Reviewing the Book Review

Less Than Zero

26 July 2009

¶ Mary Roach's enthusiastic review of Bill Streever's Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places would have been more quickly grasped if it had began with the following observation, which constitutes the antepenultimate paragraph:

A warning: This is a book only in that it has a cover. It’s structured more like a blog. There are chapters, but they aren’t united by easily discerned themes. One begins with a few pages about El Niño, followed by a section break and then “The moose is so well insulated that. . . .” I fought it for a chapter or two, and then I gave in. The book is so interesting it doesn’t matter.

¶ It's difficult to know what to make of Rich Cohen's Israel Is Real: An Obsessive Quest to Understand the Jewish Nation and Its History — at least on the basis of Tony Horwitz's review. Is it a book about Israel, or a book about Mr Cohen's obsession? Mr Horwitz does not clarify.

Cohen often riffs like this, swooping across centuries and continents to connect far-flung dots of Jewish history. The results aren’t always convincing (is Superman’s cape really a Jewish prayer shawl?), but they seldom fail to be provocative and entertaining. This breezy irreverence helps centuries of Talmud and exile go down easy. Here, for instance, is Cohen describing the self-transformation of European refugees from pale, cowed shtetl-dwellers into tanned Hebrew warriors:

“When Shmuel Goldfein — it means something like Sam the Moneygrubber (in Europe, Jews were given surnames by their Christian neighbors) — made aliyah from Plotsk, he changed his last name to Barak (Lightning), and named his son Ehud, which means something like ‘popular.’ Sam the Moneygrubber begat Popular Lightning.”

¶ The second paragraph of Douglas Wolk's rave review of David Mazzucchelli's graphic novel, Asterios Polyp is itself a rave review.

Enter Asterios Polyp: a big, proud, ambitious chunk of a graphic novel, with modernism on its mind and a perfectly geometrical chip on its shoulder. The tension between formalist rigor and emotional subtlety is not just the theme (and method) of the cartoonist David Mazzucchelli’s decade-in-the-making opus; it’s basically the plot. The book is a satirical comedy of remarriage, a treatise on aesthetics and design and ontology, a late-life Künstlerroman, a Novel of Ideas with two capital letters, and just about the most schematic work of fiction this side of that other big book that constantly alludes to the “Odyssey.”

¶ Touré reviews three books about Yankees, A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez, by Selena Roberts; The Yankee Years, by Joe Torres and Tom Verducci; and American Icon: The Fall of Roger Clemens and the rise of Steroids in America's Pastime. I dutifully read the well-written piece but could not understand why it wasn't published in the Sports Section.

¶ Liesl Schillinger tries valiantly to write positively about Elisabeth Hyde's novel about white-water rafting, In the Heart of the Canyon, but capsizes in the effort.

Will these rafters survive the ordeal? Probably. But reading “In the Heart of the Canyon,” you realize that it’s the everyday tumbles and snags encountered on dry land that most of us need help navigating. Do river guides make house calls?

¶ Adam Liptak's too-short review of Packing the Court: The Rise of Judicial Power and the Coming Crisis of the Supreme Court, by James MacGregor Burns, does not bother to tell us anything about the coming crisis. Politely dismissive, it suggests that the author is a crackpot.

He proposes a counterattack. If the court repeatedly strikes down “vital progressive legislation,” he says, the president should “announce flatly that he or she would not accept the Supreme Court’s verdicts.” The case against judicial review has been made more fully and rigorously elsewhere, but whatever its merits, it is hard to take very seriously as a practical matter this late in the life of the Republic.

¶ Jonathan Tepperman finds that, while Allis Radosh and Ronald Radosh have an important story to tell, in A Safe Haven: Harry S Truman and the Founding of Israel, they do not tell it particularly well.

Truman’s remarkable perseverance is recounted by the Radoshes in readable prose, with good anecdotal color, a general sense of fair-mindedness (except perhaps toward the Arabs) and impressive detail. How much of this will be interesting to the general reader is another question. At times the detail slips from impressive to oppressive. And the authors don’t help matters by failing to adequately signpost their narrative, stopping their recounting of events to explain why various moments were particularly important.

Nor do they do quite enough to substantiate their claims that without Truman’s help, Israel might never have come into being or have survived its first few years.

¶ Steven Pollard's warmly positive but too-short review of Bruce Bawer's Surrender: Appeasing Isam, Sacrificing Freedom begins on a hyperbolic note.

There is no more important issue facing the West than Islamism, Islamofascism or — to use yet another label — radical Islam. And there is no more necessary precondition to countering that threat than understanding it: where it springs from, how it is expressed and the ways in which it is spreading. But before we do any of that, we have to agree that the threat exists.

It ends on a correspondingly bleak one. Instead of analysis, Mr Pollard gives us a sermon.

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