The New York Times Book Review is modernizing under the editorship of Pamela Paul, who was appointed to the positon in early April. The section announced three changes in a new column in this Sunday’s issue (it was posted online today). Starting this weekend, the e-book bestseller list, which first joined the printed list in early 2011, will be online only. Additionally, book prices will no longer be included for any books. Read More
Last week was quite a whirlwind for New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter. Top of The Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV, his look at the world of morning television, hit shelves, and Mr. Stelter found himself in the potentially awkward situation of appearing as a guest on morning shows to talk about a book about morning shows.
At press time, Mr. Stelter had done around 20 media appearances, with more scheduled. He was on Morning Edition, Good Morning America, CBS This Morning, CNN’s Early Start, Entertainment Tonight and Inside Edition. Revelations were sprinkled throughout the tabloids and on the cover of Us Weekly, which featured a smiling photo of Ann Curry in a yellow cardigan, arms defiantly resting on her hips, with the headline “Stabbed in the Back: They called her ‘Big Bird’ and plotted to get rid of her. How Ann Curry’s coworkers tortured her and why she won’t forgive Matt Lauer.” 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
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
Harper, $26.99.
Lionel Shriver wrote her latest novel, The New Republic, before the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and, according to the book’s foreword, held it back until both her sales record and the public appetite for a terrorism-themed satire increased. Her first stroke of good fortune came swiftly when her 2003 novel We Need Read More
Longreads.com is the internet-famous website that aggregates all the pieces of longform writing people* are passing around on the web, and puts the best ones (or the most popular, which lets face it, are often mutually exclusive) in one place. Well, not only do they now have a reading night at a book store—a sure sign of success (with people who go to readings)—but they also have a book! Definitely as much if not more of a sign of success than a reading. It may be an eBook, which can’t exactly be sold at a bookstore you can have a reading at, but it’s still a book. Read More
In early 2003, people started killing each other in Darfur, a region of western Sudan. The Darfuris rose up against the country’s regime. Then the country’s regime cracked down on the Darfuris. The crackdown became a massacre. Things had gone from the barbaric to the Boschian. Thousands died, then hundreds of thousands. Shock at the scale of the killing was compounded by its genocidal overtones. Darfuris regard themselves as Africans, but the Sudanese government, which is focused in Khartoum, a city in central Sudan, regards itself as Arab; the state is a relic of the colonial era, and it contains a fractious hodgepodge of peoples. Although the Darfuri uprising was ostensibly about resources—Darfuris felt the regime had forsaken the region—the ferocity of its suppression suggested something more primal. Old codes had been reactivated. The hodgepodge seemed to have given way to pogroms.
The killing in Darfur also suggested, to many observers, something familiar. Read More
