By Steve Rhodes
June 2-3.
Publication: Sun-Times
Cover: Somewhat nonsensical but not entirely aesthetically unappealing art attached to Publisher John Cruickshank’s review of Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach. I’m generally uninterested in reviews and articles by the bosses, whose only qualification for writing them is usually that they are the bosess. Jeff Johnson’s review of Crystal Zevon’s I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon also starts on the section front.
Other News & Reviews of Note: Sun-Times writers Leslie Baldacci (A Memory, A Monologue, A Rant, And A Prayer: Writings to Stop Violence Against Women And Girls) and Neil Steinberg (two volumes of reissued Woody Allen stories and Simon Rich’s Ant Farm: And Other Desperate Situations) each contribute reviews that I avoided like the plague as well.
Also: I also skipped gambling columnist John Grochowski’s story about the kid who runs the world’s largest Harry Potter fan site, though I like his column.
*
Publication: Tribune
Cover: An entirely bored looking Joyce Carol Oates. Pass.
Other News & Reviews: University of Wisconsin history professor Jeremi Suri reviews Robert Dallek’s Nixon and Kissinger. The Trib is a little late to the party on this one. Conveniently for Suri, though, his book about Kissinger comes out this month.
Also: Four pages of “Hot Reads for the Summer.”
*
Publication: Books & Culture
Cover: “Remembering Auden: And learning how to make sense of his renunciations.” (Assumed; I only look at it online.)
Other News & Reviews: Andrew Morriss reviews geologist Geerat Vermeij’s Nature: An Economic History.
*
Publication: New York Times
Cover: A completely unappealing drawing of a man and woman on the beach for Jonathan Lethem’s review of On Chesil Beach.
Other News & Reviews of Note: Dick Cavett (!) reviews Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools.
“I am one who came to scoff,” Cavett writes, “but remained to pray. It quickly becomes clear that Jeff Wiltse’s Contested Waters isn’t a dreary historical catalog of shapes and styles of swimming pools vast and small. It’s the colorful story of America’s municipal swimming pools in the 19th and 20th centuries. Against that backdrop it becomes the story of America.”
Also: Neil Genzlinger says Chuck Barris’ new comic novel is “shamelessly entertaining.”
And: Robert Christgau pans Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer.
Pull Quote: “In 1982, the Clash opened for the Who, a group Strummer respected yet feared his own band might turn into.”
Finally: A man writing a book about death reviews a book about shrooms.
*
Books of the Times: On Tuesday, the Times Arts section led with dual reviews of new books about Hillary Clinton. Michiko Kakutani pretty much rips apart Carl Bernstein’s A Woman In Charge.
“Mr. Bernstein reportedly spent eight years working on this portrait of Mrs. Clinton,” Kakutani writes, and in these pages he sometimes sounds defensive, as if he needed to resort to hyperbole to justify all the time he devoted to his subject.”
Bernstein compares Hillary to FDR, Princess Diana, Oprah and Eleanor Roosevelt, Kakutani notes.
“In the course of a book that weighs in at more than 600 pages, he’s created a highly detailed portrait of Hillary Rodham Clinton, but it’s a portrait largely made up of incidents and descriptions and theories any regular follower of the news already knows.”
Meanwhile, Robert Dallek tackles Jeff Gerth’s and Don Van Natta Jr.’s Her Way. Dallek is the latest to challenge the book’s assertion that Bill and Hillary forged some sort of secret pact to rule the country for a combined 16 years, finding the evidence “less than convincing.”
But the book has a bigger problem, Dallek writes.
“The book’s greatest flaw is its flogging of all the Clinton scandals, not simply because they are so familiar and ultimately came to so little, but also because they give us insufficient clues to what sort of president Mrs. Clinton might be.”
Additional Resource: Charlie Rose grills Bernstein.
Note: Bernstein makes a big deal out of the fact that Hillary failed the bar exam, as if it’s a scoop, but in her own Living History, she wrote that she failed the Washington, D.C., bar exam but passed in Arkansas.
*
Charts:
1. God.
2. Einstein.
3. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.
George Tenet drops to 8th. Paula Deen drops to 11th.
Posted on June 6, 2007