Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Mary Roach on Cold by Bill Streever: "Streever explains in a way that makes things stick. He doesn’t just tell you small birds need to keep eating. He says, 'A crossbill needs to find a spruce seed every seven seconds.' He doesn’t tell us that blubber is good insulation. He tells us it has the same thermal conductivity as asbestos. Or that a polar bear 'enters the cold season rotund, wearing the equivalent of eight or 10 wool sweaters under its fur.' ... A warning: This is a book only in that it has a cover. It’s structured more like a blog.... I fought it for a chapter or two, and then I gave in. The book is so interesting it doesn’t matter."
• Douglas Wolk on Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli: "Enter 'Asterios Polyp': a big, proud, ambitious chunk of a graphic novel, with modernism on its mind and a perfectly geometrical chip on its shoulder. The tension between formalist rigor and emotional subtlety is not just the theme (and method) of the cartoonist David ­Mazzucchelli’s decade-in-the-making opus; it’s basically the plot.... 'Asterios Polyp' is a dazzling, expertly constructed entertainment, even as it’s maddening and even suffocating at times. It demands that its audience wrestle with it, argue with it, reread and re-examine it. Isn’t that the ultimate purpose of style?"
• Maslin on The Wilderness Warrior by Douglas Brinkley: "[F]or the patient reader Mr. Brinkley’s fervent enthusiasm for his material eventually prevails over the book’s sprawling data and slow pace.... He conveys the great vigor with which Roosevelt approached his conservation mission. And he delves into the philosophical contradictions inherent in a man whose Darwinian thinking led him both to revere and kill the same creatures."
• Tony Horwitz on Israel Is Real by Rich Cohen: "Rich Cohen’s book accomplished the miraculous. It made a subject that has vexed me since early childhood into a riveting story. Not by breaking new ground or advancing a bold peace plan, but by narrating the oft-told saga of the Jews in a fresh and engaging fashion.... The results aren’t always convincing (is ­Superman’s cape really a Jewish prayer shawl?), but they seldom fail to be provocative and entertaining."

Washington Post:

• Yardley on The Essays of Leonard Michaels: "Michaels certainly was no sentimentalist, but he strongly preferred the more modest, introspective, feeling culture of his youth to the arrogant, assertive, rude one of the present.... These are not the maunderings of one seized by nostalgia, but ones of an acutely sensitive man who was appalled by the coarsening of what now passes for adult civilization. As it happens this is a horror that I feel myself, which doubtless predisposes me to these essays, but what really matters is that you'll look for a long time to find writing as good as this and thinking as clear."
• Charles on Glover's Mistake by Nick Laird: "By the time you realize just what a dangerous writer Nick Laird is, it's too late to break away. This new novel from Zadie Smith's husband comes on all wit and chumminess, a buddy story about two London roommates in love with the same woman. But in the familiar surroundings of romantic comedy, Laird is busy plotting something far more unsettling. 'Glover's Mistake' turns imperceptibly toward the poisonous effects of bitterness, and it'll leave you feeling wary all day, as though you'd lain down with Nick Hornby and woken up beside Muriel Spark."

Los Angeles Times:

• Daniel Mallory on The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson: "Scalp those umlauted ö's, prize the double-s' apart, pave the varicose waterways of Larsson's Stockholm, and behold -- the Millennium novels are outfitted like urban-American thrillers, thick-skinned and sinewy, kinked with absurd plot twists and steeped in gore. While 'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo' read like a Nordic 'Silence of the Lambs,' its dynamic, brawny sequel, 'The Girl Who Played With Fire,' reanimates the tropes of the political thriller."
• Ross Simonini on Fugue State by Brian Evenson: "Brian Evenson is the Donald Barthelme of psychological horror. Over a career of four novels and five story collections, he has birthed a distinctive, postmodern style for exploring his favorite macabre topics -- amputation, post-apocalyptic landscapes, doppelgängers, 'creatures of darkness' and religious bloodshed. Yet the grimmest turns in Evenson's writing have always been connected to a singularly modern obsession with language.... His characters cling to sentences, phrases and words with the intensity that usually accompanies unrequited love."

Wall Street Journal:

• Brenda Wineapple on A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition by Ernest Hemingway: "The newly restored edition gives us an opportunity to meet Hemingway less as the controlled craftsman that he long pretended to be than as the embittered, frightened, sharp-eyed avoider of feelings who captured them unerringly. But in many ways the book remains what it was: the elegiac testimony of a writer sensitive to time and change, to false starts and to false people, most especially himself, and all those 'limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring.'”

The Globe and Mail:

• Martin Levin on Sum: Forty Tales of the Afterlives by David Eagleman: "When David Eagleman's Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives dropped on my desk a while back, I thought: Hmmm, a cute little self-help book to which I need give no further consideration. Definitely, as they say, my bad. Little it may be, a 109-page bijou of a book. And cute for sure, despite the vaguely ectoplasmic image on the cover. (One of my sons considered “ectoplasm” the ugliest word he knew.) But self-help? Only in the sense that delight and instruction are to be derived from Eagleman's 40 excurses into possible variants on life after life, and that a variety of lessons may be inferred therefrom."

The Guardian:

• Sarah Churchwell on Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon: "The Crying of Lot 49 contains some of the most beautiful, elegiac writing about America since Fitzgerald, as well as packing an intense metaphorical punch about revelation, hierophany, meaning and connection that is far too complex to reduce to precis. By contrast, Inherent Vice is often very funny but in the end only gestures toward meaning, significance in semaphore. That said, it is probably Pynchon's most readable novel. Remarkably, it features both a sympathetic protagonist and a recognisable plot, albeit one that is as impossible to summarise as any other Pynchon shaggy dog tale."
• Bernardine Evaristo on Jerusalem by Patrick Neate: "Jerusalem is Neate's most inventive book to date and also the hardest to define - is it three novellas thrown together? Is it one novel fragmented into several very disparate parts? It certainly invites comparisons with David Mitchell's genre-busting Cloud Atlas. And, as with Mitchell, the ambition and imaginative reach of Neate's writing are admirable." [Side note: there are, apparently, characters named "David Pinner" in both Jerusalem and Nick Laird's Glover's Mistake (reviewed above), which bears further investigation...]

The New Yorker:

• Louis Menand on Pynchon's Inherent Vice: “'Inherent Vice' does not appear to be a Pynchonian palimpsest of semi-obscure allusions. (I could be missing something, of course. I could be missing everything.) It’s a slightly spoofy take on hardboiled crime fiction, a story in which the characters smoke dope and watch 'Gilligan’s Island' instead of sitting around a night club knocking back J&Bs. It’s 'The Maltese Falcon' starring Cheech and Chong, 'The Big Sleep' as told by the hippy-dippy weatherman. Whether you think it’s funny depends a little on whether you think Cheech and Chong and the hippy-dippy weatherman are funny for more than about two minutes. It’s funnier than Chandler, anyway."

--Tom