By Steve Rhodes
“No matter how shiny and safe a city gets, no matter how high its housing prices climb, how fast its crime rates fall and how many of its corner stores are turned into buzz-before-entering boutiques dedicated to clothing the ‘urban baby’ or are replaced by franchised coffee shops with WiFi hot spots for laptop-toting Beat poets, there is one sort of room at the city’s very core whose design schemes rarely shift upscale and whose typical occupants – be they real or fictional – resist much gentrification of the soul, let alone beautification of the hair,” Walter Kirn writes in the New York Times in his review of Richard Price’s Lush Life.
“Sometimes the hands move slowly, sometimes swiftly, but when they’re controlled by a serious storyteller, they always tell the same time: too little, too late. That’s the lesson of these ugly pens. A case may be cracked and the motives behind it exposed, but the greater mysteries always go unsolved: what good are answers when what’s done is done and something just like it, or worse, will happen tomorrow?”
Is it really possible for this book to be as well-written and seductive as its review?
Word Bird
“Madness did not just run in his family; it galloped, sped, sprinted, dashed and made haste.”
– From a Times review of The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget’s Thesaurus
Choir Boy
Liberal pundit/author Eric Alterman strikes me – and many others who actually know him – as an insufferable, arrogant prick. Just read Altercation for a few weeks and you’ll see what I mean.
Still, he’s something of a representative liberal voice of the sort that needs regular checking-in on, kind of like Michelle Malkin on the right, although she’s a much better blogger. (Alterman has a lot of other things going on and seems to blog as an afterthought.)
Of course, Alterman would object to the high heavens at such a comparison, which would be fine if Alterman’s allegiance was to facts, truths and reality instead of ideology. Ironically, Alterman calls for a more partisan mainstream media even as he is one of the best examples why such a thing is the opposite of what the world needs right now. Ideological prisms shield the truth instead of revealing it.
But that’s the swamp he plays in, so it’s no surprise that his new book disappoints in a particular way, according to Scott McLemee’s review in the Times.
“Alterman seems to relinquish a chance to shape the political agenda of the next decade in favor of settling accounts with such heavy thinkers as Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter,” McLemee writes.
I don’t think the world needs another book-length recounting of the misdeeds of Limbaugh and Coulter; liberals don’t seem to understand that the key to their success – as well as Bill O’Reilly’s – is their supreme talent as entertainers. Eric Alterman has no such appeal, and shouldn’t try to play on their field. Instead, it might be nice if Alterman and his ilk figured out how to talk to the 99 percent of America that is outside of their shielded, elite (and hypocritically elitist) cohort.
“If it has never before occurred to you that conservative polemicists might sometimes be dishonest or hypocritical, then this book will offer a good remedial education,” McLemee writes dryly. “Alterman is, as always, a capable polemicist. He has no trouble shooting every fish in the barrel. But after a while, the whole effort begins to seem like an exercise in identity politics for an ideological minority.”
There are few folks more aggravating than the socially abrasive kid with above average intelligence couple with a screaming inability to comprehend a world wider than his or her own interests and viewpoints who in adulthood, consciously or not, seeks revenge and triumph on the happier kids who pranked their asses through high school. That is who I imagine Alterman to be, and like his cohort, he is still thoroughly uncool and, worse, not nearly as smart as he thinks he is.
“Self-esteem is boosted through therapeutic confrontation with bullies,” McLemee writes, “followed by affirmations that liberals really are good enough – and doggone it, people ought to like them!’
Alterman’s book, then, sounds like the ultimate preaching to the choir. My question: Isn’t the choir bored by this stuff by now? Does the choir really need this constant reinforcement to solidify its views?
“Why We’re Liberals is like a crash course in how to yell effectively at the talking heads on Fox News,” McLemee concludes. “Whatever progress might mean, this is not an example of it.”
False American Idol
“The story has no single villain, but Alan Greenspan comes close.”
– From the Economist’s review of The Trillion-Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash
Karma Chameleon
“If there’s one thing that May Pang has been fighting for the last 28 years, it’s the idea that John Lennon was depressed, isolated and out of control during the 18 months she lived with him, from the summer of 1973 to early 1975, when he reconciled with his second wife, Yoko Ono,” Allan Kozinn writes in a Times review of Pang’s Instamatic Karma, a 140-page home photo collection.
Pang makes the case that Lennon’s infamous Lost Weekend was actually a hugely productive time.
Reason To Be
“There are few subjects more timely than the one tackled by Susan Jacoby in her new book, The Age of Unreason, in which she asserts that “America is now ill with a powerful mutant strain of intertwined ignorance, anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism,” the Times’s Michiko Kakutani writes. “[P]olicy positions tend to get less attention than personality and tactics in the current presidential campaign . . . ”
It’s the entertainment state. The new politics is based on the Oprah Book Club model.
Meanwhile, “Ms. Jacoby notes that two-thirds of Americans cannot name the three branches of government or come up with the name of a single Supreme Court justice . . . only 57 percent of adult Americans had read a non-fiction book in a year.”
So lay off the kids. Adults have the problem and they’re just handing it down.
*
This book has gotten lukewarm reviews, though. Kakutani concludes that “Al Gore’s 2007 book, The Assault on Reason, did a better job than this volume in providing an up-to-date inventory of political and cultural developments reflecting the decline of reason in our national discourse.”
Gore, you might remember, is the guy who was excoriated for being a policy wonk with a wooden personality. Of course, Gore won the 2000 election, but George W. Bush was only competitive because the media helped make the public believe that a dry drunk was a great guy to have a beer with. I’m not sure we’ve learned our lesson.
Posted on March 17, 2008