By Steve Rhodes
Sept. 22 – 23.
I tried to read On The Road again last weekend. I took nothing else but my 25th anniversary paperback edition – it’s the 50th anniversary this year – with me on the plane so I would be forced to read it and nothing else.
I couldn’t get past page 10. I read the SkyMall magazine instead. There’s a lot of cool stuff in there!
Really. I’ve tried to read On The Road umpteen times over the years (see the second entry for the Sun-Times here.) It bores me to tears. And I’m a reader, folks. I read books. I couldn’t do it, and I doubt I’ll try ever again.
Tell me what I’m missing. Comments with a real full name will be considered for publication.
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Publication: Tribune
Cover: “Best Reads For Fall.” The artwork is, um, outlines of what appear to leaves against an orange background. Dig in!
Other Reviews & News of Note: There are actually only four reviews in the entire publication. Let’s take a look at how the other pages are used up:
1. Three pages of “Literary Events” that are actually paid listing and labeled “A Chicago Tribune Advertising Section” just lightly enough to deceive readers.
2. A crossword puzzle and brief listings of audiobooks and paperbacks.
3. A two-page listings spread of “Fall’s Best” presented in a way that makes reading it a chore.
4. Best Sellers from Publisher’s Weekly, a plug for the Trib’s lousy Books blog, and an Editor’s Choice note from Elizabeth Taylor plugging The Best American Essays 2007.
I’m sort of interested in Beth Kephart’s review of Run, by Ann Patchett, which seems to be getting a lot of attention; and less interested in Art Winslow’s review of One Drop, by Bliss Broyard, but you know what? I’ll just read about those books elsewhere. This book review just makes me tired.
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Publication: Sun-Times
Cover: “War Dance,” a review by the Sun-Times’s general manager (!) of David Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War.
The subhead refers to the war as “the effort to stop the Cold War’s first domino,” which may have been a rationale given for the fight, but we’ve since learned that there were no dominos. Or, at least everyone but our president has learned. The president is smarter than everyone else, despite all appearances. He knows best. Plus, he talks to God.
Anyway, Barron writes that “Three years [after the Korean War started], despite heavy fighting and death, all borders and positions remained where they were at the beginning.”
Still, Barron leaves readers with the impression that Halberstam’s is an approving account of America’s involvement in the Korean War, which would be a surprise. For a different view, see Max Frankel’s review in The New York Times below.
Other Reviews & News of Note: Books editor Teresa Budasi writes that she wasn’t looking forward to reading If I Did It, but once she started she was hooked by the whole of O.J. Simpson’s sick “love” story.
Plus: “[Bert Convy] seemed like such a lighthearted guy, a song-and-dance man, game show host,” Alan Alda tells the Sun-Times’s Miriam Di Nunzio. “And here was this person who, on the spur of the moment, put on a jacket and tie and pretended to be a lawyer to free some of the protesters [at the 1968 Democratic National Convention] who had been illegally arrested. He never really talked about it until one day with me at lunch and it was only in passing because he never wanted to take a bow for what he had done.”
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Publication: New York Times
Cover: “Meet the Supremes,” a review of Jeffrey Toobin’s The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court.”
As noted by reviewer David Margolick, the Supreme Court is an essentially unexamined institution; or, more like, the judges who sit on the court are unexamined. This book appears to give them their humanity – in both enlightening and shocking ways.
Clarence Thomas, for example, is depicted as a lonely man. Desperately lonely.
David Souter is a famously a recluse, we know, but Toobin reports that he’s never heard of Diet Coke. Wha? How in the world . . . ? Is this a man we want on the Supreme Court?
Sandra Day O’Connor is reported to consider George W. Bush “arrogant, lawless, incompetent and extreme.” Even though she was one of the judges who put him in office in a decision – Bush v. Gore – that nearly every judicial scholar agrees is indefensible. Souter, in fact, as has been noted in news stories, almost resigned his seat because of it.
(“Amid a torrent of criticism, O’Connor clearly held off-the-record conversations with reporters, trying to justify what she had done. Toobin does not mention this,” Margolick writes, “nor the more general issue of the justices’ surreptitious ties to the press.”)
Not only that, but O’Connor, a Republican, “routinely referred to her party as ‘we’ and ‘us’ in her memos to the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist. She also played tennis with Barbara Bush, and yet became appalled at the Bush administration.
At the same time, as I heard Toobin describe in a radio interview recently, she drove Antonin Scalia crazy because she based her decisions on her own notion of forging a relatively centrist outcome rather than on the law.
Is there no institution left to have faith in? Do even Supreme Court justices need a civics course?
Margolick doesn’t wholeheartedly endorse Toobin’s book, but it is no doubt an important one.
Other Reviews & News of Note: “David Halberstam discovered his calling in Vietnam, watching men die for a strategic lie.”
So begins Max Frankel’s review of Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter.
“Korea was where America first revealed its imperial ineptitude. Then came Vietnam, then Iraq.”
A bit of a different tone to John Barron’s piece in the Sun-Times. Frankel explains:
“Ever the patriot, Halberstam bemoans not so much the fact of our intervention as the mindset behind it, which led to ‘an American disaster of the first magnitude, a textbook example of what happens when a nation, filled with the arrogance of power, meets a new reality.'”
Quite.
It’s also impossible to believe that, like the creators of M*A*S*H who relocated the Vietnam War to Korea for public viewing, Halberstam was unaware of how his book would be seen as a stand-in of sorts for Iraq.
“It once again recalls the ugly fears and smears of the partisan wars at home that provoked politicians to send Americans to bleed needlessly abroad,” Frankel writes.
Note to Katha Pollitt: Get over it.
Stay Gold: “[S.E.] Hinton’s candid, canny appraisal of the conflict between the Socs, or Socials, and Greasers (for which one might substitute Jets and Sharks), published when she was 17, was an immediate hit and remains the best-selling young-adult novel of all time,” Dale Peck writes in an essay about The Outsiders.
I loved the movie, too. How could you not?
Of course, the world is filled with people who don’t get it. Many of them are newspaper editors. And developers. And political strategists.
But don’t get me started.
S.E. Hinton was 17 when she wrote The Outsiders?
Well, as Peck notes, The Outsiders was “a book for teenagers, about teenagers, written by a teenager.”
But it’s a mistake – one Peck doesn’t point out – to think the book is only for and about teenagers. It’s just that that tends to be the age when reality sinks in.
“The test comes when Ponyboy sums up the conflict between the Socs and Greasers as ‘too vast a problem to be just a personal thing,'” Peck writes.
And too vast to be just a teenage thing.
CHARTS:
1. Bill Clinton
2. Mother Teresa
3. Navy Seal
George W. Bush is 4th; Tony Dungy is 5th; Pattie Boyd is 6th; Alan Alda is 8th; the wife of Alan Jackson is 9th; Anna Nicole Smith is 10th; the not-so-great God is 11th; Dog Chapman is 13th; Jerome Bettis is 14th.
Posted on September 27, 2007