Reviewing the Book Review

Flying Blind

15 February 2009

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

FACT

¶ A rare treat: a very compelling cover story. Joe Nocera, who writes about business for the Times, gives such a persuasively favorable review to Liaquat Ahamed The Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World — an account of the Great Depression centered on the actions of the world's four principal central bankers — that one is left with no alternative to running out and buying a copy.

From a literary point of view — and let me pause to note that this is a beautifully written book; Ahamed has a gift for phrase-making and storytelling that most full-time writers would envy — the decision to build “Lords of Finance” around these four men is a brilliant conceit. Each of them was a powerful personality, with the full range of strengths and weaknesses, insights and eccentricities. Because much of the book concerns decisions, for instance, to raise or lower interest rates, you need great characters to pull the story along, and Ahamed not only has them but also knows how to make them come alive.

¶ Gershom Gorenberg finds former president Jimmy Carter's We Can Have Peace in the Middle East: A Plan That Will Work timely, but as a book he finds it to be an overextended piece of journalism.

Jimmy Carter’s advice on answering that question is clear from his title, even if he dashed this book off before the most recent war. In fact, “We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land” is really a short op-ed article disguised as a book. The argument, which might easily have been put in 900 words, is that Obama should follow Carter’s own example, defy political calculations and throw himself into Arab-Israeli peacemaking.

¶ Grégoire Bouillier's second memoir, Report on Myself (translated by Bruce Benderson) gets an approvingly amused review from Caroline Weber (who teaches French at Barnard). Having summarized the book's material, Ms Weber writes,

If all this sounds rather Gallic and hard to swallow, it’s not. Bouillier’s self-effacing shtick also includes a talent for wringing genuine humor from his many travails. I defy anyone not to guffaw at this vignette starring Laurence, a woman with whom Bouillier shares a seven-year “virulent passion”: “I saw her trying to make me her wife. . . . One day she even thought that she was growing a penis; it was a cyst, incredibly phallic in shape, and I advised her to go see a doctor. ‘You can never stand it when something good happens to me,’ she replied, closing her thighs.

There you have it.

¶ Peter Dizikes writes with some enthusiasm about Harold Varmus's The Art and Politics of Science, calling it "a perceptive book about science and its civic value, arriving as the White House renews its acquaintance with empiricism." But surely such a well-regarded book merits somewhat lengthier treatment than Mr Dizikes is given space for?

¶ Dominique Browning's enthusiasm for Our Life in Gardens, a memoir by partners Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd, will infect any readers with a taste for the most seasonable of preoccupations.

It isn’t until the chapter on the daffodil meadow that North Hill is formally presented. We never see it in an orderly manner; my only regret is that we never take one leisurely stroll over the grounds. It wasn’t until “Ilex” that I was struck full force with the power of this collection of essays: it is, in a sly and unassuming way, a tale of domestic bliss. We see the young Eck and Winterrowd using their summer holidays to drive through northern California, looking for obscure nurseries; several years later, they’re building large wooden boxes to protect their boxwoods from the winter winds; and then, just last year, they’re hacking back an overgrown yew hedge planted 30 years earlier.

¶ Writing about Mary Frances Berry's And Justice For All: The United States Commission on Civil Rights and the Continuing Struggle for Freedom in America, George Freedman speculates that the author "may have been the wrong person to tell a story that obviously matters to her so deeply," but the impatience reflected in his review suggests that Mr Freedman, who "is writing a book about football and civil rights at two black colleges in the 1960s," may not be the ideal appraiser of this book — a doubt that seems confirmed when Mr Freedman remarks,

Only intermittently does one particular commissioner, the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, then the president of Notre Dame, leap vividly from Berry’s dryly dutiful account.

¶ Shelby Steele's warmly favorable review of Up From History: The Life of Booker T Washington, Robert J Norrell's biography of Booker T Washington, does a fine job of presenting the hitherto somewhat politically-incorrect Washington in a sympathetic light and of presenting Mr Norrell's book as a fine piece of work.

No black man in American history has been more a victim of this paradox than Washington. And it is hard to think of a historical figure more in need of biographical rescue. Yet Washington is an awkward challenge for the contemporary scholar. He is so thoroughly stigmatized as politically incorrect that rescuing him could seem a political act in itself, and even a balanced book could be dismissed as a polemic. But Robert J. Norrell, in his remarkable new biography, “Up From History,” gets around this problem the old-fashioned way: by scrupulously excavating the facts of his subject’s life and then carefully situating him in his own era.

¶ Judith Martin gives Ancient Shore: Dispatches From Naples, Shirley Hazzard's collection of four essays about her favorite Italian city, including a rather different sort of contribution by her late husband, Francis Steegmuller, a guardedly favorable review, gently chiding Ms Hazzard for distinguishing — or appearing to distinguish — between the Naples of history and the city of the living.

That the city and its surroundings should be a vast museum to casual visitors is understandable. But establishing a permanent relationship should involve more than enjoying the beloved’s glamour and good looks. Surely it requires taking account of the beloved’s baggage, and Naples has more than its share. In addition to the still-threatening Mount Vesuvius, where generations of Neapolitans have insisted on building settlements, the region is also threatened by earthquakes, the criminal network known as the Camorra and levels of government corruption and street crime notorious even in today’s wicked world.

She tells an amusing anecdote in support of her idea that the two are the inseparable, and she tells it with admirable concision.

¶ Phillip Carter closes his mixed, but generally favorable, review of Michael Korda's With Wings Like Eagles: A History of the Battle of Britain, by drawing some lessons for today's strategists.

Korda’s history offers some insight for American strategists today, particularly those focused on the question of how to organize this country against its myriad enemies. Our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines have proved their courage around the world. Valor alone, however, will not ensure victory. As With Wings Like Eagles demonstrates, we must first choose the right strategy, as the British did, and then choose the right form and shape for our military before our forces ever reach the battlefield.

FICTION

¶ Sue Halpern hails Samantha Harvey's The Wildnerness, a novel told from the point of view of an Alzheimer's sufferer, as a thoughtful meditation on a much-feared menace.

While most books about Alzheimer’s are written from the outside looking in, this one stays within the ever-narrowing parameters of Jacob’s mind. Aside from the neurologist who periodically puts him through a standard battery of tests, which he dispatches with less and less competence, there is no obvious external measure of Jacob’s decline. Instead, forgetting gives way to disaffection and apathy to a certain kind of blankness, upon which Jacob projects the life he led, or the one he wished he had. “There is such pressure to remain true to the facts, and it seems so important somehow, so vital to preserve events and people as they really were,” Harvey writes. “But he knows how memory can make a shattered dream come true.”

¶ Liesl Schillinger's warmly favorable review of Helen Gardner's The Spare Room scrupulously studs storytelling with ample quotation and lucid understanding.

It may not be noble of Helen to admit these feelings, or to reveal her failures of compassion and courage during the course of Nicola’s stay. But it’s honest, understandable and brave of Garner to lay bare such stark, painful dynamics, especially since she is known for drawing her fiction from her own experience. Her first novel, “Monkey Grip,” about the intersecting lives of Melbourne hippies in the 1970s, was adapted from her diaries, and her later novels, “The Children’s Bach” and “Cosmo Cosmolino,” also have biographical elements. The character of Nicola in this new book is based on Garner’s late friend, Jenya Osborne, whom the author nursed for a time during her final illness; and the main character, Helen, shares the author’s name and circumstances — she’s a literary lady in her 60s, living in a house next door to her daughter and grandchildren. Is Helen a stand-in for Garner? Draw your own conclusions.

¶ Jim Krusoe says that the American publication of Martin Millar's 1987 fiction, Milk, Sulphate, and Alby Starvation, is "ages overdue."

What is the book really about? I find it hard to say outside of the experience of reading it. Its charm, in addition to the crisp prose (“Down in Brixton the youth are shambling through the streets wondering where their next drug is coming from”), is in the gradual transfer of information generated by the cat’s cradle of paranoia to the real world. Though no characters are saved or learn anything, in the end at least most of them are spared to live on in one fashion or another.

¶ Bernardo Atxaga's The Accordionist's Son gets a disappointed, too-short review from Jascha Hoffman, who calls it "a sprawling novel about the legacy of civil war in Spain that borrows characters from Atxaga’s previous works but does not have quite the same charm and power." The net result is an unhelpful "don't bother with this one."

¶ Tom LeClair's distinctly unfavorable review of Patrick McCabe's new novel, The Holy City lists three (3) "hypotheses about McCabe’s motives for stealing my time." This makes for droll reading, but very poor reviewing.

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