What Are You Reading at the New Yorker? Amazon Customer Reviews

By Tom

The New Yorker's Book Bench asked the head of their fabled (or satirized) fact-checking department, Peter Canby, what he's reading this weekend. Among his busman's-holiday manuscripts and recent novels by Tobias Wolff, Junot Diaz, and Sergio Ramirez, he also plans to catch up on what he calls a "raging cultural war" in the Amazon customer reviews section for Francisco Goldman's bookThe Art of Political Murder (which Canby reviewed for The Nation when it came out--subscription-only, so I can't tell what he thought of the book). I'm not sure I'd call 18 customer reviews a "raging cultural war" (if you want real rage, I might direct you to any number of our books on Israel and Palestine, or the Eduardo Galeano book Chavez gave to Obama, or the recent works of Laurell K. Hamilton), but there are some detailed and contentious reviews there, centered around another book on the murder, Quien mató al obispo?, which hasn't been translated into English yet. --Tom