Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Katie Roiphe on A Vindication of Love by Cristina Nehring: "'With our cult of success,' Nehring writes, 'we have all but obliterated the memory that in pain lies grandeur.' There is a romanticism here that could look, depending on where you stand, either pure or puerile, either bracing or silly, but it is, either way, an original view, one not generally taken and defended, one most of us could probably use a little more of. Nehring takes on our complaisance, our received ideas, our sloppy assumptions about our most important connections, and for that she deserves our admiration."
• Maslin on Everything Matters! by Ron Currie Jr.: "What these opening passages also announce is that Mr. Currie is a startlingly talented writer whose book will pay no heed to ordinary narrative conventions. His thoughts on cosmic doom somehow take the form of a joyride. He survives the inevitable, apt comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut and writes in a tenderly mordant voice of his own. He seems equipped to succeed at almost anything, in fact, except giving his books decent titles."
• Garner on Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath: "Tears in the Darkness' is authoritative history. Ten years in the making, it is based on hundreds of interviews with American, Filipino and Japanese combatants. But it is also a narrative achievement. The book seamlessly blends a wide-angle view with the stories of many individual participants. And at this book’s beating emotional heart is the tale of just one American soldier, a young cowboy and aspiring artist out of Montana named Ben Steele.... All along you are glued, out of the corner of your eye, to one story, Ben Steele’s. [SPOILER!] If you aren’t weeping openly by the book’s final scenes, when he is at last able to call home and let his family know that he is still alive after more than three years 'missing in action,' during which time this thin young man lost 50 pounds, then you have a hard crust of salt around your soul."
• Toni Bentley on The East, the West, and Sex by Richard Bernstein: "Unfortunately, but perhaps of necessity, Bernstein does a certain amount of apologetic tiptoeing around his subject — with phrases like 'it could be argued' — owing to the extremely politically incorrect nature of the facts: voracious males and compliant females are his subjects. The result of this journalistic diplomacy is that his writing has little edge, while his subject is all edge.... Bernstein has let us know all along that he is a decent sort of fellow, and just in case we suspect he’s a little too pro-harem he tells us that 'wisdom, of course, ­teaches that the greatest sexual pleasure for a man comes in a healthy monogamous and loving relationship with one woman.' Whose wisdom is this? Dr. Phil’s? It’s not the wisdom of anybody who tells the truth."
• Ross Douthat on Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin: "'Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto,' is a vindication of the aphorism about the perils of wrestling with a pig. (You get dirty; the pig likes it.) Helprin can be a wonderful wordsmith, and there are many admirable passages and strong arguments in this book. But the thread that binds the work together is hectoring, pompous and enormously tedious." (Want more? There's Lawrence Lessig's "insanely long" evisceration of Digital Barbarism in the HuffPost...)

Washington Post:

• Charles on Border Songs by Jim Lynch: "The story unfolds as a series of brief, absorbing episodes that involve a rich ensemble cast. Tender, sad and leavened with wit, 'Border Songs' reads like something written by a more efficient Richard Russo.... In a sense, Lynch has written an anti-thriller thriller, not just a liberal critique of the war on terror but also a moving, optimistic rebuttal of our paranoia that encourages us to imagine, with Brandon, the possibility of flying over everything that divides us."
• Christopher Shea on The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton and Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford: "For those who don't know de Botton's books, the author of the bestselling 'Architecture of Happiness' is a writer of long, elegant sentences and Anglo wit. Forever flirting with preciousness, he is rescued from it 87 percent of the time by his intelligence. He is not a reporter (though he reports) so much as a marvelous muser. Yet Crawford's is the better, if lumpier, text. It's the one that may upend your preconceptions about labor and, just maybe, cause you to rethink your career (or how you spend your weekends)."

Los Angeles Times:

• Laurie Stone on The Essays of Leonard Michaels: "Reading this collection feels less like an encounter with a book whose positions have been carved and sanded than a conversation with a guy in a cafeteria, his hands waving to catch an image, pieces of Danish flying from his fast mouth.... His love of maybe makes his essays works of art rather than polemics. It makes him a comedian and a theorist of comedy -- the form most attuned to limits rather than to transcendence."

Wall Street Journal:

• Frank Gannon on What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President? by Kevin Mattson: "Kevin Mattson is sometimes too much in thrall to Mr. Carter—the book’s subtitle calls the president’s address 'the speech that should have changed the country'—but he never lets his admiration get in the way of delivering a cautionary tale and a great read. And his faith in the ­significance of popular culture is both refreshing and right on the mark. It’s about time someone found Blondie as important as Barbara Tuchman. Those of us who were around back in the day will be ruefully reminded of those bygone times. And those who weren’t will be scratching their heads in disbelief at this fascinating and frequently improbable history."
• Edward Kosner on 1959: The Year Everything Changed by Fred Kaplan: "Fred Kaplan's clever '1959' has almost persuaded me that the end of the Age of Ike was one of those turning points in political and cultural history that signal the emergence of a new way of living and thinking about it. Of course, it's an old trick to pick a year -- say, 1945, with the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or 1970, with the shooting of antiwar students at Kent State -- as the cusp of a new era or the end of an old one. But Mr. Kaplan, a magazine writer and columnist for Slate, makes an intriguing case that 1959 was an authentic annus mirabilis."

Globe and Mail:

• Natalie McLennan on The Johns: Sex for Sale and the Men Who Buy It by Victor Malarek: " Even the idea of The Johns made me nervous: Was I going to have to experience the nightmare stories I'd heard about, girls being raped and beaten by johns and pimps? This wasn't the Pretty Woman fairy tale I signed up for a few years ago when I started working as an escort. This is hardly a feel-good book; it's a feel really, really bad book.... All you have to do is look in these girls' eyes to know that they are not happy, not prostitutes by choice. Eyes are a recurring theme in Malarek's book: Johns never look in the girls' eyes, and the sparkle disappears from a child prostitute's eyes. I never opened my eyes when I was with a client. And I kept them closed until now."

The Guardian:

• M. John Harrison on Hodd by Adam Thorpe (available in UK only): "In the histories of Hodd and the hermit there's a real sense of medieval people living in their filth and uncertainty and disease, infested with maggots and ideas, trying to manage it all with the tools of extreme religion, which so resemble the tools of lunacy.... [It's] a novel of sly and powerful ironies in which, at every turn, a kind of visionary fundamentalism trumps the humanity of its narrator. All Matthew ever wants is a father, and all he ever gets offered is ideas. We don't know whether to laugh or cry at this lifelong vulnerability."
• Steven Poole on Nobody Move by Denis Johnson: "After the 2007 publication of Tree of Smoke, his stupendous 600-page Vietnam war epic, Denis Johnson might well have wanted to kick back and let off some steam. He does so in grand style here. Nobody Move is a terse little hardboiled entertainment that originally ran last year as a four-part serial in Playboy magazine. Relatively speaking, the author may be slumming it, but he can't help slathering the story's pages in his usual idiosyncratic brilliance."

The New Yorker:

• James Wood on Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shahriar Mandanipour: "The first hundred pages or so of 'Censoring an Iranian Love Story' are exciting. Mandanipour’s writing is exuberant, bonhomous, clever, profuse with puns and literary-political references.... One problem with the form of the novel, however, is that Mandanipour’s unofficial authorial commentary is soon of greater interest to the reader than the official love story. A novel in which the informal, uncensored critique gradually overwhelmed the formal, censored story would have been fascinating, and gripping in its way. Instead, Mandanipour perseveres with the formal tale of Dara and Sara, who are interesting whenever the author writes unofficially about them, and boring whenever they are participants in 'an Iranian Love Story.'"
• Jill Lepore on Home Game by Michael Lewis and Bad Mother by Ayelet Waldman: "If you’ve ever read a parenting blog, and I don’t say you ought to, you have a good idea what lies at the heart of these books: ersatz confession. Lewis finds newborns hard to love; Waldman hires a maid to clean up after her maid. Lewis tells all—all!—about his vasectomy; Waldman provides her sexual history.... Lots of people find this kind of thing winsome, I guess.... But as long as we’re trafficking in unsought revelation, reading these books made me think of nothing so much as traipsing to the playground with a twelve-month-old who merrily toddles off to the sandbox while I, despite hiding behind a newspaper and attempting to appear exactly as approachable as Napoleon Bonaparte, find myself cornered by a stranger: 'You have a baby? I have a baby! Doesn’t parenthood beat all?' I’ve been that stranger, too (I confess! I confess!), which must be why I’m such an easy mark; the sandbox, my Waterloo. I used to like that conversation. Lately, though, it’s been getting old: all the mothers want forgiveness; all the fathers want applause."

--Tom