Omnivoracious: Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

Sunday Book Review cover: Graydon Carter on George, Being George by Nelson W. Aldrich Jr.: "He was not only in on the joke of being George Plimpton, he created the joke. More than anyone else I can think of, he embodied two signal strains of WASP-hood: he worked very hard to make it all look terribly easy, and in his charming, Mittyesque way he personified the gifted amateur who was game for just about anything. And that was the George Plimpton his friends and the public saw."
Kakutani on Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell: "'Outliers,' Mr. Gladwell’s latest book, employs this same recipe, but does so in such a clumsy manner that it italicizes the weaknesses of his methodology. The book, which purports to explain the real reason some people — like Bill Gates and the Beatles — are successful, is peppy, brightly written and provocative in a buzzy sort of way. It is also glib, poorly reasoned and thoroughly unconvincing."
Andrew Cayton on American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham: "'American Lion' is enormously entertaining, especially in the deft descriptions of Jackson's personality and domestic life in his White House. But Meacham has missed an opportunity to reflect on the nature of American populism as personified by Jackson. What does it mean to have a president who believes that the people are a unified whole whose essence can be distilled into the pronouncements of one man? Populist resentment is to democracies as air is to fire. But republics may endure best when leaders remain uncertain — as several dozen did in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 — as to whether the people can be entirely trusted with their own government."
Marcel Theroux on Kieron Smith, boy by James Kelman: "There’s not a memorable sentence in the entire book. Occasionally, the result is a moving artlessness or a pungent, rhythmic vitality. More often, the effect is one of eye-watering dullness.... Still, this isn’t a bad book. Kelman is a writer of singular will and sincerity. He is, like many highly original artists, proposing to create the taste by which he is judged. In language and structure, he rejects forms that have worked for other writers. He willfully ducks anything that resembles a decisive climax — as if to write one would do violence to the naturalism of his material. Instead, grittily, by inches, and yammering all the time, Kieron pulls himself virtually unaided into young manhood."

Washington Post:

Ron Charles on The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb: "A great story is buried in Wally Lamb's avalanche of a novel, The Hour I First Believed, but only the most determined readers will manage to dig it out. The author -- twice blessed by Oprah, for She's Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True -- can be a captivating storyteller, and he has built this story on one of the most shocking acts of violence in modern history. Sadly, though, his new novel becomes so burdened by diversions, delays, tangents and side plots that the whole rambling enterprise grows maddening, the kind of book you want to throw across the room, if only you could lift it."
Michael Dirda on The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul by Patrick French: "He starts life as a twerp, then fairly quickly becomes a jerk and ends up an old sourpuss. The best overall epithet for him is infantile -- though one shouldn't neglect the claims of such adjectives as whiney, narcissistic, insulting, needy, callous, impolite, cruel, vengeful, indecisive, miserly, exploitative, snobbish, sadistic, self-pitying and ungrateful."

Los Angeles Times:

Alexander Theroux on The Canterbury Tales, translated by Burton Raffel: "I commend Raffel for his ambition to get folks to read and understand this complex poem. But the problem is that, in so doing, while giving readers access to the mysteries, he ironically robs those mysteries of their beauty. The genius of this magnificent poem is precisely in its original words.... Translating Chaucer is hazardously compromising at best. Technical words become ordinary. Puns can lose their significance. Rhymes are lost. Colors fade. Substitution can seem like a violation.... Chaucer is the crown, the full flower, of English medieval verse. As Ezra Pound declared in 'ABC of Reading,' 'Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books forever.'"
David Ulin on Omega: The Unknown by Jonathan Lethem and Farel Dalrymple: "Gathered for the first time in one volume, it is a strange and wonderful hybrid: a superhero comic that reads with all the ambiguity of fiction, set in the Manhattan neighborhood of Inwood and -- like 'The Fortress of Solitude' -- merging the fantastic with the most mundane aspects of teenage urban life.... But what ultimately sets 'Omega: The Unknown' apart is how quickly we forget about who wrote it and lose ourselves in its flow."

Wall Street Journal:

Martin Rubin on The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher: "Philip Hensher has produced a work of fiction that is the antithesis of so many fashionable contemporary novels, with their elliptical ironies and screenplay-ready dialogue. 'The Northern Clemency' is a richly textured, closely observed saga -- beginning in 1974 and continuing into the 1990s -- of two British families in the Yorkshire city of Sheffield. Mr. Hensher provides plenty of action, but he embeds it in the atmosphere and rhythms of quotidian existence. There is an aspect of social history to the novel that reminds one of Mrs. Gaskell or even Dickens."
David A. Shaywitz on Gladwell's Outliers: "For all the quibbles that may attend the individual stories that Mr. Gladwell has assembled -- the thrust of his argument is right on target. Ultimately, he isn't trying to provide a prescription for individual success; this is not a self-help book. Rather, he seeks to focus our attention on a much more profound question: How much potential out there is being ignored? How much raw talent remains uncultivated and ultimately lost because we cling to outmoded ideas of what success looks like and what is required to achieve it?"

Globe & Mail:

Andrew Pyper on When Will There Be Good News by Kate Atkinson: "Atkinson's detective novels are masterworks of character-driven plots and leisurely observation. But they are primarily triumphs not of storytelling, but of tone: sardonic, faithless and dark as the inside of a cow. As a reader, you might come for the mystery, but you'll return for the prose."
Jeffrey Foss on The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Portrait of Your Head by Raymond Tallis: "Anyone with an interest in what it is to be human will enjoy reading this book. In the early chapters, Raymond Tallis - British professor of medicine, poet, novelist, philosopher - establishes himself as the Shakespeare of the skull. Though I found myself awash in the flood of anatomical detail that Tallis presented, I went with the flow of his charming prose, amazed that anatomy could be so ... well, so engrossing."

The Guardian:

Steven Poole on Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality by Manjit Kumar: "Manjit Kumar's book is an exhaustive and brilliant account of decades of emotionally charged discovery and argument, friendship and rivalry spanning two world wars. In what also has to operate as a kind of group biography of Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli, Dirac et al, the quasi-novelistic character sketches occasionally have a comic quality ('The son of a tax collector, Ludwig Boltzmann was short and stout with an impressive late 19th-century beard'); but the real meat of the book is the explanations of science and philosophical interpretation, which are pitched with an ideal clarity for the general reader."

Times Literary Supplement:

Toby Lichtig on Ghost Train to the Eastern Star by Paul Theroux: "Theroux has over the years brought to the genre an idiosyncratic brand of dry observation and honest complaint – an attention to the 'delay' and 'nuisance' intrinsic to the whole experience. Today, his approach seems pleasingly anachronistic. There are no gimmicks – no milk floats to ride or fridges to transport – no hare-brained schemes or impossibly hidden treasure. Instead, there are encounters, observations and, sometimes, wisdom. Paul Theroux is chiefly interested in the fluidity of human life, and one gets the feeling that he could write about the same journey for a third time and not be boring. He moves about, looks around him and tells us what he sees and feels. Few do it better."

New Yorker:

No long reviews, but there is John Lahr on David Rabe: "Rabe often sleeps in a bed in the corner of the ground floor—a small clearing in a forest of files and papers. Upstairs, past a water cooler, a James Dean poster, and photographs of his dogs, the five-hundred-square-foot space is a sea of books—books in bookcases, books in piles, books stashed, according to subject matter, in dozens of black bags that litter the floor. Three writing desks, two computers, and chairs loom like islands in a literary deluge.... He has several novels under way. 'I hope to finish a lot of these things, but who knows,' he said. Writing his latest novel, 'Dinosaurs on the Roof,' 'was a deeply satisfying time.' 'I just felt I was really on something alive, which is all you can ask for, frankly,' he said."

--Tom

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