By Steve Rhodes
June 30 – July 1.
Publication: Sun-Times
Cover: Well, the bikini’d woman’s arching body with the head of a shellfish certainly caught my attention. For a review of Joyce Carol Oates’ The Gravedigger’s Daughter. Secondary cover review: “Gallows Humor Falls Flat: Argentina’s Dirty War not the place for the author’s metaphysical hijinks.” I should think not.
Other News & Reviews of Note: Not really.
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Publication: Tribune
Cover:: “Kerouac’s Back.” Gee, I hardly had time to miss him. Maybe he should go away for longer next time.
Other News & Reviews of Note: None.
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Publication: The New York Times
Cover: Not unappealing artwork of a woman lazing on an idyllic and – when you think about it – oddly lush Iowa farm. For a review of Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression.
Other News & Reviews of Note: Richard Dawkins destroys intelligent design guru Michael Behe’s The Edge of Evolution.
Also: Jonathan Freedland takes up Marcus Mabry’s biography of Condoleeza Rice and comes up as frustrated as everyone else in the impenetrability of the subject. One thing I have learned about inscrutable people is that far from holding secret wisdom or poetic intrigue or unseen motivation deep inside themselves, instead there is, as someone once said to me, less there than meets the eye. They are impenetrable simply because there is nothing to penetrate. My bet is that Condoleeze Rice is just as she appears on the surface; we’re more probing of who she really is than she is introspective and self-reflective. And that makes her a perfect fit for work wife of George W. Bush.
Notable “The former arms inspector David Kay calls her the worst national security adviser since the office was created, and the verdict seems harsh but not wholly unwarranted,” Freedland writes.
Finally: “Caught shopping for shoes in New York as the corpses floated in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Rice explained that ‘I don’t think about my role as a visible African-American national figure. I just don’t think about it.'”
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Publication: New York Review of Books
Cover: John Updike’s review of Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years gets top billing.
Other News & Reviews of Note: Michael Tomasky takes his crack at this summer’s pair of Hillary Clinton biographies
“A Woman in Charge and Her Way – the former sometimes by intent, the latter almost always inadvertently – tell us less about Mrs. Clinton than they do about the political and journalistic cultures that allowed hysteria about the Clintons to thrive,” Tomasky concludes.
The real story of “the years wasted because of nasty and largely baseless attacks on the Clintons” is the vast right-wing propaganda machine that found a willing partner in a salacioius and insecure mainstream media that has yet to take responsibility for it’s malfeasance; a media that turned around to aid and abet an administration’s deceptive march to a disastrous war. And yet, the media still focuses on Hillary like a creature from the deep, even as many in her own party have internalized the critiques of crazy people.
What is this obsession?
“Like mosquitoes on the Tidal Basin, books about Hillary Clinton arrive seasonally and in profusion,” Tomasky writes.
Notable: “At graduation, she delivered the student commencement address, the first in the school’s history – ‘it was clear who the student speaker would be,’ Bernstein writes – during which she famously reproved the official commencement speaker, Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke, for seeming to defend the Vietnam War and failing to appreciate her generation’s search for ‘more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living.’ She chose Yale for law school, in part because a Harvard professor told her ‘we don’t need any more women at Harvard.'”
And: “Hillary did not change her belief that it would be difficult to change things from the outside,” i.e., outside the conventional political system. And Bernstein observes that while she did lead campaigns for such reforms at Wellesley as permitting antiwar activities in campus facilities and rescinding the skirt rule, she was more drawn to meeting than marching:
One of Hillary’s strengths as a leader, still evident today, was her willingness to participate in the drudgery of government rather than simply direct policy from Olympian heights. She attended committee meetings, became involved in the minutiae (of finding a better system for the return of library books, for instance), and studied every aspect of the Wellesley curriculum in developing a successful plan to reduce the number of required courses.
“All of this should sound familiar to observers of Clinton’s cautious and diligent Senate career.”
And a helluva lot better than Condi Rice. And more impressive than Barack Obama’s conciliatory Harvard Law Review editorship and coasting through the Illinois legislature.
Also: “With the benefit, now, of a few years’ historical hindsight, both books might have done more to survey the huge changes in journalism and politics that took place in the 1990s and give readers something that reads more like the first draft of history than the second draft of journalism.” Tomasky writes.
Yet: “Gerth and Van Natta also discuss, notably, her vote for the war in Iraq, and here, they finally circle in on an inconvenient truth. Senator Clinton has not denied their assertion that she failed to read the full classified version of the National Intelligence Estimate from the fall of 2002, a document that cast some doubt on the administration’s statements that Saddam Hussein had or was about to produce weapons of mass destruction. The authors state that only six senators read the NIE, a claim that is not hard to believe.
“But if one were told that six senators did so and were asked to guess which six, one might well speculate that the good Wellesley girl who bothered to involve herself in the minutiae of determining a better method for returning library books would have been among them. If it is true that she did not, we can reasonably conjecture that this was because she had already made up her mind to vote to authorize war, wanting to cast a ‘tough’ defense vote in preparation for her 2008 presidential run; any evidence that might have interfered with that vote was to be set aside.”
Finally: “It’s Gerth and Van Natta who are the real cynics, and they are all too representative of the political and journalistic cultures that have spent most of the past decade telling citizens that failure to admit an affair was an impeachable offense while a war launched on cooked intelligence was the only patriotic course of action. It is a way of thinking that would seem absurd if it hadn’t done so much damage.”
Posted on July 2, 2007