Intellectual Curiosities and Provocations

July 2007

Reviewing the Review: July 1 2007

I'm reviewing today's New York Times Book Review from a peaceful backyard in rural Indiana, as bullfrogs croak, hummingbirds buzz around my head (did you know that a hummingbird likes to eat half its weight in sugar every day?) and maple trees tower above. So I'm perfectly situated to enjoy Elizabeth Gilbert's cover review of Little Heathens, a memoir of a childhood on an Iowa farm by Mildred Armstrong Kalish. It's a refreshing read, though Gilbert finds some of Kalish's observations unsurprising:

This article is part of the Reviewing the New York Times Book Review series. The next post in the series is Reviewing the Review: July 8 2007. The previous post in the series is Reviewing the Review: June 24 2007.

Walden, or Life in the Woods, by Henry David Thoreau

 
First edition of "Walden" by Thoreau
 

Levi Asher explains why he considers Walden by Henry David Thoreau the greatest of all American books.

American,
Classics,
Nature,
Politics,
Transcendentalism

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, to see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when it came time to die, to discover that I had not lived.
-- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Reviewing the Review: July 8 2007

A New York Times Book Review with a cover article by John Irving is a good New York Times Book Review. This pugnacious novelist doesn't review many books (as far as I know) but he shows up here to defend his friend and one-time literary role model Gunter Grass, who's recently endured a lot of public criticism after revealing that he was a member of Hitler's Waffen-SS when he was 17.

This article is part of the Reviewing the New York Times Book Review series. The next post in the series is Reviewing the Review: July 15 2007. The previous post in the series is Reviewing the Review: July 1 2007.

New Books Report: Kristen Tsetsi, Alan King, Carolyn Porter, Stephen D. Edington

Beat Generation,
Fiction,
Reviews
Homefront by Kristen J. Tsetsi

If there's a war on (and, these days, there's usually a war on), I want to be reading about it. I appreciate first person accounts, either fictionalized or not, and Kristen Tsetsi's Homefront, an emotional novel about a young married couple's separation when husband Jake is shipped to Iraq, is a worthy new entry in this category.

Reviewing the Review: July 22 2007

Existential
Sometimes the New York Times Book Review deserves a whole lot of praise, and when this happens I'm not going to skimp on the positive reinforcement. This weekend's issue contains plenty of brain food, including a solid endpaper on American philosopher Richard Rorty, whose death last month occasioned numerous articles by people who seemed to have never read a word he wrote (and could thus only refer to him as "influential" or "highly regarded").

This article is part of the Reviewing the New York Times Book Review series. The next post in the series is Reviewing the Review: July 29 2007. The previous post in the series is Reviewing the Review: July 15 2007.

Reviewing the Review: July 29 2007

Politics
I'm back from vacation, having not looked at a New York Times for exactly one week, and I find the New York Mets still ahead of the Atlanta Braves (good), Dick Cheney still alive (no comment), and the rest of the world generally in the same lousy shape it was when I left it.

This article is part of the Reviewing the New York Times Book Review series. The next post in the series is Reviewing the Review: August 5 2007. The previous post in the series is Reviewing the Review: July 22 2007.

Woody Allen (and S. J. Perelman, and Ingmar Bergman)

Comedy,
Film,
News,
Reviews
If you ask me to name the three best things Woody Allen ever did, I'll name Annie Hall, Husbands and Wives, and his first book, Getting Even. The title of this surprising little paperback evokes a repressed intellectual working out his anxiety of influence against the literary canon with a Jackson Pollock-esque hysteria. He's getting even with Dostoevsky, with Sartre, with Heidegger, with Joyce, with Kafka, and doing so with all the dignity of Jerry Lewis in a science lab.