By
New York Times:
- Sunday Book Review cover: Christopher Caldwell on Koestler by Michael Scammell: "The biographer Michael Scammell wants to put Koestler's multifaceted
intelligence back on display and to show that something more than
frivolity or opportunism lay behind his ever-shifting preoccupations
and allegiances. As a source of information, 'Koestler,' the work of
two decades, will never be surpassed. As an argument for the man's
importance, however, it must contend with the eccentricity of
Koestler's preoccupations and "” although Scammell does not always seem
to realize it "” his vices." - Joanna Smith Rakoff on A Friend of the Family by Lauren Grodstein: "If this sounds tawdry, it's not. Grodstein ... is
a terrific storyteller and an even better ventriloquist. She
beautifully captures Pete's sly self-deceptions: the man-of-the-people
persona that masks his deeply rooted elitism, the liberal pose that
hides an almost pathological conservatism.... Ultimately, though, this is
less a novel about one imperfect citizen than a sharp account of the
status-driven suburban culture that turned him into a monster of
conformity, a place where the air at parties is rife with 'the vague
but persistent smell of striving' and a father can, without irony, deem
his son's dropping out of college a 'tragedy.'" - Rick Moody on When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin by Mick Wall: "Maybe the time for arcana is past, the time for the picayune details of
dinosaur rock "” such that it's the dirt, not the song, that remains the
same. Maybe some publisher was looking over Mick Wall's shoulder
saying, 'Put more about the shark incident in there!' ... Wall is conflicted enough about the facts that he
allows this mythologizing title to be appended to his work: 'When
Giants Walked the Earth.' But these were no giants, these were just
young people, like you, who for a time happened to have more power and
influence than was good for them. In the midst of it all, they made
extraordinary music." - Jonathan Dee on Summertime by J.M. Coetzee: "For all its self-deprecations, there is no contesting that the 'Scenes
From Provincial Life' trilogy is a fundamentally narcissistic project.
But the vandalism Coetzee commits upon the easily checked facts of his
own life ultimately serves to sharpen a question that does seem
genuine, and genuinely self-Âindicting: Doesn't being a great artist
demand, or at least imply, a certain greatness of spirit as well? ... 'How can you be a great writer,' says Adriana, 'if you are just an
ordinary little man?' Coetzee may feel it is too late to amend his
legacy in the second regard, but even from beyond the fictional grave
he is determined to expand upon the first." - Patrick Cockburn on Footnotes in Gaza by Joe Sacc "The vividness and pace of Sacco's drawings, combined with a highly
informed and intelligent verbal narrative, work extremely well in
telling the story. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how any other
form of journalism could make these events so interesting. Many
newspaper or television reporters understand that the roots of today's
crises lie in obscure, unpublicized events. But they also recognize
that their news editors are most interested in what is new and are
likely to dismiss diversions into history as journalistic
self-indulgence liable to bore and confuse the audience." - Larry Rohter on Your Face Tomorrow: Volume Three: Poison, Shadow and Farewell by Javier Marias: "On the surface 'Your Face Tomorrow' is a strange hybrid. It is almost as if Henry James or Marcel Proust decided to write a novel set in John le Carre's world. There are occasional bursts of action and much clandestine
skulduggery. But 'Poison, Shadow and Farewell,' like the two previous
volumes, 'Fever and Spear' and 'Dance and Dream' is essentially a
rumination on several of the Really Big Themes that tend to captivate
great writers: love and death, power and violence, and, above all,
betrayal, loyalty and deceit, both personal and at the level of the
state.... 'Your Face Tomorrow' requires patience, effort and intellectual
discipline of the reader. 'Poison, Shadow and Farewell' delivers a
payoff at the end, but the real challenge, and pleasure, is in getting
there."
Washington Post:
- Simon Johnson on Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin: "Andrew Ross Sorkin is the Stephen Ambrose for our financial crisis,
with the blow-by-blow story of how rich bankers fought to save the Wall
Street they knew and loved. The details in 'Too Big To Fail' will turn
your stomach. The arrogance, lack of self-awareness, and overweening
pride are astonishing.... Sorkin puts you there -- you see events unfold moment by moment, you
hear the conversations, you can sense the hubris. The executives of our
largest banks ran their firms into the ground, taking excessive risks
that even now they fail to understand fully. But, as these individuals
saw it, unless they personally were saved on incredibly generous terms,
the world's economy would grind to a halt. This is as compelling as it
is appalling." - Charles on Becoming Jane Eyre by Sheila Kohler: "If you know 'Jane Eyre' and love it, don't deny yourself the pleasure
of this intense little companion book. South African-born Sheila
Kohler, who now teaches at Princeton, sinks deep into the details of
Brontë's life to re-create the atmosphere of her tragic, cloistered
family. Parallels between Charlotte and her famous heroine are an
irresistible subject of critical inquiry, and even if those parallels
are sometimes drawn too baldly in 'Becoming Jane Eyre,' Kohler's novel
remains a stirring exploration of the passions and resentments that
inspired this 19th-century classic."
Los Angeles Times:
- David L. Ulin on Sacco's Footnotes in Gaza: "Built around two forgotten incidents (the 1956 mass killings of
Palestinians in Rafah and Khan Younis), it is a book that digs deep,
exploring the relationship of past and present, memory and experience
-- rigorously reported yet always aware of the elusive nature of
testimony, the way that stories solidify and harden over time.... What is the value of history in such a landscape? How do we make sense
of where we are? These are the primary questions raised by 'Footnotes
in Gaza,' and it is to Sacco's credit as an artist and a journalist
that he proposes no easy answers -- nor, indeed, any answers at all."
The Globe and Mail and The Guardian have light review coverage this week.
The New Yorker:
- Anthony Lane on High Society: The Life of Grace Kelly by Donald Spot "The sex life of Grace Kelly, like the home life of the Incas, is one of
those distant but down-to-earth matters which we can investigate in
depth, and muse upon at length, but never really hope to understand.
According to some observers, she herself may not have grasped its
implications; in the words of a columnist at Photoplay, 'I wonder if Grace Kelly knew she had so much S.A.' To which the only proper response is, W.T.F.?"
The New York Review of Books:
- Jonathan Raban on Going Rogue by Sarah Palin and Sarah from Alaska by Scott Conroy and Shushannah Walshe: "In Sarah from Alaska, Scott Conroy and Shushannah Walshe, who
were embedded reporters on the Palin campaign for CBS and Fox News, and
earn for themselves a couple of paragraphs of abuse in Going Rogue,
which adds to their credibility, largely confirm Palin's story in its
broad outline and coloring. Their Schmidt and Wallace are characters
nearly identical to her Schmidt and Wallace. Read side by side, the two
books work like a stereoscope through which to watch the steadily
darkening atmosphere of the campaign, the quarantining of Palin from
the press, the infighting, the stream of leaks, and the vain attempts
to educate the candidate in current affairs.... By both accounts, Palin was treated with extraordinary condescension
from the start; more as a dim and wayward eighth-grader than as a
sitting governor, putative vice-president, and the speaker whose
rallies drew ten and twenty times the crowds that showed up to hear
John McCain." - Wyatt Mason on Celine's untranslated anti-Semitic books: "To read any single novel by Céline is to receive, in a bracing style, a
hysterical primer on the abjection of being. To read them all is to
register a unique species of racism: a hatred not of particular
elements of humanity but of the human race as a whole.... [T]he congruence of Céline's wink-wink misanthropy with his unblinking
sociopathy becomes apparent. It is not that we shouldn't read Céline
because he was, at a profound level, contemptible. It is rather that,
to understand Céline, we must be ready to, and permitted to, read all
that he wrote. Only in this way can we begin to understand what we are
saying when we might think to class him as"”of all things"”a humorist." - And note "Night," Postwar author, and frequent NYRB contributor, Tony Judt's first in a series of "short reflections," in which he reveals (to me at least) that he is suffering from an advanced stage of Lou Gehrig's disease: "The best way to survive the night would be to treat it like the day. If
I could find people who had nothing better to do than talk to me all
night about something sufficiently diverting to keep us both awake, I
would search them out. But one is also and always aware in this disease
of the necessary normalcy of other people's lives: their need
for exercise, entertainment, and sleep. And so my nights superficially
resemble those of other people. I prepare for bed; I go to bed; I get
up (or, rather, am got up). But the bit between is, like the disease
itself, incommunicable."
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