Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:


• Sunday Book Review cover: Bruce Barcott on Horse Soldiers by Doug Stanton: “Doug Stanton tells the story of that brief shining moment in ‘Horse
  Soldiers,’ a rousing, uplifting, Toby Keith-singing piece of work. This
  isn’t Afghanistan for those who enjoy (I use the word loosely) Iraq
  through the analytical lens of a book like ‘The Assassins’ Gate,’ by George Packer. It’s for those who like their military history told through the eyes of heroic grunts, sergeants and captains. Think of Stephen E. Ambrose’s ‘Band of Brothers’ or Stanton’s own best seller, ‘In Harm’s Way,’ the
  story of the survivors of the cruiser Indianapolis, which sank in
  shark-infested waters during World War II.”



• Tom McCarthy on How to Sell by Clancy Martin: “The novel is a good, pacey and ultimately unchallenging read. Why
  couldn’t they just say that on the cover? ‘Entertaining, zippy and
  unchallenging — X, author of Y.’ The reason they don’t, of
  course, is that …
  there’s a bigger sale being made: we’re being asked to buy into the
  notion that lively storytelling and more-than-adequate craftsmanship
  constitute great, ‘classic’ literature. I’m not so sure. To bastardize
  the Latin, emptors need to sober up and exercise a little caveating
  over that one. I suspect that real, high-karat literature, with its
  complexity and ambiguity, its general slipperiness, is sitting in
  another box, one opening to a dimension that ‘How to Sell’ doesn’t
  breach (and, to both its and its author’s credit, doesn’t itself
  actually claim to).”



• Robert F. Worth on The Weight of a Mustard Seed by Wendell Steavenson: “Too much American reporting from Iraq reads like the dispatches of a
  group of astronauts on a vicious foreign planet, leavened only by bland
  historical paragraphs about the Sunnis and the Shiites and their
  regrettable hatreds. So it’s a relief to read Wendell Steavenson’s ‘Weight of a Mustard
  Seed,’ a masterly and elegantly told story that weaves together the
  Iraqi past and present…. She entwines their memories with bits of
  period material — speeches, transcripts of old radio broadcasts and the
  like — making the Iraq of the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s come alive
  more vividly than any other book I have read.”



• Kakutani on Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (and Greg Kot’s Ripped): “Unfortunately for the reader and for those who share Mr. Helprin’s
  views on the sanctity of copyright, he serves up these arguments in a
  pompous, sanctimonious text, full of contempt and the sort of snarky,
  ad hominem attacks that many of the bloggers he so detests like to use.
  For every persuasive point that Mr. Helprin makes, he undermines it
  with a gratuitously nasty attack on his opponents, an absurd
  generalization or a pretentious digression that does nothing to
  illuminate his thesis.”





Washington Post:


• Perry Link on Prisoner of the State by Zhao Ziyang: “Scholars will mine ‘Prisoner of the State’ for historical nuances. It
  is clearer here than elsewhere that Zhao was already in serious
  political trouble in 1988, before the democracy movement began; and
  that Zhao had bickered with Hu Yaobang over economic policy as early as
  1982, even though the two reformist leaders needed each other. Deng
  Xiaoping appears more strikingly than elsewhere as a Godfather figure:
  Other leaders jockey for access to him, dare not contradict him and use
  his words to attack one another. Yet even Deng seeks to avoid
  responsibility for difficult decisions. The group has dictatorial
  power, yet is rife with insecurity.“



• Charles on Sunnyside by Glen David Gold: “As discombobulating as the book is as a whole, its parts are
  magnificent, and ‘Sunnyside’ is flooded with funny, horrible and
  downright bizarre details of early 20th-century life. Gold’s dexterous
  voice can swing from the exuberant melodrama of silent film to the
  terror of doomed soldiers to the quiet despair of the world’s most
  beloved man.”





Los Angeles Times:


• Kenneth Turan on Gone Tomorrow by Lee Child: “Child has a style that in many ways echoes his protagonist’s. Child’s
  writing is both propulsive and remarkably error-free, and he’s expert
  at ratcheting up the tension while dispensing all manner of specific
  information…. Though
  Child has a tendency to get too fearfully graphic when describing
  physical violence, his books don’t fully come to life unless and until
  Reacher unleashes his fearsome physique and destroys whatever is in his
  path…. Which makes ‘Gone Tomorrow’ something of an odd duck.
  Perhaps because it deals with international terrorism, this book is at
  once creepier and more serious than some others in the series, with not
  as many opportunities for the old demolition machine to go into action.”



• Richard Rayner on Gold’s Sunnyside: “Film is a ruthless medium, allowing no longueurs, requiring
  acceleration through the story line and a strict adherence to tone.
  Fiction engages its audience one-on-one and relies less on control. As
  readers, we forgive problems in novels that, as viewers, we simply
  don’t in films. ‘Sunnyside’ feels, at times, like Dickensian streaky
  bacon, a bit of a baggy monster. But it has, too, those wonderful
  Dickensian qualities, namely, the capacity to startle, to thrill, to
  evoke laughter and, ultimately, to bring tears to the eyes. No reader
  who sticks for the ride is going to forget it.“





Wall Street Journal:


• Toby Young on Home Game by Michael Lewis: “American men now find themselves in the same position as Gorbachev
  after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Having done the decent thing, and
  ceded power without bloodshed, they are now looked on with good-humored
  disdain. (Full disclosure: I am a father of four living in London and
  can confirm that the situation for British men is no better.) … Mr. Lewis writes beautifully about his fall in status, but what’s
  missing from ‘Home Game’ is the trenchant social and economic analysis
  that he brings to his other subjects.”





Globe and Mail:


• Randy Boyagoda on The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen: “The Collected Works of T.S. Spivet is mostly a success. There
  will be some, for certain, who will dismiss the book for its
  preciousness. Others will no doubt love it for its preciousness. The
  rest will find the story — shorn of its sundry marginalia — very good
  in stretches, but take-it-or-leave-it otherwise, sundry marginalia
  included. I think it comes down to footwear: If you’re over 30 and wear sneakers
  to work, you’re probably going to like this novel. If your children or
  co-workers wear sneakers to work, buy this book for them and enjoy a
  probable rise in your cultural currency, sensible flats and boring
  brogues aside.” [Ed: For what it's worth, I wear sneakers to work, most days, but thought it was too precious.]



• Emma Donoghue on The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters: “The Little Stranger is a more traditional piece of storytelling
  than those previous bestsellers, relying hardly at all on the narrative
  twists for which she is known. With its single narrator and tense but
  unhurried linear movement, it tackles tricky matters — family secrets,
  madness, poltergeists — with a minimum of tricks. While her matter is
  lurid (and plenty of blood eventually gets splashed on the ripped
  carpets), her manner is not; though the story might belong in a Stephen
  King novel, The Little Stranger is notable for its restraint. Perhaps because of my relish for the Waters of Affinity and Fingersmith,
  I waited in a state of suspense for some revelation that would make me
  rethink the whole story, and felt let down when it never came.”





The Guardian:


• Mark Bostridge on The Blue Hour: A Portrait of Jean Rhys by Lilian Pizzichini: “Lilian Pizzichini’s cod psychology occasionally comes across as trite.
  Her book is inadequately sourced, so that one is sometimes uncertain
  about how much weight to give to certain remarks, and she accepts too
  readily the idea that most, if not all, of Rhys’s writing must be
  autobiographically inspired. However, there is something genuinely
  heroic about her determination to recapture Jean Rhys’s angry, bleak
  vision and her gripping narrative is an important contribution to
  helping us understand the underlying mystery of both the woman and the
  writer.”





The New Yorker:


• David Denby on Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master by Michael Sragow: “Sragow is immensely attentive to Fleming’s films, and he traces in
  detail the fortunes of all the people connected to them, but his book
  is held together by what can only be called the romance of movie-making
  in the studio era—the large, free, hard-drinking life that the men (but
  rarely the women) enjoyed when movies were still made quickly and
  relatively cheaply, craft was spoken of with respect, and art was
  barely mentioned.”





–Tom