Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• The Sunday Book Review is the gift guide edition, with no cover review
• Kathryn Harrison on The Red Book by C.G. Jung: "Its publication was postponed until now, nearly 50 years after his death, because Jung feared the book’s potential impact on his reputation. After all, anyone who read it might conclude what Jung himself first suspected: that the great doctor had lost his mind.... The creation of one of modern history’s true visionaries, 'The Red Book' is a singular work, outside of categorization. As an inquiry into what it means to be human, it transcends the history of psychoanalysis and underscores Jung’s place among revolutionary thinkers like Marx, Orwell and, of course, Freud. The dedication — the love — with which it was assembled makes 'The Red Book' as beautiful and otherworldly as a medieval book of hours."
• David Margolick on Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong by Terry Teachout: "There is a kind of perfunctory, dutiful quality to this part of Teachout’s tale; where Armstrong’s brilliance is beyond dispute, Teachout doesn’t seem fully engaged.... Only when the critics start dumping on Armstrong does Teachout become energized.... Teachout nails the case. Everyone now acknowledges what he amply documents: not just Armstrong’s prodigious talent, but his wit, courage, kindness, loyalty, charm. And his quirks: he smoked marijuana almost daily for 40 years — it 'makes you forget all the bad things that happen to a Negro,' he once said — and he took (and touted) a laxative named Swiss Kriss just as enthusiastically."
• Kakutani on Googled by Ken Auletta: "'Googled' depicts the company as a brilliant, game-changing behemoth that can be socially inept, and both naïve and arrogant in its dealings with the world. The book, more fair-minded reportage than a polemic, leaves us with a telling portrait of a paradigm-altering company, which in 11 years has utterly transformed the business and media landscape, but which also suffers at times from the sort of myopia that comes from determinedly left-brain thinking — that is, a scientific-engineering driven point of view that prizes data, efficiency and growth while often overlooking more human and political concerns like privacy and copyright."

Washington Post:

• David Oshinsky on The Fatal Strain by Alan Sipress: "The good news is that the current H1N1 strain has proved far less lethal than the one that circulated in 1918. The bad news, says Alan Sipress in his superb and sobering book about the shadowy progression of a virulent avian flu now moving across Asia, is that the worst is yet to come.... His grasp of virology, as well as of the ins and outs of the world health bureaucracy, serves him well in explaining why medical practices that appear so obvious to Western experts in containing a deadly epidemic are largely irrelevant to 'the backyard chicken farmers, cockfighters, witch doctors, political bosses, and poultry smugglers' who control the terrain where this battle must be fought."
• Charles on Reading Jesus by Mary Gordon: "Though far too cursory to work as an introduction to the Gospels, 'Reading Jesus' should appeal to anyone in that great multitude of thoughtful or lapsed Christians who feels the Scriptures growing stale and ossified, anyone who wants to wrestle with the uncomfortable problems and irreconcilable paradoxes of the New Testament.... Although Gordon is a confirmed believer, she admits, 'There are at least as many good reasons for being appalled by Jesus as there are for being drawn to him.' She wants to read the Gospels while acknowledging her own bafflement, her own sense of disappointment and betrayal.... If you're looking for revelation, look elsewhere, but if it's enlightenment you're after, Gordon is a thoughtful and stirring guide."

Los Angeles Times:

• Michael Harris on Finch by our own Jeff VanderMeer (henceforth abbreviated as OOJV): "VanderMeer creates a dense and persuasive imaginary universe, in which the things that also belong in our universe -- tanks, whiskey, revolvers, the paranoid feel of a Raymond Chandler or James Ellroy whodunit -- strike us as oddly comforting. Finch, ordered to investigate the double murder of a gray cap and a human, is in big trouble, but it's trouble we know.... Finch suffers extravagantly -- not just at the hands of his torturer and other bad guys, but because he's still capable of love as well as violence. Down these alien streets, as Chandler might say, goes a man who is not himself alien, and we're willing to follow him almost anywhere."
• Daniel Mallory on The Talented Miss Highsmith by Joan Schenkar: "Throughout nearly 700 pages of lustrous text, Schenkar's prose is as supple and shapely as Highsmith's was flat and functional.... 'The Talented Miss Highsmith' is both dazzling and definitive -- the latter nearly by default.... Its scope and scholarship are unassailable, and its vigor indefatigable. It's a volume as original as its contemptible, miserable, irresistible subject."
• Tim Rutten on Master of Shadows by Mark Lamster: "It's hard to imagine an artist more thoroughly out of fashion than the great 17th century Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens.... Mark Lamster is a brave writer to swim against so many currents. But his affection for his subject is so complete -- and completely convincing -- his style is so gracefully unpretentious and his research is so thorough that 'Master of Shadows: The Secret Diplomatic Career of the Painter Peter Paul Rubens' manages to be engaging, instructive and thought-provoking, all at once."

The Globe and Mail:

• Lauren Kirshner on Stitches by David Small: "Small uses his pen like a camera, hauntingly capturing the emotional timbres of David's alienation and reckoning through evocative close-ups, wide-shot landscapes and dreamy fade-ins and -outs. Big wordless panels take us through David's silent world, his lonely house, his social isolation. Betrayed yet again by his parents and regarded as a mute weirdo at school, Small vividly captures the bone-tingling insecurity of adolescence on the margins....For those who appreciate unique stories of survival and second chances, Stitches is a beautiful memoir of a lost childhood, and a voice bitter sweetly found. It will leave you shaken and deeply satisfied."
• Lisa Gabriele on Lit by Mary Karr: "The Liars' Club and Cherry are remarkable, not just because they're beautifully written, but because they seem to describe someone utterly lacking in self-pity – a feat, considering the hell through which Karr was dragged by her reckless, but loving, parents. In Lit, we learn, not surprisingly, that Karr coped by drinking, not very day, and not with much fanfare.... In and of itself, this is a classic addition to the memoir genre and the bow atop an unforgettable trilogy of books by a brave and brilliant writer. But it's also a moving and helpful compendium for anyone baffled by someone else's, or their own, drinking."

The Guardian:

• Jay Parini on The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy: "As one quickly sees, Sofia was herself a gifted writer. Without apparent effort, she draws countless portraits of her contemporaries, and it's fascinating to get her view of Tolstoy's encounters with such figures as Turgenev or Chekhov. His large world passes before us in scene after scene.... The hundreds of pages offered by Porter in this selection are testament to a great spirit, a woman who lived in terrifying proximity to one of the greatest writers of all time, and who understood exactly the high price she would have to pay for this privilege."
• Adam Mars-Jones on The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories by Mavis Gallant: "This collection of stories bears witness to a strong but not settled talent, and to a writer who seems to fight her chosen form at least as much as she blossoms under its restrictions. The short story is a brutal mechanism that punishes above all the loss of focus. Point of view in a story is the armature, the core, and no excellence of description and evocation, no sparkling dialogue or piercing insight into character, can compensate for the collapse of that core."

The New Yorker:

• John McWhorter on Teachout's Pops (subscription only): "Teachout excels at conveying the interplay between Armstrong the artist and Armstrong the entertainer, and at examining the particular challenge of his legacy. Armstrong survived into an era when his musical style seemed old-fashioned and his stage persona uncomfortably reminiscent of minstrelsy. A tragic by-product of his vaudevillian roots was that a man uniquely at ease with himself came to be dismissed by his own people as a fake."
• Also, the NYer has another excerpt from David Foster Wallace's upcoming, unfinished novel (not to be published until 2011). Here's two sentences: "At any rate, the best analogy for the experience of hearing these childhood 'voices' of mine is that it was like going around with your own private masseur, who spent all his time giving you back—and shoulder—rubs (which my biological mother also used to do whenever I was sick in bed, using rubbing alcohol and baby powder and also changing the pillowcases, so that they were clean and cool; the experience of the voices was analogous to the feeling of turning a pillow over to the cool side). Sometimes the experience of the voices was ecstatic, sometimes so much so that it was almost too intense for me—as when you first bite into an apple or a confection that tastes so delicious and causes such a flood of oral juices that there is a moment of intense pain in your mouth and glands—particularly in the late afternoons of spring and summer, when the sunlight on sunny days achieved moments of immanence and became the color of beaten gold and was itself (the light, as if it were taste) so delicious that it was almost too much to stand, and I would lie on the pile of large pillows in our living room and roll back and forth in an agony of delight and tell my mother, who always read on the couch, that I felt so good and full and ecstatic that I could hardly bear it, and I remember her pursing her lips, trying not to laugh, and saying in the driest possible voice that she found it hard to feel too much sympathy or concern for this problem and was confident that I could survive this level of ecstasy, and that I probably didn’t need to be rushed to the emergency room, and at such moments my love and affection for my mother’s dry humor and love became, stacked atop the original ecstasy, so intense that I almost had to stifle a scream of pleasure as I rolled ecstatically between the pillows and the books on the floor."

The New York Review of Books:

• Cathleen Schine on When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present by Gail Collins: "The basic conflict between motherhood and career, like some sort of blotchy chronic dermatitis, keeps erupting in new unexpected patches. It is a sign of just how intelligent and generous a writer Collins is that by the end of her book, the feminist dilemma seems less an incurable virus than a challenge, one that has already been met with so much energy, stubborn courage, and radical hope, not to mention desperation, drama, and, sometimes, in retrospect, downright silliness, that we feel we are all on a human adventure, and all on it together."
• John Richardson on Francis Bacon: A Centenary Exhibition: "Though painterliness was a quality disdained by most modernists, Bacon realized this was the element that would enable him to tweak the onlooker's senses into accepting and indeed enjoying a painful visual shock. To enhance his paint surfaces he tried out additives—pastel and tempera—but in the end stuck to oil paint, which he manipulated with ever more gestural abandon. On an early visit to the studio, I watched Francis experiment. Ensconced in front of a mirror, he rehearsed on his own face the brushstrokes that he envisaged making on canvas. With a flourish of his wrist, he would apply great swoops of Max Factor 'pancake' makeup in a gamut of flesh colors to the stubble on his chin."

--Tom

Comments

[ben_ on December 08, 2009 at 11:28 AM]

Jeff VanderMeer is writing here?! How lovely!