Michiko Kakutani is not a fan of Roger Ailes: Off Camera, Zev Chafets’ new biography of the Fox News chairman which comes out today.
“The overall book, however, reads like a long, soft-focus, poorly edited magazine article. For the most part Mr. Chafets serves as little more than a plastic funnel for Mr. Ailes’s observations — much Read More
New York Times book critic Dwight Garner has no kind words for Martin Amis: The Biography by Richard Bradford. But if Mr. Garner did not enjoy the reading experience, which he described as ”like watching a moose try to describe a leopard, using only its front hooves,” well, he sure seemed to enjoy panning it.
The biography “is mortifying in its dullness and lack of instinctive feeling for its subject.” Part of this is due to Mr. Bradford’s writing. Read More
Katie Roiphe is, to put it mildly, a controversial figure. But Times literary critic Dwight Garner comes down firmly on the “Team Roiphe” side in his review of new essay collection, In Praise of Messy Lives.
In fact, he is such a fan that, if he “could condense [his] opinion of her new book onto a T-shirt, that Beefy-T would read: “Team Roiphe.” We imagine that the author of essays about the lack of virility in our current crop of male writers would like the fact that Mr. Garner’s T-shirt would be “beefy.” Read More
New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani uses Calvin Trillin’s signature style of rhyming verse about current events to review the author’s new book, Dogfight, A Presidential Race in Verse. The result?
It does sound a lot like Mr. Trillin: Read More
The first person thanked in the acknowledgments of Tom Wolfe’s new novel, Back to Blood (Little, Brown and Company, 720 pp., $30), a doorstop set in Miami, is that city’s former mayor, Manny Diaz. Read More
In order for one to pass muster as a cultural critic these days, a certain omnivorousness seems necessary. This is not a good thing. A lot of criticism has lately been marred by the obsessive need to draw connections between everything that is currently popular, all of which the critic has quickly formulated into a set of fervent opinions. Read More
On the first warm Friday in May, The Observer was sitting in a secret backroom of Tavern on Jane with comedian Dave Hill, who had promised to show us the best toilet experience of all time.
“It will change your life,” said the first-time author, whose collection of essays, Tasteful Nudes, came out last week from St. Martins’ Press. Outside of his regular contributions to “This American Life,” the soft-spoken Mr. Hill is probably best known around the indie comedy circuit for his combination of cerebral humor, aw-shucks demeanor and a faux-metal bravado. During a recent book release party for Tasteful Nudes at The Bell House in Brooklyn, Mr. Hill sang with his band Valley Lodge, got into a wrestling/kissing match with a wine-drunk John Hodgman, dodged a moonwalking Michael Jackson-impersonating dwarf and fielded questions that voice actor H. Jon Benjamin had lifted from the pages of the booty magazine Straight Stuntin’. (“What’re your measurements?”) Read More
