Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Walter Kirn on How Fiction Works by James Wood: "The heroes of this great artistic labor tend to be semimonastic intro­verts who, like Wood’s beloved Henry James and Gustave Flaubert, toil with the doors shut and locked, in soundproof splendid isolation, attentive to the subtle frictions among nouns and adjectival phrases.... For the vicarish Wood, sequestered in his chamber, part of the fiction writer’s true vocation appears to be acoustic regulation — the engineering of a mental space in which literary whispers can be heard.... For someone who professes to understand the fine machinations of characterization, Wood seems oblivious to the eminently resistible prose style of his donnish, finicky persona."
• Kakutani on The Wrecking Crew by Thomas Frank: "Less humorous and far more hectoring than '[What's the Matter with] Kansas,' this volume quickly devolves into a highly partisan, Manichaean-minded screed against conservatives and private-sector economics.... Mr. Frank comes across in these pages as a sort of parody of the liberal right-wingers love to hate — as someone in love with big government for the sake of big government and opposed to all manner of capitalism and entrepreneurial initiative." Meanwhile, on Sunday, Michael Lind notes "Frank’s portrait of the conservative movement ... sacrifices complexity to caricature," but says, "With rare exceptions like John Kenneth Galbraith, conservatives ... have been the best satirists. In Thomas Frank, the American left has found its own Juvenal."
• Sophie Gee on The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson: "The lovers in 'The Gargoyle' have the intimacy of roommates who hook up when they get drunk, not a time-defying passion. Their thoughts, feelings, conversations and affections are so unformed, so hampered by sentiment and under­powered awkwardness that the courage, endurance and under­standing ascribed to them seem silly. Davidson’s lovers are dysfunctional and quirky, qualities that can look a bit like profundity from a distance, but they don’t have emotional or imaginative depth or range, which at the end of the day are the only things that can make a love story deep and wide-ranging."
• Douglas Wolk on Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko: "The portrait that emerges here is of an artist whose principles have ossified into bitter perversity.... Ditko isn’t easy to love. As vivid as his work is, it’s never been pretty, and he’s never returned to his most famous creations for a victory lap or courted attention beyond acknowledgment of his work. The raw, nightmarish visions of his art are all he offers, and all he’s ever needed to offer."

Washington Post:

• John A. Nagl on The Strongest Tribe by Bing West: "West has made 15 reporting trips to Iraq over the last six years and is almost as personally invested in the current conflict as he was in Vietnam; this book, his third on Iraq, is his attempt to ensure that the 'endgame' in Iraq turns out better than in his last war. It is increasingly possible to believe that it will."

Los Angeles Times:

• Erica Schickel on Waiter Rant by "The Waiter": "'Waiter Rant' has all the fixings for fun.... He delivers a smorgasbord of objectionable personalities and high-stress situations, always serving from the left, rendering his stories impeccably but perhaps a little stiffly. Everybody gets their due: his temperamental, paranoid bosses; the noble, illegal busboys; the slacker co-waiters. But Dublanica's true bile is reserved for customers: the rude, the ridiculous, the entitled, the drunk, the horny, the stoned and, worst of all, the Foodies. 'The Food Network,' he writes, 'is, quite simply, the Death Star of American cooking.'"
• Richard Eder on How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken by Daniel Mendelsohn: "Sharp as he can be in his judgments, he is equally sharp in identifying the virtues of what he doesn't like. He gives a spacious view of the countryside, whatever the particular road he hews through it. He takes his subjects seriously, but not himself. Like Snow White, you might say, he whistles while he works."

New York Sun:

• Laura Collins-Hughes on The Suicide Index by Joan WIckersham: "I read 'The Suicide Index' with a rapacity bordering on need, with tears in my chest and in my eyes. Occasionally I had to put it down and leave the room. More often, I devoured it.... The book is the product of a loving daughter's grief, and part of her process of grieving. But it is also the measured, elegant, gripping work of a professional writer who has set her powers of observation to work on her own family — her parents and grandparents, her uncle, her sister, her husband, her son — and on herself."

Globe & Mail:

• Caitlin Sweet on Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer: "The story's emotional intensity is relentless, and all of it — light or dark — is rendered at the same fever pitch. The most consuming love — until tomorrow, when it'll get even better. The most consuming pain — until tomorrow, when it'll get even worse. Bella, whose human self is bumbling, always blushing and a terrible driver, becomes the strongest, most beautiful, most confident vampire ever. Jacob, who begins the tale impatient and cranky, also ends up in a new, exalted state.... It might be unreasonable to expect a young-adult vampire romance novel to be anything other than hyper-intense. But what it left me with was this thought: Readers are permitted to be breathless, but stories aren't."

Times Literary Supplement:

• Donald Rayfield on The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus by Charles King: " It is a bold historian who writes a history of the Caucasus, as events of the past week have made all too clear.... King ends with a vague hope that Europe’s 'inexorable march' towards liberal values can proceed in the Caucasus, but not much of the evidence supports him. For over a thousand years the Georgians and Armenians have appealed to Europe for support as fellow Christians, as Europeans by culture, if not by geography, and after being strung along by Crusaders, by Louis XIV, by various Popes, by Presidents Wilson, Roosevelt and both Bushes, can still not believe that the answer they get will always be a perfunctory apology that deeper interests of state force the West to take sides with its major trading partners, not its cultural and spiritual brothers. Ghost of freedom, indeed."

The New Yorker:

• Joan Acocella on Giordano Bruno by Ingrid Rowland: "Rowland is well aware of the gaps in her portrait of Bruno’s life, and she tries to fill them with other material. For his years in the monastery, she again has almost no facts to go on, so, once she deposits him there, she switches gears and offers a series of history-of-ideas chapters—on Neoplatonism, on Kabbalah, and so forth—in order to let us know what intellectual trends might have influenced him at that time. She is a lively writer, and these chapters are interesting. Still, we’re sitting there wondering, How’s he doing in the monastery?"

--Tom