Reviewing the Book Review

Politics, Real and Imagined

10 February 2008

In which we have a look at this week's New York Times Book Review.

Matt Bai begins his review of Willie Brown's memoirs (which he claims to be an exception) with the following rule.

If the agents at Guantánamo Bay ever run out of interrogation techniques, they might consider forcing their prisoners to spend hours reading aloud to one another from the memoirs of American politicians. It’s a dreadful genre, mainly because any politician who is still alive and coherent — and this would include at least two-thirds of the United States Congress — is too concerned about his own place in history to be a very reliable chronicler of it.

Happily, there are no examples in this week's Book Review — although of a dozen books about politicians and their issues, only two are self-evidently worthy of general consideration.

Striking an apolitical note — or maybe not — is Paul Greenberg's Essay, "Fitzgerald vs Hollywood." The imminent end of the writer's strike is the occasion for a look at F Scott Fitzgerald's "Pat Hobby" stories, written in the combination of desperation and destitution that marked the great writer's final phase. Mr Greenberg contrives to be oleaginously tough on all parties.

Yes

The following titles belong on your bookshelf.

Where Have All the Soldiers Gone: The Transformation of Modern Europe, by James J Sheehan. Geoffrey Wheatcroft's enthusiastic, almost impassioned review makes the case for the indispensability of this book, which vaporizes all the nonsense about Mars and Venus and "soft" Europeans.

In a bravura final chapter Sheehan explains “Why Europe Will Not Become a Superpower.” As he recognizes, the European Union is already a superstate economically, but its failure to develop a common foreign and defense policy will continue to disappoint some enthusiasts. Disingenuous and ignorant at once, Blair once said that no one had ever envisaged a United States of Europe. In fact that very phrase has been current since the mid-19th century. But it was always a false analogy, illustrating Johnson’s saying that life’s follies stem from the attempt to emulate that which we do not resemble: the European Union no more resembles the American Union than the Soviet Union, and why should it?

It is not complacent to say that “the European idea” has in many ways been a heartening success, even if it never achieved all that its early proponents hoped. Europeans may have chosen butter instead of guns, and Europe as a whole may even be what Churchill said he hoped to see Germany become after 1945 — fat but impotent. And yet, while the continents are certainly drifting apart in some ways (secular Europe looks on with bewilderment at the contest between preacher-men in this presidential campaign), Europeans aren’t quite the decadent lotus-eaters that some Americans claim.

One can talk about European soft power against American hard power, but the point is made better by Sheehan in the peroration to this excellent book. The birth of the Bolshevik regime — and then of Fascist and National Socialist regimes — was a direct consequence of the “intense violence” then poisoning Europe. The astonishingly peaceful collapse of Communism rather more than 70 years later reflected in turn “the decline of violence that, by the 1980s, had transformed international and domestic politics throughout Europe”: a change for the better if ever there was one. To put it another way, soccer is not only England’s and Europe’s gift to all mankind. It really is a better game.

Okay

These titles appear to deserve coverage in the Book Review. The reviews may still be inadequate or useless.

It's no doubt meant to seem topically apt, but instead it's simply creepy that both of this week's fiction titles concern renegades from the Sixties, criminals in the name of righteousness who have had to leave their identities behind them, even if both novels are written by top-drawer novelists. The reviews, however, are of very different quality. Will Blythe simply storytells the contents of Hari Kunzru's My Revolutions, and makes the book sound somewhat tedious in the process. Liesl Schillinger's review of Peter Carey's His Illegal Self, also involves a fair amount of storytelling, but with the important difference that it takes pains to assess the author's achievement.

This idea, this truth — that a child in distress is hard-wired to seek protection from a woman, any woman, whatever her failings, her confusions, her ideology — is the heartbeat that races through Peter Carey’s enthralling new novel, “His Illegal Self,” a book as psychologically taut as a Patricia Highsmith thriller and as starkly beautiful as [Harry] Mulisch’s modern classic.

Ms Schillinger especially marks the freshness of Mr Carey's undertaking.

In “His Illegal Self,” Peter Carey draws as much magic from the muslin of contemporary speech as he has previously from the lustrous velvet of his more fanciful prose. This novel marks a departure — an altogether successful one — for the versatile author, who usually paints gorgeous whorls of story around outlandish figures from the untouchable past, real or imagined: gamblers and dreamers, circus freaks, outlaws, prodigals and passionate eccentrics. Here, the world he inhabits — the protest movement of the ’60s and ’70s — is both familiar and recent. Arguably, it lives on, remembered in every campus protest, every new burst of civic activism.

Mr Kunzru deserves no less.

Ravens in the Storm: A Personal History of the 1960s Antiwar Movement, by Carl Oglesby; and America's Child: A Woman's Journey Through the Radical Sixties: A Memoir, by Susan Sherman. Elsa Dixler's joint review, although heavy on the storytelling and obviously compressed into too short a space, makes it clear that these are very different books, one of them an organizational history in which lifestyle is an incidental, the other a "people" book with a strong sense of the Sixties counterculture.

Sherman’s account, like Oglesby’s, ends in 1970, but for her the experience of the women’s and gay liberation movements still lies ahead. Looking back, she argues for a long ’60s, beginning with the civil rights movement in the 1950s and lasting until the end of the Vietnam War. For Sherman it was the “hundreds of thousands of people who were active, in whatever capacity they struggled, who really constituted The Movement, not the dozen or so names thrown up into prominence.”

It might be argued that the movements of the 1960s were far more successful culturally than they were politically, and that helps explain why Sherman is more hopeful than Oglesby. Shortly before he was forced out of S.D.S., Oglesby’s wife urged him to leave the organization. “You could go back to school, try to get another teaching job,” she suggests. “You could write another play ... hang out with our kids.” But Oglesby continues to try to convince his comrades that it is possible to maintain a nonviolent opposition to the war and remain “a significant force in American education.” Unfortunately — for Carl Oglesby and for the American left — it wasn’t

The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse, By Richard Thompson Ford. Orlando Patterson's sympathetic but not enthusiastically favorable review strikes just the right note:

With a daring disregard for ideological propriety, Ford vivisects every sacred cow in “post-racist” America. Inevitably he overreaches, and he is occasionally quite wrong; but the end result is a vigorous and long-overdue shake-up of the nation’s stale discourse on race.

Embryo: A Defense of Human Life, by Robert P George and Christopher Tollefson. William Saletan finds this book ultimately wrong-headed, but presents it as an argument worth reckoning with. "Shifting the pro-life case from religion," he writes, "to science puts it at the mercy of scientific discovery, with all the attendant surprises."

Sizwe's Test: A Young Man's Journey Through Africa's AIDS Epidemic, by Jonny Steinberg. While very unhappy with the author's downplaying of South African President Thabo Mbeki's disastrous embrace of crackpot science, reviewer Adam Hochschild's neutral-toned review nonetheless presents this book as a compelling look at on-the-ground responses to the terrible scourge of AIDS in a climate of stigma and credulity.

Maybe

It is difficult to tell whether these books are actually as indifferent or pointless as the reviews suggest.

Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism, by William A Link. It is only because David Greenberg calls this book the "go-to biography of Helms for some time" that keeps this title out of the Noes.

Stocked as it is with all this information, “Righteous Warrior” offers little in the way of description, scene-setting, recaptured conversations or the fine feel of Helms’s life. Drama, suspense and emotion are largely absent. Nor do we see much of Helms’s personal life — his friendships, his family or any activity besides his work. Perfunctory passages describing him as gentlemanly and kind to children hardly illuminate the man. The book is a public life — solid if a bit stiffly written, worthy if somewhat plodding.

It's difficult enough to read about such a man, without having to plod through such a book.

The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats Are Closing the God Gap, by Amy Sullivan; and Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right, by E J Dionne. R Scott Appleby's review rather oddly fails to find any distinguishing marks between these two books, which, he writes, "blend reportage, analysis of voting patterns, historical precedents, personal religious testimony and unvarnished advocacy." It is difficult to see how these books might appeal to the general reader.

Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal, by Randall Kennedy; and A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win, by Shelby Steele. Review Jill Nelson, like both authors here an African-American, is uncomfortable with both of their books.

Perhaps most troubling about both Steele and Kennedy is the virtual absence of any acknowledgment of the ways in which white racism, and the more subtle and prevalent white privilege, influence black identity and necessitate, for some, a strong collective identity as a defense against white power. “Obviously, black responsibility is the greatest — if not the only — transformative power available to blacks,” Steele says. But this is simply not true. Ditto for Kennedy’s assertion that “open expression of racial prejudice is politically and socially suicidal.” Tell that to Trent Lott, Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond and Don Imus, to name but a few. Lott and Imus were finally taken to task for their racist comments, but after what has become an American ritual of denial, apology and a brief stay in the woodshed, they were back.

And that discomfort is what one takes away from her review.

Basic Brown: My Life and Times, by Willie Brown. Although Matt Bai makes it clear that this book is a lot of fun, he cautions that it may also be a lot of nonsense.

In fact, as in any such work, there is plenty in “Basic Brown” that invites scrutiny. Brown is the hero of every story he tells; his insecurity is manifest in the constant references to himself as, say, “an awfully talented man,” “alert, learned and sage” and “the King Kong of California politics.” But somehow, in this charming memoir by a charming man, exaggeration is part of the fun.

Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950, by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore. Maurice Isserman's unhelpful review indulges in extensive storytelling (considering the brief space allotted). Although he praises the author's "gift for vivid description," his conclusion is dismissive:

That final point is crucial to Gilmore’s argument. Unfortunately her belief that radical activists of the 1930s and 1940s “hastened” the end of Jim Crow in the postwar era is more asserted than demonstrated. And without such demonstration, Pauli Murray notwithstanding, “Defying Dixie” becomes an exercise in radical antiquarianism, a series of disparate essays built around interesting personalities, the whole rather less than the sum of its parts.

Rather amazingly, Mr Isserman does not comment on what appears to be the support that Ms Gilmore's figures' histories lends to the vulgar notion that the drive for civil rights was instigated by Communists.

These books, if they deserve coverage at all, ought to grace other sections of The New York Times.

Heroic Conservatism: Why Republicans Need to Embrace America's Ideals (And Why They Deserve to Fail if They Don't), by Michael Gerson; and Surrender Is Not An Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad, by John Bolton. Michael Lind: "The moment for Bolton's movement conservatism may have passed. They moment for Gerson's heroic conservatism never arrived."

Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again, by David Frum. Alan Ehrenhalt:

Comeback is, in short, a book in which serious reappraisal and fresh, challenging ideas are sandwiched between slabs of partisan sloganeering. Republican loyalists should find much of it provocative and worth thinking about. Other readers might benefit from it as well — but most of them will have a difficult time making it through the bombast.

Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary: Reflections of Women Writers, edited by Susan Morrison. Alexandra Jacobs's review suggests that a printed book does not provide the appropriate format for this transitory-sounding collection of quibbles. "Many of the women here may be poised to pull the lever, or punch the chad, for Hillary Clinton, but none of them appear ready to do it with any degree of zest..." What could be more ephemeral? This stuff belongs on the Internet somewhere.

Homo Politicus: The Strange and Barbaric Tribes of the Beltway, by Dana Milbank. Reviewer Tara McKelvey writes of this throwaway book,

There is a difference between satire and mockery. Satire, in its highest form, is inspired by rage. Milbank’s book does not have much of that. Instead, the writing seems smug and complacent when he takes pot shots not only at the powerful but also at those on the margins, mainly for tackiness.

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