New York Times:
- Sunday Book Review cover: Max Rodenbeck on A Path Out of the Desert by Kenneth Pollack: "Pollack seems oddly unaware of history’s motivating forces. To assert
that 'what triggers revolutions, civil wars and other internal unrest
is psychological factors, particularly feelings of extreme despair,' is
plain silly. The Boston Tea Party could not have been prevented by Prozac.... What is troubling about Pollack’s view, which is fairly representative
of his fellow liberal interventionists, who are likely to be in power
soon, is its lack of clarity.... No matter what good will America’s 'policy
community' proclaims toward the Middle East, this mix of blinkered
indulgence of Israel and disdain for the rest of the region, as well as
a predilection for Wilsonian dreams over achievable goals, suggests we
will remain in the wilderness for some time to come."
- Miranda Seymour on White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson by Brenda Wineapple: "By restoring the colonel to what now seems his rightful position —
as a courageous, principled radical who was Dickinson’s chosen reader,
admirer and advocate — Wineapple throws what she describes as 'a small,
considered beam' upon the work and life of these two 'seemingly
incompatible friends,' the recluse and the activist. That 'beam,' when directed by a writer as thorough and intuitive as
Wineapple, brightens not only the pale figures of the poet and the
hitherto elusive colonel but the poems for which, upon occasion,
Dickinson drew inspiration from Higginson’s more active life."
- Robert Macfarlane on Ghost Train to the Eastern Star by Paul Theroux: "Certain writers have a style that can be best likened to body odor:
irresistible to some, obnoxious to many and apparently imperceptible to
the writer himself. Theroux’s lack of self-awareness, his failure to
observe the basic hygiene of modesty, is compelling in its way. How can
anyone be this narcissistic, you wonder in disbelief, in appalled
fascination.... After reading the auto-hagiography of the Turkmen leader Niyazov,
Theroux summarizes it as 'pages and pages … most of it
self-reverential.' He could be writing a press release for his own book."
- Charles Taylor on The Unfortunates by B.S. Johnson: "Handsomely reconstituted by New Directions from the scarce original
editions, 'The Unfortunates' comes in a box of 27 unbound chapters.... Picking up the sheaves of 'The Unfortunates,' sometimes only a page,
that familiar heft is replaced by the feel of the ephemeral, even
fragile, and that translates, as we are reading, to the fragility of
the experiences we are reading about: friendship, marriage, betrayal,
parenthood, early death.... This book, with no belief in God, no hope of heaven, makes you feel the
stuff of life as sacred, and our inability to hold on to it as
damnation enough for anyone to be made to bear."
Washington Post:
- Douglas Wolk on Bottomless Belly Button by Dash Shaw: "The young cartoonist Dash Shaw comes down firmly on the symbolic end of
the comics continuum. Shaw isn't much of a draftsman in the
conventional sense, but he's got a gift for evoking what things feel
like and mean, rather than what they look like.... All of Shaw's formal experimentation ...
works in the service of the story's emotional impact: It's a sprawling
mess, but a fascinating, affecting sprawling mess, whose raw invention
and sentimental core justify each other."
Los Angeles Times:
- Tim Rutten on Theroux's Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: "What's really remarkable about "Ghost Train to the Eastern Star" is how
much it reveals about Theroux the writer.... One of the problems Theroux presents
to the careful reader is the fact that he's a compelling writer who is
essentially unlikable. In part, that's a consequence of his blimpish
judgments on everyone upon whom his disapproval settles -- including
the rich and the Chinese, as a people."
- Jane Smiley on Man in the Dark by Paul Auster: "
Brill, Brick, Frisk, darkness, metafiction, sinuous and elegant style. Yup, it's Paul Auster.... A narrative built of layers and layers of disorientation is not new for
Auster -- this is, in fact, his specialty. It used to be that his young
men were disoriented and that their disorientation afforded the reader
a new way of seeing the world. Now it is his old men who are
disoriented, but their way of seeing the world is more weary than
fresh. Frankly, this book could be funnier. Or darker. Or meaner. Or
something."
New York Sun:
- Laura Collins-Hughes on American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld: "All fears to the contrary, however, 'American Wife' is no hatchet job,
no gossipy Kitty Kelley bio in disguise. Nor is it hagiography or the
sort of seamy political pulp fiction in which denizens of the Capitol
have been known to dabble. Rather, it is an intelligent, well-crafted,
psychologically astute novel that, granted, will anger the overly
literal and the easily outraged. But such people are unlikely to be
eager readers of contemporary fiction. This book is for those of us who
are."
Globe & Mail (on a two-week review section "hiatus," which got a few people worried):
- Steven Hayward on The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson: "Suffice to say that The Gargoyle does not disappoint. It's a cross between The English Patient, in which a burned guy with a past tells stories to his nurse, and Highlander,
that schlocky eighties movie starring Christopher Lambert in which a
handful of immortal swordsmen chase each other through history and the
globe trying to cut each other's heads off. Sweeping,
intergenerational, wholly implausible, unapologetically melodramatic,
and absolutely absorbing. While reading it I rolled my eyes more times
than I care to remember; it was, at the same time, impossible to put
down."
The Guardian:
- Hermione Lee on The Pages by Murray Bail (available on Amazon.ca): "Murray Bail plays a laconic, self-concealing game, cunningly luring the
reader in to his interlinked stories. The Pages is not an easy or open
book, but it is an oddly compelling one. The spell is most powerfully
cast in the brilliant quiet skill of the writing, which can make the
world come alive on the page.... After all, perhaps, it is fiction
that does best what this philosopher is trying for, to grasp 'what he
saw before him, ordinary objects', to 'fit words only to what can be
seen'."
The New Yorker:
- John Updike on Max Factor: The Man Who Changed the Faces of the World by Fred E. Basten: "Then, there were wigs. Max persuaded Cecil B. De Mille, in town to
direct the large-scale Western 'The Squaw Man,' that wigs and
hairpieces painstakingly formed of real human hair (135,168
individually knotted strands went into an average Max Factor wig, with
sixty thousand in a full beard and a mere seven thousand in a false
mustache) were more photogenic than 'clumsy substitutes such as straw,
mattress stuffing, excelsior, Spanish moss, wool, tobacco leaves, even
mohair stuffing from Model-T Fords!'"
--Tom
New York Times:
- Sunday Book Review cover: Walter Kirn on How Fiction Works by James Wood: "The heroes of this great artistic labor tend to be semimonastic introverts who, like Wood’s beloved Henry James and Gustave Flaubert,
toil with the doors shut and locked, in soundproof splendid isolation,
attentive to the subtle frictions among nouns and adjectival phrases.... For the vicarish Wood, sequestered in his
chamber, part of the fiction writer’s true vocation appears to be
acoustic regulation — the engineering of a mental space in which
literary whispers can be heard.... For someone who professes to understand the fine machinations of
characterization, Wood seems oblivious to the eminently resistible
prose style of his donnish, finicky persona."
- Kakutani on The Wrecking Crew by Thomas Frank: "Less humorous and far more hectoring than '[What's the Matter with] Kansas,' this volume quickly devolves into a highly partisan,
Manichaean-minded screed against conservatives and private-sector
economics.... Mr. Frank comes across in these pages as a sort of parody of the
liberal right-wingers love to hate — as someone in love with big
government for the sake of big government and opposed to all manner of
capitalism and entrepreneurial initiative." Meanwhile, on Sunday, Michael Lind notes "Frank’s portrait of the conservative movement ... sacrifices complexity to caricature," but says, "With rare exceptions like John Kenneth Galbraith, conservatives ... have been the best satirists. In Thomas Frank, the American left has found its own Juvenal."
- Sophie Gee on The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson: "The lovers in 'The Gargoyle' have the
intimacy of roommates who hook up when they get drunk, not a
time-defying passion. Their thoughts, feelings, conversations and
affections are so unformed, so hampered by sentiment and underpowered
awkwardness that the courage, endurance and understanding ascribed to
them seem silly. Davidson’s lovers are dysfunctional and quirky,
qualities that can look a bit like profundity from a distance, but they
don’t have emotional or imaginative depth or range, which at the end of
the day are the only things that can make a love story deep and
wide-ranging."
- Douglas Wolk on Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko: "The portrait that emerges here is of an artist whose principles have
ossified into bitter perversity.... Ditko isn’t easy to love. As vivid as his work is, it’s
never been pretty, and he’s never returned to his most famous creations
for a victory lap or courted attention beyond acknowledgment of his
work. The raw, nightmarish visions of his art are all he offers, and
all he’s ever needed to offer."
Washington Post:
- John A. Nagl on The Strongest Tribe by Bing West: "West has made 15 reporting trips to Iraq over the last six years and is
almost as personally invested in the current conflict as he was in
Vietnam; this book, his third on Iraq, is his attempt to ensure that
the 'endgame' in Iraq turns out better than in his last war.
It is increasingly possible to believe that it will."
Los Angeles Times:
- Erica Schickel on Waiter Rant by "The Waiter": "'Waiter Rant' has all the fixings for fun.... He delivers a smorgasbord of
objectionable personalities and high-stress situations, always serving
from the left, rendering his stories impeccably but perhaps a little
stiffly. Everybody gets their due: his temperamental, paranoid bosses; the
noble, illegal busboys; the slacker co-waiters. But Dublanica's true
bile is reserved for customers: the rude, the ridiculous, the entitled,
the drunk, the horny, the stoned and, worst of all, the Foodies. 'The
Food Network,' he writes, 'is, quite simply, the Death Star of American
cooking.'"
- Richard Eder on How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken by Daniel Mendelsohn: "Sharp as he can be in his judgments, he is equally sharp in identifying
the virtues of what he doesn't like. He gives a spacious view of the
countryside, whatever the particular road he hews through it. He takes
his subjects seriously, but not himself. Like Snow White, you might
say, he whistles while he works."
New York Sun:
- Laura Collins-Hughes on The Suicide Index by Joan WIckersham: "I read 'The Suicide Index' with a rapacity bordering on need, with
tears in my chest and in my eyes. Occasionally I had to put it down and
leave the room. More often, I devoured it.... The book is the product of a loving daughter's grief, and part of her
process of grieving. But it is also the measured, elegant, gripping
work of a professional writer who has set her powers of observation to
work on her own family — her parents and grandparents, her uncle, her
sister, her husband, her son — and on herself."
Globe & Mail:
- Caitlin Sweet on Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer: "The story's emotional intensity is relentless, and all of it — light or
dark — is rendered at the same fever pitch. The most consuming love —
until tomorrow, when it'll get even better. The most consuming pain —
until tomorrow, when it'll get even worse. Bella, whose human self is
bumbling, always blushing and a terrible driver, becomes the strongest,
most beautiful, most confident vampire ever.
Jacob, who begins the tale
impatient and cranky, also ends up in a new, exalted state.... It might
be unreasonable to expect a young-adult vampire romance novel
to be anything other than hyper-intense. But what it left me with was
this thought: Readers are permitted to be breathless, but stories
aren't."
Times Literary Supplement:
- Donald Rayfield on The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus by Charles King: "
It is a bold historian who writes a history of the Caucasus, as events of the
past week have made all too clear.... King ends with a
vague hope that Europe’s 'inexorable march' towards liberal values can
proceed in the Caucasus, but not much of the evidence supports him. For over
a thousand years the Georgians and Armenians have appealed to Europe for
support as fellow Christians, as Europeans by culture, if not by geography,
and after being strung along by Crusaders, by Louis XIV, by various Popes,
by Presidents Wilson, Roosevelt and both Bushes, can still not believe that
the answer they get will always be a perfunctory apology that deeper
interests of state force the West to take sides with its major trading
partners, not its cultural and spiritual brothers. Ghost of freedom, indeed."
The New Yorker:
- Joan Acocella on Giordano Bruno by Ingrid Rowland: "Rowland is well aware of the gaps in her portrait of Bruno’s life, and
she tries to fill them with other material. For his years in the
monastery, she again has almost no facts to go on, so, once she
deposits him there, she switches gears and offers a series of
history-of-ideas chapters—on Neoplatonism, on Kabbalah, and so forth—in
order to let us know what intellectual trends might have influenced him
at that time. She is a lively writer, and these chapters are
interesting. Still, we’re sitting there wondering, How’s he doing in
the monastery?"
--Tom
This week in Old Media Monday: Traffic hits New York, DC, and LA, Geoff Dyer writes one of the best introductions to a review I've ever read, and Tom Nissley takes a week off. --Anne
New York Times:
- Sunday Book Review cover: Mary Roach on Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt: "Drivers will slow down to look at anything: 'Something as simple as a
couch dumped in a roadside ditch can send minor shudders of curiosity
through the traffic flow.' 'Traffic' is jammed with these delicious
you’ve-got-to-be-kidding moments."
- Bryan Burrough on The Challenge by Jonathan Mahler: "If 'The Challenge' is to be graded on objectivity, thoroughness,
discipline and sincerity, it passes with flying colors. Mahler has done
everything you can ask an author to do. Is it fair then to say it’s not
exactly spellbinding? Since the book is being touted as a legal
thriller, I suppose it must be. Still, as a nonfiction author myself,
my heart goes out to any writer whose voice, no matter how smooth,
finds the sheet music he’s chosen doesn’t quite allow him to rise to
his ambitions."
- Bruce Handy on The Night of the Gun by David Carr: "What Carr excels at, where his gifts as a journalist shine, is
explaining how an addict’s life works, the economics of it, the ad-hoc
social web, the quotidian feel of the thing... [it's] an essay in urban typology worthy of Balzac at his keenest (and least
windy)."
- Eve Fairbanks on This Land Is Their Land by Barbara Ehrenreich: "Ehrenreich is at her best (and she’s very, very good) when chronicling
the outrageous human downside of our economy, the costs it imposes on
people who can’t afford a bacon-infused old-fashioned. Remove the less-than-trenchant lifestyle and culture essays, and you’ve
got a tight and chilling companion volume to 'Nickel and Dimed.'"
Washington Post:
- Ron Charles on The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff: "The voices Ebershoff has brought to life here
dramatize one of the most
remarkable periods of America's religious history, and he's just as
discerning about the bizarre descendants that can sprout like toxic
weeds from a founder's revelation. The greatest triumph is the way all
this material, though it's focused on the peculiarities of Mormonism --
devout and heretical, ancient and modern -- illuminates the larger
landscape of faith."
- Jonathan Yardley on Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt: "Traffic gets about as close to the heart of modern existence as any
book could get, yet what's truly astonishing is that no one else has
done it, at least not on the scale that Vanderbilt has achieved."
- Michael Grunwald on Habits of Empire by Walter Nugent: "Nugent
argues that the story of American imperialism is really one
continuous story of expansion divided into three phases stretching from
the end of the Revolution to the misadventures of the Bush
Administration: the 'continental empire,' the 'offshore empire' and the
'global or virtual empire.' But those are three very different stories;
the second is relatively unimportant, and the third is not really about
empire. Not all imperialism is created equal, and not all imperiousness
is imperialism."
Los Angeles Times:
- Paula L. Woods on The Turnaround by George Pelecanos: "Although Pelecanos pays homage to his crime-writing roots, uncoiling a
lethal subplot involving no-good Charles Baker that spurs a fitting, if
bloody, resolution, it is the central questions of how men can have
purpose and atone for their sins that makes 'The Turnaround' an
indelible read."
- Susan Salter Reynolds on The Legend of Colton H. Bryant by Alexandra Fuller: "Fuller never
met him [Bryant], but re-creating him has dragged her into a world of greed and
power and destruction and beauty. It is a book more channeled
than written, sparse and beautiful."
- And one more for Traffic, from Matthew DeBord (a close reading with a delightful bit of snark that seems only appropriate for the LA perspective): "A driver may get rankled at the rubbernecking delay, but she'll never
fall out of love with her Prius. Neither will the guy with the Ferrari,
plodding along during rush hour at 1/10,000th of its potential. But to
his credit, Vanderbilt does indicate that, for much of the world,
driving anything beats walking."
New York Sun:
- Christopher Willcox on The Wrecking Crew by Thomas Frank: "Thomas Frank's latest is actually far
more instructive on the unsettled state of the Democratic Party and its current leftward drift...we are witnessing a tectonic
shift from the centrism that President Clinton
embraced and imposed on his restive followers to a more open-throated
liberalism, now referred to as progressivism, that is angry and
spoiling for a fight."
Globe & Mail:
- Spider Robinson on Little Brother by Cory Doctorow: "If you only read one science fiction novel this year, let it be this one. Doctorow reminds us of the profound truth: People who use technology to
control and enslave others are always and everywhere, by definition,
stupid and cowardly. There are no brave or intelligent reasons to
torture."
Entertainment Weekly:
- Kate Ward on The Likeness by Tana French: "Read one page of snappy, brainy dialogue with the roommates
(''Today Henry [V] would be running a banana republic with serious
border issues and a dodgy nuclear-weapons program''), and you'll
understand why Maddox becomes too emotionally caught up with her
suspects."
- Leah Greenblatt on One More Year by Sana Krasikov: "Krasikov imbues her
writing with a tangible humanity that erases the otherness an unfamiliar
culture so often breeds, and in the process makes us care about each one
of her characters. Whether male or female, teenage or elderly, in
chaotic modern Moscow or a bucolic New York City suburb, their stories
feel immediate, urgent, and gratifyingly real."
New York Times:
- Sunday Book Review cover: Alan Brinkley on The Dark Side by Jane Mayer: "In some respects, the Bush administration is simply following a
familiar path by responding to real dangers with illegal and deplorable
methods. But Jane Mayer’s extraordinary and invaluable book suggests
that it would be difficult to find any precedent in American history
for the scale, brutality and illegality of the torture and degradation
inflicted on detainees over the last six years; and that it would be
even harder to imagine a set of policies more likely to increase the
dangers facing the United States and the world."
- Thomas Mallon on Can You Ever Forgive Me: Memoirs of a Literary Forger by Lee Israel: "Israel displayed an excellent ear and fine false turn of phrase during
the 15 or so months in the early 1990s when she sold hundreds of phony
celebrity letters — and a lot of filched real ones — to about 30
different dealers. Now, all these years later, she’s written a slender,
sordid and pretty damned fabulous book about her misadventures.... If I were a librarian, I wouldn’t let Lee Israel through the door, but
I’d certainly make sure I had her latest book on the shelves. If I were
an editor, I’d sign her up to write a biography of Louise Brooks — and
not just to keep her out of trouble."
- Nicholson Baker on Reading the OED by Ammon Shea: "The effect of this book on me was to make me like Ammon Shea and,
briefly, to hate English. What a choking, God-awful mash it is! Surely
French is better. Then I recovered and saw its greatness afresh. The
O.E.D., Shea notes, is 'a catalog of the foibles of the human
condition.' Shea has walked the wildwood of our gnarled, ancient speech
and returned singing incomprehensible sounds in a language that turns
out to be our own."
- Kakutani on Alfred & Emily by Doris Lessing: "Doris Lessing once declared that 'fiction makes a better job of the truth' than
straightforward reminiscence, and while that might well be true of her
celebrated and semi-autobiographical Martha Quest novels, it’s an
observation that doesn’t apply at all to her latest book, 'Alfred &
Emily,' an intriguing work that is half fiction, half memoir. The
sketchy, insubstantial first half of the book imagines what her
parents’ lives might have been like if World War I had never occurred.
The potent and harrowing second half recounts the real life story of
her parents, and the incalculable ways in which the war fractured their
dreams and psyches and left them stranded in the bush in Africa, eking
out a meager existence on a tiny farm in Rhodesia."
Washington Post:
- Ron Charles on The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson: "In the opening pages of The Gargoyle, Andrew Davidson's
outrageous new novel, a pornographer high on cocaine runs his car off a
mountain road. The vehicle bursts into flames and burns him to a crisp.
Welcome to the pain-riddled world of an acerbic, 35-year-old man who
loses everything in those fiery minutes: his career, his fortune, his
skin -- all broiled away. This is a story for people who like their
literary entertainment well done."
- Joel Brouwer on White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson by Brenda Wineapple: "Brenda Wineapple ... brings a scholar's
diligence and a novelist's imagination to her account of Dickinson and
Higginson's relationship, crafting a tour de force that should delight
specialists and casual readers alike. The book's individual strands of
inquiry -- Higginson's life, Dickinson's poems, the letters that passed
between them, and the historical, political and artistic contexts of
the age -- are interesting in and of themselves, but when intertwined
so as to inform and strengthen each other, they're fascinating."
Los Angeles Times:
- Uh, I hate to kick a book section when it's down, but their new book pages are nearly unreadable in Firefox (at least on my machine).
- Nick Owchar on A Good and Happy Child by Justin Evans: "'A Good and Happy Child' is so well done that part of me wishes I had missed it:
I like to sleep soundly at night. Now, I find myself checking the doors and
windows more often than I used to and listening to make sure it's really the cat
I'm hearing in the hall.... By tapping into our own fears, 'A Good and Happy
Child' leaves us buzzing with dread long after we have put it down."
New York Sun:
- Laura Collins-Hughes on The Defenestration of Bob T. Hash III by David Deans: "This sly and discombobulating flight of whimsy by David Deans is, in a
sense, a book-length joke, and nothing drains the humor from a good
joke as effectively as vivisecting it.... Has Comenius hallucinated his transformation —and if so, where did
he acquire his knowledge of Kafka and Rilke, of Orpheus and Lady
Macbeth? Is Bob a good guy after all? Is he even out of town, let alone
in Mexico? And where is Miss Scarlett, anyway? Mr. Deans may or may not provide the answers to these queries. But
the reader's irresistible desire to know is evidence that he's pulled
off a splendid joke."
- Benjamin Lytal on Travel Writing by Peter Ferry: "Despite its specific American flavors, 'Travel Writing' seems most like
a contemporary French novel, such as those by Christian Oster and
Gregoire Bouillier, a book in which an atmosphere of established and
almost enviable dailiness underwrites sophisticated narrative conceits.... Truth matters less than the telling ... and that
makes for a cool, easy kind of fiction. It's not Hemingway or Borges,
or even Dashiell Hammett, but it's nice."
Globe & Mail:
- Michelle Berry on The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry: "Have I raved enough? I feel as if I'm Barry's publicist or agent. Maybe
she'll give me a cut of the $2-million? But I did love this book. It
didn't matter if I was in a bad mood, or tired, or had other things to
do, I wanted to read this book. I wanted to be living in these
characters' minds, hanging out in Salem or on Yellow Dog Island. Does
the novel deserve the hype? I certainly don't begrudge it."
The Guardian:
- George Walden on The Forsaken: Hope and Betrayal in Stalin's Russia: "The now forgotten US immigrants to the Soviet Union in the early
Thirties were communist sympathisers or, more often, desperate victims
of the Depression.... At first,
they were feted; baseball was made an official sport. Waves of
repression, however, ensured that they and their descendants ended up
either in Russia's prisons or as inmates of the Gulag.... This is a powerful, important and highly readable book. The Gulag is no
novelty, but Tzouliadis brilliantly links high politics to the torment
of innocents, adding devastating detail."
- Irvine Welsh on Bright Shiny Morning by James Frey: "The amazing thing about Bright Shiny Morning is that it is an absolute
triumph of a novel. In fact, it's so good that it makes Frey's
real-life resurrection from crooked biographer to great American
novelist far more impressive than his fantasised one from down-and-out
drug monster to bestselling writer. Freed from the responsibility of
getting the facts right, Frey, a natural novelist to his fingertips,
hits the deeper truths with this honest, vibrant and tender portrait of
Los Angeles and the American dream. It's Bright Shiny Morning, not A
Million Little Pieces, that is the real tale of stunning redemption."
The New Yorker:
- Nicholas Lemann on Arthur Fisher Bentley's 100-year-old lost classic, The Process of Government: A Study of Social Pressures: "'The Process of Government' can be annoying—in its obsessive repetition
of its main theme, in its lack of interest in empirical evidence—and
yet it’s one of those rare books which change the way you look at the
world. Like a tune that you can’t get out of your head, it’s always
playing in the background. Most of what is said and written about
American politics, which stipulates that, although the politics we have
may be awful, a radiant, transcendently good politics is a genuine
possibility, becomes hard to take altogether seriously."
--Tom
New York Times:
- Sunday Book Review cover: Charles McGrath on Thrumpton Hall by Miranda Seymour: "Her odd and oddly affecting book, beautifully written, is in part a story of house-love that borders on madness. It’s also the story of her father, and not the least of its
accomplishments is that it instantly catapults him into the front rank
of impossible and eccentric English parents — right up there with the
overbearing Thomas Butler, nightmarish father of Samuel; with Evelyn Waugh, who wrote that 'I despise all my seven children equally'; and even
with Lord Redesdale, Nancy Mitford’s 'Farve,' who once kicked a young
man off the family estate just because he carried a pocket comb."
- Henry Alford on Collections of Nothing by William Davies King: "Part memoir and part disquisition on the psychological impulses behind
the urge to accumulate, 'Collections of Nothing' is a wonderfully frank
and engaging look at one man’s detritus-fueled pathology. King’s
honesty and ambivalence about his pastime only increases his emotional
connection to the reader. I wanted, by turns, to breast-feed and
strangle him." [Ed: I love this book.]
- Tom Vanderbilt on Spiral Jetta by Erin Hogan: "I was never quite sure what Hogan was looking for when she set out —
self-fulfillment or some new insights into what art is, or what it is
for — or indeed whether she found it. But I loved the ride. In 'Spiral
Jetta,' an unashamedly honest, slyly uproarious, ever-probing book, art
doesn’t magically have the power to change lives, but it can, perhaps
no less powerfully, change ways of seeing."
- Richard Eder on The Creator's Map by Emilio Calderon: "Like 'Da Vinci,' its mysteries are no more than mystifications. Unlike
its exemplar, it is put together clumsily: an assemble-it-yourself kit
enclosed with instructions in Korean.... A more skillful handling would frame it all as a running mystery;
instead it becomes a creeping confusion. To succeed, a mystery smuggles
its truth past the reader. Here, the smuggling is done so awkwardly as
to spill out rattly chunks of hint, contradiction and clue while trying
to get through."
Washington Post:
- Greg Myre on A Path Out of the Desert by Kenneth Pollack: "Pollack is persuasive in his new book, but it helps to have a touch of
amnesia. Those with a working memory may recall that six years ago,
Pollack said there was too much hand-wringing about the potential
pitfalls of invading Iraq. 'Those who argue that the United States
would inevitably become the target of unhappy Iraqis generally also
assume that the Iraqi population would be hostile to U.S. forces from
the outset,' he wrote. 'However, the best evidence we have suggests
that the Iraqi people would be pleased to be liberated.'"
- Ron Charles on The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry: "Beneath all this hype is a moderately entertaining story of three
generations in a setting rich with Wiccan wisdom and deadly misogyny.... If you're the kind of person who copies such sayings on index cards and
sticks them on your refrigerator, you'll love these little ornaments,
but if you're the kind of person who mocks those people, you may want
to peer into the lace and see yourself reading a different novel."
Los Angeles Times:
- As you may have heard, the LA Times, as part of yet another round of newsroom cost-cutting by the Tribune Company, is shutting down their Sunday book review section and folding the remaining book coverage into their Calendar section. This Sunday's was the last edition of the review, and books editor David Ulin had a
|
