We'd always thought, based on cursory flips through the Review and a few years of working in publishing, that putting an ad in the Times was mostly something mainstream publishers did in order to appease diva authors. Most of the ads have always seemed to us to be for books on tape and books selfpublished via iUniverse and for Bose speakers. So we had Intern Mary tally up the ads in three consecutive Reviews. And:
We were right.

None of this would matter much if Mabry's subject were merely a departing secretary of state. But it's plain, even from the jacket photo of a 9-year-old Rice posing outside the White House, that this is a book about a woman who just might become president. She certainly has the right profile for it: moderate on abortion and gay rights, firm on guns, a Californian, Rice could someday be the Schwarzenegger Republican the party is looking for. There is no doubt that she has the self-discipline and confidence. She has already come so far; who would bet against her going farther?

What's that? All of them? Oh.

Madame Secretary [NYT]

A fun game for poetry nerds: read the first line or sentence of a favorite poet's first book, and imagine it as a summary of the writer's entire career... Meghan O'Rourke, the culture editor of Slate, offers a terse contribution to the first-sentence genre in this, her debut collection: "My poor eye."

Fields Of Memory [NYT]

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

When I think about breasts—and as a DD-endowed editor of sex and parenting magazines currently breast-feeding a baby, that's quite often—I think about 'lactivist' organizations like La Leche League, dopey enterprises like 'Girls Gone Wild,' sublime celebrities like Dolly Parton and the blog-traffic-boosting potential of the red-carpet 'nip slip.'

Earlier: Is 'Stacked' Author Susan Seligson Padding Her, Uh, Resum

The Times tries to downplay things with some "if this is plagiarism, then Schott's got ten fewer testicles than Kaavya" examples:

Among several thematic similarities that readers commented on are references to a system of dog-earing pages either at the top or at the bottom depending on referential purpose and to travelers who rip previously read sections from paperbacks and discard them before boarding an airplane.

But the most striking resemblance occurs in the opening lines of each essay. Schott's begins: "I have to admit I was flattered when, returning to my hotel room on the shores of Lake Como, a beautiful Italian chambermaid took my hand. . . . Escorting me to the edge of the crisply made bed, the chambermaid pointed to a book on my bedside table. 'Does this belong to you?' she asked. I looked down to see a dog-eared copy of Evelyn Waugh's 'Vile Bodies' open spread-eagle, its cracked spine facing out. 'Yes,' I replied. 'Sir, that is no way to treat a book!' she declared, stalking out of the room."

Fadiman's essay begins: "When I was 11 and my brother was 13, our parents took us to Europe. At the H tel d'Angleterre in Copenhagen, as he had done virtually every night of his literate life, Kim left a book facedown on the bedside table. The next afternoon, he returned to find the book closed, a piece of paper inserted to mark the page, and the following note, signed by the chambermaid, resting on its cover:

"Sir, you must never do that to a book."

Questioned about the similarities, Schott, who has recently been contributing freelance work to The Times, said that he had never read Fadiman's essay before it was brought to his attention, also by a reader of the Book Review, and suggested that the thematic resemblances were a coincidental result of the narrowness of the topic. He maintains that the encounter with the Italian chambermaid took place as he described it, in 1989, when he was 15.

Had editors been aware of Fadiman's essay, the Book Review would not have published Schott's.

Corrections [NYT]

Levy: "Courtney Love the exhibitionist is so insistent upon upstaging Courtney Love the artist."
Nussbaum: "Self-indulgent isn't a strong enough word."
Notable quotables?
Levy: "a list of her goals from early adulthood: 'Make LP, Achieve LA visibility, 125 Toned Pounds—Heal, Cash flow very good—loose'"
Nussbaum: "There's a 1991 set of goals: 'achieve L.A. visibility,' '125 toned pounds,' 'write 3-4 new songs'"
More notable quotables?
Levy: "An altruistic urge that comes from the same part of Love that wrote (as a young woman already in Hole), 'I want to help the ugly, the disavowed, the disowned, the terminal'"
Nussbaum: "at least her heart is in the right place, as with her fevered pledge to help 'the ugly the disavowed the disowned the terminal'"
Tough-loving Love ending?
Levy: "But what would be really thrilling is to see her defy the feminine convention of self-loathing."
Nussbaum: "The slot Courtney Love filled nearly 20 years ago — the big-mouth punk lunatic feminist rocker, the bad girl as role model — is still open. But it's nice to know the original candidate hasn't stopped auditioning."

It kinda sounds like these two riot grrrls have a lot in common. Come on, ladies, kiss and make up! There's enough cake to go around.

'In 'Dirty Blonde,' Courtney Love Suffers at the Expense of her Art [NYMag]
Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love [NYTBR]
Earlier: 'New York' Catfight: Nussbaum v. Levy

The Emperor's Children
By Claire Messud
Reviewed by Meghan O'Rourke

Meghan O'Rourke went to Yale and writes for a "contrarian" publication and in this week's NYTBR, writes about Claire Messud who also went to Yale and wrote a book about a group of privileged New Yorkers who went to Brown who write for a "contrarian" publication.

To make matters more complicated, the "Up Front" column, penned by "The Editors," which we t ake to mean Sam Tanenhaus, Yale MA '78, explains how O'Rourke went to Yale, and wrote about Messud (who went to Yale) who wrote a book about Brown graduates.

And here's the icing on the cake that may just blow your mind: We went to Yale (and St. Ann's where Meghan O'Rourke went!) and write for a "contrarian" publication.

Yale graduate/St. Ann's-attender (we didn't graduate from there) writes about Yale/St. Ann's graduate writing about Yale graduate who wrote about Brown graduates. AND Yale graduate/St. Ann's-attender writes about "Up Front" column written by Yale graduate about a Yale/St. Ann's graduate writing about a Yale graduate who wrote about Brown graduates.

There you go.
Now you can send us a bag of burning poop.

Voyage Along the Horizon, Your Face Tomorrow
By Javier Marias
Reviewed by Wyatt Mason

This was one of the more alienating reviews we've seen in quite sometime. Almost as alienatingly pretentious as a class we heard about called "Re-reading Faulkner." Damn. Wyatt Mason might be a smartie, but there is no reason to write this first paragraph:

To judge the Spanish novelist and essayist Javier Mar as solely on the basis of "Voyage Along the Horizon" would be akin to imagining Flaubert only from "Salammbo" or Nabokov from "Transparent Things.

This is the like the obnoxious Jeff Bridges character in The Squid & the Whale who referred to A Tale of Two Cities as a "minor Dickens."

Mason then goes on to drop Proust, Italo Calvino, Agatha Christie (she doesn't really count, but we threw her in for good measure), Proust again, and uses the words Conradian, Jamesian and Melvillean in a row.

Remember, New York Times Book Review writers, your audience may have just finished reading "Come on and Do the Tuckermotion with Me." Be gentle with us.

Letters

Oh, come now re: the GUSHING letters to the editor about Joe Queenan's show-offy and dull backpage essay, "Why I Can't Stop Reading Books."

Saul Schachter of Sea Cliff, NY writes this whimsical little number:

I started reading Joe Queenan's essay, "Why I Can't Stop Starting Books" (Aug. 6), when about halfway through I switched over to the review of the Richard Hofstadter biography, which I didn't finish because I was attracted by "The Syringa Tree," Pamela Gien's novel of apartheid...

And so on.

Leni Grossman of Whitehouse Station, NJ cutesie-poo-ly writes:

Aging lady would like to meet Joe Queenan. Thick glasses but good measurements: 36 (books on my nightstand), 26 (books on the table next to my reading chair), 36 (books piled on the floor....

And so on.

And finally, Rochelle Clerkin of Hamilton Square, NJ, writes:

Thank you, thank you and thank you again, Joe Queenan. I thought I was the only one who kept the same unfinished, dog-eared volumes in strategic reading locations around my home for years at a time....

And so on.

We were trying to think of something snappy to say involving Saul Schacter, a Syringa tree, and Joe Queenan's feces, but we're reeling from the mental image of Leni and Joe, rolling lustily around in a pile of unread paperbacks. Yeek.

Jeans: A Cultural History of an American Icon
By James Sullivan
Reviewed by Caroline Weber

Here's the review in a nutshell: Caroline Weber has Joe's Jeans that cost her at least $160. Jeans are important. Culturally. In case you forgot, Caroline Weber has Joe's Jeans.

Related: When will the denim bubble burst?

TBR: Inside the List
By Dwight Garner

We were tickled by Dwight Garner's little blurb about author Mark Childress's website, on which he apparently dumped a list of keywords in an attempt to fool search engines:

Mark Childress, Crazy in Alabama, novelist novelist novelist, Tender Tender Tender, Gone for Good Gone for Good, A World Made of Fire A World Made of Fire A World Made of Fire V for Victor V for Victor V for Victor Southern novelist Southern novelist Southern novelist Southern writers...

Ha! We just had to see these crazy shenanigans for ourselves, so we paid a deliberate visit to www.markchildress.com. Alas! Childress must have removed his list in shame after reading Garner's piece, cause it wasn't there.

Hey, there's no shame in that game! To wit: Gawker Gawker Gawker Paris Hilton Paris Hilton Hilton Family Sam Tanenhaus Tanenhaus Tanenhaus Lohan Desparate Housewives Blowjob Asian Teens Teens Teens Slut.

The Bedroom Secrets of Master Chefs
By Irvine Welsh
Reviewed by Robert Macfarlane

From the review's mild HED ("Pain Spotting"), harmless DEK ("Irvine Welsh's new novel is set in depressed Edinburgh") and informational PQ ("Welsh's fiction has won notoriety for hits episodes of sex, violence and self-abuse, and for its adventures in the Scottish demotic") one would never know that this was one of the nastiest reviews we've seen in our R-about-R tenure.

Writes Macfarlane of the newest novel from Welsh, who also penned "Trainspotting" and a slew of others:

Although it fails at every imaginable level — metaphysical, ethical, technical, thematic — it is at the stylistic level, the level of the sentence, that Welsh's novel is most wanting. The prose throughout is lazy, clich -ridden and exhaustingly repetitive.

He goes on, mercilessly:

Nor is this what George Orwell fondly called good bad writing. This is bad bad writing. There are tautologies (offices that are "unobtrusively tucked away"). There are mixed metaphors (the "bull of a man" whose frame was "going to seed"). There are mistakes — the use of the word "diligently" where "carefully" is meant. And there are unfortunate ambiguities, as when Welsh describes Kibby's erection as "poking through the material of his trousers." We must assume either that Welsh means "showing through," or that Kibby has an unusually sharp phallus.

OK, OK — we get it, but pray tell: What's wrong with an erection "poking through the material of his trousers"? An erection "showing through" does not sound that much better... sometimes penises really do poke and it's fine. Hell, we like it that way.

Essay: What I Did at Summer Writer's Camp
By Rachel Donadio

Backpage essays are generally like those kids in class who "talked most said least," but, hey, nothing wrong with a blowhard. This week's essay is no exception really. Though it didn't really say all that much, Donadio's piece on the phenomenon of the cushy artists' colony was amusing. There were quotes from fun folks like Michael Chabon, Jeffrey Eugenides and A.M. Homes and it made us want to go to a writers' colony and do not much of anything and maybe meet our husband and maybe have that husband be Jonathan Franzen. Oh, New York Times Book Review, always taunting us with false hopes!

Feeding the Monster: How Money, Smarts, and Nerve Took a Team to the Top
By Seth Mnookin
Reviewed by Charles McGrath

Former New York Times Book Review editor Charles McGrath takes on former New York Times Jayson Blair scandal writer-about-er Seth Mnookin's new Red Sox tome, "Feeding the Monster." McGrath thinks that it's excellently reported but not so stylishly written and is concerned that there's not enough Red Sox porn "to satisfy the true addict:"

What we mostly learn is that by the end everyone in the locker room was glad to see Nomar go, that Millar turned into a jerk and that Manny Ramirez's idea of a good joke is to stick his cellphone down his pants and take a picture. Millar, for one, was not impressed, remarking, 'Forty home runs and 140 R.B.I.'s, and with this penis!'

McGrath just said penis! Anyway, speaking of porn, here's a little New York Times porn taken from a parenthetical in the review:

(Journalistic ethics compel me to point out that The New York Times Company also owns a piece of the Red Sox, though the opportunities for conflict of interest have in fact been many fewer than Sox fans on the staff could have wished: no tickets, no hats — nothing.)

Juicy. Oh man oh man, are you as turned on as we are? No? Hey. We never promised you the high-class shit. Think of the above as a commercial for Asian escorts and us as Robin Byrd. Mmmm actually maybe
don't.

The Sound of No Hands Clapping
By Toby Young
Reviewed by Hugo Lindgren

Mr. Lindgren found himself in a bit of a moral dilemma when it came time to review Toby Young's second memoir, "The Sound of No Hands Clapping." He wondered if he should do what everyone else has done and "whip him like a rented mule" or "champion Young" and "anoint him the courageous voice of our generation." Perhaps if he did so, Lindgren muses,

I could score some excellent perks. For example, out of gratitude, Young might try to befriend me and ask me to help write his next Hollywood script (I've got great ideas!), or cast me in one of his plays, or, at the very least, take me to dinner on his restaurant-critic expense account next time I'm in London. Tempting.

In the end, however, Lindgren decides to tell the truth: There are some absorbing parts of the book, but "most of it is merely dull." He concludes the review, wondering: "Maybe I didn't like this book because, years ago at a party, Young spilled a drink on me and hit on the girl I was with. In which case, I'd have just one word for him: Gotcha." Someone's making the professional personal! Hey, does this mean that you will whip Young like a rented mule? And if so, can both of you be naked?

The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future
By Vali Nasr
Reviewed by Irshad Manji

Irhsad Manji may have written an interesting and well-informed review of Vali Nasr's overview of the current Muslim conflicts, but her lede is as annoying as can be. She writes:

In February, a group of Sunni Muslims bombed the Golden Mosque in Samarra, Iraq, one of Shiite Islam's holiest sites. Meanwhile, Muslims continued rioting over Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Prompted by the week's violence, HBO's Bill Maher pulled a Rodney King and asked, 'Can't we all just get Allah?'

As a guest on his show that night, I howled offstage. But the joke fell flatter than my hair under a head scarf. Most of Maher's studio audience didn't get it.

Casually dropping that you were a guest on the Bill Maher show does not impress us. Who hasn't been a guest on the Bill Maher show? Our dog and gerbil have both been on it. Twice. Each.

Essay: Why I Can't Stop Starting Books
by Joe Queenan

We've read our fair share of mediocre back-page essays in the New York Times Book Review, but this week's, "Why I Can't Stop Starting Books" by Joe Queenan, seemed particularly mediocre. The premise of the essay, "but I am never reading fewer than 25 books," that Queen lays out for us at the beginning is merely a ruse that enables him to then list all 25 books and to preen over his abilities as a reader. He ends up coming to the conclusion that the reason he reads so many books at once is not, as his friends suggest, because he suffers from a short attention span. Instead, he writes, "I do not stop reading books
because I lose interest in them; if anything, I have too long an attention span, one that allows me to read dozens of books simultaneously without losing interest in any of them." Well, isn't that sweet.

There is an exciting experiment wherein Queenan tries his darndest not to start a new book, and "whittle down the number to a manageable 10 by July 15," but... Queenan is just so frickin intellectually curious
that he can't resist buying a book about the 1954 French catastrophe at Dien Bien Phu and the experiment fails.

At the end of the essay he buys another book he doesn't need:

"I'm already reading 25 other books, so why am I buying this one?" I asked a friend. "Do you think this is a disease?"

"Yes," interjected the cashier. "But it's a good disease to have."

"Yes," agreed Alexis. "But let's just hope it's not sexually transmitted... "

Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography
By David S. Brown
Reviewed by Sam Tanenhaus

"Wow, that's odd that there is a 800-million-word, four-full-pages-long review of the new Richard Hofstadter biography smack in the middle of the Book Review," we initially thought to ourselves upon doing a quick skim of this week's NYTBR. Then we thought, "Oh no, that's not odd, because it's by Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the Book Review, and he can do whatever he wants." What's next? His freaking "Dear Diary" entries?

The Abortionist's Daughter
By Elisabeth Hyde
Reviewed by Danielle Trussoni

Generally when reviewers take issue with an author's curious use of metaphors we're right there with them ("Her eyes were like pomegranate seeds, spit out and then eaten again and then pooped out") but we're not sure we agree with Danielle Trussoni's claim that Elisabeth Hyde's "metaphors can veer out of control." Trussoni is a little concerned that "a police officer's perspiration problem is revealed when 'twin
pockets of sweat darkened her underarms, like Muppet mouths.'" But we, on the other hand, are not! We think that is genius and adorable and clever. Muppet mouths for president 2008.

The analogy may be slightly inapt, but we couldn't help remembering that story when we read the following letter in this weekend's Times Book Review:

To the Editor: I was entertained by Henry Alford's essay, "Chamber Plots" (July 23). For over 45 years now, my personal loo lit has been The New York Times Book Review.

To be fair, it isn't as if the Times hasn't already acknowledged this.

Expect the World [NYT]

Academy X
By Andrew Trees
Reviewed by Hugo Lindgren

First off, Hugo Lindgren, let's hang out! He wants there to be a Laguna Beach about New York City private school kids (us too!) and he's addicted to The O.C. (us three!). We also dig his style. While pondering why there is no reality show for the 79th and Park crowd, he asks, "are they not loving hard enough?" and he throws around compound words like, "sick-rich" and the Book Review equivalent of a Yo' Mama taunt, writing, "let's just say the book's schematic narrative could help teach a geometry class. The angles are that cleanly drawn." A little odd, though, that Lindgren, editorial director of New York Magazine, she who houses the New York private school-obsessed "Intelligencer" column, left out the juicy tidbit that Trees taught at Horace Mann and that "Academy X" is clearly based on said esteemed institution and that all hell broke loose a few months ago when the book first came on the scene and that Trees was called the"biggest self-righteous arrogant traitor" by a Riverdale board of trustee member. That said, we would still like to have an O.C. party with you. We'll bring the Tostitos.

Friendship: An Expos
By Joseph Epstein
Reviewed by Jennifer Senior

Reviewer Jennifer Senior came away from Joseph Epstein's expos of friendship not being very interested in his expos on friendship. We on the other hand, came away from Jennifer Senior's review of Epstein's expos on friendship feeling incredibly sorry for Epstein. Over and over again, Senior points out what a sad sack of potatoes Epstein is:

Repeatedly — oppressively, almost — Epstein says that he doesn't go in for the therapeutic, that he does not find sharing "manly," that he doesn't "wish to burden friends with such meager inner turmoil as I possess."

He's formal even when professing his goofiness — "He also encourages the madcap in me, which is very agreeable," he says of one friend — and dispassionate when discussing his sadness. "In a fortunate life," he says, "I have had only two serious (nonmedical) setbacks: I went through a divorce in my early 30's and I lost a son in his 28th year, when I was myself 53." Hearing a divorce described as a setback is common enough, but the death of a son is not; one reads on, expecting him to open up, to explain how his friendships bore this loss. Did they freeze? Intensify? Strain under the weight of his sadness? He never says. "A friend who is a psychiatrist, subsequently a good friend, once asked me, in the spirit of kindness, if I cared to talk to him about it," he writes. "I said no, thank you. The only one I care to talk to about it is God, though thus far he hasn't answered any of my queries on the subject."

Epstein, we'll be your friend! Let's hang out and watch The O.C. with Hugo Lindgren.

Uberpower: The Imperial Temptation of America
By Josef Joffe
Reviewed by Roger Cohen

"It" father about town, Josef - father of Jessica - Joffe, gets his "Uberpower" uber-schooled by the International Herald Trib's Roger Cohen. Cohen's lede sums up the review:

Josef Joffe, a thoughtful German worried by the United States he loves, has written a book with endless, irritating alliterations, cudgel-you-over-the-head repetitions and a belabored quest for the kind of journalistic hipness that speaks of the "real estate" of the Roman Empire. Beyond the fizzling attempts at verbal cleverness, however, lies an important reflection on a time when anti-Americanism is perhaps the world's most effervescent idea.

Annoying writer; good points. Get this guy a J-school professorship!

Essay: Misery Loves a Memoir
By Benjamin Kunkel

Oh Kunkatron, how we missed thee! BK returns to the NYTBR this week, penning an essay on the state of the memoir. According to Kunkel, it seems like only people who have chugged bottles of Robitussin while
being sexually molested by a pair of Siamese twins in the supply closet at Taco Bell who then went on to spend three years in a prison in Thailand before eventually defeating the odds and turning into Madeline Albright can write them these days. Thoreau types who write about ponds and sitting near them are no longer getting their memoirs published. Kunkel asks:

But where is the contemporary writer reporting honestly, ambitiously and without therapeutic cant or smug self-help recipes on his or her effort to live a proud and decent life? Contemporary memoirists have taught us mostly how to survive. They haven't begun to teach us how to live.

A rallying cry to those who have lived uneventful lives - quit sitting around watching "Instant Beauty Pageant" on the Style network and start writing your boring memoir. Kunkel will read it!

All in all, it's a fairly typical Pollitt performance. She seems to believe that, by virtue of writing about doing something pathetic, it becomes less pathetic. (HINT: It does not.) In any event, now that The Times has made it clear that writers are allowed to respond to their bad reviews in its pages, we look forward to Ms. Cox's forthcoming essay, "Thank You for Hating My Review."

Thank You for Hating My Book [NYT]
Woman of the Nation [NYT]
Webstalker, by Katha Pollitt [Wes Jones]

Letters

Oh, how we love a poem on the letters page!

But sometimes it makes us a little uncomfortable when a poem on the letters page clearly reveals that the poet has gone crazy. This love-slash-uncomfortableness that we sometimes feel was certainly a factor when we read Cynthia Ozick's letter-slash-poem which she penned in response to Walter Kirn's dismissive review of her collection of essays "The Din in My Head."

Here is her poem. It's called: "How to Write a Literary Essay, by Walter Kirn":

No words too big, no brow too high.
Haunch lacks raunch, so just say thigh.
Stuck-up prose gets up your nose.
Edge is what the wise guy knows.
What's new is true, the rest is quaint.
What Trilling was is what you ain't.
If you don't agree with the dogma I bring
You are left behind (and surely right-wing).
So take my advice, and din it in your head:
The best is right now, because Trilling is dead.

Now it's your turn, Kirn, to go crazy. Write back and lay a killer limerick on Ozick's ass, yo.

Across the Universe
By Dave Itzkoff

Further supporting our theory that the New York Times Book Review is using Davie Itzkoff's semi-regular "Across the Universe" column to appeal to the Comic Book Guy from "The Simpsons" is Itzkoff's lede this week:

Perhaps the surest sign that I paid too much for my college education is the amount of time my classmates and I spent in a freshman philosophy seminar debating the metaphysical underpinnings of the technology on "Star Trek": What exactly happens to your body, and to your mind, when the transporter beam disintegrates you in one place and reassembles you someplace else? If the simulated human beings created by the holodeck can convince you, and themselves, that they possess consciousness, are they not, in fact, alive? Could dilithium crystals have any recreational uses?

Oy.

LESBIANS!

There were two books about lesbians reviewed in this week's New York Times Book Review! Catherine Friend's "Hit By a Farm: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Barn" as reviewed by Katherine (with a "K" this time!) Lanpher and Mary Cheney's "Now It's My Turn: A Daughter's Chronicle of Political Life," which was reviewed by Alexandra Jacobs. Not sure why we're wasting our time and yours pointing this out, but may we go so far as to say that lesbian writing is to mid-summer as baseball writing is to mid-spring? Just some food for thought for a lazy Tuesday afternoon in July.

After the jump, Intern Alexis guides you towards literacy in her review of the Review.

Letters:

The New York Times Book Review makes us want to do a lot of things: Reach for an Excedrin, think about what we are going to have for dinner, count the number of things in our room beginning with the letter "F"...

It does not however, make us want to reach into the depths of our soul and share our most traumatic experiences with the entire Book Review-reading public.

Not that we have any problem with Dorin Oltarsh Schumacher's letter to the editor in which she explains that Kathryn Harrison's review of Ann Fessler's book, "The Girls Who Went Away," inspired her to come forward and tell NYTBR readers that she gave a child up for adoption in the 1950s. In fact, we think her letter is quite moving and it was a very brave and honorable way to share her story. She writes: "I went on to get married, have two more healthy children, earn a Ph.D. and have a successful career in academe and nonprofit organization management. I have told few people about my first child... until now."

We just wonder whether Dorin was really thinking about her audience here. Does she truly want her story of losing her virginity at 19 to a boy she did not love and her time spent at the Staten Island home for unwed mothers to fall on the ears of some 60-something, elbow-patch-wearing, first-edition-John Cheever-owning, gin-breath in a suburb outside of Boston? Maybe O Magazine next time?

Road Trippin:

The front page of this week's Review is dedicated to Robert Sullivan's ode to the Great American Road Trip as reviewed by Bruce Barcott. We don't have a driver's license and our learner's permit expired about eight months ago, but we're feeling the road trip vibe and could use some root beer or fried chicken or a piece of Elvis paraphernalia or something right now.

Kind of weird and unfortunate though that no one told poor Stephen Prothero to cool it with the road trip metaphors in his review of J.C. Hallman's "The Devil Is a Gentleman"... He begins his review of Hallman's book on the "religious fringe" by writing:

At least since Gilgamesh went on a quest for immortality in the ancient Babylonian epic that bears his name, road novels have often doubled as flights of spiritual fancy. In "Dharma Bums," for example, Jack Kerouac read the pilgrimages of his Beat Generation friends through the lens of "A Buddhist Bible," an anthology of Zen and other Buddhist scriptures edited by the Christian-minister-turned-Buddhist-advocate Dwight Goddard. "The Devil Is a Gentleman," by J. C. Hallman, is nonfiction, but it too is a tale of the sort of spirituality that can be found on the American road.

Been there done that on the cover, bro!

Meanies:

While reading this seemingly sunny and ice-tea drenched issue of the NYTBR, we realized that it was actually not so sunny, and in fact, the July 4th edition was generally filled with some pretty mean reviews. We guess people were anxious to leave for the Hamptons and just dashed off some piss and vinegar before they could get to their mimosas and ice cold Coronas.

Here is a round-up of some mean things people said this week (and there was more! We just didn't have it in us to include everything):

Erica Wagner on Andrea Lee's "Lost Hearts in Italy":

... I kept wondering why I was bothering with these people, and why the author kept feeling the need to drive her points, such as they are, home so firmly... it's possible for a novel - and unfortunately, this is just such a novel - to be both too particular and not particular enough. It's a shame, but there are no surprises here, however much even the author herself might have wished for them.

Terrence Rafferty on Philippe Claudel's "By A Slow River":

It's a shame Claudel doesn't trust his storytelling skill. He appears to believe (fatal error) that a novel, a literary novel, requires a fully formulated philosophy of life. So he formulates and formulates, relentlessly, almost desperately, like an interrogator trying to sweat the truth from a stubborn suspect. But it's no use...

Walter Kirn on Cynthia Ozick's "The Din in the Head":

If the novel did die a few years back, well, we survived, apparently. And if it didn't, it probably never will. Either way, the din of our destruction is mostly in Ozick's head.

Ana Marie Cox on Katha Pollitt's "Virginity or Death!":

When women dress up damaging choices as empowerment, it weakens feminist argument. But when feminists start lecturing about wrong choices, it lessens their numbers. I wish I had an easy answer about how to navigate between stridency and submission. Then again, I wish Katha Pollitt did too.

David Quammen on Carl Safina's "Voyage of the Turtle":

I would like to be able to tell you that this is a riveting nature book for hardheaded, skeptical people of broad interests who, ordinarily, would never read a nature book. Instead I can merely assure you that it contains some potent facts and some very nice turtles.

Sarah Ferrell on Helen Reddy's "The Woman I Am":

"The Woman I Am" belongs right up there with the collected works of Shirley MacLaine.

Norah Vincent on John Cornwell's "Seminary Boy":

He renounces his pious life as quickly and inexplicably as he began it, essentially saying that he suddenly found himself unwilling to submit to its "outrageous and dogmatic demands." Sadly, this is a conclusion as deeply unsatisfying and disappointing as the rest of Cornwell's account - an account that serves only to confirm the worst stereotypes of Catholic life without elucidating any of what even a recovering Catholic can acknowledge are that life's profound mystical attractions.

Letters

Timothy Ferris from San Francisco writes in:

To the Editor:
Let's have more
From David Orr.

This little nugget takes us back to our crazy days in November of 2004 when we wrote a haiku about how much we adored David Orr:

David Orr, we think,
Is smart, funny, and dead on.
Yeah, sometimes we're nice.

Hey, literary agents: "On Orr On Poetry" anybody?

Sex Collectors: The Secret World of Consumers, Connoisseurs, Curators, Creators, Dealers, Bibliographers, and Accumulators of "Erotica."
By Geoff Nicholson
Reviewed by Emily Nussbaum

We are a sucker for anything Paul Rudd-related and admit to having seen "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" one and a half times, but Emily Nussbaum's otherwise delightful review of Geoff Nicholson's look at erotica-collecting freaks came with a lede which required that we read it over not twice, but thrice:

"Andy, for the last time, I don't want your big box of porn!" Paul Rudd shouted in last year's sex comedy "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," backing out of the title character's apartment. It was a well-meaning ploy: Rudd, playing Andy's good friend, was actually the one who had collected the porn, and he was trying to force Andy to accept his precious cargo, hoping — with a pervy, wrongheaded generosity — that it would educate his buddy and enable him to get lucky.

The subjects of Geoff Nicholson's new book, "Sex Collectors," might sympathize with that impulse.

Our slowness may have had something to do with the fact that while we were reading Nussbaum's review, we were also watching the exciting France/Korea game, but Rudd was the who playing Andy and the sex in the porn in the what now?

Telegraph Days
By Larry McMurtry
Reviewed by Chelsea Cain

Chelsea Cain goes to town on Larry McMurtry's latest. She writes:

The book is like one of those peppy war stories that Grandpa used to tell in which he insisted he was at every battle, and gee willikers wasn't it all grand? It's endearing, sure. But at some point you want to take Grandpa by the shoulders, give him a shake, and get him to tell you what really happened.

We have this to say, Chelsea: We think McMurtry is the bomb, and thought he was just cute as a button when he accepted his best screenplay award at the Golden Globes and the Oscars. Don't even think about shaking him. Or we'll unleash a still-bitter and potentially rabid Annie Proulx on you.

Public Editor #1: The Collected Columns (With Reflections, Reconsiderations, and Even a Few Retractions) of the First Ombudsman of the New York Times
By Daniel Okrent
Reviewed by Harold Evans

Sir Harold Evans begins his review claiming that he was never a real and true ombudsman fan ("In my own career as a newspaper editor, I was never persuaded that an ombudsman was a good idea..."). He goes on to call Okrent a bit of a hard-ass: "Writing a review for this newspaper, my prejudice declared, I hope to be fair and accurate, etc., but it is a relief to know the combative Okrent is not breathing down my neck: his successor seems of milder disposition." He also criticizes Okrent for his decision, upon becoming public editor, not to "write about anything published or not published prior to his arrival," which, Evans says, "meant he recoiled from an inquest on the paper's failure to shine a clear searchlight through the administration's fog of war."

He ends the review, though, with quite a turnaround: "So let me conclude without equivocation: Daniel Okrent in 'Public Editor #1' represents a force for better journalism. I hope that somewhere he continues to scrutinize the wayward press." What gives? That's a whole lot of positive for a review that was generally a whole lot of negative... So while Okrent is no longer able to breathe down Evans' neck, we are. It's nice and warm, isn't it?

After the jump, Intern Alexis plays with the cards she's dealt.

Letters

Big Mark Felt/John D. O'Connor/John Dean scandal on the letters page, ending with the editors conceding that "the Book Review should have encouraged [Dean] to be more specific about his dealings with Mark Felt during the Watergate controversy," and if you care about that kind of stuff, you should read it.

More our speed, however, was Henry Halsted of Racine, Wisconsin, who writes in:

..to my dismay I pick up the May 21 issue and it is devoted entirely to fiction. I feel robbed. Then comes the May 28 issue devoted exclusively to food. I throw it in the wastebasket... How I yearn for the Book Review of old that did not try to push particular books or categories of books on me but always stimulated me with a careful selection of reviews of outstanding and important books on a wide variety of subjects, along with eye-catching book ads. Perusing The New York Times Book Review is a habit difficult to break. Please, no more special-interest issues other than the year-end best books of the year. I do not enjoy throwing copies in the wastebasket before reading.

Might want to start re-thinking the Raw Anal Sex Issue, Tanenhaus.

The Places In Between
By Rory Stewart
Reviewed by Tom Bissell

Rory Stewart walks across Afghanistan; Tom Bissell pees his pants. After a gush-heavy review in which Bissell, among other things, claims Stewart to be Robert Byron's "better," he ties things up with the sweeping:

If, finally, you're determined to do something as recklessly stupid as walk across a war zone, your surest bet to quash all the inevitable criticism is to write a flat-out masterpiece. Stewart did. Stewart has. 'The Places in Between' is, in very nearly every sense, too good to be true.

Indeed. Bravo! What really caught our attention though, was how smoking Stewart looks in the accompanying photo; with his puffy North Face jacket and Bubar, the toothless, ear-less and tail-less former fighting dog, who accompanied Stewart on his journey. Hey, Rory, we totally have that same jacket and have been rocking it each winter since 9th grade! Um, can we be friends? Or at least be in the same prep school gang?

Garrison Keillor on Harper Lee

Famous people, and especially famous people who not so long ago wrote a scathing-slash-hilarious review of Bernard-Henri Levy's "American Vertigo" and have a Robert Altman movie starring Lindsay Lohan that came out this week, can be thrown a bone or two. Respect. So we'll let Garrison Keillor's review of the new Harper Lee biography, "Mockingbird," by Charles J. Shields in which he devotes a mere 54 words to what he actually thinks of the book — "Charles Shields is a former English teacher who taught Harper Lee's book, and a scrupulous journalist who respects the lady's privacy even as he opens up her life. This biography will not disappoint those who loved the novel and the feisty, independent, fiercely loyal Scout, in whom Harper Lee put so much of herself" — slide. We actually liked what we read and fear that we sound a bit like those crotchety ladies from South Dakota who always write letters to the editor saying things like, "I thought this was the New York Times Book Review not the New York Times Book Synopsis," but we actually care about Garrison Keillor's opinion and wanted more of it! So, consider this a friendly warning, GK. And know that next time you pull something like this, we'll drown Bruno the Fishing Dog.

Ah, the Summer Reading issue. We liked the Superman cover because we like Superman, though we couldn't help but wonder if this was some sort of cross promotional advertising joint venture something or another between the New York Times Book Review and Superman Returns, the Movie of the Summer, a soaring new chapter of one of the world's most beloved super heroes directed by Brian Singer. We understand that Superman Returns tells an intimate story of one man's unattainable love and struggle to belong against a backdrop of vast scope and scale, set in a modern-day Metropolis, and opens on June 30th nationwide, but we think it's odd that the Review would so openly sell itself out like that...

Letters

Daniel Asimov, a visiting scholar in mathematics at UPenn, writes in challenging the methodology used in the NYTBR's "Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years" feature. He claims that the Review's decision to ask each literati to choose one novel as the "best" was a flawed one - instead it would have been more reliable to ask each person to pick their top three. In conclusion, he writes "The method I= suggest is highly likely to result in the same conclusion if you had chosen another group of the same size of a similar composition. But if each person submits only one choice, that is not nearly so likely, rendering your poll's final ranking virtually meaningless."

You know that that means... it's time to burn your copies of Beloved! Burn, baby, burn.

Baseball

We understand that this is the Summer Reading issue, and as such, we are ready to concede on several points (for example, we stayed calm, did not sound any alarms, when we realized that there was not one Liesl Schillinger-penned review; we are not going to dwell upon Dave Barry's repeated mention of clipping his toenails in his review of Tom Lutz's "Doing Nothing"...), but we will not stand for any more reviews of books about baseball! Hugo Lindgren reviews two baseball-related books - one on baseball statistician Bill James and another on the phenomenon of fantasy baseball; Bob Spitz reviews a new Babe Ruth biography; Ihsan Taylor reviews five baseball books in a special "Baseball Chronicle" section; and if that weren't enough, in the frickin Children's Book section, Charlie Rubin reviews "Heat," Mike Lupicia's newest about a 12-year-old Little League pitcher. We would formally like to shove America's pastime up the collective ass of the editorial staff of the NYTBR. As a form of protest, we went on strike, as it were, and read none of these reviews. Heck, until there is a "Gymnastics Chronicle," we're not reading any more book reviews about sports. Think of this as our attempt to "Stick It."

The Horror, the Horror

Oh Lord help us, Terrence Rafferty has a "Horror" column. This week marks the first installment with a discussion of books with titles like "The Ghost Writer" and "Headstone City." This is just what the Book Review needs. Another infrequent column about a nerdy genre that no one cares about written by an author dedicated to boosting the genre's respectability (Dave Itzkoff's "Science Fiction" column, anyone?). The New York Times Book Review is beginning to look a lot like a Star Wars convention.

This week's "Food Issue" was crunchy as well as salty and, gosh darn it, made us really hungry (except when we were reading Dorothy Kalins' review of "The Way We Eat" and "What to Eat," in which she writes that on its way to veal-town "a baby male calf, ripped from its mother, faces '16 weeks of confinement in semi-darkness, in a bare wooden crate too narrow to turn around.'" That ruined the ol' appetite. Back to the Special K Challenge we go!).

When we were not drooling ourselves and vowing to cut Veal Parmesan from our diet, we were noting that almost every review touched on the phenomenon of the celebrity super-chef/restaurateur. The words "Batali" and "Food Network" appeared so many times we almost subconsciously picked up the phone to make a reservation for two at Babbo.

First there's Julia Reed's review of Bill Buford's "Becoming Mario Batali" tome, "Heat," in which Reed describes Buford's obsession with Batali:

Buford was smitten by Batali's larger-than-life personality and considerable talent, a "crush" that not only landed him in Babbo's kitchen but led him on an increasingly obsessive nearly four-year odyssey...Buford had first encountered Batali on the Food Network in 1996; by now it's five years later and Batali is so famous he's greeted with chants of "Molto, Molto, Molto" at football games and Nascar races.

Then there's Bruce Handy's review of "The Nasty Bits," by Les Halles chef Anthony Bourdain. Writes Handy of Bourdain's celebrity chef-itude: "From Bourdain's perch as a celebrity chef (he now has a show on the Travel Channel to go along with his books), the view of the contemporary food scene is a fairly rosy one. To his mind, the brand names who have opened serious restaurants in the formerly buffet-dominated precincts of Las Vegas — Keller, Bobby Flay, Daniel Boulud, among others — are largely doing God's work, and even Emeril Lagasse, a foodie punch line, is for the most part unobjectionable. He notes without comment that the Culinary Institute of America, of which he is a graduate, now offers instruction in media training."

If we weren't already sick of these clowns, Batali and Bourdain were among the celebrity foodie types asked to write little paragraphs on their favorite out-of-print cookbook for a two page spread. Can't we just stare at Jamie Oliver instead of reading this stuff?

Finally, hitting us over the head with a stale baguette was John T. Edge's review of "The Reach of the Chef: Beyond the Kitchen," in which "Ruhlman pulls back the curtain as American chefs are 'stepping out of their monk's robes, slipping off their clogs and donning pairs of hand-stitched John Lobb loafers... The issue is that chefs like Keller and Emeril Lagasse are no longer leashed to their ranges: 'The best in the country scarcely cooked anymore as a direct result of their success at cooking.' Instead of cooking, chefs have opened fast-casual chains, pursued television deals, hawked toothpaste."

WE GET IT. Rachel Ray for president.

We did, however, learn something useful from this issue. Quoting from Marion Nestle's "What to Eat," Kalins writes, "On chicken: 'if you eat the skin, you might as well be eating a hamburger.'" Good to know! As an avid chicken eater (on all surveys, we respond to "favorite food?" with "chicken") we like to know exactly what we're putting in our mouths.

Letters: Passing Love Notes to Walter Kirn

Author Thisbe Nissen ("The Good People of New York," "Osprey Island"), writes in this week, declaring: "I'd like to start a petition to name Walter Kirn the United States Book Reviewer Laureate. No matter what he's writing about, Kirn's reviews are consistently insightful, profoundly articulate and uniquely illuminating." She goes on to list her favorite Kirn reviews and ends with a coquettish question: "Maybe I should just register this as my official book-critic crush?" Stay tuned for next week when Kirn responds with a simple, tasteful, slightly whimsical emoticon rose: —--<—((@

P.S. Hey Thisbe, quit writing letters to editor and let's work on novel number three! Kirn can't ravely review your book after all your ass-licking if it doesn't exist...

The Best of the Best

Moving on to the elephant in the room, the NYTBR finally published its "What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years" list this week. There is not much to go on about here, cause too much going-on-about feels slightly irrelevant, given that the list and A.O. Scott's accompanying essay have been available online for two weeks already. "Beloved" is number one, there was a whole lot of Philip Roth, and a bunch of Don DeLillo. No huge shockers there. What we did enjoy, however, were Scott's surreptitious name-dropping (without the names!) of respondents who found fault with the parameters laid out by Tanenhaus. Scott politely chose not to call anyone out, so we turned his essay in a blind item guessing game extravaganza. Let the games begin!

WHICH "famous novelist, unwilling to vote for his own books and reluctant to consider anyone else's, asked us to 'assume you never heard from me'?"

WHICH authors "sighed that they could not possibly select one book to place at the summit of an edifice with so many potential building blocks?"

WHICH Roth fan asserted "that the presumptive preference for 'American Pastoral' over 'Operation Shylock' was self-evidently mistaken?"

WHICH " writers who, finding themselves unable to isolate just one candidate, chose an alternate, or submitted a list?"

WHICH "best-selling author (whose fat novels seem to have been campaigning for inclusion in this issue long before the editors dreamed it up, even though not even he bothered to vote for any of them) reflected on the poverty of our current literary situation by wondering what the poll might have looked like in 1940, with Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald - to say nothing of Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather and Sinclair Lewis - in its lustrous purview?"

Oooooh baby, this is so juicy. Tom Wolfe, anyone? Is there a Rick Moody in the house? How about that slithery Phillip Lopate? Helloooo, Cynthia Ozick? Anybody home? Write in with your guesses.

Just kidding. Just send us sales figures of "Beloved" - have they even gone up?

The Man of My Dreams
By Curtis Sittenfeld
Reviewed by Claire Dederer

Darling de la Book Review Curtis Sittenfeld has returned. After the NYTBR showered her debut novel "Prep" with butterfly, Eskimo and French kisses, she was asked back to pen several back page essays, and in January, "Prep" was named one of the five best works of fiction of 2005. We also noticed she was on the list of noted authors and editors asked to vote on the "Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years. This week, her newest, "The Man of My Dreams" is reviewed by Claire Dederer and is met with a trombone snort not unlike the one that appears during Debbie Downer sketches on SNL. It's not that Dederer was downright mean - far from it, in fact. Instead, she puts on her point shoes and delicately prances around the fact that "The Man of My Dreams" is just not as good as "Prep" and comes off sounding downright apologetic.

She writes:

"The Man of My Dreams" strings up a kind of reverse-chic velvet rope. The author waves in loneliness and indignity. She denies entry, on the other hand, to the elements that made her first novel such a darling: old money, New England breeding, boarding-school sex, grosgrain ribbon. She refuses their glamour as resolutely as the Amish refuse zippers. In her new book, there's room only for Very Unimportant People.

You may be forgiven for thinking "The Man of My Dreams" sounds like a boring book. And it ought to be... "The Man of My Dreams" reads mostly like a comic novel; Sittenfeld circles Hannah, laughing at her, sympathizing with her, even judging her."

Calling the book dull and pointing out the exciting and delicious things Sittenfeld did not write about this time around, but comforting us with the fact that it's a "comic novel" does not get our panties in a twist.

She then ends the review with this piece of cheese:

There are authors who write solid books for years until, finally, with luck, they break out ahead of the pack. "The Man of My Dreams" shows us a writer who is in it for the long haul; she just happened to write her breakout anomaly on the first go-round. The legions of readers who loved "Prep" will most likely not flock to this quiet novel. But Sittenfeld's determined exploration of her character's interior life feels like bravery.

"Prep" rode to its wild success on the impression that Sittenfeld, a prep school teacher, was spilling some beans. By stepping outside that dynamic, Sittenfeld has surrendered an easy advantage. I admire that sacrifice. "The Man of My Dreams" reads like the next necessary step in a serious career.

Waaa Woooouwwwwn.

Janet Maslin, in her Books of the Times review last week was less kind, and tells it like it is a little bit more:

Sharp glimpses of dull phenomena — specifically the high school blues leavened by boyfriend trouble and snobbish class distinctions — were that book's hallmark. And Ms. Sittenfeld's embrace of the unremarkable is even clingier the second time around. In "The Man of My Dreams" her drab heroine is made special mainly by endless reserves of myopia and self-pity. An amazing number of episodes involve pizza, despite the limited range of pizza as a literary device.

Unlike the Review, "Books of the Times" hath no shame and is clearly in it to win it!! And hold the pepperoni, please.

JPod
By Douglas Coupland
Reviewed by Dave Itzkoff

Oh, man.

As the resident NYTBR dorkatron (aka writer of "Across the Universe," the Book Review's infrequently-written science-fiction column), Dave Itzkoff lives up to his namesake this week with his review of Douglas Coupland's novel, "Jpod," about a video-game programmer named Ethan. Itzkoff thought it would be clever if he wrote the review in computer programming speak, creating a very precious meta feel to the whole endeavor. Each paragraph is prefaced with a heading like so:

{expiation of reviewer's self-doubt through alternately excessive praise and backhanded disparagement of well-intentioned author}

Gimmicky? Yes. Cute? Yes. Nauseatingly dorkatronical? Hell yes! Readable? Not really...

Letters

Oh, it was an entertaining day of mixed messages on the letters page! Harry Lander of New York writes in complaining that Sara Wheeler's review of "The Lost Men" is "not a review at all - it's the crib notes! Of the 53 sentences in the 'review,' exactly four comment on the writing and composition and 48 retell the story." Then, Robley Wilson of Orlando, Fla. Writes in: "When the editors of the Book Review make their assignments, do they ever say to the chosen reviewer, 'Remember: Your review should be about the book?'? The more of your reviews I read, the more I wonder." Good points, all. Still, that's a lot of whine coming from the paper on a Sunday; We might not be able to provide enough cheese to go with it.

Interspecies mingling

There are few things in this world we love more than when different species become friends. For example, we nearly died when we learned about the owl and the dog, the squirrel and the dog, and, of course, the tortoise and the hippo! We're the types of people to forward these articles to every poor soul in our address book and put little notes saying "Can't we all just get along?" and
such.

So you can imagine how completely blown away we were when we saw that the children's book section devoted a page to four new books about interspecies mingling. Two focus on the famous hippo and tortoise rendez-vous and the others, "Chicken and Cat" and "Lost and Found" revolve around a chicken and a cat and a boy and a penguin, respectively. Sarah Ellis's last paragraph made us a shed a tear. She writes:

The hope of interspecies relationships, which is of course just an echo of the hope that we can get along among ourselves, may not lie so much in what we have in common (mud color, lumpy shape) or in shared pleasures and values (gardening) but simply in paying attention to one another, in listening to one another's stories and in trying to give one another what we need.

Well frickin said. We love that.

Double Lives: American Writers' Friendships
By Richard Lingeman
Reviewed by Roy Blount Jr.

Speaking of inter-species relationships, Roy Blount Jr. reviews Richard Lingeman's study of seven literary friendships. The review was quite enjoyable, especially when Bount Jr., "BJ" as we like to call him, went a little c-c-razy and starts rambling on about first names...

Odd to think of addressing Hemingway as "Ernest." Which is what Scott called him, we gather from this book. Of course Fitzgerald had known Hemingway since they were both in their 20's. You wouldn't address someone who once wrote to you, as did Hemingway to Fitzgerald, "Oh... I'd get maudlin how damned swell you are" - you wouldn't address someone like that as "Papa." Even if by some chance he were your papa. And "Ernie" - out of the question.

Not odd, on the other hand, to think of addressing Fitzgerald as "Scott." Even though he doesn't seem like a Scott, any more than Hemingway seems like an Ernest. Fitzgerald's actual first name, Francis, would have suited him more: soft, androgynous. Ernest was the alpha - the more aggressively insecure - male of that pair...

He finds no evidence, however, to support either the Brokeback rumors about Hemingway and Fitzgerald, in their day...

Hm, that's too bad, because we think Ernest was totally the hippo to Scott's tortoise.

Inside the List

Dwight Garner, in his weekly "Inside the List" column notices that the cover of Mike Leonard's "The Ride of Our Lives: Roadside Lessons of an American Family" looks "weirdly similar to the cover of Mitch Albom's mega-selling 1997 book 'Tuesdays with Morrie.' It's all there - the same Time magazine-like red border, a similar typeface and mix of upper- and lowercase words." He goes on to claim that this form of flattery "is a bit more brazen than most." He then quotes an anonymous book designer saying that, "it's odd to want your book to look like 'Tuesdays with Morrie,' which has one of the least attractive dust jackets of all time." That may be true, but call us deaf, dumb, mute and colorblind — we just don't, honest to goodnessly, think that the two book jackets look that similar at all!

OK, they both have red borders and both, albeit very differently, play with different font sizes, but there is nothing brazen about this! That said, we think we're going to hold off on coining the phrase "The Ride of Our Lives: Roadside Lessons of an American Family-gate."

This Book Will Save Your Life
By A.M. Homes
Reviewed by Walter Kirn

Several weeks ago, Michiko Kakutani truly pulverized A.M. Homes's "This Book Will Save Your Life" in the NYBTR's younger cousin, "Books of the Times."

She opened with a kazam: "A. M. Homes's dreadful new novel, 'This Book Will Save Your Life,' reads like a cartoon illustration for a seminar on men and middle age — a pastiche of all that is hokey, hackneyed and New Agey in Robert Bly's 'Iron John' and Gail Sheehy's 'Understanding Men's Passages.'"

And ended with a shebang: "In a blurb on the back of this book, Stephen King writes that "this brave story of a lost man's reconnection with the world could become a generational touchstone, like 'Catch-22,' 'The Monkey Wrench Gang,' or 'The Catcher in the Rye.' To this reader, the apt comparison is not to a modern literary classic but to a television show starring Montel Williams or Dr. Phil."

As we often do with books that have been Kakutani-fied, we waited, with bated breath, wondering what the NYTBR would do to poor Homes-slice. Walter Kirn, who's been known to have Kirn-ified a few books in his day, was a little nicer in his negative (but non-commital) review, peppering his criticism with compliments: "This Californian talent for turning absurdity into sustenance and employing farce to build its future presents a challenge for a writer as knowing, cool and ingenious as A. M. Homes, who's decided — as all social novelists dream of doing but only the cocky or careless still attempt — to take a grand stab at the laughing vampire's heart and hope that her actions create a show worth watching." Then Kirn goes for the gut, writing that "Homes's respect for the wisdom of the East and her disdain for the vanity of the West are both very Santa Monica, of course. Properly combined with opportunism, in fact, they form Streisandism — the alchemical religion that allows Hollywood's bipolar elite to self-loathe its way into a party mood every wartime Oscar night."

He just backhandedly called Homes a "Streisandist." We are not sure — is this is better or worse than comparing her book to an episode of Dr. Phil? Perhaps more importantly, is Streisandism the new Scientology? And if so, we'll sign up only if Streisandists have a cruise ship like Freewinds that we can go on. All aboard!

Stumbling on Happiness
By Daniel Gilbert
Reviewed by Scott Stossel