Reviewing the Book Review
Wasted Land
5 July 2009
¶ Walter Kirn's review of Nick Reding's Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town, appearing on this week's cover, makes a boffo case for the book: Must Read! The review is so well-written (as well as so sympathetic), that I was lulled into thinking that Mr Kirn himself had written the book. Perhaps he'll write the novel.
Too many scenes of sulfurous agony might chase away the most calloused, ambitious reader, so Reding recounts these nightmares sparingly, surrounding them with stretches of patient journalism tracing the convergence of social vectors that made the meth plague nearly inevitable and its eradication well-nigh impossible. He details, with blunt statistics and apt anecdotes, the vanishing of educated young males from rural Iowa, as well as the butchering of middle-class jobs at the local packing plant.
The agricultural conglomerates that have gobbled up Oelwein and similar farm towns may feed the world, but they starve the folks who work for them, breeding a craving for synthetic stimulants that conveniently sap the appetite while enlarging the body’s capacity for toil. These offal-streaked Dickensian mills are also magnets for desperate immigrant laborers who, in some cases, blaze the smuggling trails that run up into the Corn Belt from Mexico, home to the gang lords who own the superlabs that, increasingly, dominate the meth trade.
“Vicious cycle” is not an adequate term. As Reding painstakingly presents it, the production, distribution and consumption of methamphetamine is a self-catalyzing catastrophe of Chernobylish dimensions. The rich, with their far-off, insulated lives, get richer and more detached, while the poor get high and, finally, wasted. In the meanwhile, the traffickers fatten in their dens, expanding their arsenals and their private armies, some of whose troops are recruited from the ranks of the pale zombies their business spawns.
¶ Great storytelling on the part of reviewer Tom Vanderbilt cannot distract from the conclusion that neither Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown, by Edmund Andrews, nor Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us, by Alyssa Katz, merits Book Review coverage. Busted sounds like an awkward hybrid of economic reportage and personal memoir, while Ms Katz's book, which is economic reportage tout court, ought to have been written up in the newspaper's Business section.
¶ Caitlin Macy's largely favorable review of Jill Ciment's Heroic Measures suggests a novel that is going to make a deep, special impression on many readers while leaving others bemused.
It’s funny what books stick in one’s mind; it doesn’t have to do — precisely, anyway — with how much one oohs and ahs while reading them, but rather with some lasting illumination the writer affords the reader. I doubt I’ll walk through the East Village again without thinking of Alex and Ruth Cohen. Ciment’s short, detailed novel effectively reveals this older twosome to us, this couple whom time and circumstance have prevented us from actually meeting (unless, at that open house?), yet whom we instantly and intimately know.
¶ Frances Osborne's The Bolter gets a kind, but ultimately dissatisfied review from Dominique Browning.
Enough time has passed that a notorious relative simply casts a sequined halo of glamour over her descendants, an inherited chic. Osborne is still haunted — and thrilled. Which leads to a problem American readers may have with this book: the tedium of meaningless names dropping to the ground. After a while, I couldn’t keep track of all the families. I have the distinct feeling that any British readers even remotely related to the upper classes (a relatively small club with an outsize reputation) would experience a tribal frisson of recognition; these are, after all, the grandparents of their classmates. “The Bolter” is a feast for the Anglophile; followers of the charmingly bizarre blog An Aesthete’s Lament will find long-lost soul mates. But give me love in a cold climate any day.
¶ Alan Brinkley's review of Right Time, Right Place: Coming of Age With William F Buckley, Jr and the Conservative Movement, by Richard Brookhiser, strikes me as strangely confused. First this:
What appears to have justified this book — starting with the title — is not so much the author’s own experiences as his relationship to one of the most famous and influential men of the postwar generation — a person often called the founder of the conservative movement, but one who also became a national and even global celebrity, liked and admired by people across the ideological spectrum.
then this:
Just as Buckley flitted in and out of Brookhiser’s life, he flits in and out of this book. The result is that Brookhiser adds only a little more to an understanding of Buckley than he does to the history of conservatism. ... Instead, Right Time, Right Placeis mostly a profile of the author himself — a talented man whose genial memoir is likely to leave readers asking for more.
Actually, what Mr Brinkley says first is that the book is "slight but engaging." Well hedged! — but that's not what's wanted.
¶ Not only does Kate Zernike's gimlet-eyed review of Sam Apple's American Parent: My Strange and Surprising Adventures in Modern Babyland offer not a single reason for the book's coverage in the Book Review, but it begins to make one regard Mr Apple as an impudent whippersnapper for having written the book at all.
Sam Apple’s “American Parent: My Strange and Surprising Adventures in Modern Babyland,” might be described as memoir by Facebook status update: Sam Apple’s wife is pregnant. Sam Apple feels pretty weird trying on this Baby Bjorn! Sam Apple wonders if it’s really possible to breathe your way through labor pains. Sam Apple thinks baby formula tastes seriously awful. With his wife, his college love, expecting their first child, Apple sets out to understand the world he’s entering, thinking (mistakenly, he later discovers) that “if I looked into enough theories, explored enough trends and spoke to enough experts, I would be able to find order in the chaos that new parents face in the months before and after the birth of a child.”
¶ Kaui Hart Emmings is disappointed by Kate Christensen's Trouble, but her discontent is informative, allowing readers with other expectations to look beyond it.
Readers love trouble, too, and Trouble doesn’t have enough of it. The best part of this novel comes early on, when Josie is treating various patients while ruminating over her own problems. This is before she talks with her husband and before she knows what she’s going to do with her life. The writing at this point is sharp, clear and often hilarious. Christensen sweeps us through a cast of perfectly delineated neurotic patients in treatment with their distracted, hung-over and anxious therapist. Josie’s adventure with Raquel lacks these interactions with characters who bring out the conflicted protagonist in ways no exotic city ever could. And while at times the women’s friendship is illuminated by Mexico City, all sense of urgency disappears once they are there. Over the border, the tension of the novel is forsaken, and it becomes little more than a travelogue, reducing particular lives to anonymous dots. For a writer, that’s real trouble.
¶ Jackson Lears spends so much time storytelling the life of I F Stone that his review never imparts a proper sense of D D Guttenplan's biography, American Radical: The Life and Times of I F Stone. His conclusion —
By the 1970s, Stone seemed to be everywhere, delivering commencement addresses, accepting honorary degrees and appearing on “The Dick Cavett Show.” He continued to challenge cold war premises even as he exposed Soviet abuses. His last major project, his book “The Trial of Socrates,” published in 1988, was a vigorous effort to reconcile free speech and democracy. It was also a fitting coda to the career of an unrepentant radical.
— might lead one to wonder which author he is selling.
¶ David Andelman begins his review of Norman Stone's World War One with a call for a certain kind of book.
Nearly a half-century ago, the remarkable Oxford historian A. J. P. Taylor published a brief but dazzling study, “The First World War,” which dealt with horrors that remain deeply relevant today. The book has gone through several printings, but with the opening of a host of new archives, it is probably time to update that masterpiece of condensation.
Alas, he concludes that Mr Stone's book is not a worthy successor to A J P Taylor's. Mr Andelman was presumably aware of his conclusion before he began writing about the book, and, seen in that light, the opening paragraph is gratuitous as well as unhelpful.
¶ Thanassis Cambanis waxes enthusiastic about Neil MacFarquhar's The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday: Unexpected Encounters in the Changing Middle East.
He’s a diligent reporter with eclectic interests. He drinks beer with a German brewer in Yemen. He is detained by regular police in Saudi Arabia and sips tea with the secret police in Egypt. He researches religious edicts against dogs at a reference library in Iran and questions an Egyptian cleric whose dial-a-fatwa service berates women reluctant to take the veil.
How, MacFarquhar wants to know, have Arab tyrants and dictatorial Iranian ayatollahs succeeded at smothering almost every effort at reform? And why has the United States failed so dramatically to promote greater freedom? He argues, convincingly, that despots have won Washington’s backing on a platform of “après moi, le déluge” — if popular uprisings sweep out friendly dictators in Cairo, Riyadh and Amman, far worse authoritarian Islamist movements will take their place.
¶ Jan Stuart's review of Amanda Eyre Ward's Love Stories in This Town is both too short and too condescending.
Throughout these stories, Ward endeavors to synthesize crisp gravitas with chatty verve. The mix can be discombobulating, as if Mary Tyler Moore’s glacial matriarch in Ordinary People and her flappable news hound, Mary Richards, had fallen down adjoining rabbit holes.
That's clever, but it's also dismissive. A dismissible book does not warrant coverage in the Book Review.
¶ In Sarah Fay's too-short review, Ginnah Howard's Night Navigation comes across as unusual but strong.
Yet the strength of this story pulls Howard’s readers along, unable to turn away from a fierce mother and son who are determined to negotiate the future without having to “detour around every moment of their past.” What they share is an insistence on taking action, wherever it may lead them. “For god’s sake,” Mark finally tells Del, “let’s do something.”
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