Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

By Tom

New York Times:

• Susann Cokal on Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger: "Lovers of Niffenegger's past work should rejoice. This outing may not
  be as blindly romantic as 'The Time Traveler's Wife,' but it is mature,
  complex and convincing "” a dreamy yet visceral tale of loves both
  familial and erotic, a search for Self in the midst of obsession with
  an Other. 'Her Fearful Symmetry' is as atmospheric and beguiling as a
  walk through Highgate [cemetery] itself."
• Joe Klein onThe Clinton Tapes by Taylor Branch: "The rowdy, discursive intellectual brilliance of the man is evident on
  almost every page, and so is the self-­indulgence, self-pity and
  self-­destructiveness "” the magisterial excessiveness of every sort.
  Compared with the buttoned-up cool of the Oval Office's current
  occupant, Bill Clinton is a one-man carnival "” a magician, tightrope
  walker, juggler, mesmerist, hot-dog-eating contestant and burlesque
  show. You kind of miss the guy."
• Garner on The Dead Hand by David E. Hoffman: "In 'The Dead Hand' he delivers a readable, many-tentacled account of
  the decades-long military standoff between the United States and the
  Soviet Union.... What's particularly valuable about Mr. Hoffman's book,
  however, is the skill with which he narrows his focus (and his
  indefatigable reporting) down to a few essential areas. Thanks to
  interviews and new documents, he provides the fullest "” and quite
  frankly the most terrifying "” account to date of the enormous and
  covert Soviet biological weapons program, developed in defiance of
  international treaties at the same time that the Soviets appeared to be
  earnestly interested in reducing their weapons stockpile.... 'The Dead Hand' is deadly serious, but this story can verge on
  pitch-black comedy "” 'Dr. Strangelove' as updated by the Coen Brothers."
• Maslin on Where Men Win Glory by Jon Krakauer: "Mr. Krakauer cobbled together his book in a spirit of desperation.
  Though he set out in search of Mr. Tillman's whole story, he didn't
  find what he was looking for.... 'Where Men Win Glory' keeps readers constantly aware of Mr. Krakauer's
  straining. He had some of Mr. Tillman's journals and the cooperation of
  Mr. Tillman's widow, brother and mother.... But he didn't have enough new, firsthand
  information to sustain a book."

Washington Post:

• Charles on Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby: "As usual, Hornby's dialogue between exasperated women and clueless men
  hits all the right comic notes. The likable slackers who mope through
  his stories appeal to that stuck and frustrated adolescent in us all.
  While wicked novelists like Jonathan Franzen or Claire Messud expose
  our pettiest thoughts and snicker at them, Hornby's gentle satire of
  arrested development offers a comforting, shame-free sense of
  recognition. You may want to knock some sense into his Peter Pans, but
  you also want to give 'em a hug."
• Anna Mundow on The Coral Thief by Rebecca Stott: "With consummate skill and compassion, Stott plunges Daniel the innocent
  into a serpentine plot that involves spies, philosophers,
  revolutionaries and scientists. Treasure may be at the heart of Stott's
  mystery, but fossils and corals are equally precious in this hybrid
  novel of action and ideas. Like Daniel, the reader emerges from 'The
  Coral Thief' having had an adventure and an education."

Los Angeles Times:

• John Freeman onThe Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood: "Because Atwood thinks deeply on these matters, her vision is often
  bleak. So it's a welcome surprise that her new novel, 'The Year of the
  Flood,' is a slap-happy romp through the end times. Stuffed with
  cornball hymns, genetic mutations worthy of Thomas Pynchon (such as the
  rakuunk, a combined skunk and raccoon) and a pharmaceutical company run
  amok, it reads like dystopia verging on satire. She may be imagining a
  world in flames, but she's doing it with a dark cackle."
• Sonja Bolle on The Georges and the Jewels by Jane Smiley: "'The Georges and the Jewels' bears none of the signs of a literary writer slumming it for the kids
  -- no condescension, just the keen interest in what makes life tick
  that animates all of Smiley's fiction, but with a seventh-grade
  narrator. I have never admired her writing as much as I do in the first
  of what promises to be a series of books for children."
• Ben Ehrenreich on Desert by J.M.G. Le Clezi "The problem with 'Desert' is not that its author is European or that he
  won the Nobel, but that it is a truly dreadful book, a dull and dimly
  plotted fable based in one of the West's oldest and most self-serving
  myths, that we are the locus of all corruption and that purity lies
  outside. What better escape from the beguiling demands of humanity than
  to strip another of all complexity and will?"

Globe and Mail:

• Randy Boyagada on The Death of Conservatism by Sam Tenenhaus: "What I miss most from my time in the United States is all the
  yelling. I lived in the U.S. from 1999 to 2006, a tumultuous period
  from any political perspective.... More than once in those years, I was at dinner parties where people
  were standing on chairs yelling at each other until it was time to go
  home, at which point they would shake hands and return to their corners
  until next time. The only reason I think you would see someone standing
  on a chair at a Toronto dinner party is to change a light bulb."
• Donna Bailey Nurse on Suddenly by Bonnie Burnard: "As Burnard reiterates "“ repeatedly "“ Suddenly is not a religious
  novel, even though the staircase in the Rusano household is as 'wide as
  that of a church,' and the young Sandra regards her pubescent body as
  an 'article of faith,' and Jack describes Sandra's pills, and the juice
  to wash them down, as 'communion.' However, Burnard does exhibit great
  faith in memories "“ in stories "“ as a kind of salvation. In oral or
  written form, stories keep us alive. She champions vivid, modest
  portraits, where not much happens, with an emphasis on character and
  quotidian detail. And as everybody knows, God is in the details."

The Guardian:

• Geoff Dyer on A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore: "On first reading A Gate at the Stairs, one can become not
  frustrated, exactly, but impatient with Moore's determinedly
  lackadaisical way of proceeding. Second time around, when you know
  what's going to happen, when you give yourself up to the book's unusual
  and distinctive rhythm, it quivers on the brink of being a masterpiece.
  That quivering, that slight feeling of uncertainty (like 'candlelight
  vibrating the room') is entirely appropriate given Moore's hesitant
  engagement with the demands of a big novel and the protracted gestation
  of this, her eventual response and solution."
• Graham Parry on A Gambling Man by Jenny Uglow: "This is panoramic history of a high order. Uglow evokes the tumultuous
  events of the 1660s, and catches the feel of men and women living at
  the extremes of danger, pleasure and recklessness..... Yet from first to last
  it is the king who lives again through these pages, holding the age
  together, making his own history through calculation, compromise, whim
  and ingenuity. To understand how Charles learnt the difficult art of
  kingship, read this book."

The New Yorker:

• Bad James is back! James Wood on Generosity by Richard Powers: "His novels lead double lives, in which the sophistication of his ideas
  is constantly overwhelming the rather primitive stylistic and narrative
  machinery; the reader has to learn to switch voltages, like a busy
  international traveller. What falls in the gap is any subtlety of
  insight into actual human beings.... Powers's new book, 'Generosity,' his most
  schematic and coarse, exaggerates the weaknesses of his better work.... 'Generosity' is a slimmer, hastier, more crowd-pleasing book than
  anything Powers has yet written. Perhaps it is just a quick folly
  between more considered works. Still, in insidious ways it diminishes
  its better predecessors."

Harper's (behind subscription wall):

• Nicholas Fraser on The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard: "Like the Orwell of 1984, as well as Daniel Defoe and Thomas
  Hobbes, Ballard was an arch-dystopian, making his debut amid the
  postwar British scene of cracked Bakelite, chipped teacups, and
  squadrons of bombers on the flatlands of East Anglia, readied for
  Armageddon.... He was to
  prove formidably effective in destroying the last vestiges of the
  British official morality of cheeriness and stiffened upper lips, and
  you can still see people reading Ballard in the crowded, ramshackle
  carriages of the London Underground, absorbing a whiff of catastrophe
  between the familiar, blandly named tube stations, as their forebears
  must have done when turning the pages of H. G. Wells's
  end-of-civilization fantasies.... When his wife died in 1964, he brought up their three young children by
  himself. If one envisions Ballard ironing school ties and cooking
  bangers and mash, these glazed, absent stories set in other worlds
  acquire miraculous, restorative properties."
• Geoffrey Wheatcroft on Bite the Hand That Feeds You by Henry Fairlie: "He combined brilliance as a writer with self"“destructive profligacy as
  a man to a degree unusual even among his journalistic contemporaries,
  and he left behind a wreckage of debts and lawsuits, of broken
  contracts and hearts"”but he left fond memories too. After a first
  Fairlie cult had flourished in London, a new cult was born in
  Washington, D.C., where The New Republic offered him a home, eventually in the most literal sense of the word.... This fascinating book allows us to judge how far his admirers were
  justified. It might also prompt some reflections on the nature of
  conservatism, of journalism, and of our trade's equivalent of the poète maudit: the myth of the heroic but doomed scribbler."

--Tom