Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

With apologies for last week's missing Monday. I was in the woods.

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Susann Cokal on Telex from Cuba by Rachel Kushner: Kushner "evinces an intimate knowledge of her novel’s world and characters. Her style is sure and sharp, studded with illuminating images.... These are potent moments, and they make the novel a dreamy, sweet-tart meditation on a vanished way of life and a failed attempt to make the world over in America’s image. Out of tropical rot, Kushner has fashioned a story that will linger like a whiff of decadent Colony perfume."
• Last Sunday's cover: William Logan on Selected Poems by Frank O'Hara: "It’s hard to care about a lot of O’Hara’s poems, but he doesn’t want you to care.... In his best poems ... O’Hara found something beyond that terrible vacancy he was trying so hard to fill. (His best poems are rarely his most characteristic or frenzied.) The style, though at times foolish and self-parodic, remains fresh 50 years later. However much these poems live in the world of Lowell’s 'tranquilized ’50s,' their giddiness in the face of despair, their animal pleasure in gossip, their false bravado, their frantic posturing and guilelessness and petty snobberies — and these were O’Hara’s virtues — give us as much of a life as poetry can."
• Kakutani on The Sister by Poppy Adams: "Imagine a mash-up of the campy 1962 chiller 'What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?,' starring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, and Arnold Bennett’s 1908 novel 'The Old Wives’ Tale.' Then imagine the result rewritten as a Gothic novel by an amateur lepidopterist — not a Nabokov exactly, but a novelist with a scientific bent — and you have a pretty good idea of Poppy Adams’s first novel, 'The Sister.' Though it’s flawed by a predictable and unsatisfying ending, 'The Sister' is powered by the same sort of confidently rendered literary suspense that propelled Donna Tartt’s 1992 thriller, 'The Secret History,' onto best-seller lists."
• Boris Fishman on City of Thieves by David Benioff: "In contrast to the piety of so many of today’s historical novels — their facts unimpeachable and their souls somewhere in the library — Benioff’s book lets its characters inhabit the human condition in all of its sometimes compromised versatility. But it’s never cavalier, because the author has done his research.... The research never stands out because Benioff weaves it in so deftly. He shifts tone with perfect control — no recent novel I’ve read travels so quickly and surely between registers, from humor to devastation."

Washington Post:

• Jonathan Yardley on Shining City by Seth Greenland: "That is very smart stuff, and there's plenty more of it here; the opening scene, in which Julian 'Juice' Ripps goes to his final reward, borders on the classic. But there's serious stuff as well. Greenland ... understands that the exhilarating yet troubling place where Marcus finds himself entails complex and often ambiguous questions of right and wrong, and he treats these questions sensitively and intelligently. Mainly, though, Shining City is simply pedal-to-the-metal fun -- sassy and knowing and irreverent. It's much too much of all those things to be pigeonholed as 'summer reading,' but if you have room for only one entertainment this summer, let Shining City be it."

Los Angeles Times:

• Richard Schickel on Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard by Richard Brody: "Deeply researched, conscientiously written, careful to contextualize its subject both in his field and in the larger culture that shaped his work, 'Everything Is Cinema' is in almost every respect an admirable biography, exactly the sort of scrupulous and passionate work significant movie figures deserve and almost never receive. I am in awe of Richard Brody's accomplishment. Yet I have rarely been so glad to come to the end of an admirable book. That's because his subject is Jean-Luc Godard, who may be the most chilling and annoying figure in the history of the movies."

New York Sun:

• Eric Ormsby on The Snake Charmer: A Life and Death in Pursuit of Knowledge by Jamie James: "Mr. James tells this odd story with great flair. His book is an affectionate — though not uncritical — biography of Slowinski that also offers a vivid glimpse into the practice of all science today.... In the end, for all its high drama, this is a book about strangeness. In the exotic locales where rare snakes lurk, the scientists who study them come to seem even more exotic. They have their own lingo, their own customs, their private codes; they don't go hunting snakes, they go 'herping.' In Genesis, the serpent is described as the 'subtlest' of the beasts; it hugs the ground, it knows the secrets of the earth. For scientists such as Joe Slowinski, the serpent embodies an elusive wisdom, as strange as it is precious. Unfortunately, it is a wisdom with fangs."

Globe & Mail:

• Lisa Carver on Sex and Bacon: Why I Love Things That Are Very, Very Bad for Me by Sarah Katherine Lewis: "Sex and Bacon makes me want to shout from a rooftop. Not sure which rooftop, or what I would say. Maybe just some guttural hoots. Maybe that this book, this book is great! This book is life! This book is about sorrow, smells, meat, joy, sex - professional and non - heartache, heart burst, contentment, kindness, connection, isolation, snuggling, colonoscopes, handfuls of rosemary thrown into the pot, realizing you're a fraud, realizing you're awesome, bereavement, discovery, mistakes, the money that comes from being naked and all the exciting, semi-horrifying foods in unusual locales that can be bought with that money, budgeting when you give up being naked and try typing instead and the couple of pieces of brown thigh meat that can be bought after the rent is paid, and what you can do with that past-the-best-used-by date brown meat, one wilted potato, dried beans and Tabasco."

Times Literary Supplement:

• Alasdair Gray on Little Hut of Leaping Fishes by Chiew-Siah Tei (not available in US yet): "In 2002, I and other teachers of creative writing at Glasgow University read the earliest pages of this novel and agreed that it would likely become a good one. It is."

The New Yorker:

• Adam Kirsch on Posthumous Keats by Stanley Plumly: "Through this interweaving of themes and episodes—a 'walk around in Keats’s life and art, not simply through them'—Plumly emphasizes, as a more conventional biography never could, the fatal, fated quality of Keats’s career. He shows how Keats, in a way that feels unique even among the doomed Romantics, became posthumous while he was still alive."

--Tom

Comments

[on July 09, 2008 at 04:17 AM]

Thanks for explaining. I consider "Old Media Monday" a highlight of this blog and a major service readers. I missed it last week Hope you had a good time in the woods.

[kristin on July 10, 2008 at 12:05 AM]

So glad you're back!!!