Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Adam Kirsch on Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C. Heller: "Yet while Rand took to wearing a dollar-sign pin to advertise her love of capitalism, Heller makes clear that the author had no real affection for dollars themselves. Giving up her royalties to preserve her vision is something that no genuine capitalist, and few popular novelists, would have done. It is the act of an intellectual, of someone who believes that ideas matter more than lucre. In fact, as Heller shows, Rand had no more reverence for the actual businessmen she met than most intellectuals do. The problem was that, according to her own theories, the executives were supposed to be as creative and admirable as any artist or thinker."
• Alan Furst on Enemies of the People by Kati Marton: "'Enemies of the People,' Kati Marton’s seventh book, [is] a powerful and absolutely absorbing narrative of her parents’ journey — a series of escapes, from Hitler, from Stalin, eventually to America.... [S]ome years after the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989, when the records of secret police operations in Hungary became available, Marton knew she had to read the file (one of the biggest, it turned out) on herself and her family. It was, after years of concern for the victims of totalitarian states, her turn. And what came next, 'Enemies of the People,' has all the magnetism and, yes, the excitement, of the very best spy fiction. But would that it were fiction."
• Dave Eggers on Look at the Birdie by Kurt Vonnegut: "In the era of the 'slicks' — weekly and monthly magazines that would pay decently for fiction — a writer had to have a feel for what would sell. The 14 stories in 'Look at the Birdie,' none of them afraid to entertain, dabble in whodunnitry, science fiction and commanding fables of good versus evil. Why these stories went unpublished is hard to answer. They’re polished, they’re relentlessly fun to read, and every last one of them comes to a neat and satisfying end. For transmittal of moral instruction, they are incredibly efficient delivery devices."
• Maria Russo on The Hidden by Tobias Hill: "'The Hidden' is Hill’s fourth novel — in addition to a story collection and three volumes of poetry — and like his previous novels, it’s an unusual, exhilarating hybrid of high-stakes, propulsive narrative; erudite yet breezy summations of specialized historical data; and strikingly evocative language. He excels at the rendering of place, often freezing a scene to make it a charged tableau of wonder and menace."
• Tony Horwitz on The Big Burn by Timothy Egan: "Egan weaves his account of the Big Burn with the creation story of the United States Forest Service. This might seem a dull, bureaucratic yarn, but Egan tells it as the stirring tale of a very odd couple: the irrepressible Teddy Roosevelt, who 'burned 2,000 calories before noon and drank his coffee with seven lumps of sugar,' and his chief forester, Gifford Pinchot, an ascetic loner who sometimes slept on a wooden pillow and for 20 years mystically clung to his deceased fiancée."

Washington Post:

• Charles on Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving: "Everything that makes John Irving such a wonderful writer is on display in the opening section of his 12th novel, 'Last Night in Twisted River.' And everything that makes him such a maddening one is evident in the 450 rambling pages that follow. It's like signing on for a week's vacation after a great first date only to discover that now you're trapped in a small hotel room. For. Seven. Long. Days."
• Yardley on The Man in the Wooden Hat by Jane Gardam: "As to Gardam's pair of novels, what the old song says about love and marriage must be said about them: You can't have one without the other. They are a set, his and hers. To my taste, they are absolutely wonderful, and I would find it impossible to choose one over the other. While 'Old Filth' is principally about the man, his dark boyhood at the mercy of a distant, unfeeling father, with the wife a rather shadowy character in the background, 'The Man in the Wooden Hat' fills in her side of the story, in the process revealing itself to be an astute, subtle depiction of marriage, with all its shared experiences and separate secrets."

Los Angeles Times:

• Richard Rayner on The Humbling by Philip Roth: "On the one hand, Roth's 30th book deals with themes that his work, especially his recent work, has made familiar. On the other, it's direct and urgent, a taut and controlled fever-dream that demands to be experienced at a single sitting. 'The Humbling' is divided into three chapters, three acts almost, and near the end the name of Chekhov is invoked, reminding us that a gun that's been shown at the beginning of the tale is likely to go off by the end. And the gun duly does, leaving the reader with feelings of terror and exhilaration in equal measure."
• Denise Hamilton on The Gates by John Connolly: "My 13-year old called it 'a cross between Eoin Colfer and Terry Pratchett,' and I'm stealing his description because he got it exactly right.... There has long been a cornucopia of Halloween-themed picture books for young children. With its endearing protagonist, rollicking plot, and dollops of weird but mostly true science, 'The Gates' has a shot at becoming a middle-school Halloween classic."
• Susan Salter Reynolds on Baddies by David Stromberg: "David Stromberg has created a cozy little planet of alter egos and parallel lives, urban marginals with vaguely Eastern European names. The drawings are a cross between George Grosz and Gahan Wilson, with a touch of 'Beavis & Butt-Head.' The humor is Roz Chast; dry commentary on inside-out characters. Fantastic."

The Globe and Mail:

• William Kowalski on Irving's Last Night at Twisted River: "In Last Night in Twisted River, Irving's 12th novel, his style is anything but cute. Throughout the 1970s and '80s, the old Irving played with language the way a kitten plays with yarn, but the 21st-century Irving uses it to weave a serious yet colourful tapestry of love, guilty consciences, broken hearts and triumphant survival. The result is a flawed but mature work by one of our most accomplished writers."
• Stephen Smith on Gretzky's Tears by Stephen Brunt: "As there was in the excellent Searching for Bobby Orr, there's plenty more here to dispirit even the most heavily Cooperall'd true north patriot love of the game. Gretzky's Tears is as penetrating a book, and as sure in its navigation of hockey's cultural currents, even if it isn't so much a biography as an annotated receipt of sale. It's a book about assets and bottom lines, market forces and bank frauds, wheelers and dealers, a story played out in Ford dealerships and the offices of public relations executives rather than Gretzky's familiar on-ice suite, behind the net, waiting for Jari Kurri to swoop into the slot."

The Guardian:

• Robert Irwin on The Arabs: A History by Eugene Rogan: "Today, Arab fear of the west and resentment at the humiliating and socially damaging effects of westernisation fuels Islamism and the spread of terrorism. How have we come to this pass? Rogan answers this question by tracing the history of Arab hopes and ultimate disappointments from the early 16th century, when the Ottomans conquered most of the Arab world, to the present day.... Rogan was a student of Albert Hourani, the author of A History of the Arab Peoples, an eloquent and predominantly upbeat account of Arab achievements over the centuries. Rogan's version, hard-nosed and sadder, is no less eloquent, and compulsively readable."
• Jerome Boyd Maunsell on Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives by Brian Dillon: "Boiling biographical subjects down to their symptoms, and life down to health, is potentially a reductive and morbid task. What Dillon has written, though, is a brilliant series of portraits that recalls the original spirit of the literary essay. He never belittles his subjects or their work, while drawing out the pathos and humour of their hypersensitivities."

The New Yorker:

• Elizabeth Kolbert on Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer: "'Eating Animals' closes with a turkey-less Thanksgiving. As a holiday, it doesn’t sound like a lot of fun. But this is Foer’s point. We are, he suggests, defined not just by what we do; we are defined by what we are willing to do without. Vegetarianism requires the renunciation of real and irreplaceable pleasures. To Foer’s credit, he is not embarrassed to ask this of us."
• Jill Lepore on American Homicide by Randolph Roth: "As a discussion of the available data, 'American Homicide' is rich, fascinating, and unrivalled. As an explanation, though, it gets dubious. Roth’s work involves three steps: first, he uses his database to count murders (he’s primarily interested in homicides among unrelated adults); then, using surviving censuses to count people, he calculates the homicide rate; finally, he attempts to explain what factors correlate with that rate, across four centuries. It’s the last step that’s the most wobbly."

New York Review of Books:

• Pico Iyer on The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk: "In the many pages describing how Kemal collects 4,213 of Füsun's cigarette butts, visits her family's home for supper over 2,864 days, and recalls their early afternoons together, Pamuk unfolds a classic, spacious love story a little like a Nabokovian version of Love in the Time of Cholera (other books are so much a part of his sensibility that one finds oneself reaching for such comparisons). But for most readers, I suspect, what will bring the long, slow romance to life is the much more particular love story hidden within it, of the author's real passion, for Istanbul. The engaging and somewhat awkward Kemal and his beloved, out of 'old Persian miniatures,' sometimes feel like archetypes; the uncertain, semi-cosmopolitan Istanbul of Pamuk's upbringing is so specific, it comes to seem universal."
• Jonathan Raban on Dorothea Lange by Linda Gordon and Daring to Look by Ann Whiston Spirn: "Linda Gordon's substantial, cradle-to-grave biography of Lange is usefully complemented by Anne Whiston Spirn's careful documentation of one year—1939—in Lange's working life. Both books have their flaws, but between them they add up to a satisfyingly binocular portrait of the photographer as she traveled the ambiguous and shifting frontier between art, journalism, social science, and propaganda. Lange's work is much harder to place than that of, say, Walker Evans, and so is her personality. If neither Gordon nor Spirn quite succeeds in bringing her to life on the page, they do convey her complex and mercurial elusiveness."

--Tom

Comments

[Vitor Guerra on November 03, 2009 at 11:55 AM]

The Gates: a great book!

[John Galt on November 03, 2009 at 01:22 PM]

Egad. Is it not possible that Rand reduced her per book royalty by a few pennies because she thought she might sell more books and thus get more, you know, total dollars? That just isn't that hard to figure out.

[Silvering on November 04, 2009 at 02:12 PM]

The Rand bio reviewer, Kirsch, seems to think that Objectivism means "obtain the largest amount of dollars in the short range as possible, discounting all other possible values". Its as if the reviewer was unaware that Rand wrote The Fountainhead.

Anyway, while Rand was disappointed that most businessmen (whom she did admire) overlook the importance of philosophy in their lives and work, her opinion of the dominant type of contemporary "artist or thinker" was extremely, *extremely* negative. How did Kirsch get any idea otherwise?