Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

By Tom

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Curtis Sittenfeld onBoth Ways Is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy: "Though it might seem strange to praise a writer for the things she
  doesn't do, what really sets Meloy apart is her restraint. She is
  impressively concise, disciplined in length and scope. And she's
  balanced in her approach to character, neither blinded by love for her
  creations, nor abusive toward them.... [S]he's such a talented and unpredictable writer that I'm officially
  joining her fan club; whatever she writes next, I'll gladly read it."
• Maslin onThe Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes: "That word ["scientist"] had not been coined during most of the era that will now be
  known, thanks to Richard Holmes's amazingly ambitious, buoyant new
  fusion of history, art, science, philosophy and biography, as 'The Age
  of Wonder.' And Mr. Holmes's excitement at fusing long-familiar events
  and personages into something startlingly new is not unlike the
  exuberance of the age that animates his groundbreaking book."
• Maslin onHow I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely: "Steve Hely needed to know how to write very well in order to write as
  miserably as he does in 'How I Became a Famous Novelist.' In a
  satirical novel that is a gag-packed assault on fictitious best-selling
  fiction, Mr. Hely, who has been a writer for David Letterman
  and 'American Dad,' takes aim at genre after genre and manages to
  savage them all. You are invited to trawl the mass-market fiction in
  your local bookstore if you think Mr. Hely is making much up."
• Peter Keepnews onHow the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll by Elijah Wald: "'How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll' contains some arguments that
  will have you slapping your forehead and exclaiming 'Of course!' and
  some that will have you scratching your head and saying 'Huh?' The one
  that gives the book its name may have you doing both."

Washington Post:

• Yardley onDangerous Games by Margaret MacMillan: "When political leaders are ignorant of history, as the
  Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld triumvirate most certainly was, yet seek to employ
  it toward their own ends, the inevitable result is a distortion of
  history that is unwitting at best, deliberate at worst. It is easy to
  find in the past justifications or excuses for doing what one wants. It
  is rather more difficult to examine the past thoroughly and objectively
  and to learn whatever lessons it may teach us, however inconvenient
  they may seem."

Los Angeles Times:

• Samantha Dunn on Meloy's Both Ways: "If that pebble rolling around in your shoe were in fact a diamond, it
  would still cause a blister. And so it is with the stories of Maile
  Meloy's collection, 'Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It.' Superbly
  crafted, these hard little tales wind through the ways people fail to
  relate to each other and even to themselves -- their central insight
  being how complicit we are in creating our own misery."
• Rich Cohen onA Bright and Guilty Place by Richard Rayner: "In his brilliant new book, 'A Bright and Guilty Place,' Richard Rayner
  has given us, finally and definitively, the nonfiction equivalent of
  the Raymond Chandler classics that fell like hammer blows in the middle
  of last century: 'Farewell, My Lovely,' 'The Long Goodbye,' 'The Big
  Sleep.' Chandler turned fact, the criminal underworld of Depression-era
  Los Angeles, into fiction, and now Rayner, by a strange Didion-like
  alchemy, has turned fiction back into fact. Not to say he has dug up
  the story behind the story, as a reporter might profile the real white
  whale, but that he has run the world of Chandler through the machine a
  second time, the result being utterly truthful, fantastic and new."
• Tim Rutten onGolden Dreams by Kevin Starr: "With 'Golden Dreams,' Starr has completed a magnificent gift to the
  people of his native state. No other in the union possesses so
  intelligent, humane and comprehensive a synoptic account of its origins
  and development. That's all of a piece with the author's convincing
  notion of California's singularity. He has given his contemporaries and
  generations to come a story filled with heroic examples and tragic
  caution. Most of all, it is a series of histories that -- like any life
  worth dreaming of -- is worthwhile from beginning to end."
  

Globe and Mail:

• Mark Anthony Jarman onLet the Great World Spin by Colum McCann: "McCann's choice of era is inspired in showing that the United States is
  always in crisis, always in a just war, and always at war with itself.
  The country seems to lose its innocence over and over, but does not
  remember, a cultural amnesia to which we are all prone. This may not be
  the novel's point, but it is a valuable lesson in what seem like
  unsettled times. Times are always unsettled; we're always walking on a
  wire."
• Chris Scott on Kahn & Engelmann by Hans Eichner: "Kahn & Engelmann recreates a long-lost way of life. But it
  also revives a vanished pan-European sensibility. Beautifully written,
  it may be the last great European novel, a middle-European hybrid of Remembrance of Things Past and Buddenbrooks.... Memory is the enemy of death, and Kahn & Engelmann is an
  elegant memorial. If philosopher Theodor Adorno ruled that turning the
  Holocaust into art is 'not only immoral but perhaps even impossible,'
  Hans Eichner has demonstrated it is not only possible and moral but
  also necessary."

The Guardian:

• Vikas Swarup onBetween the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga: Adiga "has boldly gone where few Indian writers choose to venture, casting his
  gaze beyond the complacent smugness of middle-class drawing rooms to
  the anger and squalor lurking in the underbelly of urban India.... As in The White Tiger, Adiga is concerned with issues of injustice and
  poverty, and these fluid, flickering stories are as far removed from
  the gentle ironies of RK Narayan's short fiction
  as Kittur is from Malgudi. What emerges is not so much a moral
  biography of an Indian town as the autopsy of a morally dead town."
• Angus Macqueen onLost and Found in Russia by Susan Richards (available only in UK): "These are timeless stories, which, while plugged into the Russian soil,
  speak to us all. The ability of her friends to fall completely, to rise
  up and then fall again, is deeply moving. Their natural instinct to
  survive on virtually nothing provides Richards with a vision of how
  humanity might cope with any forthcoming global apocalypse. Certainly
  she is right that many Russians will be better prepared for survival
  than we are."

The New Yorker:

• Elizabeth Kolbert on books on American obesity, including The Evolution of Obesity by Michael L. Power and Jay Schulkin: "In America today, by contrast, obtaining calories is very nearly
  effortless; as Power and Schulkin observe, with a few dollars it's
  possible to go to the grocery store and purchase enough sugar or
  vegetable oil to fulfill the average person's energy requirements for a
  week. The result is what's known as the 'mismatch paradigm.' The human
  body is 'mismatched' to the human situation. 'We evolved on the
  savannahs of Africa,' Power and Schulkin write. 'We now live in
  Candyland.'"

--Tom