keep an eye on in preparing Old Media Monday, the LA Times has carried, along with the New York Sun, pound for pound the most interesting reviews of the most interesting books--often ones no one else is reviewing--and I hope Ulin and his team are able to keep up their solid work under reduced circumstances.
• Kenneth Turan on The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe: a "fiendishly comprehensive look at a civilization so unexpectedly multifaceted that it's best viewed as a Yiddish-speaking Atlantis, a lost world buried forever by the volcano of Nazi mass murder.... More than accessible, the 'YIVO Encyclopedia' is so compulsively browsable that you can disappear within its pages for hours without a trace, the equivalent of diving into the coolest, deepest of pools. These volumes should come with a warning label, cautioning the time-challenged that they are entering at their own risk."
• Peter Terzian on What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami: "The flat, colloquial style that serves to heighten the magical qualities of Murakami's fiction makes this work of straightforward nonfiction sound pedestrian. Clichés abound: The heat of a city in summer is 'something else,' squirrels run around 'like crazy' and young Harvard students run 'like the wind.' For a book by such a gifted writer, 'What I Talk About When I Talk About Running' reads as though it could have been written by anyone."

 

New York Sun:

• Eric Ormsby on Imagining Spain by Henry Kamen: "In seven trenchant chapters and a postscript, Mr. Kamen demolishes one cherished fantasy after another. Drawing on archival sources, unpublished manuscripts, and a vast body of scholarship in several languages, he takes a fresh, and often scathing, look at Spanish notions of nationhood, monarchy, and empire, and shows them to rise almost wholly out of ignorance and self-delusion.... The effect is as if poor, raving Don Quixote were not simply given a cold shower but strapped to a gurney for a series of electroshock treatments. And yet, only someone who loves Spain deeply could have written this book."

Globe & Mail:

• Margaret Cannon on Bleeding Heart Square by Andrew Taylor (coming to the US in January): "Andrew Taylor's historical novels are simply some of the best being published. I read The American Boy straight through and then turned around and read it again, just to catch the nuances, the touches of Poe and Trollope and Dickens. I devoured Bleeding Heart Square in a day. The setting (Taylor is a master of place and time) is Britain in 1934. It is the beginning of the end of the Empire. The ruling classes are toying with fascism and communism. The war to end war is 15 years past. In short, we are in the time of mainstream novels like Atonement and The Remains of the Day, but without the despair. One might say that Taylor, in this brilliantly constructed and beautifully written crime novel, has transcended the mainstream."

The Guardian:

• M. John Harrison on Night Work by Thomas Glavinic (coming to the US in November): "Night Work is an exhausting experience, not just because the events portrayed are harrowing - indeed, at times genuinely horrific - but because of the reader's constant anxiety that Glavinic won't, indeed can't, deliver a solution to his own mystery. Is Jonas's sleeping self a genuinely separate entity? Or is he a hallucination? The measure of Glavinic's skill lies in how long he keeps both possibilities open, and how well he manipulates reader anxiety around them.... When an answer arrives, it is as implacable as the rest of this disturbing book."

The New Yorker:

• Judith Thurman on White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson: "Dickinson’s experience, or what we know of it, has been so thoroughly archived, interpreted, and reimagined in every genre ... that a contemporary scholar needs a good excuse to exhume the picked-over bones. In rehabilitating Higginson—dispatching the caricature of a tin-eared pedant—Wineapple finds one, and, through him, brings Dickinson into focus for a new generation. The poet’s impulse to seek sanctuary in isolation, and the militant’s to seek justice through intervention, should, she suggests, feel familiar to us in 2008. It’s an enduring schism in American history."

--Tom

Comments

[on July 29, 2008 at 06:23 AM]

If as, Greg Myre, the reviewer of Kenneth Pollack's "A Path Out of the Desert", writes "it helps to have a touch of amnesia" while reading this book, clearly it also helps to have a near total blindness to current reality while writing a review this snippy.

Earth to Greg Myre, the war in Iraq is almost won. It was harder and longer and more expensive in blood and treasure than summer soldiers and sunshine patriots as most of the liberal hawks like Pollack proved to be had predicted, but we got the job done and are already beginning to reap the benefits, no thanks to the likes of Greg Myre and his ilk who foresaw nothing but total disaster from day one and could barely contain their joy at each military setback.

Normally a hard won victory steels you for the fight to come. Should that not prove to be the case here we can thank the doomsayers from day one who are not about to let facts get in the way of their pronouncements and the summer soldiers and sunshine patriots who strongly advocated war...

until it got hard.

[FredTownWard on July 29, 2008 at 06:32 AM]

In light of reviews like the previous I find it difficult to feel sadness at the closing down of Yet Another obsolete media book review department.

Do you want to keep your jobs? Do you want to attract readers? Try actually REVIEWING new conservative books that are the talk of the right instead of simply ignoring them while they sit atop the bestseller lists mocking you, and when you do review them, try assigning someone who understand the meanings of the words: objective, fair, balanced, etc., not someone who repeats them on command like a trained parrot.

What the Hell, you might even hire a few conservative book reviewers,...

if only for the sake of attracting enough new readers to keep you employed.