Reviewing the Reviews

August 4 - 5.

Publication: Tribune

Cover: Some crayon thing; it's a kids issue or something.

Note: I found absolutely nothing to read in this issue. Let's take a look at the Trib's books coverage online.

Wow, this page really sucks.

Let's try the TribBooks blog.

Wow, this blog really sucks.

*

Publication: The New York Review of Books

Cover: The Sopranos.

Other News & Reviews of Note: "The Iraq war is lost. Of course, neither the President nor the war's intellectual architects are prepared to admit this. Nonetheless, the specter of defeat shapes their thinking in telling ways," writes Peter Galbraith, a former US Ambassador to Croatia and the author of The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End.

"The case for the war is no longer defined by the benefits of winning - a stable Iraq, democracy on the march in the Middle East, the collapse of the evil Iranian and Syrian regimes - but by the consequences of defeat. As President Bush put it, 'The consequences of failure in Iraq would be death and destruction in the Middle East and here in America.'"

Also: "The American press has the blues," the legendary Russell Baker writes. "Too many authorities have assured it that its days are numbered, too many good newspapers are in ruins. It has lost too much public respect. Courts that once treated it like a sleeping tiger now taunt it with insolent subpoenas and put in jail reporters who refuse to play ball with prosecutors. It is abused relentlessly on talk radio and in Internet blogs. It is easily bullied into acquiescing in the designs of a presidential propaganda machine determined to dominate the news."

*

Publication: Sun-Times

Cover: "Fairy Tale Fallacy," behind the "booming 'tradition' of Latina coming-of-age." By a Washington Post writer. The other cover review, of Stormy Weather, a piece of fiction by Paulette Jiles, is from the Gannett News Service.

Other News & Reviews of Note: None, really. I guess it's really the summer doldrums around here.

*

Publication: New York Times

Cover: A series of 11 photos (nine online) of a man and woman seated on a couch, their heads cut off and out of the frame. In each successive shot, the man moves a little closer, until the end when he makes his move. Now that's art direction! In consideration of The Master Bedroom and Sunstroke.

Other News & Reviews of Note: In two interior photos, our cover couple moves to the bedroom.

Also: The New Republic's Michael Crowley takes on Nigel Hamilton's Bill Clinton: Mastering the Presidency and finds it wanting - too bloated, tabloidy and stale, with the exception of Hamilton's account of Clinton regaining a failing presidency in the wake of the Oklahoma City federal building bombing and Newt Gingrich's self-destructive takeover of the U.S. House.

*

CHARTS:

1. Tony Dungy
2. Navy Seal
3. God

Diana is 4th; Gore is 6th; Bob Novak is 7th; Einstein is 10th.