New York Times:
- Sunday Book Review cover: Kathryn Harrison on Real World by Natsuo Kirino: "As Dostoyevsky did in 'Crime and Punishment,' Kirino pushes her
antihero to murder as a means of philosophical statement and
communicates an authorial anxiety that contemporary social ills will
destroy humanity. But while Dostoyevsky sets up a contest between
Christian love and a pernicious nihilism that inspires barbarity,
Kirino’s 'Real World' offers no possibility of god or redemption."
- Maslin on The Condition by Jennifer Haigh: "As she demonstrated in 'Mrs. Kimble' and particularly in 'Baker
Towers,' Ms. Haigh has a great gift for telling interwoven family
stories and doing justice to all the different perspectives they
present. She is subtle and intuitive about the whole McKotch household,
which in 1976 is based in Concord, Mass. And when the family ruptures —
because, even in an uncommonly good version of the tragic-family-secret
book, it inevitably will — she does justice to each McKotch’s way of
absorbing that change."
- Howard Hampton on Heavy Metal Islam by Mark LeVine: "'Heavy Metal Islam' gets trapped by its good intentions whenever it
attempts to shoehorn the headbangers’ intransigence into preconceived
political slots. Metal music, however you parse it, is dystopian in the
extreme: hyper-aggressively embracing the death instinct, regimented
chaos, deliriously fetishized morbidity. Call it cathartic, sure, even
a way of keeping sane in an insane world (as one performer here says, 'We play heavy metal because our lives are heavy metal'), but don’t
confuse it with 'If I Had a Hammer.' Unless it’s a hammer of the
nihilist gods aimed at your forehead — not to hammer out justice or a
warning or 'the common struggle for democracy and economic equality,'
but to crack your skull open, scrape out your pulverized brains and
feed them to the wolverines."
- Marilyn Stasio on The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale (hot on the heels of its Samuel Johnson Prize last week): "Summerscale accomplishes what modern genre authors hardly bother to do
anymore, which is to use a murder investigation as a portal to a wider
world. When put in historical context, every aspect of this case tells
us something about mid-Victorian society, from prevailing attitudes
about women ('prone to insanity'), children ('full of savage whims and
impulses,' according to one 19th-century physician) and servants
('outsiders who might be spies or seducers') to the morality-based
intellectual constructs that codified such views of human behavior."
Washington Post:
- Martha Sherrill on The Eaves of Heaven by Andrew X. Pham: "Poised to inherit everything, Thong Pham instead lost it all, as Andrew
X. Pham, his son, recounts in this gorgeously written book. But this is
not ultimately a story of loss and upheaval, nor is it simply a
retelling of Vietnam's war-torn history from a Vietnamese point of
view. Many other books have ably covered that ground. The Eaves of
Heaven is something entirely new: an effort to recapture the moments of
beauty and transcendence that emerged from these events."
- Maureen Freely on We Are Now Beginning Our Descent by James Meek: "I was able to look out over the same seas and islands that featured in
Kellas's thoughts. I was so gripped by the story that I carried the
book open in my hand through passport control and customs. I am full of
admiration for Meek's precise and lyrical prose, for his mapping of the
political landscapes through which his characters drift and for his
evocation of the strange, torn geometries of the life in the global
news stream. But what I most treasure in this novel is its generosity.
We carry the flaws of the world inside us. But -- however difficult,
desperate and demented its manifestations -- there is also love."
Los Angeles Times:
- Gideon Lewis-Kraus on How Fiction Works by James Wood: "As the burden of the novelist is to give her readers reason to keep
reading, the burden of the untethered critic (as opposed to the
academic one, whose authority is institutionally granted) is to offer
enough gratuitous pleasure and intelligence that he is taken seriously.
Reading Wood, no matter the book under review, provides enormous
pleasure; his prose is at once buoyant and momentous, his judgment
swift with imperial grace."
New York Sun:
- Adam Kirsch on Paradise Lost: Smyrna, 1922 by Giles Milton: "As Mr. Milton damningly shows, the British, the Americans, and the
other Western powers refused to act, fearful of getting mixed up in the
Greek-Turkish war.... The result was a horrifying massacre — all the more horrifying because
it was entirely predictable and, indeed, often predicted. Drawing on
the memoirs of survivors, most of whom were just children at the time,
Mr. Milton conjures the nightmarish scene.... After a century of ethnic cleansing, Smyrna deserves to be remembered
as, if not a paradise lost, at least a martyr to the human capacity for
hatred."
- Michael Rubin on A Path Out of the Desert by Kenneth Pollack: "Ultimately, there is very little new in the 'grand strategy' Mr.
Pollack suggests should replace the failed policies of the past.
Indeed, while he describes himself as a liberal internationalist, 'A
Path out of the Desert' is little more than a neoconservative manifesto
uncorrupted by the bluntness of Richard Perle or the arrogance of
Douglas Feith.... If Mr. Pollack's grand strategy gives the Bush doctrine a second wind,
both the Middle East and long-term American national security will be
better for it."
Globe & Mail:
- Jason Rotstein on My White Planet by Mark Anthony Jarman: "Each of the 14 episodes traces the same trajectory in describing the
ways our planet is spiritually and morally 'damaged,' 'scorched' and
beyond repair. But Jarman infuses each new episode with startling
examples of life recorded in heavily stylized, idiomatic rhetoric. It's
as if Jarman is saying he won't let the world go down without a fight.
And language is his fighting tool."
[Ed. note: I say this every time his name comes up, but reading Mark
Anthony Jarman for the first time was the highlight of my years as our
Canadian editor. Time to publish him down here, somebody!]
- Stephen Lewis on The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of AIDS by Elisabeth Pisani: "The sad, sad truth about the Pisani book is that the rude language and
controversial nostrums will allow it to be dismissed by policy makers
at all levels. But it should be mandatory, not voluntary, reading:
Pisani is lucid, colourful, insightful and impatient. In her last
chapter, she says quite plainly that we know what to do and we're just
not doing it. She's right. The worst thing that's happened to AIDS is
that the same tired, intellectually ossified bureaucrats in
international aid agencies, in many governments, in multilateral
financial vehicles and above all in the United Nations, are calling the
shots. Elizabeth Pisani is a far straighter shooter than most of them put together."
The Guardian:
- Kate Kellaway on Morality Tale by Sylvia Brownrigg: "This novel is like a single intake of breath. It has a taut,
first-person narrative and one reads it avidly, without a break,
wondering what relief - what oxygen - its ending may bring. It is no
surprise to see, in an afterword, that the book came 'straight from the
dark solitary heart of the middle of the night'."
- Patrick Ness on Jamaica by Malcolm Knox (not available in the US yet): "Jamaica is still a remarkable book: witty, psychologically acute and
muscularly well written, a summer read that could very well blindside
you.... Alongside Tim Winton's Breath, this is the second excellent novel in as
many months to examine masculinity and male friendship in Australian
sport, a subject that might seem of limited intrinsic interest. But
it's not the song, it's how it's sung, and if Winton is an aria, Knox
is early Rolling Stones. If you're looking for something meatier for
the beach, something accessible to read but also engaging for your
brain and heart, then pack both in your luggage and enjoy the trip."
The New Yorker:
- James Wood on The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon: "He is a fabulist but not really a postmodernist; or, rather, he is a
postmodernist who has been mugged by history. When he 'lays bare the
device' (an old Russian Formalist phrase for the technique of playful
fictive self-consciousness), he opens a wound.... [T]he narrator’s mother remarks, 'The trouble with the Hemons . . . is
that they always get much too excited about things they imagine to be
real.' The formulation is canny: a good proportion of reality consists
of what we freely imagine; and then, less happily perhaps, we discover
that that reality has imagined us—that we are the vassals of our
imaginings, not their emperors or archdukes."
--Tom
New York Times:
Sunday Book Review cover: Liesl Schillinger on Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen: "It’s unusual — in fact (why be coy?), it’s extremely rare — to come
across a first novel by a woman writer that concerns itself with such
quirky, philosophical, didactic explorations; a novel in which the
heart and the brain vie for the role of protagonist, and the brain
wins. While the voice and mood of the novel are masculine, clinical and
objective (Leo registers Rema’s distress with detachment, recording it
but not feeling it), the book’s descriptions of colors, smells,
clothing and bodies show feminine perception."- Craig Seligman on The Size of the World by Joan Silber: "Few of her sentences call out
to be quoted or even remembered, really. Her first two stories ... frankly seem a little
bit pallid. But something in them keeps you reading; you may feel
lulled but not bored. And as you continue, you perceive what a serious
misjudgment 'pallid' is. Slowly, almost while your attention is
somewhere else, the intensity level rises. And rises. Notes sounded
softly in the early stories deepen and resonate, until Silber’s quiet
music has turned symphonic."
Becca Zerkin on Wave by Suzy Lee: "I am in love with a nameless little girl made of charcoal dust. She is
the sparingly drawn heroine of 'Wave,' Suzy Lee’s wordless picture book
about a day at the beach, and she bursts from the page with vitality."- Kakutani on Out of Mao's Shadow by Philip P. Pan: "It is Mr. Pan’s achievement in 'Out of Mao’s Shadow' that he makes the
dark side of China’s glittering economic growth palpably real to the
reader by showing the fallout of these changes on the lives of
individual citizens, just as he shows the potent effect that a few
brave individuals — speaking up on behalf of civil liberties, freedom
of the press and government accountability — can have on the party’s
conduct of day-to-day business.... He interviewed artists,
workers, peasants, journalists and entrepreneurs, and his portraits of
these people possess both the immediacy of first-rate reportage and the
emotional depth of field of a novel."
- David Margolick on Rome 1960 by David Maraniss: "It was, his subtitle tells us, an event 'that changed the world.' He
never really proves his case. A gold medalist of a writer ... he has put together a silver medal of a study of a bronze medal of a topic."
Washington Post:
Andrew J. Bacevich on The Dark Side by Jane Mayer: "With the appearance of this very fine book, Hillary Clinton can claim a
belated vindication of sorts: A right-wing conspiracy does indeed
exist, although she misapprehended its scope and nature. The conspiracy
is not vast and does not consist of Clinton-haters. It is small,
secretive and made up chiefly of lawyers contemptuous of the
Constitution and the rule of law."- Randall Balmer on The Family by Jeff Sharlet: "In the film version of 'All the President's Men,; Deep Throat castigates Bob Woodward for his uncorroborated accusations against H.R. Haldeman. 'You've done
worse than let Haldeman slip away,' Deep Throat says. 'You've got
people feeling sorry for him. I didn't think that was possible. . . .
If you shoot too high and miss, everybody feels more secure.' The same might be said about Jeff Sharlet's book about a loose coalition
of religiously conservative individuals and organizations that operates
in and around the councils of power in Washington."
Los Angeles Times:
- Jesse Cohen on The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics by Leonard Susskind: "'The Black Hole War' is a gregarious narrative of intellectual brinkmanship.... Like the best teachers, Susskind makes it fun to learn. With a deft use
of analogy and a flair for language, he tames the most ferocious
concepts. In his hands, a D-brane in anti de Sitter space seems like
the most natural thing in the world. He has also come up with the best
visual metaphor for the multidimensionality of string theory that I've
yet come across, one that alone is worth the price of the book."
- Tim Rutten on Mayer's The Dark Side: "If you intend to vote in November and read only one book between now and then, this should be it."
New York Sun:
Tyler Cowen on The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art by Don Thompson: "Don Thompson provides the single best guide to both the anthropology
and the economics of contemporary art markets. This book is fun and
fascinating on just about every page.... You'll ... learn how to bid at an auction (inexperienced buyers start
too soon in the process), how auctioneers entertain a crowd (they count
on the non-buyers to keep the buyers interested), and why art critics
don't matter much anymore. If the magazine Art in America pays $200 for
a review article, why listen to that writer? We have a much richer and
generally more accessible guide to the value of art — namely the market
itself."
Globe & Mail:
- Michelle Berry on The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski: "In this powerful and compelling book, Wroblewski works with his own
kind of rich, detailed language; at times, it almost feels as if he
invents language. Words and phrases become images so completely that
you often forget you are reading.... I would much rather have too many details written beautifully than just the right amount of really bad writing.... This is a long book. One you will want to think about as you read. It
can be meandering and detailed one minute and fast and action-packed
the next. Run with it. You won't be disappointed."
The Guardian:
Tim Radford on The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow: "He writes in the best traditions of the genre: the prose is simple and
suitably vivid, the explanations pop up as brisk anecdote and lively
example rather than as uncompromising strings of numbers, and the
personal detail - which is lively enough - is sternly contained by the
needs of the narrative. There have been many literate and diverting
books by physicists and mathematicians, but this one starts with one
distinct advantage. Most of us don't want to know about quantum
mechanics, even if we do want to know why the universe is as it is. But
we all want to know what follows when we take a chance on love, the
lottery or a smear test for cancer. We may not understand how to
calculate the rate of false positives, or the margin of error, but we
know that we have a lot to lose."
The New Yorker:
- Elizabeth Kolbert on anti-lawn books: "The anti-lawn treatise attacks both the idea of the velvety
expanse—David Quammen has observed, only half jokingly, that though
Communism has fallen, 'lawnism' continues—and the real labor that goes
into pursuing it. The writer in this tradition toils in the hope
(probably vain) of reversing more than a hundred and fifty years of
gardening history. He envisions an American landscape that looks more
like it did in Downing’s day—one covered in moss, or scrub, or,
alternatively, just weeds."
- Also, Jill Lepore unearths a powerful librarian's failed attempt to block E.B. White's Stuart Little at publication: "'I never was so disappointed in a book in my life,' Moore declared. She
summoned Nordstrom to her rooms at the Grosvenor Hotel, where she
warned her that the book 'mustn’t be published.' To the Whites she sent
a fourteen-page letter, predicting that the book would fail and that it
would prove an embarrassment, and begging the author to reconsider its
publication."
--Tom
With apologies for last week's missing Monday. I was in the woods.
New York Times:
- Sunday Book Review cover: Susann Cokal on Telex from Cuba by Rachel Kushner: Kushner "evinces an intimate knowledge of her novel’s world and
characters. Her style is sure and sharp, studded with illuminating
images.... These are potent moments, and they make the
novel a dreamy, sweet-tart meditation on a vanished way of life and a
failed attempt to make the world over in America’s image. Out of
tropical rot, Kushner has fashioned a story that will linger like a
whiff of decadent Colony perfume."
- Last Sunday's cover: William Logan on Selected Poems by Frank O'Hara: "It’s hard to care about a lot of O’Hara’s poems, but he doesn’t want
you to care.... In his
best poems ... O’Hara found something beyond
that terrible vacancy he was trying so hard to fill. (His best poems
are rarely his most characteristic or frenzied.) The style, though at
times foolish and self-parodic, remains fresh 50 years later. However
much these poems live in the world of Lowell’s 'tranquilized ’50s,'
their giddiness in the face of despair, their animal pleasure in
gossip, their false bravado, their frantic posturing and guilelessness
and petty snobberies — and these were O’Hara’s virtues — give us as
much of a life as poetry can."
- Kakutani on The Sister by Poppy Adams: "Imagine a mash-up of the campy 1962 chiller 'What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?,' starring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, and Arnold Bennett’s 1908 novel 'The Old Wives’ Tale.' Then imagine
the result rewritten as a Gothic novel by an amateur lepidopterist —
not a Nabokov exactly, but a novelist with a scientific bent — and you
have a pretty good idea of Poppy Adams’s first novel, 'The Sister.' Though it’s flawed by a predictable and unsatisfying ending, 'The
Sister' is powered by the same sort of confidently rendered literary
suspense that propelled Donna Tartt’s 1992 thriller, 'The Secret
History,' onto best-seller lists."
- Boris Fishman on City of Thieves by David Benioff: "In contrast to the piety of so many of today’s historical novels —
their facts unimpeachable and their souls somewhere in the library —
Benioff’s book lets its characters inhabit the human condition in all
of its sometimes compromised versatility. But it’s never cavalier, because the author has done his research.... The research never stands out because Benioff weaves it in so deftly.
He shifts tone with perfect control — no recent novel I’ve read travels
so quickly and surely between registers, from humor to devastation."
Washington Post:
- Jonathan Yardley on Shining City by Seth Greenland: "That is very smart stuff, and there's plenty more of it here; the
opening scene, in which Julian 'Juice' Ripps goes to his final reward,
borders on the classic. But there's serious stuff as well. Greenland ... understands that the
exhilarating yet troubling place where Marcus finds himself entails
complex and often ambiguous questions of right and wrong, and he treats
these questions sensitively and intelligently. Mainly, though, Shining City
is simply pedal-to-the-metal fun -- sassy and knowing and irreverent.
It's much too much of all those things to be pigeonholed as 'summer
reading,' but if you have room for only one entertainment this summer,
let Shining City be it."
Los Angeles Times:
- Richard Schickel on Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard by Richard Brody: "Deeply researched, conscientiously written, careful to contextualize
its subject both in his field and in the larger culture that shaped his
work, 'Everything Is Cinema' is in almost every respect an admirable
biography, exactly the sort of scrupulous and passionate work
significant movie figures deserve and almost never receive. I am in awe
of Richard Brody's accomplishment. Yet I have rarely been so glad to
come to the end of an admirable book.
That's because his subject is Jean-Luc Godard, who may be the most chilling and annoying figure in the history of the movies."
New York Sun:
- Eric Ormsby on The Snake Charmer: A Life and Death in Pursuit of Knowledge
by Jamie James: "Mr. James tells this odd story with great flair. His
book is an
affectionate — though not uncritical — biography of Slowinski that also
offers a vivid glimpse into the practice of all science today.... In
the end, for all its high drama, this is a book about strangeness.
In the exotic locales where rare snakes lurk, the scientists who study
them come to seem even more exotic.
They have their own lingo, their
own customs, their private codes; they don't go hunting snakes, they go
'herping.' In Genesis, the serpent is described as the 'subtlest' of
the beasts; it hugs the ground, it knows the secrets of the earth. For
scientists such as Joe Slowinski, the serpent embodies an elusive
wisdom, as strange as it is precious. Unfortunately, it is a wisdom
with fangs."
Globe & Mail:
- Lisa Carver on Sex and Bacon: Why I Love Things That Are Very, Very Bad for Me by Sarah Katherine Lewis: "Sex and Bacon makes me want to shout from a rooftop. Not sure
which rooftop, or what I would say. Maybe just some guttural hoots.
Maybe that this book, this book is great! This book is life! This book
is about sorrow, smells, meat, joy, sex - professional and non -
heartache, heart burst, contentment, kindness, connection, isolation,
snuggling, colonoscopes, handfuls of rosemary thrown into the pot,
realizing you're a fraud, realizing you're awesome, bereavement,
discovery, mistakes, the money that comes from being naked and all the
exciting, semi-horrifying foods in unusual locales that can be bought
with that money, budgeting when you give up being naked and try typing
instead and the couple of pieces of brown thigh meat that can be bought
after the rent is paid, and what you can do with that
past-the-best-used-by date brown meat, one wilted potato, dried beans
and Tabasco."
Times Literary Supplement:
- Alasdair Gray on Little Hut of Leaping Fishes by Chiew-Siah Tei (not available in US yet): "In 2002, I and other teachers of creative writing at Glasgow University read
the earliest pages of this novel and agreed that it would likely become a
good one. It is."
The New Yorker:
- Adam Kirsch on Posthumous Keats by Stanley Plumly: "Through this interweaving of themes and episodes—a 'walk around in
Keats’s life and art, not simply through them'—Plumly emphasizes, as a
more conventional biography never could, the fatal, fated quality of
Keats’s career. He shows how Keats, in a way that feels unique even
among the doomed Romantics, became posthumous while he was still alive."
--Tom
New York Times:
- Richard Holbrooke on One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War: "Any new entry in the crowded field of books on the 1962 Cuban missile
crisis must pass an immediate test: Is it just another recapitulation,
or does it increase our net understanding of this seminal cold war
event? By focusing on the activities of the American, Soviet and Cuban
militaries during those tense October days, Michael Dobbs’s 'One Minute
to Midnight' passes this test with flying colors. The result is a book
with sobering new information about the world’s only superpower nuclear
confrontation — as well as contemporary relevance."
- Kakutani on America America by Ethan Canin: "There are some wonderful, deeply affecting moments here, detailing the
relationship between the narrator, Corey Sifter, and his family, but
they are unfortunately submerged in a bloated, maladroit narrative that
relies on clumsily withheld secrets for suspense and that encumbers the
story of Corey’s coming-of-age with ponderous and unconvincing
meditations on matters like noblesse oblige, the responsibilities of
privilege and working-class resentment of the rich."
- Emily Mitchell on Two Kinds of Decay by Sarah Manguso: "Manguso was already a writer when she became ill, and her obsession
with words, their capacities and limitations, permeates her book.... As much as anything, this book is a search for adequate descriptions of
things heretofore unnamed and unknown. Manguso concludes her account
with questions — and an exhortation to the reader to pay attention.
Through her own attentiveness, Manguso has produced a remarkable,
cleareyed account that turns horror into something humane and beautiful."
- Leah Hager Cohen on Cost by Roxana Robinson: "Robinson has been perennially and somewhat reductively tagged a
chronicler of WASP life. This designation, while factually accurate —
as is the observation that her stories regularly address parenting and
marital issues — doesn’t do her justice. These subjects — WASP life,
domestic life — are often used as code for 'small,' in the sense of
both trivial and mean, and Robinson’s fiction is neither. In writing
about characters whose lives are constrained, she makes them loom large."
Washington Post:
- Jonathan Yardley on The Spies of Warsaw by Alan Furst: "Furst is that rarity, a writer of popular fiction who is also a serious
novelist. This is the third of his novels that I've reviewed, and the
steady growth of his achievement almost can be measured with calipers.
At times his prose can get a little strained, as he reaches a little
far for effects, but it's now much more controlled than it was a dozen
years ago in The World at Night. Like a handful of other
writers who have turned espionage fiction into something approximating
art -- John le Carré, of course, and Charles McCarry -- Furst combines
the craft of entertainment with the exploration of important themes,
and in no way does the entertainment diminish the themes."
- James G. Hershberg on Dobbs's One Minute to Midnight: "As the pages fill with memorable characters in extraordinary
circumstances and exotic settings, and as the drama steadily builds, One Minute to Midnight
evokes novelists like Alan Furst, John le Carré or Graham Greene -- a
reminder that footnote-laden history need not take a backseat to
fictional thrillers. Dobbs's vivid narrative brings the crisis alive not only in the
rarefied inner sancta of politicians, bureaucrats and revolutionaries
in Washington, Moscow and Havana but also among the grunts in the
superpowers' vast, unwieldy military machines, from the tropical
Caribbean to the frigid Arctic."
- Ron Charles on More Than It Hurts You by Darin Strauss: "If you don't belong to a book club, Darin Strauss's bitter and
brilliant new novel is reason enough to start one. You can always
disband afterward, and in any case your discussion of More Than It Hurts You may be so heated that you'll never talk to those people again."
Los Angeles Times:
- Martin Rubin on The Forger's Spell by Edward Dolnick: "When it comes to forgery and its ability to fascinate, the bigger the
better, and the greater the audacity the more compelling. In the story
of a two-bit Dutch painter, Han Van Meegeren, who had the nerve to take
on that most rarefied of his artistic compatriots, Johannes Vermeer,
author Edward Dolnick has hit the mother lode. And as if this tale of
unparalleled chutzpah were not good enough, it takes place amid the
tumult of the Nazi occupation of Holland and the competitive plunder of
its -- and much of Europe's -- art treasures by Adolf Hitler and
Hermann Goering. Dolnick more than does it justice, drawing on his
knowledge of a wide range of subjects, including scientific process,
politics and the gullibility and herd-instinct of the art market."
- Geoff Boucher on Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko by Blake Bell: "For students of comics history, there are few names that strike the ear
and the imagination quite like Ditko's. In a field defined by brilliant
oddballs, embittered journeymen, penniless geniuses and colorful hacks,
Ditko is the strident hermit king.... Ditko's life, like that of R. Crumb or Harvey Pekar, has enough
obsessive oddity and outsider struggle to be a tale told wide. But Bell
goes the opposite direction, getting as narrow as the lines Ditko used
to restrain the action in the old Marvel and Charlton comics."
New York Sun:
- Adam Kirsch reconsiders Robert Lowell's Life Studies: "It would be unfair, however, to lay the blame for so much bad writing
at Lowell's door. Just as Marx was not a Marxist, so Lowell was not
really a confessional poet.... In the confession booth, all that
matters is honesty and sincerity. In a poem, even the most heartfelt
recital remains inert if it is not brought to life with cunning
artistry. And nothing could be more artful than the way Lowell, in his
masterpiece, turns the pain and risk of his own life into the catharsis
and consolation of great poetry."
Globe & Mail:
- Kevin Chong on Breath by Tim Winton: "Breath isn't as much about the joys and sorrows of youth as it
about the long shadow it casts into our adulthood. Our younger, former
selves, Winton suggests, might be callow and inexperienced, but they're
also more attuned to an essential paradox: The moments we feel most
alive are also those when our own lives are most at peril - when the
next breath might not come."
Times Literary Supplement:
- G.S. Smith on Diaries (Vol. 1 and Vol. 2) by Sergei Prokofiev: "Far from being aide-memoire jottings of
dates, people and places, Prokofiev’s diaries offer carefully wrought,
polished narrative prose, put together with a sense of pitch and timing
reminiscent of his best music. And on the whole they bustle along with the
same cocky gait; there is occasional high seriousness, and a sense of
occasion when the occasion merits, but there is never any pontificating....
Prokofiev was always impatiently striving forward; the only retrospective
activity he seems truly to have enjoyed, it has to be said, was writing and
rereading his own diary."
The New Yorker:
- Pankaj Mishra on Beijing Coma by Ma Jian: "What comes through most strongly and often repetitively is Ma Jian’s
own alienation from his country, and while there is much to agree with
in his dire prognosis for China, its very comprehensiveness feels too
limiting for a novelist. A dissident writer’s pessimism, you suspect,
can be as relentless and simplistic as a socialist realist’s optimism."
--Tom
New York Times:
- Sunday Book Review cover: Lisa Margonelli on Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It by Elizabeth Royte: "Where others are bold, 'Bottlemania' is subversive, and after you read
it you will sip warily from your water bottle (whether purchased or
tap, plastic or not), as freaked out by your own role in today’s
insidious water wars as by Royte’s recommended ecologically responsible
drink: 'Toilet to tap.'"
- Maslin on The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski: "[T]he most enchanting debut novel of the summer. Written over a decade by
the heretofore unknown David Wroblewski and arriving as a bolt from the
blue, this is a great, big, mesmerizing read, audaciously envisioned as
classic Americana. Absent the few dates and pop-cultural references
that place the book somewhere in the post-Eisenhower 20th century, its
unmannered style, emotional heft and sweeping ambition would keep it
timeless."
- Laura Miller on Minders of Make-Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of Children's Literature by Leonard S. Marcus: "Marcus, a charming and nimble writer, makes a valiant effort to keep
things interesting, but the editorial shake-ups and new printing
technologies will be of interest primarily to historians and people in
the industry. It’s the editor’s lot, alas, to subsist on reflected
glory. The most interesting thing about even the most esteemed
individuals that Marcus covers are the authors they discovered and the
books they published, and there’s not quite enough about either in 'Minders of Make-Believe.' The effect is a little like hanging around
at a perfectly nice party while there’s a terrific one going on just
down the hall."
- Lauren Mechling on Moving Day: Allie Finkel's Rules for Girls, Book One by Meg Cabot: "Cabot’s books are quick-paced romps that take one night to read and,
apparently, not much longer to write. In addition to regularly updating
her blog with detailed posts, she has said in interviews that she
writes five to 10 pages a day, turning out roughly a book a month. More unbelievable, though, is that the work holds up. While legions of
Meg Cabot imitators get waylaid by brand-name this and 'Oh my God'
that, Cabot’s voice remains fresh. She favors the
spill-the-beans-as-you-go style common to teenage fiction, but her
material has a spirited fizz that’s lacking in many so-called young
adult comedies."
Washington Post:
- Michael Dirda on The Delighted States by Adam Thirlwell: "Normally, I would eagerly applaud a young writer's enterprising attempt
to recreate the critical essay, to spin out a set of variations on a
theme in the history of fiction. But to bring off the loosey-goosey
manner of a book like The Delighted States
requires more than a few appealing literary anecdotes: It needs
considerable authorial charm, and this Thirlwell lacks. Instead, he
proffers many thoughtful, if hardly soul-stirring, analyses of passages
from classic authors and a slew of sloganizing generalizations, such as
this gnomic description of Kafka's writing: 'It is adagio, and massive,
and very short.' Well, Adam Thirlwell's The Delighted States is flashy,
and pompous
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