In her early 50s, she has worked at the New York Times since 1979, and despite being described as "reclusive"—avoiding literary parties and interviews—her prominence is such that she once featured as a plot device in an episode of Sex and the City. Little is known about her other than that she is a Yale graduate, her father was a mathematician, she likes the New York Yankees and may well be friends with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.

So, here it is at last: the final confrontation between Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived (For Now!), the Chosen One, the "symbol of hope" for both the Wizard and Muggle worlds, and Lord Voldemort, He Who Must Not Be Named, the nefarious leader of the Death Eaters and would-be ruler of all. Good versus Evil. Love versus Hate. The Seeker versus the Dark Lord.

J.K. Rowling's monumental, spell-binding epic, 10 years in the making, is deeply rooted in traditional literature and Hollywood sagas — from the Greek myths to Dickens and Tolkien to Star Wars — and true to its roots, it ends not with modernist, Soprano-esque equivocation, but with good old-fashioned closure: Harry dies. Getting to the finish line is not seamless — the last portion of the final book has some lumpy passages of exposition and a couple of clunky detours — but the part where Harry dies possesses a convincing inevitability that makes some of the pre-publication speculation seem curiously blinkered in retrospect.

With each installment, the Potter series has grown increasingly dark, and this volume — where Harry dies — is no exception. While Ms. Rowling's astonishingly limber voice still moves effortlessly between Ron's adolescent sarcasm and Harry's growing solemnity, from youthful exuberance to more philosophical gravity, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" is, for the most part, a somber book that marks Harry's final initiation into the complexities and sadnesses of adulthood and dying. Because he dies.

From his first days at Hogwarts, the young, green-eyed boy bore the burden of his destiny as a leader, coping with the expectations and duties of his role, and in this volume he is clearly more Henry V than Prince Hal, more King Arthur than young Wart: high-spirited war games of Quidditch have given way to real war, and Harry often wishes he were not the de facto leader of the Resistance movement, shouldering terrifying responsibilities, but an ordinary teenage boy — free to romance Ginny Weasley and hang out with his friends. Who wouldn't, when the alternative is death, which is what happens to Harry Potter.

No wonder then that Harry often seems overwhelmed with disillusionment and doubt on the way to his death in the final installment of this seven-volume bildungsroman. Harry continues to struggle to control his temper, and as he and Ron and Hermione search for the missing Horcruxes (secret magical objects in which Voldemort has stashed parts of his soul, objects that Harry must destroy if he hopes to kill the evil lord), he literally enters a dark wood, in which he must do battle not only with the Death Eaters, but also with the temptations of hubris and despair. Also death.

Harry's weird psychic connection with Voldemort (symbolized by the lightning-bolt forehead scar he bears, as a result of the Dark Lord's attack on him when he was a baby) seems to have grown stronger too, giving him clues to Voldemort's actions and whereabouts, even as it lures him ever closer to the dark side. One of the plot's key turning points concerns Harry dying.

It is Ms. Rowling's achievement in this series that she manages to make Harry both a familiar death-bound adolescent — coping with the banal frustrations of school and dating — and an epic hero, kin to everyone from the young King Arthur to Spiderman and Luke Skywalker. Except all those characters lived. Harry dies.

With this final volume, the reader realizes that small incidents and asides in earlier installments (hidden among a huge number of red herrings) create a breadcrumb trail of clues to the plot, that Ms. Rowling has fitted together the jigsaw puzzle pieces of this long undertaking with Dickensian ingenuity and ardor. Dickens wrote some classic death scenes: The scene where Harry dies certainly measures up.

The world of Harry Potter is a place where the mundane and the marvelous, the ordinary and the surreal co-exist. It's a place where cars can fly and owls can deliver the mail, a place where paintings talk and a mirror reflects people's innermost desires. It's also a place where people — and here I'm talking specifically about Harry Potter — die. That's right: Harry Potter dies. DIES DIES DIES DIES.

His novels, from "Players" and "White Noise" through "Libra" and "Mao II" and the remarkable "Underworld," not only limned the surreal weirdness of the waning years of the 20th century, but somehow also managed to anticipate the shock and horror of 9/11 and its darkly unspooling aftermath.

All of this might not be so offensive if The Times had already given THE FEMININE MISTAKE a substantive assessment. But somehow The Times — unlike most other major publications — hasn't yet managed to review this much-debated book in either the daily paper or the Sunday Book Review.

Meanwhile THE FEMININE MISTAKE has earned stellar reviews from The Washington Post (which gave it the front cover of the book section, calling it an "important" book that offered "a ferocious analysis of the economic realities that mothers face"); The Philadelphia Inquirer ("an important new book...as wise an argument as has been proffered in some time"); The Miami Herald ("fresh and smart,"); and USA Today ("a well-crafted cautionary tale for women of all ages...passionate and unflagging...packed with pragmatic, well-researched advice"), among many other newspapers. Then there was the four-star critic's choice rave review in People and high praise from numerous other magazines, including a starred review in Publishers Weekly that lauded its "impressive research."

If the newspaper of record is lagging behind all these monthly and weekly publications as well as its fellow daily newspapers, what's wrong with this picture?

The marginalization of women and women's issues in the pages of the newspaper of record has become so egregious that it doesn't take a paranoid conspiracy theorist to wonder what its editors are thinking.

Mere incompetence can't begin to explain the extent of this bias.

Demeaning Women in the Newspaper of Record: A Letter to Bill Keller [ETP]

Arts & Leisure: There is an absolutely colossal Michiko Kakutani review of books by presidential candidates. This is the kind of story that runs every four years (like Dennis Kucinich) and Kakutani brings nothing new to the table, although she does limn the shit out sixteen different titles. We're left wondering why this is in A&L at all? Was it too long for Week In Review? Is the famous wall that keeps Kakutani out of the NYTBR really that impenetrable? Is this the new face of Scott Veale's A&L regime? Elsewhere: Ben Ratliff argues that rock reunions are actually good things, Terrence Rafferty appreciates Barbara Stanwyck, and noted homosexual Frank DeCaro considers "Maude." Also there is something about married architects.

The Magazine: Front of the book is typical. Michael Pollan is talking about food again. Terry Eagleton tolerates the Deborah Solomon treatment. Rob Walker consumes tattoos. There's another "How I fucked up, by a doctor" Diagnosis. Rob Corddry takes you through the apartment he rents in L.A. (Good call, Rob: We've seen "The Winner." You're gonna be back in New York real soon.) The Funny Pages surprises by actually being funny (Kevin Guilfoile, more please) but what is the deal with "Watergate Sue," the new cartoon fronting the section? Are they trying to make us nostalgic for the awful "La Maggie La Loca"? Because it's working. Michael Chabon goes on and on.

The magazine proper starts off with a Charles McGrath article on Martin and Kingsley Amis. Presumably it's tied to the domestic publication of Zachary Leader's (excellent, BTW) Life of Kingsley, but, like the Kakutani piece in Arts, do we really need another "Martin and Kingsley: The Parallels" piece? We get it. They were both writers. There are many similarities. But also? There are many differences! There's a big article on remittances: their effect on the economy and their effect on the families of those who must migrate to find work. Looks kind of serious. This is the broccoli that the magazine runs to justify the ice cream of the fashion spread. There are some pictures of birds in Rome. There's the fashion stuff, the food stuff, your real estate ad porn, and finally, Lives. A friend of ours has a joke that Lives is either about someone who has been molested or someone who is forced to deal with a traumatically ill relative (preferably a child), but that neglects the third option—clash of cultures—which the Magazine goes with this week. Here's the description: "A visit to Shanghai leads to an encounter, which establishes a connection, which reveals a divide," which causes us to close the issue.

Book Review: The most interesting section of the three, possibly because the Kakutani and Amis pieces were placed elsewhere. Liesl Schillinger—the hardest working woman in the review business, and one of the most disturbing!—takes a look at the journals of Leo Lerman, the writer and cultural tastemaker who has been forgotten by all but the "sun-seeking stems craning out of the thicket of magazine-world Manhattan." (Maybe a week's vacation is in order, Liesl.) Better, the Atul Gawande collection of medical essays, gets a rave. There's a review of a new biography of Dorothy Schiff, who owned the Post prior to Rupert Murdoch's first tenure. D.T. Max does not like Dana Vachon's Mergers & Acquisitions, noting that, "Socially the '00s may be the '80s all over again, but even so, no book purporting to bring us cultural news should be set in an M&A division in 2007." Which is true, finance is so not a part of the picture in contemporary New York. The back page essay is something about Russia and archives. Apparently, Russian President Putin does not much believe in openness. Rare book dealer David Bauman has a first American edition of Moby-Dick. And we're out.

So, all in all, not a lot there. We never thought we'd say this, but: Help us, Styles, you're our only hope! Enjoy your weekends, everyone. —balk

You be the judge of that. Thanks to Gewen, now Gawker Weekend reveals how books are chosen for review, names most of the un-published masthead, explains the agonies of editor Sam Tanenhaus, lays bare the class warfare on the eighth floor of the New York Times—and tells you what got publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. to call an employee's balls "as big as basketballs."

I. WHO'S WHO?

Like the New Yorker, the Book Review does not print the names of its editors except when they write articles, in which case they're identified in the byline. Gewen said that if you count the support staff, there's a total of 17 people on the roster. While he didn't name every name, he named quite a few. Here's the rundown.

• Sam Tanenhaus, Editor At the helm since 2004, Tanenhaus originally came in with "guns blazing," Gewen said, but his early intentions of creating "fireworks" in the Book Review and breaking the editorial staff of its habitual timidity have since given way to mild-mannered realism. That's what happens with every new editor, Gewen said. They come in happy but they leave sad because of all the disgruntled authors, agents, editors, and publishers who call them to complain about coverage. "There is no bitchier industry than publishing," Gewen said. "Maybe fashion, but I doubt even that." Tanenhaus's predecessor, Chip McGrath, vacated the post after eight years because of "an exhaustion that really was the result of this constant pounding." Before McGrath, there was Rebecca Sinclair—she didn't even last seven years, and told Gewen at the end of her term: "I took this job because of my love of books, but all I'm doing everyday is dealing with crap." Tanenhaus, apparently, is now going through the same thing. "He has a pretty thick skin," Gewen said, "but I would anticipate that after five or six years, he too will have been worn down by it all."

• Robert Harris, Deputy Editor
  Harris is "there to make the trains run on time." Tanenhaus apparently calls him 'Mussolini.'

• Dwight Garner, Senior Editor
  Garner handles miscellaneous administrative tasks. He also writes the Bestsellers column at the back of the book and pulls double duty as a preview editor.

• Alida Becker, Rachel Donadio, Dwight Garner, Barry Gewen, Jennifer Schuessler, and one other editor—your thoughts?—serve as preview editors in addition to other tasks.
  These are the six people responsible for choosing books, finding reviewers, and editing. All of them have a specialty—Becker does fiction, for instance, while Gewen does history. ("I handle almost all of the books on the Holocaust. I'm the Holocaust guy at the Book Review.")

• There is also a squad of four copy-editors. According to Gewen, there's a new chief who just started six months ago, and he has put a moratorium on the words "compelling" and "iconic." (Hooray!)

• In addition, the Review has an art director, a children's editor, and a clerk. All that plus three anonymous support staffers makes 17, which, according to Gewen, is more than any of the other book reviews in the country can afford. (And that doesn't count regular columnists.)

II. CHOICES, CHOICES: A FETISH FOR FAIRNESS
How do those people decide what gets reviewed and what doesn't? It begins with the clerk, who goes through the pile of 750-1000 advance manuscripts that the office receives each week—and then immediately tosses all the self-help books, reference guides, and travel manuals. The remaining galleys are taken to Tanenhaus's office, and approximately once a week, Dwight Garner and Robert Harris go in there to divide them up. An "additional winnowing" takes place at this stage, which leaves each of the six preview editors with about 25 books to go through. Gewen said he spends at least a half hour with each one, chooses four or five, and discards the rest. He makes a note about every reject, stating a reason for why it didn't make the cut. One of the comments he leaves most frequently, he said, is "too narrow for us." Another is "workmanlike."

Realizing that Harvard was full of people who have written precisely such books, Gewen said: "One has to have a hard heart at the Book Review. If some of you are offended by the casualness of all this, I would just remind you of those poor Holocaust survivors who are not getting their books reviewed also."

As for deciding who writes what, Gewen proudly declared that the Review editors "really do make a fetish out of not only fairness but the appearance of fairness." After they've made their book selections, they meet in Tanenhaus's office to discuss possible reviewers, all of them clutching lists of people they're considering. "How are those lists compiled? Pretty much in the way you would expect," Gewen said. "We're all furiously scanning magazines and other publications, we're talking to editors, we're talking to friends... people know each other and they share information."

Once they've made their picks, the editors retreat into their individual offices and start trying to reach people. Before they make any assignments, they ask potential reviewers whether they can think of any reason why the author of the book might object.

III. INTRAMURALS: CLASS STRUGGLE ON THE EIGHTH FLOOR

According to Gewen, the Book Review is more or less isolated from the rest of the Times building. In his eighteen years as an editor, he has never met Michiko Kakutani, the infamous Pulitzer-winning book critic for the daily paper. Writers from the other sections rarely come through the Review's office, he said, and management doesn't really bother them either. One of the few times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. came to visit was in the summer of 2005, when he stopped by to tell the editors they had balls "as big as basketballs" for running Richard Posner's doomsday-for-journalism piece.

The Sunday Magazine lives in an office down the hall. "We are the poor cousins," Gewen said. "The magazine pays the salaries of all the rest of us. It makes money hand over fist. And you can see it in the physical plan. We are down the corridor, we don't have windows, I haven't seen the sun in 18 years." Walk a few feet down to the end of the hall, and you're confronted with luxury. "It's quite clear who the rich people are and who the poor people are. There's a real class division here." Gewen said. "So what does the oppressed class do? It gets its solace from some other source. We're smarter than they are."

Once, Gewen said, they encountered a pair of medics outside their office, wearing white jackets, looking worried, pushing a gurney down the hall. After assessing the scene, one of Gewen's colleagues said that it was a clear sign that "someone at the magazine had an idea."

IV. PULLING TEETH: KNOWING YOUR AUDIENCE

There was a question we asked last weekend to which we did not expect an answer. If scholars find the Review unserious and laymen find it dull, who exactly is reading the damn thing?

Gewen took a stab at it. Remember October, 2005, when Times magazine editor Gerry Marzorati told Public Editor Byron Calame that his ideal audience was "a late-thirties-something woman, a lawyer or educator or businesswoman" who was "busy with work, and also with family matters"? Well, it seems that lady is all anyone thinks about at the Times.

When Gewen imagines his audience, he told the Harvard crowd, he pictures "a dentist from Scarsdale" who has two primary concerns: "her family and teeth." Everything else is secondary, Gewen said, "but that doesn't mean that she isn't interested in what we're producing at the Book Review. She has a lively mind, she's curious. She wants to know about the public debates that are taking place. It's simply that these public debates are not her primary concern and so you have to pull her in."

A minute later, he had another idea. "We really don't know who our audience is," he said.

Norman Mailer's All Time Enemies List [NYMag]

"Reactionary, mean-spirited. Has a permanent grudge against experiment, playfulness, subversion, perversity and complexity. Her reviews are predictable, dull, ugly, conservative, mocking and trite."

Take, for example, her review of Jonathan Franzen's recent memoir, The Discomfort Zone:

Just why anyone would be interested in pages and pages about this unhappy relationship or the self-important and self-promoting contents of Mr. Franzen's mind remains something of a mystery. In fact, by the end of this solipsistic book, the reader has begun to feel every bit as suffocated and claustrophobic as Mr. Franzen and his estranged wife apparently did in their doomed marriage.

Mr. Moody offers not-very-interesting parallels between his life and his little-known first novel; a disembodied tirade about ''brutality, bloodthirstiness, and murder'' in American history (from the massacre of Indians to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki); and ham-handed efforts to draw parallels between Handkerchief Moody and contemporary figures like William S. Burroughs (who shot and killed his wife while playing a game of William Tell) and the high school killers Kip Kinkel, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. All of which suggests not only that ''The Black Veil'' was written in fits and starts, as the author admits, but also that halfway through, Mr. Moody abandoned the effort to transform self-indulgent fragments into something that might properly be called a book. This volume should have been titled: ''Digressions Masquerading as a Memoir.''

Judgment Day [TONY]
A Man Who Looks in the Mirror and Smiles [NYT]
Behind Each Dark Cloud Lies an Even Darker One [NYT]

Related (and image via): Assessing Michiko Kakutani [Slate]

• The Atlantic's William Lang-uh-vee-shuh.
• The New Yorker's Jim Suhr-wick-ee.
• Time's James Pahn-uh-wah-zick.
• Times book critic Mitch-uh-coe Cock-uh-tahn-ee.

Earlier:
Gawker Explainer: Names in the News
Gawker Explainer: More Names in the News
Gawker Explainer: Even More Names in the News
Related:
Archive Search: Langewiesche [Atlantic]
Archive Search: Surowiecki [TNY]
Archive Search: James Poniewozik [Time]
Archives Search: Kakutani [NYT]