Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Leah Hager Cohen on The Mercy Papers by Robin Romm: "Full disclosure: I may have a little crush on Romm. Not because she’s a good writer, although her prose ... is so fresh and uncompromising it can feel practically impertinent. Nor because of her wit, although she can be startlingly funny (particularly on the subject of her nonagenarian grandfather). Not even because of her fearless, scathing honesty, like a gauntlet thrown down on page after page. It’s ultimately her anger that is so magnetic — though like a real magnet, it holds power both to repel and to attract."
• Liesl Schillinger on The Red Convertible: Selected and New Stories by Louise Erdrich: "Readers of Erdrich may think of her as a chronicler of Native American ways, and this she certainly is, but her mine taps other veins as well. Many sorts of Americans appear among her characters: a reclusive New Hampshire sculptor; a small-minded German sister-in-law; a trapeze artist who saves her daughter from a burning house; a play-acting bank robber; a Eurasian doctor who lures a college girl by promising to cook her an omelet. Some readers may think of Erdrich as a teller of folk tales and parables, which she also is, although much of her writing lies outside that category. Still others may regard her as a master tuner of the taut emotions that keen between parent and child, man and woman, brother and sister, man and beast, and she is that as well. She can also be very, very funny."
• Adam Kirsch on Amerika: The Missing Person by Franz Kafka, translated by Mark Harman: "Karl’s innocence is the main reason 'Amerika' remains less persuasive a parable than 'The Trial' and 'The Castle.' To be sure, in his first novel Kafka lighted instinctively on many of the techniques he would later use to such great effect. So similar are all three novels in structure and mood that they can be seen as the successively widening turns of a spiral; each time, Kafka surveys the same spiritual territory, but from a more commanding height."
• Maslin on The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston: "'The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death' is his almost entirely successful leap into crime fiction’s mainstream. Despite frequent and literally splashy touches of the grotesque, it takes a tart, quick-witted, sharply funny trip, hijacked only by certain conventional plot touches and brushes with sentimentality. The vivid hilarity of Mr. Huston’s hippies manqué and stumblebum, Hollywood-obsessed tough guys is this book’s hallmark."
• Kakutani on Lark and Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips: "Jayne Anne Phillips's intricate, deeply felt new novel reverberates with echoes of Faulkner, Woolf, Kerouac, McCullers and Michael Herr's war reporting, and yet it fuses all these wildly disparate influences into something incandescent and utterly original."

Washington Post:

• Dirda on Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill: "Only writing -- a talent that the now 91-year-old Athill discovered relatively late in life -- affords some modest pleasure to this former editor for the English publisher André Deutsch. To readers Athill delivers far more than modest pleasure: Her easy-going prose and startling honesty are riveting, for whither she has gone many of us will go as well.... A refusal to sugar-coat and a commitment to utter frankness, coupled with an engaging style, make Diana Athill's Somewhere Towards the End unusually appealing, despite its inherently cheerless subject."
• David Smick on The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath by Robert J. Samuelson and The Return of Depression Economics and the Crash of 2008 by Paul Krugman: "The world desperately needs a big-think financial doctrine. The problem is not a lack of capital or liquidity, but a lack of trust in the financial system. Team Obama needs to use its considerable brainpower to outline nothing less than a global financial architecture for the 21st century. This, however, will be a process of muddling through, a sorting out of possible solutions by trial and error. As Samuelson and Krugman show, there are no quick-fix panaceas. The age of hubris is, or should be, over."

Los Angeles Times:

• Donna Seaman on Lima Nights by Marie Arana (who just stepped down as the editor of the Washington Post's Book World to focus on her writing): "'Lima Nights,' her second novel, is a study in contrasts and a devastating cross-cultural and cross-racial urban love story as sinuous, precise and incendiary as a tango.... So rich in feeling and perception, so wrenching and paradoxical is 'Lima Nights,' its beautifully sad, mysterious and soulful music plays on long after the book is closed."

Wall Street Journal:

• Mark Falcoff on The Shameful Peace by Frederic Spotts: "With 'The Shameful Peace' he lifts the lid on one of the least known -- and most shameful episodes -- of the period: namely, the role of artists and intellectuals in occupied France.... Hitler, far from trying to eradicate French national culture, chose to nourish it as a distraction from his other demands. During the years of occupation the German authorities positively encouraged literature, theater and the arts -- as long as Jews, Freemasons or (after June 1941) communists were excluded....Carefully and authoritatively written, 'The Shameful Peace' peels back the pages of history and reminds us of events that many would still prefer to forget."

The Guardian:

• Killian Fox on A Quiet Adjustment by Benjamin Markovits: "The conflict [Lord Byron's] attentions produced in the mind of this subtle, calculating young woman is dramatised with extraordinary precision by Markovits, a 35-year-old American who studied in England and now lives in London. It's hard to decide which is more remarkable - his insight into the psychology of a 19th-century Englishwoman or his control over the language of her thoughts.... A brisk, straightforward narrative lends ballast to each lyrical flight, making Annabella's story as compelling to read as it is dazzling. Then again, it would take a lot to make any tale from Byron's life seem dull."

The New Yorker:

• Adam Kirsch on Hannah Arendt: "This is the insight that makes Arendt a thinker for our time, when failed states have again and again become the settings for mass murder. She reveals with remorseless logic why emotional appeals to 'human rights' or 'the international community' so often prove impotent in the face of a humanitarian crisis. 'The Rights of Man, after all, had been defined as ‘inalienable’ because they were supposed to be independent of all governments,' she writes in 'Origins,' 'but it turned out that the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them.' This is exactly what happened in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and what is happening now in Darfur. Genocide is a political problem, Arendt insists, and it can be solved only politically. Yet the supreme value that Arendt places on individual pride and aristocratic distance, on intellect and excellence, also sharply restricts the human understanding that must be the basis for any confrontation with political evil, especially the evil of the Holocaust. Too much of life and too many kinds of people are excluded from Arendt’s sympathy, which she could freely give only to those as strong as she was."

--Tom

Comments

[Jerry on January 08, 2009 at 08:06 AM]

Journey Home by Paul Burke is an excellent novel. One your readers might like. The URL provided will take you to the home page for reviews and a brief chapter selection. Enjoy!