Omnivoracious

Media Monday

This is the first Media Monday in a long time. Granted, it's barely still Monday, but the intention is to release this post on Mondays from now on, so I'm sticking with "Media Monday." It's not called Old Media Monday, because I’ve included some new media. I’ll probably include examples from new media in future posts, so we’ll keep the name moving forward.

The New York Times

• Although the cover of the Sunday Book Review features House of Holes, with an exuberant review by the one and only Sam Lipsyte (check out his reading of Thomas McGuane on the New Yorker books podcast), we were drawn to Liesl Schillinger's review of one of our August Best of the Month picks: Amor Towles’s first novel, Rules of Civility. According to Schillinger, "his clever heroine, who grew up in Brooklyn as 'Katya,' restyles herself in 1930s Manhattan as the more clubbable 'Katey,' aspiring to all-American inclusion. As World War II gears up, raising the economy from bust to boom, Katey’s wit and charm lift her from a secretarial pool at a law firm to a high-profile assistant’s perch at a flashy new Condé Nast magazine. One night at the novel’s outset touches off the chain reaction that will produce both Katey’s career and her husband, and define her entire adult life. She’s swept into the satin-and-cashmere embrace of the smart set — blithe young people with names like Dicky and Bitsy and Bucky and Wallace — with their Oyster Bay mansions, their Adirondack camps, their cocktails at the St. Regis and all the fog of Fishers Island." Call it The Very Good Gatsby.

 

Reviewing the Reviewers: Post-Easter Edition

The New York Times

• Debby Applegate praises Adam Goodheart's unconventional Civil War book 1861: The Civil War Awakening: "Not everyone will be enamored of 1861. Some will object that it concentrates too much on the white men of the North, giving short shrift to women, blacks and Southerners. Readers hoping for a conventional war story might be put off by the book’s peripatetic structure. Skeptics may look askance at Goodheart’s unabashed optimism and open admiration of the Union cause in spite of the many ways it would fall short of its most noble goals. But readers who take “1861” on its own passionate, forthright terms will find it irresistible. And for those who don’t like this Civil War book, well, just wait--there are plenty more to come."

• Stacey D'Erasmo highlights the depth Linda Grant's characters in We Had It So Good, a novel that follows a British couple in the late '60s: "We Had It So Good is pleasingly true in form, if not in spirit, to a turbulent era, about which it maintains a rueful skepticism. Grant’s ability to gather up a pivotal scene with a loose hand, her grace in hopscotching through the decades, her freedom in moving among perspectives and the clear-eyed empathy she displays for her characters are wonderfully open-ended, never forced into narrative conventions or easy epiphanies."

• Stefan Fatsis, who penned Word Freak, enjoys Dan Barry's Bottom of the 33rd, about the longest baseball game in history. "It’s fitting, and for Mr. Barry narratively ideal, that baseball’s longest game occurred in the rung just below the majors, Triple-A, populated by has-beens and will-bes and those in between. Everyone in Triple-A is at a life-changing crossroads, even if they don’t yet know it, but for one night there in April 1981 time simply stopped. In the moment those present wanted the insanity to end; three decades later they are grateful that it didn’t."

• A surprisingly positive review by Baz Dreisinger for rapper/Law and Order: SVU star Ice-T's autobiography, Ice: "Ultimately, Ice showcases an eminently reasonable, positively likable guy, the gangsta rapper even a parent could love. So if the expanding hip-hop library speaks to the genre’s ever-mounting campaign for middle-aged respectability — which climaxed when Jay-Z decoded Decoded alongside Cornel West at the New York Public Library in November — then Ice-T is doing his part for the cause. Jay-Z may have won over the academics, but Ice-T’s got another constituency under hip-hop’s belt: Mom and Dad."

Reviewing the Reviewers: Catch Up on Your Reading Now That Your Taxes are Done Edition

Tired of thinking about taxes? You might want to dodge The Pale King then...

The New York Times

• Gail Caldwell relates to Meghan O'Rourke's The Long Goodbye, a heartfelt memoir about the loss of her mother: "Unsparing in its description of the process of dying and the world that catapults past, The Long Goodbye hardly suggests that people — physicians, friends and family, the narrator herself — know how to behave in the face of death. One doctor, caught unawares by the metastases in Barbara O’Rourke’s brain, announced to Meghan that this new turn was “fascinating”; O’Rourke argued with her mother’s friend over who got to feed her, and fought with her father, who was near collapse, over the use of a car. Grief doesn’t necessarily make you noble. Sometimes it just makes you crazy, or primitive with fear, and O’Rourke captures that emotional violence with elegant candor."

• Tom McCarthy, author of the novel C, regards David Foster Wallace's The Pale King as a modern Moby Dick (this is a long excerpt, but a good one!): "[Herman] Melville’s Bartleby, the meek and lowly copyist who cannot will himself to complete the act of copying--or, to put it another way, the writer who cannot will himself to complete the act of writing. In effect, all the I.R.S.’s clerical serfs are Bartlebys; through them, and through this book, he emerges as the melancholy impasse out of which the American novel has yet to work its way. America’s greatest writer, the author of Moby-Dick, spent his final 19 years as a customs officer--that is, a tax inspector. To research The Pale King, Wallace trained in accounting. We’re moving beyond haunting to possession here. Bartleby, of course, ends up dead, leaving a stack of undeliverable papers. This is the inheritance that Wallace earnestly, and perhaps fatally, grappled with. The outcome was as brilliant as it was sad--and the battle is the right one to engage in."

• For political science junkies, Michael Lind recommends Francis Fukuyama's The Origins of Political Order: "Fukuyama shares a view of politics as a product of history and evolution, and a rejection of the absolutism of Lockean natural rights theory and market fundamentalism, or “Manchester liberalism.” Against libertarians like Friedrich Hayek, who try to explain society in terms of Homo economicus, he says that a strong and capable state has always been a precondition for a flourishing capitalist economy."

• Janet Maslin is charmed by the young adult novel The Coffins of Little Hope by Timothy Schaffert: "There’s a lot of plot to The Coffins of Little Hope. But Mr. Schaffert’s style is so gossamer-light that the story elements don’t become cumbersome. His book can accommodate a large cast of characters who bump into one another with an almost screwball regularity."

Reviewing the Reviewers: A New Look at Malcolm X and More

The New York Times

• Michiko Kakutani has high praise for the late Manning Marable's ambitions biography Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention: "One of the many achievements of this biography is that Mr. Marable manages to situate Malcolm X within the context of 20th-century racial politics in America without losing focus on his central character, as Taylor Branch sometimes did in his monumental, three-volume chronicle of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. At the same time Mr. Marable provides a compelling account of Malcolm X’s split with the Nation of Islam as he moved away from that sect’s black nationalism and radical separatist politics, and as personal tensions between him and the Nation leader Elijah Muhammad escalated further after Muhammad impregnated a woman who had had a longtime romantic relationship with Malcolm X."

• Jincy Willet is impressed by the surprising depth of The Uncoupling by Meg Wolitzer, a novel about a wind that breezes through a small town and takes with it all women's desire to have sex: "Although The Uncoupling is enchanting from start to finish, that owes less to the spell than it does to the way Wolitzer liberally and inventively populates her storytelling. When writers turn to the supernatural, their characters often suffer, losing dimension and I.Q. points as their creators bat them around. But Wolitzer has too much respect for her craft to let this happen.

• Poet David Kirby recommends David Orr's Beautiful and Pointless: A Modern Guide to Poetry for poetry fans both serious and casual: "True, no poem speaks to us as directly as a stop sign or a Star of David. But nobody listens to a Jay-Z song and says, “Hmm, I wonder what he meant by that,” and a well-made poem works the same way. Susan Sontag once wrote an essay advocating “an erotics of art,” and that’s the main point of Orr’s passionate, nimble little book: that poetry is for lovers, not cryptologists."

Reviewing the Reviewers: From "Bismarck" to "Bossypants"

The New York Times:

• Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is impressed by the depth and scale of Bismarck: A Life by Jonathan Steinberg: "It is a measure of Steinberg’s achievement in Bismarck: A Life that the subsequent description of the "political genius of a very unusual kind" becomes far from a panegyric. He describes — in an incisive, if occasionally distracting, psychological approach — a highly complex person who incarnated the duality that later tempted Germany into efforts beyond its capacity."

• Janet Maslin agrees with our choice of Tina Fey's Bossypants as one of the Best Books of the Month: Bossypants isn’t a memoir. It’s a spiky blend of humor, introspection, critical thinking and Nora Ephron-isms for a new generation... For all Ms. Fey’s efforts to depict herself as “a little tiny person with nothing to worry about running in circles, worried out of her mind,” she comes off as a strongly opinionated dynamo with a comedic voice that is totally her own."

• Speaking of our Best of the Month, Mythili G. Rao also finds Please Look After Mom by Kyung-sook Shin a affecting portrayal of motherhood: "Shin’s novel, her first to be translated into English, embraces multiplicity. It is told from the perspectives of four members of the family, and from their memories emerges a portrait of a heroically selfless and industrious woman... Shin’s prose, intimate and hauntingly spare in this translation by Chi-Young Kim, moves from first to second and third person, and powerfully conveys grief’s bewildering immediacy."

• Thomas Mallon believes the short stories in Jim Shepherd's You Think that's Bad are as ambitious as they are truthful: "His fine contrivances of cerebration and feeling can remind one of Richard Powers at his best. And his preference for historical quests, for real people’s big gestures, may help keep American short fiction from falling asleep in the snug little precincts of its usual subject matter."

Reviewing the Reviewers: End of March Edition

The New York Times:

• Geoffrey C. Ward calls the new biography Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggles With India by Joseph Lelyveld a triumph despite its inaccessibility: "This is not a full-scale biography. Nor is it for beginners. Lelyveld assumes his readers are familiar with the basic outlines of Gandhi’s life, and while the book includes a bare-bones chronology and is helpfully divided into South African and Indian sections, it moves backward and forward so often, it’s sometimes harder than it should be to follow the shifting course of Gandhi’s thought. But Great Soul is a noteworthy book, nonetheless, vivid, nuanced and cleareyed. The two decades Gandhi spent in South Africa are too often seen merely as prelude. Lelyveld treats them with the seriousness they deserve."

• Steve Heighton has high praises for the small town, coming-of-age novel Rodin's Debutante by Ward Just: "Rodin’s Debutante is an achievement. Into a couple of hundred fast-moving pages, it compacts an impressive array of characters, settings, ideas and scenes, including a superb account of the aftermath of a winning football season that fuses the romanticism of the early Kerouac and his mentor, Thomas Wolfe, with the wry humor of Richard Yates: the season soon becomes 'a very distant, very satisfying memory, one without any suggestion of regret or ambiguity. Lee knew without being told that there were few such experiences in life, at least in Illinois.'"

• Sarah Fay has many kind words for Peter Stamm's Seven Years, a Swiss novel about alienation and adultery: "With its understated descriptions and cool perceptions, Stamm’s fiction (demonstrated in the earlier stories and novels that have been translated into English: Unformed Landscape, On a Day Like This and In Strange Gardens and Other Stories) explores the tendency to experience two incongruous emotions or sensations simultaneously: attraction and disgust, warmth and estrangement, anxiety and liberation."

• Andrew Delbanco is pleasantly surprised by America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation by David Goldfield, which reinforces the idea that the 600,000 casualties of the Civil War could have been avoided: "Despite its implausibilities, Goldfield’s thought experiment in alternative history is provocative in the best sense. Most history books try to explain the past. The exceptional ones, of which America Aflame is a distinguished example, remind us that the past is ultimately as inscrutable as the future."

Reviewing the Reviewers: Now-with-Blogs Edition

Last week, a few commenters asked why we had changed the title from "Old Media Monday" to "Reviewing the Reviewers." Mostly, we didn't want to limit ourselves to excerpting reviews from just newspapers when the book blog community is an outlet for some of the most vibrant, new voices on literature. Enjoy!

The New York Times:

• Janet Maslin has high praises for crime-thriller-for-people-who-don't-like-crime-thrillers Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson: "The tone of the novel might be mild and nattering if Ms. Atkinson were not so handy with the chill-worthy frisson... The idea of Schrödinger’s cat, the paradoxical creature that can be both alive and dead, is another handy reference. And Ms. Atkinson writes passages that simply have to be read twice, once when you first travel through the book and then later, when you want to see just how she tricked you."

• Can computers become more convincing humans than real humans? That's what the Turing test, and The Most Human Human by Brian Christian, seek to answer. David Leavitt highlights the book's revelation about humanity: "His quest is, more or less, the subject of “The Most Human Human,” an irreverent picaresque that follows its hero from the recondite arena of the “Nicomachean Ethics” to the even more recondite arena of legal deposition to perhaps the most recondite arena of all, that of speed dating — and on beyond zebra. What Christian learns along the way is that if machines win the imitation game as often as they do, it’s not because they’re getting better at acting human; it’s because we’re getting worse."

• Geoffrey Nunberg calls The Information by James Gleick a "prodigious intellectual survey": "Gleick ranges over the scientific landscape in a looping itinerary that takes the reader from Maxwell’s demon to Godel’s theorem, from black holes to selfish genes. Some of the concepts are challenging, but as in previous books like Chaos and Genius, his biography of Richard Feynman, Gleick provides lucid expositions for readers who are up to following the science and suggestive analogies for those who are just reading for the plot. And there are anecdotes that every reader can enjoy."

 

Review the Reviewers: Memoirs About Meals, Math, Music, and More

This week, the major book reviewers took on even more of our Best Books of March list, including our Spotlight pick, Blood, Bones & Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton:

The New York Times:

• Frank Bruni, former restaurant critic and author of the memoir Born Round, reviews Blood, Bones & Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton: "There are rhapsodic passages aplenty about eating and cooking, and while such reveries can easily seem forced or trite, hers ring sweetly true. She’s recounting actual rapture, not contriving its facsimile on cue. You can feel her amazement as her father roasts whole lambs on a spit and her awe at the dexterity with which the chef André Soltner pulls off a perfect omelet, using only a fork. Readers with limited appetites for food porn, beware. This is one salacious expedition into the folds of orecchiette and fine points of puntarelle."

• Alexandra Horowitz reviews Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer: "His assemblage of personal mnemonic images is riotous. He makes suspenseful an event animated mostly by the participants’ 'dramatic temple massaging.' By book’s end, Foer can boast the ability to memorize the order of nine and one-half decks of cards in an hour. Yet he still loses track of where he left his car keys like the rest of us. He numbly types into his cellphone the phone numbers he does not want to bother to remember. And one can only imagine what he will do with the fantastical images that now people his brain."

 

Reviewing the Reviewers: Joshua Foer, David Brooks and More

Book reviews, hot off the presses (so to speak). It's a non-fiction-heavy week that takes us from applying to college to the United States memory championship. And it just so happens to include several titles from Amazon's Best Books of March list, too:

The New York Times:

• Michiko Kakutani on Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer: "'Moonwalking With Einstein'...has a lot in common with Malcolm Gladwell’s best sellers: it popularizes scientific concepts in a breezy, accessible fashion while cheerfully dispensing some practical insights and lots of entertaining anecdotes. But whereas Mr. Gladwell's 2008 book, 'Outliers,' reads like a parody of his own formula, devolving into an unconvincing mash-up of gauzy hypotheses and highly selective illustrations, Mr. Foer writes in these pages with fresh enthusiasm. His narrative is smart and funny and, like the work of Dr. Oliver Sacks, it's informed by a humanism that enables its author to place the mysteries of the brain within a larger philosophical and cultural context."
  

• Janet Maslin on The Information by James Gleick: "'The Information' offers this point-blank characterization of its author: 'James Gleick is our leading chronicler of science and modern technology.' This new book goes far beyond the earlier Gleick milestones, 'Chaos' and 'Genius,' to validate that claim."

• Dwight Garner on Crazy U by Andrew Ferguson: "The admissions process, as Andrew Ferguson puts it in his new book, 'Crazy U,' entangles not just our pocketbooks but everything else that, besides world peace and cocktail hour, matters to parents: 'our vanities, our social ambitions and class insecurities, and most profoundly our love and hopes for our children.'"
  

 

Reviewing the Reviewers: Post-Oscars Edition

Shake off your post-Oscars disappointment (or ease yourself down from your post-Oscars euphoria) with some reviewer-vetted great reads:

New York Times:

• Michiko Kakutani on Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton: "Though Ms. Hamilton’s brilliantly written new memoir, 'Blood, Bones & Butter,' is rhapsodic about food -- in every variety, from the humble egg-on-a-roll sandwich served by Greek delis in New York to more esoteric things like 'fried zucchini agrodolce with fresh mint and hot chili flakes' -- the book is hardly just for foodies. Ms. Hamilton...is as evocative writing about people and places as she is at writing about cooking, and her memoir does as dazzling a job of summoning her lost childhood as Mary Karr’s 'Liars' Club' and Andre Aciman’s 'Out of Egypt' did with theirs."


• Janet Maslin on The Adults by Alison Espach: "Although 'The Adults' is quite a good novel, it is easily underestimated. On the surface this is the coming-of-age story of a disaffected girl in wealthy, leafy Connecticut, and please, please try not to start yawning. The book is better than its title. Its sweep is larger than might be expected, its fine-tuning more precise. And the girl, Emily Vidal, is a lot more interesting than the sum of her spoiled suburban parts."


• Scott Hutchins on The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier, one of Amazon's Best Books of February: "All across the world, human pain — physical, and maybe spiritual — has been made visible. Brockmeier devotes his considerable gifts of description to the illuminated wounds of his characters, using lush, quiet prose to detail their cancer, abuse, self-mutilation and just plain old age...'The Illumination' is a hymn to such suffering, and though the novel isn’t always as dynamic as it might be, on this point it never fails to be deeply felt and precisely observed."


• Zoe Slutzky on The Night Season by Chelsea Cain: "The world that Cain creates is as dark and ominous as ever. The novel's greatest menace is the weather, which transforms Portland’s familiar topography into something less than welcoming. Flooded and obscured by rain, the city becomes wild, unknowable: 'The thin wisps of trees lining the sidewalk shuddered, bare-leaved, in the wind. The whole world glistened wet and black, like the Pacific Ocean at night.' When the storm nearly levels its downtown, the sudden shifts in perspective are vertiginous, and thrilling. This is the mood that Cain has mastered: the dread of knowing something is off, but not being able to see it clearly. It is what presses her readers onward, pulses rising along with the waterline."