Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review: The Inauguration Issue, including Anthony Lewis on King's Dream by Eric J. Sundquist: "A remarkable fact of which I was unaware is that the last third of the speech — the part about the dream — was extemporized by King. He had a text, completed the night before. But as he was addressing the crowd, protesting the indignities and brutalities suffered by blacks, he put the prepared speech aside, paused for a moment and then introduced an entirely new theme. 'I still have a dream,' he said. 'It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream....'"
• Gary Hart on Presidential Command by Peter W. Rodman: "For those who find comfort in believing their nation’s role in the world is being guided by sober, thoughtful, wise and judicious men and women, this book is not to be recommended. Indeed, its look at behind-­the-scenes policy-making may give America’s enemies considerable comfort. And a skeptical reader may conclude that foreign policy is a field so messed up no one can manage it. But 'Presidential Command' should be on the short list of readings for members of the Barack Obama administration — as much for its pointing out the mistakes to avoid as for illustrating the procedures to emulate."
• Kathryn Harrison on Lark and Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips: "Jayne Anne Phillips renders what is realistically impossible with such authority that the reader never questions its truth. This is the alchemy of great fiction: the fantastic dream that’s created in 'Lark and Termite' is one the reader enters without ever looking back."
• Maslin on Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed: "Mr. Ahamed, an investment manager who proves to be a writer of great verve and erudition, easily connects the dots between the economic crises that rocked the world during the years his book covers and the fiscal emergencies that beset us today. He does this winningly enough to make his book about an international monetary horror story seem like a labor of love."

Washington Post:

• Alan Cooperman on The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama by Gwen Ifill: "After 30 years of reporting for newspapers and television, Ifill is programmed to give both sides of the story and avoid expressing an opinion. She lends a sympathetic ear to Obama and Clinton, to the surviving lions and the impatient upstarts, to those who want to erase race from politics and those who think race is indelible. Perhaps that's why, in the end, her book is gently persuasive. Without cheerleading for any individual, it gives us something to cheer about: a breakthrough that is bigger, even, than Obama's."
• Marie Arana on The Piano Teacher by Janice Y.K. Lee: "Let's make no false claims here. The Piano Teacher hardly rises to the level of novels by Ballard, Greene or Farrell.... Nevertheless, a persistent reader will be rewarded. There is something altogether haunting here. Perhaps it's the way the story advances, peeling its way from layer to layer until the truth of each character lies bare. Perhaps it's the way Lee shows us that war can make monsters of us all. Most memorably, however, it's her portrait of Hong Kong, which having witnessed so much cupidity, moves on with splendid indifference."

Los Angeles Times:

• Susan Salter Reynolds on Elsewhere, U.S.A. by Dalton Conley: "You know how Andy Rooney always asks these whiny questions about why things don't work the way he thinks they should? You agree with him, sure, but you also feel a little stupid for being duped by the march of progress. Way too many sociologists sound like Andy Rooney -- with their smug little I-told-you-so's, picking their noses and chuckling ominously at human idiocy.... 'Welcome to Elsewhere, U.S.A.,' Conley says gleefully. I want to kill myself, you think. But do go on."
• Wendy Smith on Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the 100 Days That Created Modern America: "His focus is on FDR as chief executive in the most fundamental sense of the term: a masterful manager who set the agenda and delegated others to sweat the details.... In a lucid, intelligent narrative as fast-paced as the hectic Hundred Days, Cohen skillfully charts the course of events with just enough detail, building by accretion a portrait of the stop-and-start process by which sweeping change is made. Present-day liberals dismayed by an Obama Cabinet filled with centrist old hands may take comfort in the author's analysis of Roosevelt's decision-making style: He surrounded himself with experts, listened to everyone, then made up his own mind."

Wall Street Journal:

• Matthew Continetti on So Much Damn Money by Robert G. Kaiser: "Mr. Kaiser would like to have things both ways. He wants to argue that the influence of money and fat-cat conservatives have turned Washington into a place where 'the players have ignored or avoided a great many grave national problems.' But he also wants to pay tribute to a lost Washington, the city where legislators had an 'appetite for taking on serious national problems, including many related to poverty and inequality"'and where bureaucracies were staffed with 'devoted public servants' who 'marched to their own drummers' and 'were not enticed by the new incentives to get rich.' But of course it was the exponential growth of government during Mr. Kaiser's lost empyrean age that created the opportunities for graft exploited by the likes of Jack Abramoff."
• Saul Rosenberg on William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man by Duncan Wu: "What Mr. Wu gives us is, if not a broad, persuasive argument, an astonishingly detailed account of Hazlitt's life -- from his writing habits down to what he ate for dinner and with whom. Along the way the author paints a vivid portrait of an England racked by pro- and anti-Revolutionary fervor, and particularly of London, with its finery and squalor, its artistic delights and banal necessities -- 'Othello' at the theater and the bailiff at the door. Drawn steadily in by the biography's fantastic detail, we sink into Hazlitt's world itself. There may be better books on Hazlitt, but none that offers us so direct an experience of the writer's actual life."

Globe and Mail:

• Ray Robertson on Hot Burritos: The True Story of the Flying Burrito Brothers by John Einarson and Chris Hillman: "Every time (and there are several) that Hillman proudly invokes in Hot Burritos the achievements of his lengthy post-Parsons career with such very professional, very boring outfits as the Parsons-less Burrito Brothers, the Souther, Hillman and Furay Band, and the Desert Rose Band as a way to illustrate how he's the more accomplished artist, and how Parsons was just a talented kid who blew it and who never lived up to his potential, one can't help but be reminded of Ludwig Wittgenstein's definition of genuine art: 'A wild beast, tamed.' And, fair or not, it's the tamers we're thankful for, but it's the wild beasts we remember."

The Guardian:

• Carrie O'Grady on The Outlander by Gil Adamson (out in Canada in 2007, where it won our Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award, in the US in 2008, and now the UK in 2009): "If you never managed to track down a good read for your Christmas break, this may just make up for it. Striking, thoughtful, full of unexpected twists, The Outlander is that rare delight: a novel that is beautifully written yet as gripping as any airport page-turner.... Adamson, a Toronto-based poet, must possess either an impressive collection of reference books or a powerful imagination - or both. How else could she describe so convincingly how it feels to take laudanum, to be shot with an arrow, to eat raw venison on an empty stomach?"

The New Yorker:

• No long book review this week. Here's one of the unsigned brief reviews, of Damon Galgut's The Impostor: "Galgut gives even seemingly innocuous details sinister overtones: the clicking of peacocks on a roof, the shuffling steps of Canning’s elderly black servants. Beneath a fairly standard thriller plot (affairs, corruption) runs a critique of contemporary South Africa, from the venality of those enriched by a reinvigorated economy to the stale pieties of the white liberal class."

--Tom

Comments

[mrbill on March 20, 2009 at 02:07 PM]

But, and its a big one. There is no mention of what caused it to start. No talk of the Community Reinvestment Act and Jimmy Carter et al, Barney Frank, et al.