Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

By Tom

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review (no cover review for their Summer Reading issue): Robert Pinsky on Road Dogs by Elmore Leonard: "'Road Dogs' is about the varying degrees of truth and baloney in human
  relationships. Sometimes the truth or the baloney is lethal. Droll and
  exciting, enriched by the self-aware, what-the-hell-why-not insouciance
  of a master now in his mid-80s, 'Road Dogs' "” underlying its material
  of sex, violence and money, and beyond its cast of cons and thugs and
  movie stars "” presents interesting questions."
• Maslin on Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life by Gerald Martin: "The last thing this literary lion needed was a fawning,
  accommodating Boswell. Nor did he need a biographer eager to show off
  his own flair. When writing about Mr. García Márquez, king of the
  magical realists, Mr. Martin understands that it is best to stick to
  the facts and skip the fancy footwork. Could any biographer have
  been better suited to this gargantuan undertaking? Absolutely not: Mr.
  Martin is the ideal man for the job."
• Christine Muhlke onSeven Fires: Grilling the Argentine Way by Francis Mallmann (as part of a cookbook roundup): "I craved Mallmann's burnt flavors, from caramelized oranges with rosemary to flattened sweet potatoes charred in butter. Bobby Flay, be very afraid. What
  makes Mallmann so punk is that he makes six ingredients taste better
  than 20. (His honey gremolata has already become the sauce equivalent
  of a hit summer song I can't stop singing.) He also reconnects us to
  the primal simplicity and visceral pleasure of cooking over a fire "”
  though his recipes can be made over charcoal or in a grill pan, too. A
  salad of tomatoes and fennel becomes a different course when charred. In many ways, 'Seven Fires' was the simplest book I read (cow-flaying aside), and by
  far the most inspiring."

Washington Post:

• Dirda on The Four Corners of the Sky by Michael Malone: "This is a fabulously entertaining novel. It's probably a trifle too
  long, the plot contains a number of improbabilities and it's easy
  enough to guess at least a couple of the revelations toward the book's
  end. But you know what? None of this matters. Michael Malone's prose --
  as smooth as a con man's patter -- hooks you on the first page, and
  you're not going anywhere after that, except to your favorite reading
  chair or backyard hammock or vacation beach blanket. Malone possesses
  the only gift -- according to Vladimir Nabokov -- that a writer really
  needs: Shamantsvo, the ability to cast a spell, to enchant."
• Anna Mundow onStone's Fallby Iain Pears: "A marvel of skillful agglomeration, the novel propels us backward in
  time to illuminate one man's rise and fall. The trajectory may be
  familiar, even predictable, but this particular tragedy encompasses the
  entire history of late mid-19th- to early-20th-century capitalism and
  provides enough romance and intrigue to fuel a dozen operas."

Los Angeles Times:

• Tom Lutz on The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton: "De Botton is a philosopher, and he seems impatient with work itself,
  eager to jump to what it means. To talk about work, he rightly
  surmises, requires talking about alienation and happiness, about global
  production systems and industrial engineering, about specialization and
  marketing, and he keeps all these balls in the air. As a result, we
  come away from his book with no real conclusions about work, but
  instead, a sense that for any topic this big, there can be no grand
  argument. In the place of easy answers, De Botton offers an array of
  potent and portable insights about the delight and despair we find,
  daily, in our working lives."
• Sasha Watson onThe Photographer by
  Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefèvre and Frédéric Lemercier: "'The Photographer's' unique mix of talent and media allows the graphic
  novel form to flex its muscle to stunning effect. The book's clear-eyed
  reflection on global politics, its touching portrait of a young man
  struggling to mature and its arresting visual narrative come together
  to create a story greater than the sum of its parts -- a story that is,
  ultimately, a sweeping declaration of human strength, compassion and
  creative power."

Globe and Mail:

• Andre Alexis on Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro (out in the US in September): "In the end, I feel I'm in the odd position of saying negative things
  about a book I enjoyed. The thing is, of course, that my love for
  Ishiguro's previous work, his novels, has (along with my quibbles about
  his story writing) dampened my feelings for Nocturnes. So, if a friend were to ask me how I liked the book, I'd answer: It's good, but have you read Never Let Me Go ? Now that's a great book."

The Guardian:

• Giles Foden on D-Day by Antony Beevor: "It is almost impossible for a reader not to get caught up in the
  excitement. The historian must always make a choice between the work of
  depiction and the work of analysis. Even though Beevor is well capable
  of the latter, we should be glad he has chosen the former. By doing so
  he has overleaped the barrier of hindsight, getting us as near as
  possible to experiencing what it was like to be there, that fateful
  summer, 65 years ago."
• Justine Jordan on The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen: "Reif Larsen's debut novel combines meticulous eccentricity with an
  amazingly broad appeal: the tale of a child prodigy with an obsessive
  interest in mapmaking and scientific illustration, it's as lovable as
  it is odd, while the book is a thing of beauty in itself.... One of the many clever things about the book's structure is that its
  secrets are revealed as gradually to the reader as to the hero. TS's
  journey - towards forgiveness, understanding, adulthood, love - is a
  familiar one, but the views are spectacular."

The New Yorker:

• Louis Menand on creative writing programs andThe Program Era by Mark McGurl: "He points out that teachers in creative-writing programs were asking 'Can it be taught?' right from the start, but that virtually no one has
  ever tried to lay down rules for what should go on in the classroom.
  This is because not having an answer to the 'Can it be taught?'
  question"”keeping alive the belief that all this training and
  socialization never really touches the heart of the imaginative
  process"”is what marks creative-writing programs as 'creative.' Academic
  creative-writing programs are, as McGurl puts it, examples of 'the
  institutionalization of anti-institutionality.' That's why institutions
  love them. They are the outside contained on the inside."
• It's also the Summer Fiction issue, with stories by Tea Obreht, Edna O'Brien, and Jonathan Franzen, only the latter of which, "Good Neighbors" is available online to non-subscribers. It includes these lines: "Patty was looking a mess, gray-faced, poorly slept, underfed. It had
  taken her an awfully long time to start looking her age, but now at
  last Merrie Paulsen had been rewarded in her wait for it to happen."

--Tom