Old Media Monday Followup: Baum vs. Solnit
It's rare that a rave review leads immediately to a spat between writer and author, but as anyone knows, if you hear twenty good things about yourself and one bad, you're going to focus on the bad. (Although, as the following shows, this is not only question of hurt feelings.) Soon after Dan Baum's review of Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell (which I excerpted in Old Media Monday this week) appeared in the Washington Post, she emailed him to protest his one reservation about the book, in which he accused her of "trafficking in the kind of overheated rumor she decries" in regard to accounts of the killing of black men by white vigilantes during hurricane Katrina. On his blog, Baum posted her email and his reply (and then her further email in the comments section). A few short excerpts from a much more detailed exchange:
From Solnit:
The reluctance of the mainstream media to give credence to this story even in the face of substantial evidence has been one of the most shocking things about it. You owe me an apology. You owe a much bigger one to history.
From Baum:
Jeez Louise, Ms. Solnit. If this is how you go after somebody who writes a glowing review of one of your books, how do you address people who review you negatively?... I stand by the conclusion of my review: "(Solnit) is right to raise the issue, but she fails to turn rumor into proof." To find, at the end of a such a terrific book about the corrosive power of rumor and prejudice a lapse into just such rumor-mongering was a disappointment. Everything you raised at the end of "A Paradise Built in Hell" was worth discussing. It just wasn't "evidence," and that was my point.
Baum also links to a related article from The Nation that Solnit makes reference to. (Via GalleyCat.) --Tom
P.S. Baum, who did his own Katrina reporting for his book Nine Lives, last surfaced on Omni for his Twitterthon about his short rise-and-fall as a staff writer at The New Yorker, which turned into another contretemps of sorts with NYer writer Susan Orlean.
externe festplatte on September 24, 2009 at 02:09 AM
Just what the "anarchist-communists" need, more books for them to point to showing how great everything will be once they blow it all up and reduce us to scavenging.
"utopia is possible, if only we recognize how good life can be when the state breaks down."
So I just lost my whole family, but now that I'm working with a community for basic survival I'm now somehow in an imagined Utopia?
I wonder how the WTO protesters will fit this spontaneous anarchic communism with the "shock doctrine" which says all these people should now be completely incapable of thinking for themselves and throw themselves at the state.