New York Times:
- Sunday Book Review cover (as detailed at length earlier today on Omni): George Will on Nixonland by Rick Perlstein: "In Perlstein’s mental universe, Nixon is a bit like God — not, Lord
knows, because of Nixon’s perfect goodness and infinite mercy, but
because Nixon is the explanation for everything.... 'How did Nixonland end?' Perlstein asks in the book’s last line. 'It
has not ended yet.' But almost every page of Perlstein’s book
illustrates the sharp contrast rather than a continuity with America
today. It almost seems as though Perlstein, who was born in 1969, is
reluctant to let go of the excitement he has experienced secondhand
through the archives he has ransacked to such riveting effect."
- Maslin on Bright Shiny Morning by one of our other guests this week, James Frey: "The million little pieces guy was called James Frey. He got a second act. He got another chance. Look what he did with it.
He stepped up to the plate and hit one out of the park. No more lying,
no more melodrama, still run-on sentences still funny punctuation but
so what. He became a furiously good storyteller this time."
- Kakutani on The Boat by Nam Le: "The other tales in this book ... circumnavigate the globe,
demonstrating Mr. Le’s astonishing ability to channel the experiences
of a multitude of characters, from a young child living in Hiroshima
during World War II to a 14-year-old hit man in the barrios of Medellín
to a high school jock in an Australian beach town. Mr. Le not only
writes with an authority and poise rare even among longtime authors,
but he also demonstrates an intuitive, gut-level ability to convey the
psychological conflicts people experience when they find their own
hopes and ambitions slamming up against familial expectations or the
brute facts of history."
- Jennifer Senior on Blood Matters by Masha Gessen: "'Blood Matters' is valuable reading to almost anyone facing a huge
health decision, not only for the literary commiseration it offers, but
also for the inspired example of medical sleuthing on one’s own behalf
that it provides. Gessen keeps an inflammatory topic at room
temperature, writing elegantly and without self-pity. The book is very
funny in places. (My favorite sentence, for reasons I can’t quite
describe: 'DNA-testing equipment tends to fall into two categories:
things that look like printers and things that look like toasters.')
It’s also very lucid, even when the science gets complex. It’s a
liberating book. Strange as it sounds, it would make a great Mother’s
Day present."
Washington Post:
- Carolyn See on The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer: "Considering that Andrew Sean Greer is the author of the wildly imaginative 'Confessions of Max Tivoli' ... it will come as no surprise that the new novel is built on several
narrative surprises that cannot (or should not) be revealed. So this
will be a hard review to write.... This is a plot that deepens as surprises explode unexpectedly and
terrifyingly. 'The Story of a Marriage' is more than worth the reader's
attention. It's thoughtful, complex and exquisitely written."
Los Angeles Times:
- David L. Ulin on Frey's Bright Shiny Morning: "'Bright Shiny Morning' is a terrible book. One of the worst I've ever
read. But you have to give James Frey credit for one thing: He's got
chutzpah.... Whatever else his failings as a writer, Frey was once able to move his
readers; how else do we explain the success of 'A Million Little
Pieces'? It's just one of the ironies of this new book that his
fictionalized memoir is a better novel than 'Bright Shiny Morning'
could ever hope to be."
- Minna Proctor on Exiles by Ron Hansen: "In 'Exiles,' the dramatic inevitable belongs to the
five drowned German nuns to whose memory the Victorian poet Gerard
Manley Hopkins dedicated perhaps his most important work, 'The Wreck of
the Deutschland,' a poem that was neither understood during his
lifetime nor terribly well-liked.... From the magnificent words of Hopkins to the terrifying drama aboard
the Deutschland, the promises of "Exiles" are superlative. The
execution is tentative. If only Ron Hansen had plunged more deeply into
those dark waters. If only a novel about fate, faith and poetry could
give us more."
Continue reading "Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers" »
New York Times:
- Sunday Book Review cover (Chinese fiction issue): Jonathan Spence on Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out by Mo Yan: "Although one can say that the political dramas narrated by Mo Yan are
historically faithful to the currently known record, 'Life and Death'
remains a wildly visionary and creative novel, constantly mocking and
rearranging itself and jolting the reader with its own internal
commentary.... From the start, the reader
must be willing to share with Mo Yan the novel’s central conceit: that
the five main narrators are not humans but animals, albeit ones who
speak with sharply modulated human voices.... Such a brief summary may make the book sound too cute when it is, in fact, harsh and gritty, raunchy and funny."
- Pankaj Mishra on Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong: "The author’s preoccupation with his Chinese audience may not be the
only source of frustration for foreign readers of Howard Goldblatt’s
generally fluent translation. Jiang Rong seems to have barely attempted
to transmute his experiences and epiphanies into fiction; his book
reads like an extended polemic about the superiority of nomadic people
and the dangers of a triumphant but brutishly ignorant modernity."
- David Margolick on 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War by Benny Morris: "The history of the 1948 war desperately needs to be told, since it’s so
barely understood or remembered and since so many of the issues that
plague us today had their roots in that struggle.... No one is better suited to the task than Benny Morris, the Israeli
historian who, in previous works, has cast an original and skeptical
eye on his country’s founding myths. Whatever controversy he has
stirred in the past, Morris relates the story of his new book soberly
and somberly, evenhandedly and exhaustively. Definitely exhaustively,
for '1948' can feel like 1948: that is, hard slogging. Some books can
be both very important and very hard to read."
- Maslin on Audition by Barbara Walters: "If any single thing keeps 'Audition' from achieving the stature of Katharine Graham's 'Personal History,' the book that set the high-water mark for memoirs of the politically
and socially well-connected, it is the excess decorousness built into
Ms. Walters’s conversation. That is not to say that she lacks sharp
elbows or that she is shy about remembering grievances or settling
scores.... A little more barbed frankness
would have gone rather far in a book that uses 'rather' as its favorite
modifier."
- Maslin on A Wolf at the Table by Augusten Burroughs: "When Augusten Burroughs wrote 'Running With Scissors,' he regaled readers with hilarious tales
of the domestic craziness he endured while growing up. Now in another
family memoir Mr. Burroughs makes a crazy move of his own. 'A Wolf at
the Table' is a portrait of the author’s apparently maniacal and
Augusten-hating father. Determinedly unfunny, awkwardly histrionic and
sometimes anything but credible, it repudiates everything that put Mr.
Burroughs on the map."
Washington Post:
- Michael Dirda on Trauma by Patrick McGrath: "Beautifully crafted and paced, Trauma can be viewed as either
a superb psychological thriller or as a masterly evocation of modern
alienation and despair -- assuming, of course, there is any difference.... McGrath eschews splatter or gruesomeness, instead relating Charlie Weir's story in clear, quick-flowing prose, as if Dick Francis had rewritten Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier. Trauma is, in short, a terrific literary entertainment, one that will keep you on edge, worried and guessing for 200 pages."
Los Angeles Times:
- Tim Rutten on Counselor by Ted Sorensen: "'Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History' is not only a fascinating
memoir but also this election year's most important political book. Despite the subtitle's characteristic modesty, part of what makes
"Counselor" so important is that its author was at the very center of
so much that was important in American history and politics during the
second half of the 20th century.... Sorensen's willingness to draw lessons concerning the current political
situation from his experience is one of the several things that make
"Counselor" such remarkably pleasurable and instructive reading."
Continue reading "Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers" »
New York Times:
- Sunday Book Review cover: Leon Wieseltier on The Second Plane by Martin "Chucklehead" Amis: "Amis seems to regard his little curses as almost military contributions
to the struggle. He has a hot, heroic view of himself. He writes as if
he, with his wrinkled copies of Bernard Lewis and Philip Larkin, is what stands between us and the restoration of the caliphate.... Pity the writer who wants to be Bellow but is only Mailer.... You get the feeling, reading these pages, that for his side Amis will
say almost anything, because being noticed is as important to him as
being right. The complication is that there is considerable justice on
Amis’s side.... I have never before assented to so many of the principles of a book and found it so awful." [Sorry for all the ellipses, but I had to squeeze in some of the best lines in this classic of vitriol.]
- Kakutani on The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich: "Writing in prose that combines the magical sleight of hand of Gabriel Garcia Marquez with the earthy, American rhythms of Faulkner, Ms. Erdrich traces the
connections between these characters and their many friends and
relatives with sympathy, humor and the unsentimental ardor of a writer
who sees that the tragedy and comedy in her people’s lives are
ineluctably commingled.... With 'The Plague of Doves,' she has written what is arguably her most
ambitious — and in many ways, her most deeply affecting — work yet."
- Tom LeClair on Shadow Country by Peter Mathiessen: "By reducing his Watson materials to one volume, Matthiessen has
sacrificed qualities that gave those novels their powerful reinforcing
illusions of authenticity and artlessness. Book I still has that Ten
Thousand Islands quality, but 'Shadow Country' as a whole is like the
Tamiami Trail that crosses the Everglades. It offers a quicker and
easier passage through the swamp, but fewer shades and shadows."
- Katie Roiphe on Shakespeare's Wife by Germaine Greer: "One might wonder why this book, filled with mundane accounts of
business deals, wills and birth records, is so riveting. It may be that
one senses the passion in the archives, in the artifacts of daily life
that Greer meticulously uncovers.... The details — so rare, so tangible —
have the bareness of poetry. The world of Elizabethan England is so
completely lost to us that these hard facts glow a little in the
darkness."
Washington Post:
- David Leavitt on The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon: "Whether describing turn-of-the-century Chicago, with its mean tenements
and decrepit outhouses, or the 'onionesque armpits' of a Moldovan pimp
or an 'unreal McDonald's' in Moldova, 'shiny and sovereign and
structurally optimistic,' Hemon is as much a writer of the senses as of
the intellect.... [B]eauty and violence, in Hemon's universe, are far from mutually
exclusive. Indeed, he seems determined not to let his readers
(particularly his American readers) escape the experience of war as a
personal affront and a personal transformation."
- Ron Charles on Erdrich's Plague of Doves: "What marks these stories ... is what has always set Erdrich apart and made her
work seem miraculous: the jostling of pathos and comedy, tragedy and
slapstick in a peculiar dance. As horrific as the crimes at the heart
of this novel are, other sections remind us that Erdrich is a great
comic writer.... 'I am sentenced to keep watch over this small patch of earth,' says one
character, who could just as well be speaking for Erdrich herself, 'to
judge its miseries and tell its stories. That's who I am.'
Sit down and listen carefully."
Los Angeles Times:
- One more rave, by Brigitte Frase, for The Plague of Doves: "She gets better and better. If her first book, 'Love Medicine,' was a
concerto, then ever since 'The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No
Horse,' she has been composing symphonies filled with a complex wisdom
about the strands of darkness and light that make up a human life.... Erdrich moves seamlessly from grief to sexual ecstasy, from comedy ... to tragedy,
from richly layered observations of nature and human nature to magical
realism. She is less storyteller than medium. One has the sense that
voices and events pour into her and reemerge with crackling intensity,
as keening music trembling between sorrow and joy."
Continue reading "Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers" »
New York Times:
- Sunday Book Review cover: Terrence Rafferty on The Journey Home by Dermot Bolger [a 1990 novel only now brought out by the University of Texas Press]: "This is a mournful book, but not a glum one, really: the writer’s love
of his agonized characters and his unsettled homeland is unmistakable,
and redemptive. There is, as the young know and the old are prone to
forget, a weird exhilaration about going all the way, even if where you
find yourself is a little scary.... Wherever the 'real' Ireland is or was or will be, there are great
chunks of it, with the smell and texture of Irish earth, in Dermot
Bolger’s rich, conflicted, ferociously vital book. This is a novel full
of rage and full of melancholy and full, to overflowing, of home truths."
- Janet Maslin on Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon--and the Journey of a Generation: "'Girls Like Us' turns out to be unexpectedly captivating. And it defies
expectations, to the point where Ms. Weller’s grand ambitions wind up
fulfilled.... Never mind
that her book has a tendency to gush and fawn. She has still put it
together in revelatory ways, underscoring the generation-wide impact of
her subjects’ songs and stories.... 'Girls Like Us' is a strong amalgam of nostalgia, feminist history,
astute insight, beautiful music and irresistible gossip about the
common factors in the three women’s lives."
- Marilyn Stasio on The SIlver Swan by Benjamin Black: "Make no mistake, Black is a grand writer with a seductive style, and
the dark, repressive world he makes of postwar Dublin ... goes a long way to explain why everyone in this
morally claustrophobic world is so sex-mad. But the conventions of
crime fiction provide structural security for any exploratory attack on
the subject of evil (or sin, as Black’s characters are more apt to
define it), and failing to take full advantage of that freedom is like
traveling all the way to Ireland and neglecting to visit either a
church or a pub."
Washington Post:
- Ted Genoways on Posthumous Keats by Stanley Plumly: "If the mark of true genius is the effortless creation of something
wholly new that, once seen, becomes self-evident -- as Plumly regards
Keats's odes -- then it's apt that Plumly himself should have to mint a
new genre to reckon with the young poet.... What contemporary critic would dare make such sweeping assertions or
venture so deeply into the mind of his subject? What poet would engage
in such exhaustive research or craft such an exacting portrait? Plumly
shows us how bloodless and cold criticism has become in the last
half-century by demonstrating how passionately engaged he is -- with
the life he is writing, the poems he is explicating, the era he is
recreating. The effect, at times, is like watching a resurrection --
not only of Keats, but of the cadaverous genre of literary criticism."
- Daniel Byman on Terror and Consent by Philip Bobbitt: "Despite his establishment pedigree, he is a thoroughgoing contrarian.
Defying the nearly universal criticism among academics of the term 'war
on terror,' Bobbitt embraces it, making a strong case -- better than
the Bush administration has -- that the challenge can best be thought
of as a series of wars....
My advice is that readers should approach Terror and Consent
with a mixture of caution and open-mindedness. Not all of Bobbitt's
pronouncements may be convincing. But his book constantly prods us to
reexamine our preconceptions about terrorism, which is by itself some
preparation for what may lie ahead."
- Peter Behrens on Fall of Frost by Brian Hall: "Hall's themes, like Frost's, are major: love, death, the anarchy of
living, the tragedy implicit in creating children and poems. This is a
book about a man confronting the world and struggling to make sense,
through his work, of what he cannot otherwise grasp. Like Frost's
poetry, Hall's novel is pungent, deceptively simple and magnificently
sad."
Los Angeles Times:
- Jay Parini on Lavinia by Ursula K. LeGuin: "Anyone who comes to 'Lavinia' seeking a conventional realistic fiction
will feel disappointed. This is a poem in the form of a novel,
an elegant echo chamber for a canonical work, a reading of an epic
poem, and a rewriting of that poem.... She addresses the primitive world,
summons a vision and declares it pure. She has heard voices and
channeled them in the language of Lavinia herself. And this voice has
something wonderful and strange to tell us."
New York Sun:
- Benjamin Lytal on The White King by Gyorgy Dragoman: "A memoir of communist oppression, it is also an of-the-moment
contribution to world literature, representing the childlike
combination of wonder and irony currently in vogue across the globe.... There is always the risk that what should seem horrible will only
become precious, a species of fairy tale awkwardly bearing the badge of
politics. But unlike most such authors, Mr. Dragomán captures a
childhood that feels less like a fairy tale than like a real childhood
— perhaps because he actually lived it."
Continue reading "Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers" »
New York Times:
- Sunday Book Review cover: Niall Ferguson on Terror and Consent by Philip Bobbitt: "'Terror and Consent' is in many ways a manifesto for a new
Atlanticism, not just a reassertion but a reinvention of the dominant
role of the trans-Atlantic alliance. It will be read with pleasure by
men of a certain age, class and education from Manhattan’s Upper East
Side to London’s West End. But 'Terror and Consent' is much more than that readership might
suggest. This is quite simply the most profound book to have been
written on the subject of American foreign policy since the attacks of
9/11 — indeed, since the end of the cold war." [I have to add here that I started this giant book with great interest a little while back and found it borderline incomprehensible. I'd like to think that Ferguson's rave might lead me back to the book now, but, let's be honest, it's far more likely to substitute for it.]
- William Grimes on McMafia by Misha Glenny: "Mr. Glenny sets a fast pace as he races from one criminal hot spot to
another, riding with marijuana traffickers in British Columbia, walking
into pachinko parlors in Tokyo, visiting brothels in Tel Aviv and
scoping out the sex clubs in Dubai. For sheer enterprise he is hard to
beat, but anything like a clear picture of global crime eludes him." [This one, by contrast, which provides a nice, depressing complement to Bobbitt's book, I thought was excellent. The chaotic feeling Grimes describes I found a plus.]
- Erica Wagner on The Rain Before It Falls by Jonathan Coe: "'The Rain Before It Falls' is a peculiar book, to put it kindly; it is
itself a failure, in more brutal terms. It’s peculiar because it’s hard
to understand why Coe, an accomplished novelist, did (it seems)
everything in his power to distance his readers from the characters and
situations he wishes to portray."
- Charles Taylor on The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Graff: "In the end, all of Groff’s parodies and pastiches cannot disguise that
she’s written a very simple tale of homecoming and reconciliation. Her
talent appears to be simpler and more openly emotional than she
acknowledges. Though she throws in ending after ending, Groff also ties
things together quite nicely; if what had preceded these multiple
endings had been less showy, you could even say satisfyingly."
Washington Post:
- Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore on Ida: A Sword Among Lions by Paula Giddings: "Giddings set out to write a definitive biography and has succeeded spectacularly. Ida
gradually brings us to see the world through Wells's eyes; as she shops
for a new seersucker suit that we know she can't afford or feels
betrayed when fellow activists try to leave her off the list of
founders of the NAACP, we come to love this brave and wise woman.
Read it and weep. Then give it to the last person who told you that ideals are a waste of time."
Los Angeles Times:
- Jack Lynch on Shakespeare's Wife by Germaine Greer: "Germaine Greer works to fill the 'wife-shaped void in the biography of
William Shakespeare.' The result is learned, rousing, lively -- and
often downright infuriating. Greer is no scholarly dilettante. She wrote her Cambridge doctoral
dissertation on Shakespeare, and she knows her way around an archive....
She
also writes engagingly; the book will be an exciting read even for
nonspecialists.... The real problem with 'Shakespeare's Wife' is that it says more about
fantasies than about the real world -- both the fantasies of the
old-fashioned misogynists and of the modern feminist."
- Richard Eder on All the Sad Young Literary Men by Keith Gessen: "His achingly comic command of the hopes, vanities, foibles and
quandaries of his peers has produced something better than fashionably
maneuvered satire. It is irony (of a rare cosmopolitan sort) that this
Russian-born writer brings to the New York scene, a pond that takes
itself to be the ocean. He evokes the world's culture along with our
own."
Continue reading "Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers" »
New York Times:
- Sunday Book Review cover: Liesl Schillinger on Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri: "Lahiri handles her characters without leaving any fingerprints. She
allows them to grow as if unguided, as if she were accompanying them
rather than training them through the espalier of her narration.
Reading her stories is like watching time-lapse nature videos of
different plants, each with its own inherent growth cycle, breaking
through the soil, spreading into bloom or collapsing back to earth." And on Friday, Kakutani said, "A Chekhovian sense of loss blows through these new stories: a reminder
of Ms. Lahiri’s appreciation of the wages of time and mortality and her
understanding too of the missed connections that plague her husbands
and wives, parents and children, lovers and friends."
- Kakutani on The Second Plane--"these chuckleheaded essays"--by Martin Amis: "This pretentious, formalistic argument underscores Mr. Amis’s efforts
to deal with a vast historic tragedy with preening, self-consciously
literary musings.... 'The Second Plane' is such a weak, risible and often objectionable
volume that the reader finishes it convinced that Mr. Amis should stick
to writing fiction and literary criticism, as he’s thoroughly
discredited himself with these essays as any sort of political or
social commentator."
- Liz Phair (yes, that Liz) on Black Postcards by Dean Wareham: See Brad's post from earlier today.
- Joshua Henkin on Last Last Chance by Fiona Maazel: "Maazel’s book has enough event — and enough eccentricity — to torpedo your average novel. But 'Last Last Chance' isn’t your average novel, thanks in no small
part to Maazel’s funny, lacerating prose. The book fits squarely in the
tradition of novels about the wealthy and dissolute, but ultimately
it’s less John Cheever than Denis Johnson — the Denis Johnson of 'Jesus’ Son,' with its drug-addled narrators."
Washington Post:
- Michael Dirda on The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel: "Surely, though, the man is your typical melancholy, dry-as-dust
bibliophile? Nope. Not only does Manguel own wonderful books housed in
an eat-your-heart-out library in an idyllic part of France, he seems,
well, content. According to The Library at Night, he lives with
someone he loves, writes during the morning, potters among his books
throughout the day and evening, and, come nightfall, sips wine in the
garden with visiting friends from around the world. Sigh."
Los Angeles Times:
- Ron Carlson on Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen: "In 'Shadow Country,' Matthiessen revisits his three novels about the
career of Watson ('Killing Mister Watson,' 'Lost Man's River' and 'Bone
by Bone') and fits them together so that they unfold, layer by layer,
mystery by mystery, episode by episode, gathering, gathering, nodding
back and forth, in a tangle not unlike the living imbroglio in which
the tale is set, the impenetrable jungle wetland of the Florida
lowlands. I'll just say right here that the book took my sleeve and
like the ancient mariner would not let go."
Continue reading "Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers" »
New York Times:
- Sunday Book Review cover: Steven Brill on The Appeal by John Grisham: "There’s lots of other intrigue worthy of a Grisham novel — missing
witnesses, destroyed evidence, insider stock trading. It’s a shame,
though, that Grisham’s grace in constructing a sophisticated story is
so poorly matched by his writing.... Still, Grisham keeps his story moving. And he not only moves to a
surprising ending but makes a real point about how judicial elections
undermine the integrity of any justice system."
- Kakutani on The Bin Ladens by Steve Coll: "It is a book that possesses the novelistic energy of a rags-to-riches
family epic, following its sprawling cast of characters as they travel
from Mecca and Medina to Las Vegas and Disney World, and yet, at the
same time, it is a book that, in tracing the connections between the
public and the private, the political and the personal, stands as a
substantive bookend to Mr. Coll’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning 2004 book, 'Ghost Wars.'"
- David Orr on Elegy by Mary Jo Bang: "This is a tightly focused, completely forthright collection written
almost entirely in the bleakest key imaginable. The poems aren’t all
great, some of them aren’t even good, but collectively they are
overwhelming — which is both a compliment to Bang’s talent and to the
toughness of mind that allowed her to attempt this difficult project in
the first place."
- Evan Thomas on Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 by Max Hastings: Hastings "is equally adept at analyzing the broad sweep of strategy and creating
thrilling set pieces that put the reader in the cockpit of a fighter
plane or the conning tower of a submarine. But he is best on the human
cost of war.... Americans were shocked by the Japanese massacre of civilians in
Manila. After a month of constant bombardment, the United States Army
left much of the city in rubble."
Washington Post:
- Thomas de Waal on One Soldier's War by Arkady Babchenko: "The memoir, by turns horrific, sad and funny, fills a big gap by
providing us with the first-person experiences of an articulate Russian
soldier. As one tale of savagery follows another, however, the story
becomes increasingly frustrating to the reader who knows the Russian
political context. The end of one war, a two-year interlude and the
start of a second war are barely registered as the narrative becomes war-without-end, totally enclosed within a soldier's helmet and a company of men."
Los Angeles Times:
- Nathaniel Rich on Bastard Tongues by Derek Bickerton: "Some linguistic scholars sit at home and analyze field data, others
convene demographically vetted test groups, but Derek Bickerton will
have none of that cautious bunk. In 'Bastard Tongues,' his 'favorite
modus operandi was simply to drive around until I saw a bar I liked the
look of.' Drunks, he explains, 'are the world's most underrated
language teaching resource.'"
New York Sun:
Continue reading "Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers" »
New York Times:
- Sunday Book Review cover: Colm Toibin on Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker: "Slowly, as you read, because of the variety in the tone and the
shocking or tragic nature of the quotation, and because of how well
chosen they are, 'Human Smoke' becomes riveting and fascinating. It is as though a
brilliant film editor, with an urgent argument to make, began to work
with gripping newsreels.... He has produced an eloquent and passionate assault on the idea that the deliberate targeting of civilians can ever be justified."
- Kakutani on The Finder by Colin Harrison: "In 'The Finder,' as in earlier thrillers..., Mr. Harrison combines a Balzacian eye for social
detail and a poet’s sense of mood with a sleazily sensationalistic plot
— this time, so gory at one point and often so far-fetched that it
seems more like a story line borrowed from a straight-to-video
production than a high-budget feature film. The result is a grisly page
turner of a novel that lacquers its cheap thrills with an upscale
literary veneer, even as it leaves the reader with some memorably
visceral snapshots of a nervous, profligate New York City, barreling
headlong into the new millennium."
- Maslin on Change of Heart by Jodi Picoult: "Not even the most cultish Picoult fans are likely to think Ms. Picoult
broke a sweat while preparing 'Change of Heart.' Despite her grim
diligence and earnestly religion-based story line, she seems to have
written her latest tear-jerker on authorial autopilot. When writers
become this popular..., they can coast
in ways not possible for the up-and-coming. The opportunity to be
long-winded yet perfunctory, paradoxically daring yet formulaic, is
available to only proven hit makers at the top of the heap."
Washington Post:
- David Chanoff on The Translator by Daoud Hari: "The Translator, by Daoud Hari, a native Darfurian, may be the
biggest small book of this year, or any year. In roughly 200 pages of
simple, lucid prose, it lays open the Darfur genocide more intimately
and powerfully than do a dozen books by journalists or academic
experts. Hari and his co-writers achieve this in a voice that is
restrained, generous, gentle and -- astonishingly -- humorous."
- Pico Iyer on Dog Man by Martha Sherrill: "Martha Sherrill [is] one of the most open and responsive writers around,
whose special gift is for entering other lives so deeply that we feel
their longings, their confinements as our own. ... In her new book,
Sherrill tells the spellbindingly beautiful and affecting story of
Morie and Kitako Sawataishi as they have gone through their days,
raising Akita dogs, for more than 60 years in the dark and unforgiving 'snow country' of northern Japan."
Continue reading "Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers" »
New York Times:
- Sunday Book Review cover: Walter Kirn on Lush Life by Richard Price: "Raymond Chandler is peeping out from Price’s skull, as well he should be, given such
gloomy doings, but ... one detects Saul Bellow’s vision, too. Price is a builder, a drafter of vast blueprints, and though the Masonic keystone of his novel is a box-shaped N.Y.P.D. office, he stacks whole slabs of city on top of it and excavates
colossal spaces beneath it. He doesn’t just present a slice of life, he
piles life high and deep. Time too. The past is rendered mostly as an
absence, though, as a set of caverns, a hive of catacombs. Some of his
characters’ ancestors are down there, but the main way we know this is
through the hollowness of the new neighborhood built over their crypts."
- William Grimes on Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker: "Muddled and often infuriating, 'Human Smoke' sounds its single, solemn
note incessantly, like a mallet striking a kettle drum over and over.
War is bad. Churchill was bad. Roosevelt was bad. Hitler was bad too,
but maybe, in the end, no worse than Roosevelt and Churchill.... In dedicating it to the memory of American and British pacifists, Mr.
Baker writes, 'They failed, but they were right.' Millions of ghosts
say otherwise."
- David Rieff on Marching Toward Hell by Michael Scheuer: "While Scheuer fancies his ruthlessness to be Machiavellian realism, his
arguments ... are pure militarist
utopianism. 'Marching Toward Hell' is an enormously crude, reductionist account of
the challenges posed by the jihadists, and as such, difficult to take
seriously.... He flatters himself that he is a modern-day Patrick Henry.
He’s mistaken." And on Friday Kakutani called it a "scathing, wildly uneven and often intemperate work."
- Gregory Cowles on Smash! Crash! by Jon Scieszka: "Parents probably won’t love this series the way they love 'The Stinky
Cheese Man,' but that’s only because as Scieszka reaches out to younger
readers, he’s stopped trying so hard to please the grown-ups. I might
miss his tap-dancing — in the end, I’m a grown-up too — but Scieszka
knows his audience. The same children who chant 'Can we fix it?' as
they watch 'Bob the Builder,' after all, turn around and yell 'Can we
break it?' as they attack their block towers. For them, Trucktown
should be a smash."
Washington Post:
- Ron Charles on The Blue Star by Tony Earley: "The novel builds slowly to these more serious themes -- probably too slowly. Although Jim the Boy
walked the line between banality and profundity with exquisite
sensitivity, here the balance is not so well executed. Many of these
chapters are warm and graceful but not sufficiently essential, and the
writing isn't note-perfect enough to sustain the lack of import....
Fortunately, as the novel nears its conclusion, these merely nostalgic scenes begin to acquire real emotional depth."
- Fiasco author Tom Ricks digs into the archives to review Piers Mackesy's 1964 classic The War for America: 1775-1883 for its modern parallels: "Nor did British leaders understand the intensity and vitality of the
rebel cause. 'I may safely assert that the insurgents are very few, in
comparison with the whole of the people,' Gen. Sir William Howe wrote
in 1775.... He calls it a 'strategic history,' which he describes as the
no-man's-land between a diplomatic history of a war and a narrative
history of its battles. It is the single best such work that I ever
have encountered."
Los Angeles Times:
- Paul Wilner on Jackalope Dreams by Mary Clearman Blew: "Reciting plot points doesn't begin to do justice to this remarkable
work. Sentences seethe with urgent, unhurried energy, and the
description of the land the author so clearly loves is in service of
the story, not showing off. You come to care deeply about these people,
caught between an uncapturable past and an uncertain future. 'Jackalope
Dreams' is a small masterpiece; it deserves the attention it makes a
point of not seeking."
Continue reading "Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers" »
New York Times:
- Sunday Book Review cover: Scott Turow on The Blue Star by Tony Earley: "Earley described 'Jim the Boy' as 'a children’s book for adults,' and 'The Blue Star' has a similar feel. It’s such a deceptively simple
strategy — to take the unembellished storytelling style of children’s
literature and to bend it to adult themes — that many novelists will
feel like smacking themselves on the side of the head for not having
thought of it themselves. But it is no easy feat, especially to stay
inside the hazard lines of sentimentality.... Yet I galloped through the novel and relished every page." Maslin liked it too on Thursday, saying, "Though Mr. Earley’s style remains endearingly airborne, 'The Blue Star' is in substance heavier than its predecessor."
- And Maslin today on The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America by David Hajdu: "'The Ten-Cent Plague' is the third book by David Hajdu to take a
subject suitable for fans’ hagiography and turn it into something of
much wider interest.... [T]his book tells an amazing story, with thrills and chills more extreme than the workings of a comic book’s imagination."
- William Grimes on Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of "Energy Independence" by Robert Bryce: "Ethanol? A scam. Wind power? Sheer fantasy. Solar power? Think again.... With all the gusto of a hunter clubbing baby seals, Mr. Bryce goes
after one cherished green belief after another, but he is an
equal-opportunity smiter. Having kicked the props from under every
green technology in sight, he goes after the political right."
- Tom Bissell on Willing by Scott Spencer: "No novel narrated by a man willing to embark on a sex tour, even
reluctantly, should contain the following sentence: 'In fact, I had
never been in such an ambiguous, confusing situation in my life.' As a
sentence it is banal; as an in-context psychological bulletin, it is
risible.... 'Willing' amounts to a Scott Spencer blooper reel, and in it the
language moves along with the undignified haste of a purse-snatcher in
flight." [I must confess that I agree about this one.]
Washington Post:
Los Angeles Times:
Continue reading "Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers" »
New York Times:
- Sunday Book Review cover: Patrick Cockburn on Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East by Robin Wright: "She is particularly good on the moribund nature of the regimes that now
hold power and know they are too unpopular to allow any open expression
of popular will (though some innovations, like satellite television and
the Internet, have prized open their control of information). Both the
Algerian election in 1992 and the Palestinian poll in 2006 showed that
the West will not accept an election won by its enemies. But since the
invasion of Iraq it is difficult to imagine a fair poll having any
other result."
- Kakutani on Lush Life by Richard Price: "No one writes better dialogue than Richard Price--not Elmore Leonard, not David Mamet,
not even David Chase. Not only does Mr. Price have perfect pitch for
the lingo, the rhythms and the inflections of how people talk, but he
also knows how to use a line or two or even a single phrase to conjure
a character’s history and emotional vibe.... Mr. Price puts his myriad gifts together to create his most powerful
and galvanic work yet, a novel that showcases his sympathy and his
street cred and all his skills as a novelist and screenwriter: his
gritty-lyrical prose, his cinematic sense of pacing, his uncanny
knowledge of the nooks and crannies of his characters’ hearts."
- David Leavitt on About My Life and the Kept Woman by John Rechy: "In a sense, though, literary ineptitude is as much a part of Rechy’s
persona as the oiled chest and the jeans unbuttoned at the top.... The irony is that Rechy appears to have been complicit in this erasure
of his own literary identity. On the one hand, he wants to be admired
as a writer. On the other, he wants to be desired as a 'tough man' —
heterosexual, swaggering and functionally illiterate."
- And meanwhile, Margaret B. Jones's memoir of an LA gangland childhood that got a Kakutani rave last week? Totally made up by a private school grad from Sherman Oaks, who was turned in by her sister! (Kakutani's telling-in-retrospect quote: "...enabling her to write with a novelist’s eye for the
psychological detail.") Go back a few days and read the NYT's wide-eyed profile (hey, no stones thrown here--I'm as gullible as they come) and look at the slide show of the author (who had to know she'd be found out) with her daughter, which makes me sad, sad, sad.
Washington Post:
- Ron Charles on Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana by Anne Rice: "As a Christian, I appreciate the reverence and piety that Anne Rice brings to her second novel about the life of Jesus, Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana. But as a reader, I kept wishing some gay vampires would swoop in to liven things up.... In the closing pages of the book, Jesus tells his disciples, 'I will go
on, from surprise to surprise,' but in fact, this highlights the most
fundamental problem of the novel: It's virtually surprise-free."
- Louis Bayard on Against Happiness by Eric G. Wilson: "Wilson's idea of melancholia is thoroughly Romantic and more than a
little romantic. He's the kind of guy who likes to wander through
solitary landscapes, thinking sad and beautiful thoughts.
Unfortunately, once he's refracted his thoughts through the prism of
his prose, they sound pretty goofy: 'What is existence if not an
enduring polarity, an endless dance of limping dogs and lilting
crocuses, starlings that are spangled and frustrated worms?'"
- Michael Dobbs on The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation by Philip Shenon: "While Shenon has interviewed many commissioners and staffers, his
sourcing falls short of the standard set by the 9/11 commission. His
book includes 14 pages of often vague notes, compared to 114 pages in
the 9/11 report. It can be difficult to tell who is drawing the key
conclusions in Shenon's book: a named source, an anonymous source or
the author.... [F]our years later, the 9/11 report stands up pretty well -- despite Shenon's dogged revisionism."
Continue reading "Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers" »
