Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Garrison Keillor on Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes: "Julian Barnes, an atheist turned agnostic, has decided at the age of 62 to address his fear of death — why should an agnostic fear death who has no faith in an afterlife? How can you be frightened of Nothing? On this simple question Barnes has hung an elegant memoir and meditation, a deep seismic tremor of a book that keeps rumbling and grumbling in the mind for weeks thereafter.... I don’t know how this book will do in our hopeful country, with the author’s bleak face on the cover, but I will say a prayer for retail success. It is a beautiful and funny book, still booming in my head."
• Maslin on Serena by Ron Rash: "'Serena' is Ron Rash’s fourth novel. For those unfamiliar with the elegantly fine-tuned voice of this Appalachian poet and storyteller, a writer whose reputation has been largely regional despite an O. Henry Prize and other honors, it will prompt instant interest in his first, second and third."
• Alex Kuczynski on A Promise to Ourselves: A Journey Through Fatherhood and Divorce by Alec Baldwin: "As brilliant an actor as Baldwin can be, his comic acuity may be so keen partly because we associate him in real life with a darker, more dolorous personality. His new book, 'A Promise to Ourselves,' is a treatise on how the family law system in America is broken, and why it should be changed. It is a serious book, masquerading as a manifesto but eventually turning into a desperately sad memoir, layered beneath the polemic, about the failure of Baldwin’s marriage and his estrangement from his only child. It’s the curse of the comic not to be taken seriously when he or she wants to be serious."
• James Traub on Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq: "'Tell Me How This Ends' is the first book about this new Iraq. It’s a first-rate piece of work, probing and conscientious, though reading a good-news book about one of America’s all-time bad-news stories can take some getting used to.... You cannot help being struck by the radical difference between Bush and his world, and Petraeus and his. The ­55-year-old general is a superachiever who took on all the toughest training assignments and came away with the ­medals, a perfectionist who demands as much from others as from himself and a deeply reflective figure — he has a Ph.D. in international relations from Princeton — who continually adapts to the lessons of experience. Petraeus puts no special store by his gut intuitions; in Iraq, he surrounded himself with junior officers as analytical, and as driven, as he is. Robinson singles out as his greatest gift not leadership but 'intellectual rigor,' which compelled him 'to mount a sustained effort to understand the problem.'"

Washington Post:

• Jonathan Yardley on A Most Wanted Man by John le Carre: "As one who has reviewed his work for more than three decades, always with admiration and at times with unfettered enthusiasm, I'd place A Most Wanted Man toward the lower end of the 21 novels he has now written. It is intelligent, of course, and immensely informative about espionage and the people who engage in it, but its prose occasionally is flabby (especially when the heroine is involved), the feelings its central characters have for each other are utterly unconvincing, and it ends on a note of clichéd, knee-jerk anti-Americanism that I find repellent. Now in his late 70s, le Carré perhaps has earned the right to phone a novel in, and phoned-in is what this one is."
• Amy Wilentz on Michelle: A Biography by Liza Mundy: "It's an odd beast, neither tabloid nor tome, less a biography than a clip-job that incorporates interviews and profiles by many other journalists, along with interviews that Mundy did in Chicago.... Even though this is a quickie book meant to capitalize on the public's current interest in Michelle Obama, it also manages, quietly and implicitly, to discount the paranoid fulminations that she has often inspired, especially among right-wing commentators."

Los Angeles Times:

• Laurel Maury on The Jewel of Medina by Sherry Jones: "[C]ritics and pundits were weighing in on a work that almost no one had seen. So what exactly is the book like? 'The Jewel of Medina' is a second-rate bodice ripper or, rather, a second-rate bodice ripper-style romance (it doesn't really have sex scenes). It's readable enough, but it suffers from large swaths of purple prose. Paragraphs read like ad copy for a Rudolph Valentino movie.... I suspect Jones wanted to write a feminist text, sort of Islam 101 for the post-'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' generation. I can't say whether, from a religious point of view, 'The Jewel of Medina' is worth the anguish it's caused, but as literature, it's a misstep-ridden, pleasant-enough mediocrity."
• Thane Rosenbaum on What Can I Do When Everything's On Fire by Antonio Lobo Antunes: "Lobo Antunes has taken stream of consciousness to a new extreme. 'What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire?' is a rushing river of interior reflection, piercing imagery and excruciating shame. The debt owed to Faulkner is apparent, with his cerebral self-awareness and utter disregard of narrative and grammatical convention. Yet, this is most assuredly not your grandmother's Faulkner -- Lobo Antunes is Faulkner on crack. 'What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire?' is a novel of abundant ambition and astonishing grace, reaffirming the author's reputation as a master stylist with a uniquely original voice."

 

Wall Street Journal:

• David M. Shribman on Reputation: Portraits in Power by Marjorie Williams: "Reputation: Portraits in Power,' ... only confirms our sense of Ms. Williams as the Lytton Strachey of our time. This volume might have been called 'Eminent Washingtonians.' 'Reputations' provides wonderful sketches, superb examples of a silky stylist at the top of her art. If I had time enough or treasure I would hand a copy to every freshman journalism student and say: Make sure this genre does not die amid a flurry of podcasts and Twitters, and while you're at it look up Lytton Strachey -- in the library, not on Wikipedia."

Globe & Mail:

• Margaret Cannon on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson: "Yet again, Scandinavia produces a brilliant, gifted author. Swede Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is a dazzling debut with marvellous characters and a wonderful story built around the most difficult of all plots, the locked room, although here, it's remote island. This novel, a runaway bestseller in Europe, will thrill North American readers as well."

The Guardian:

• Sean O'Hagan on John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman: "Norman is brilliant at evoking the postwar world from which the Beatles emerged and to which their unprecedented global success signalled the end. He vividly recreates Lennon's childhood in Liverpool, and his often tumultuous family environment, providing in the process what is the most rounded portrait to date of Lennon's wayward father.... This is the best life of Lennon to date ... if only for its brilliant evocation of his childhood in postwar England, that repressed and essentially Victorian society that shaped him and that he, more than any other British pop star, helped tear down."

The New Yorker:

• Thomas Mallon on Looking for Lincoln: The Making of an American Icon by Philip B. Kunhardt III, Peter W. Kunhardt, and Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr.: "Among the nearly fifteen thousand books published on Lincoln since his death, this one, which will appear next month, is an oddly magnificent downer, lavish and pictorial, but more wince-inducing than anything else, covering a post-Reconstruction era that prompted Frederick Douglass to pronounce emancipation, in its actual practice, 'a stupendous fraud' against Southern blacks and Lincoln himself."

--Tom

Comments

[on October 09, 2008 at 03:55 PM]

It is an indication of how deluded Bush-haters like James Traub and (apparently, according to this review) Linda Robinson are that in a book and a review of that book describing how (and more importantly finally ADMITTING that) the Surge in Iraq has worked despite all the nay-sayers in the Democrat Party, the mainstream news media (but I repeat myself), the State department, and the Pentagon, they are bound and determined to deny credit to the President who picked the general AND his strategy and backed him all the way when almost NOBODY else would.

This would be like giving all the credit for victory in the American Civil War to Generals Grant and Sherman but denying it to the president who, like Bush, had to go through an army full of McClellans until he found HIS Petraeus.