Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Liesl Schillinger on Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls: "[Laura Ingalls] Wilder’s stories have acquired such mythic power (in 'The Glass Castle,' Walls lists them among her favorite childhood books) that it can be easy to forget how many American families shared similar histories, each with their own touchstones of calamity, endurance and hard-won reward. With convincing, unprettified narration, Walls weaves her own ancestor into this collective rough-and-tumble heritage."
• William T. Vollmann on Crossers by Philip Caputo: "Caputo has stenciled his villains out of the cheapest cardboard he could find.... That such people exist and commit their atrocities is indisputable; but why they do what they do is not something you will learn from this book. Accordingly, the plot of 'Crossers' is as preposterous as that of any James Bond novel, which of course is not a bad thing if you like James Bond novels. Where Caputo does succeed, and beautifully, is in portraying the conflicting feelings any thoughtful American has about illegal immigration."
• August Kleinzahler on Thelonious Monk by Robin D.G. Kelley: "Robin D. G. Kelley, in his extraordinary and heroically detailed new biography, 'Thelonious Monk,' makes a large point time and time again that Monk was no primitive, as so many have characterized him.... There will be shapelier and more elegantly written biographies to come — Monk, the man and the music, is an endlessly fascinating subject — but I doubt there will be a biography anytime soon that is as textured, thorough and knowing as Kelley’s. The 'genius of modern music' has gotten the passionate, and compassionate, advocate he deserves."
• Maslin on Robert Altman: The Oral Biography by Mitchell Zuckoff: "He has spun all this material into a big, comprehensive, flesh-and-blood account of Altman’s persona and exploits, though not a serious look at his body of work. Above all, this book is fair. And surely Mr. Zuckoff has done a lot of careful shaping and wrangling to make it that way, since the assessments in these pages range widely. Some speakers deify Altman; some recall his mean streak; some attest to his endless ability to confound conventional Hollywood thinking."
• Maslin on What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell: "Are the carefully constructed articles in 'What the Dog Saw' too similar? Or, because Mr. Gladwell favors either/or constructions, are they instead reassuringly familiar? A book that repackages well-read articles by a well-known writer might sound unexciting, but that changes if the paradigm is something other than publishing. What if this were a music album? What if the songs were all catchy? What if the reasons for their individual popularity were uncontrovertible? Then the collection would not feel recycled. It would feel sure fire. It would be 'Malcolm Gladwell’s Greatest Hits.' And there you have it: This book full of short conversation pieces is a collection that plays to the author’s strengths."

Washington Post:

• Dirda on The Wild Things by Dave Eggers: "Where Sendak created a poetic blend of words and pictures to depict typical childhood impulses, fears and desires, Eggers has crimped these universals, reducing them to the upswellings of confusion and rage felt by an 8- or 9-year-old after his parents' divorce. Yes, the general outline of Sendak's story is still there: Max misbehaves in his wolf suit, sails to an island inhabited by roly-poly monsters, becomes their king and eventually returns home a wiser child. But everything has been made trendy, diminishing the original's archetypal resonance to syrupy movie cliches. This is especially so in the first third of the novel, set in our world. Once on monster island, the book grows more charming and witty."
• Charles on Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem: "Jonathan Lethem's brilliant, bloated new novel about the hollowness of modern life should delight his devoted fans -- and put them on the defensive. They will point, justifiably, to the exquisite wit and dazzling intricacy of every single paragraph. In the pages of 'Chronic City,' all 467 of them, this super-hip, genre-blurring, MacArthur-winning, best-selling novelist proves he's one of the most elegant stylists in the country, and he's capable of spinning surreal scenes that are equal parts noir and comedy. But ultimately, these perfectly choreographed sentences compose a tedious reading experience in which redundancy substitutes for development and effect for profundity."
• Michael Schaffer on Inside of a Dog by Alexandra Horowitz: "Alexandra Horowitz's smart new book fills a niche in this field. Most authors seeking to explain canine minds are pushing a trendy training style or a worthy humane-treatment goal. Horowitz sets out to study dogs for their own fascinating sake..... 'Inside of a Dog' offers a thoughtful take on the interior life of the dog, a topic often left to poets and philosophers and 'Marley & Me.' ... The result is a work long on insight and short on jargon."

Los Angeles Times:

• Akiva Gottlieb on Lethem's Chronic City: "If the first part of the book offers an immersive contact high, the second can feel like a morning-after headache. Observations that once seemed halfway clever -- 'Ballard's just Baudrillard without the u-d-r-i' -- sound more and more like empty punch lines. And because Lethem never seems fully committed to Perkus' conspiracies, it's unclear why we should follow him down a rapidly multiplying series of rabbit holes."
• Susan Salter Reynolds on The Collected Short Stories of Lydia Davis: "Do what you can do; go as far as you can go. If it's any consolation, you are an instrument being played by a master. Davis alternates sharp and soft notes; great wide context and individual events: 'They stay this way wrapped in nearly complete silence, and they are nearly motionless, only the man's gentle thumbs move over the cat's skull and the woman sometimes lays her cheek down against the man's fragrant soft hair and then lifts it again and the cat's eyes are shifting quickly from point to point. A motor starts up. . . . ' As interior as these stories are, the world is always breathing down the backs of Davis' characters."

The Globe and Mail

• Stephen Smith on Small Wars by Sadie Jones (available at Amazon.ca): "Small Wars is a map on a different scale, with all the complex contours right there in front of you. You'd swear you can feel the heat and the danger radiating off them like an element on a stove. Cyprus may be the background for Jones's taut second novel, but at the fore is an emergency with the precise dimensions and frailties of a marriage."
• David Thomson on The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe by J. Randy Taraborrelli and How to Be a Movie Star by William J. Mann: "I'll be candid: You can survive without either of these books, but the Monroe is the better read and that's a sign that there will be more Monroe books – many of them outlandish and closer to fiction. Whereas I'm not sure if the public cares any more about Elizabeth Taylor. For a few years – the late fifties and through the Richard Burton years – she defined celebrity just as her career gave impetus to so many magazines. But there was too much about Taylor that was grown-up, sensible and in charge."

The Guardian:

• Ian Sample on Gladwell's What the Dog Saw: "This is what Gladwell does best: he takes an idea, recasts it as a human story, and works it through to its conclusion, taking a strip off conventional wisdoms as he goes. Even when the patterns he identifies are spurious or the conclusions flawed, the arguments he raises are clear, provocative and important.... When Gladwell's theories are drawn across a broader canvas, the cracks are harder to ignore. One virtue of What the Dog Saw is that the pieces are perfectly crafted: they achieve their purpose more effectively when they aren't stretched out."
• Blake Morrison on Beginners by Raymond Carver (the original, pre-edited versions of Carver's stories also found in the Library of America's Collected Stories): "For his part, Lish treated Carver as a wayward genius – a drunk, or ex-drunk, who needed taking in hand. It's not a case of hero and villain: on his good days at the office, Lish helped Carver to achieve what he was after (not least a far more memorable and selling title than Beginners). But he also squeezed the life out of him. The true Carver, we now see, is gentler, fleshier, less brutal than Lish's Carver. The true Carver accommodates digressions and back-stories. The true Carver isn't Carveresque."

The New Yorker:

• No full-length reviews this week.

The New York Review of Books:

• Stephen Greenblatt on Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel: "Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall is a startling achievement, a brilliant historical novel focused on the rise to power of a figure exceedingly unlikely, on the face of things, to arouse any sympathy at all.... Cromwell's actual life story is, in its way, a somberly fascinating one. But it is not the story that Hilary Mantel has chosen to relate. The Cromwell of Wolf Hall has some of the qualities that his enemies feared and detested—toughness, wiliness, worldliness—but as Mantel depicts them, they are qualities in the service of survival, success, and even a measure of decency in a cruel and indecent world. A formidable character constructed from fundamentally base materials, he is rather like the great mosque of Djenné, a magnificent structure made out of mud"
• Jerome Groopman on Carrying the Heart: Exploring the Worlds Within Us by F. Gonzalez-Crussi: "He melds history with literature, religion with science, high humor with serious concerns. The sum of his narrative shows that medicine does not exist as some absolute ideal, but is very much a product of the prevailing culture, affected by the prejudices and passions of the time. This truth is far from the sterile conception of care as a commodity and the body as a jumble of molecules, disconnected from the experience of illness shared between patient and physician. But our culture, with its worship of technology and its deference to the technocrat, risks imposing an approach to medical care that ignores the deeply felt symbolism of our body parts and our desperate search for meaning when we suffer from illness."

--Tom