Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

This week in Old Media Monday: Traffic hits New York, DC, and LA, Geoff Dyer writes one of the best introductions to a review I've ever read, and Tom Nissley takes a week off. --Anne

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Mary Roach on Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt: "Drivers will slow down to look at anything: 'Something as simple as a couch dumped in a roadside ditch can send minor shudders of curiosity through the traffic flow.' 'Traffic' is jammed with these delicious you’ve-got-to-be-kidding moments."
• Bryan Burrough on The Challenge by Jonathan Mahler: "If 'The Challenge' is to be graded on objectivity, thoroughness, discipline and sincerity, it passes with flying colors. Mahler has done everything you can ask an author to do. Is it fair then to say it’s not exactly spellbinding? Since the book is being touted as a legal thriller, I suppose it must be. Still, as a nonfiction author myself, my heart goes out to any writer whose voice, no matter how smooth, finds the sheet music he’s chosen doesn’t quite allow him to rise to his ambitions."
• Bruce Handy on The Night of the Gun by David Carr: "What Carr excels at, where his gifts as a journalist shine, is explaining how an addict’s life works, the economics of it, the ad-hoc social web, the quotidian feel of the thing... [it's] an essay in urban typology worthy of Balzac at his keenest (and least windy)."
• Eve Fairbanks on This Land Is Their Land by Barbara Ehrenreich: "Ehrenreich is at her best (and she’s very, very good) when chronicling the outrageous human downside of our economy, the costs it imposes on people who can’t afford a bacon-infused old-fashioned. Remove the less-than-trenchant lifestyle and culture essays, and you’ve got a tight and chilling companion volume to 'Nickel and Dimed.'"

Washington Post:

• Ron Charles on The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff: "The voices Ebershoff has brought to life here dramatize one of the most remarkable periods of America's religious history, and he's just as discerning about the bizarre descendants that can sprout like toxic weeds from a founder's revelation. The greatest triumph is the way all this material, though it's focused on the peculiarities of Mormonism -- devout and heretical, ancient and modern -- illuminates the larger landscape of faith."
• Jonathan Yardley on Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt: "Traffic gets about as close to the heart of modern existence as any book could get, yet what's truly astonishing is that no one else has done it, at least not on the scale that Vanderbilt has achieved."
• Michael Grunwald on Habits of Empire by Walter Nugent: "Nugent argues that the story of American imperialism is really one continuous story of expansion divided into three phases stretching from the end of the Revolution to the misadventures of the Bush Administration: the 'continental empire,' the 'offshore empire' and the 'global or virtual empire.' But those are three very different stories; the second is relatively unimportant, and the third is not really about empire. Not all imperialism is created equal, and not all imperiousness is imperialism."

Los Angeles Times:

• Paula L. Woods on The Turnaround by George Pelecanos: "Although Pelecanos pays homage to his crime-writing roots, uncoiling a lethal subplot involving no-good Charles Baker that spurs a fitting, if bloody, resolution, it is the central questions of how men can have purpose and atone for their sins that makes 'The Turnaround' an indelible read."
• Susan Salter Reynolds on The Legend of Colton H. Bryant by Alexandra Fuller: "Fuller never met him [Bryant], but re-creating him has dragged her into a world of greed and power and destruction and beauty. It is a book more channeled than written, sparse and beautiful."
• And one more for Traffic, from Matthew DeBord (a close reading with a delightful bit of snark that seems only appropriate for the LA perspective): "A driver may get rankled at the rubbernecking delay, but she'll never fall out of love with her Prius. Neither will the guy with the Ferrari, plodding along during rush hour at 1/10,000th of its potential. But to his credit, Vanderbilt does indicate that, for much of the world, driving anything beats walking."

New York Sun:

• Christopher Willcox on The Wrecking Crew by Thomas Frank: "Thomas Frank's latest is actually far more instructive on the unsettled state of the Democratic Party and its current leftward drift...we are witnessing a tectonic shift from the centrism that President Clinton embraced and imposed on his restive followers to a more open-throated liberalism, now referred to as progressivism, that is angry and spoiling for a fight."

Globe & Mail:

• Spider Robinson on Little Brother by Cory Doctorow: "If you only read one science fiction novel this year, let it be this one. Doctorow reminds us of the profound truth: People who use technology to control and enslave others are always and everywhere, by definition, stupid and cowardly. There are no brave or intelligent reasons to torture."

Entertainment Weekly:

• Kate Ward on The Likeness by Tana French: "Read one page of snappy, brainy dialogue with the roommates (''Today Henry [V] would be running a banana republic with serious border issues and a dodgy nuclear-weapons program''), and you'll understand why Maddox becomes too emotionally caught up with her suspects."
• Leah Greenblatt on One More Year by Sana Krasikov: "Krasikov imbues her writing with a tangible humanity that erases the otherness an unfamiliar culture so often breeds, and in the process makes us care about each one of her characters. Whether male or female, teenage or elderly, in chaotic modern Moscow or a bucolic New York City suburb, their stories feel immediate, urgent, and gratifyingly real."