Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Walter Kirn on Methland by Nick Reding: "The book, wrought from old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting of a type that’s disappearing faster than nonfranchised lunch counters on Main Street, isn’t chiefly a tale of drugs and crime, of dysfunction and despair, but a recession-era tragedy scaled for an 'Our Town,' Thornton Wilder stage and seemingly based on a script by William S. Burroughs. As Reding painstakingly presents it, the production, distribution and consumption of methamphetamine is a self-catalyzing catastrophe of Chernobylish dimensions. The rich, with their far-off, insulated lives, get richer and more detached, while the poor get high and, finally, wasted. In the meanwhile, the traffickers fatten in their dens, expanding their arsenals and their private armies, some of whose troops are recruited from the ranks of the pale zombies their business spawns."
• Dominique Browning on The Bolter by Frances Osborne: "Alcohol. Cocaine. Promiscuity. Nympho­mania. Wife swapping. Divorce. Profligate spending. ­Sixties swingers? Merely rocking in their cradles. The beautiful and damned of New York’s Roaring Twenties? Neophytes vomiting on the sidewalks. It was the British colonialists in 1920s Africa, the Happy Valley set, who took partying to mythic heights, or depths, depending on your perspective. They didn’t stop until their lives were in smithereens. And the internationally celebrated and reviled high priestess of this crowd ... was Idina Sackville.... Out of countless trunks and boxes of letters and diaries pours the unremittingly sad story of a legendary woman, and an unnerving portrait of upper-crust London and colonial Africa in the early 20th century."
• Garner on Last Journey by Darrell Griffin Sr. and Darrell Griffin Jr.: "Two soldiers in dress greens knocked on the door, came inside to deliver their news and then walked back out. It’s an all-too-common scene, but it arrives at the beginning of an uncommon book, one in which a mourning father has scooped up a dead son’s e-mail messages, blog posts and journal entries and combined them with his own observations. He’s made something that is, at worst, ungainly, but at best raw and true and unvarnished and strange, its own kind of outsider art."
• Maslin on Free by Chris Anderson (and Cheap by Ellen Ruppel Shell): "But after beating the drum for giveaways throughout most of his book, Mr. Anderson eventually acknowledges that his idea is in fact not viable. Such are the perils of his sloppily constructed sweeping argument. No, he doesn’t envision an economy based entirely on giveaways. 'Free may be the best price, but it can’t be the only one,' he says. He advocates the balancing of differently priced versions for different markets, acknowledging that this tricky balance is not easily achieved." [Not to keep picking on Maslin here, but what she claims as a reluctantly confessed exception to his "sweeping argument" is, in fact, his argument.]

Washington Post:

• Marie Arana on The Ascent of George Washington by John Ferling: "Once in a while a book comes along to remind us that history has no gods, that the past is less fossil than textbooks suggest and America more vibrant than a mere list of principles. John Ferling's 'Ascent of George Washington' is just such a book: a fresh, clear-eyed portrait of the full-blooded political animal that was George Washington.... It's as if a trusted historian with ample laurels were taking us aside, speaking to us like adults, letting us in on the very grown-up information that the father of our country may have been a great man in very many ways, but was also as cunning and as complicated as any modern-day politician."
• Charles on A Monster's Notes by Laurie Sheck: "Gorgeously printed by New York's premier publishing house, here is a baffling 500-page book about Frankenstein's creation that defies description and shreds any expectations you might have for a novel.... I'm sure somewhere there's a reader smart enough (or dishonest enough) to enjoy this novel in all its rich allusiveness, but I spent the entire ordeal lurching along about 50 IQ points behind. Having survived the encounter, though, I'm eager to brag about it, and even if 'The Monster's Notes' is nothing you want to experience firsthand, it's a remarkable creation, a baroque opera of grief, laced with lines of haunting beauty and profundity."

Los Angeles Times:

• Joanna Smith Rakoff on Heroic Measures by Jill Ciment: "Given that Jill Ciment's 'Heroic Measures' opens in the months following Sept. 11, it's hardly surprising that one of her geriatric heroines should find 'the anxiety of being left alone in the apartment became too much for her . . . particularly as dusk fell and nocturnal shadows grew menacing, and her sense of loneliness and old age became inseparable.' What is surprising -- like much in this brave, generous, nearly perfect novel -- is that this particular character, Dorothy, is a dachshund. And yet, Ciment manages to pull off this risky, sentiment-baiting maneuver, an accomplishment previously attained only by the likes of Tolstoy."
• Wendy Smith on Camus: A Romance by Elizabeth Hawes: "Misjudged first as an avatar of existentialism, then as an out-of-touch reactionary, he was in fact, Elizabeth Hawes reveals in her intimate study, a deeply private man propelled into the public arena by the tides of history and his sense of responsibility.... What Hawes does brilliantly is bring to life Camus the human being: the charming friend, the seductive womanizer, the lifelong outsider 'from somewhere else.' ... We get a bit too much of Hawes in her frankly confessional narrative, but perhaps that's what she needed to do to give us so much of Camus with such perceptiveness and warmth."

The Globe and Mail:

• Sheila Heti on True to Life and Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees by Lawrence Weschler: "The result is two deeply engaging volumes, intimate portraits of what it feels like to think about art for so long, and to be on a passionate search. Weschler writes with the suspense and pacing of a detective novelist, and we intimately accompany the artists through their epiphanies, doubts and discoveries, wondering what corner they're likely to turn next.... The reader puts down these volumes with new eyes, seeing the world as if for the first time, or as if one has stepped out of a great art museum on an afternoon on which one has been particularly receptive."
• Brad McKay on A Drifting Life by Yoshihiro Tatsumi: "In A Drifting Life, he attempts to transform the solitary life of the cartoonist into an outsized adventure story, and the creative process behind the form into something genuinely exciting. This is the cartoonist as heroic protagonist.... For anyone who has been fortunate enough to fall under the spell of Tatsumi's groundbreaking work of the 1960s and '70s, this book will prove a compelling and worthwhile read. And for those brave souls aspiring to become a cartoonist themselves, A Drifting Life will prove to be indispensable."

The Guardian:

• Martin Amis on My Father's Tears by John Updike: "This piece would have gone unwritten if its subject were still alive. In the last three decades I have published about 15,000 words of more or less unqualified praise of John Updike, and his achievement remains immortal.... Updike's prose, that fantastic engine of euphony, of first-echelon perception, and of a wit both vicious and all-forgiving, has in this book lost its compass. Formerly, you used to reread Updike's sentences in a spirit of incredulous admiration. Here, too often, you reread them wondering a) what they mean, or b) why they're there, or c) how they survived composition, routine reappraisal, and proof-checking without causing a spasm of horrified self-correction."
• Sarah Churchwell on Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas: "All this self-conscious literariness risks becoming as solipsistic as the protagonist - and as pretentious. While allusions and quotations pile up, storylines and characters disappear.... But the book is unquestionably redeemed by its intelligence, its ambition - and most of all by the lovely, bluesy riffs it ceaselessly plays on old American standards."

The New Yorker:

• Malcolm Gladwell on Chris Anderson's Free: "'Information wants to be free,' Anderson tells us, 'in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill.' But information can’t actually want anything, can it? Amazon wants the information in the Dallas paper to be free, because that way Amazon makes more money. Why are the self-interested motives of powerful companies being elevated to a philosophical principle? ... The only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws." [Anderson has responded on his blog to one of the questions that Gladwell raises.]

--Tom