(It might have helped that The Puppy Diaries was published by Times Books.)

To avoid an editor-has-no-clothes scenario, the Arts and Book Review sections assigned their reviews to two writers whose job security does not depend on Ms. Abramson’s esteem, John Grogan and Alexandra Styron, respectively.

Outside reviewers aren’t always kind to Times writers. Earlier this year, pinch hitter Michael Kinsley was asked to review the documentary Page One. “See His Girl Friday” again, he told readers.

Mr. Grogan, author of the dog owner’s tear-jerker–turned–major motion picture Marley & Me, seemed a safer bet, and he raved about Ms. Abramson’s book. His only complaint was that it was a little too serious.

“Ms. Abramson writes with intelligence and grace and never descends into the saccharine,” he wrote, adding that part of him “wishes she had forgotten about her serious-journalist credentials and had more fun.”

On Sunday, Ms. Styron (son of William Styron and a celebrated “dadoirist”) wrote appreciatively of Ms. Abramson’s ability to “vanquish the writer’s self-regarding pose” and to emerge with an “unaffected, unironic, and lovingly goofy [...] golden retriever of a memoir.”

But The Puppy Diaries is not merely a poorly timed,  half-endearing and half-embarrassing assemblage of personal anecdotes from the executive editor’s less high-profile past. The book is based on a Times blog of the same name, which taught Ms. Abramson a lot about digital journalism, she told Sam Tanenhaus on the Times’s Arts Beat books podcast. The blog was her first experience with interactive journalism, and helped shape her thinking about the ongoing transformation of the Times’s newsroom.

“Readers want it all, and they want it as soon as you can give it to them,” she said. “They want to combine pictures and video, they want to comment, they want to talk to other dog owners.” Recalling that her invitation to readers to send in pictures of their own pets had crashed the website, she pointed out, “Journalism is no longer simply the authority of a reporter or editor telling an audience what the facts are and what to think of them. It’s more of a vigorous back and forth.”

The best part of The Puppy Diaries, Mr. Grogan noted in his review, is the “insight into the private sensibilities of the Times’s top editor, the final arbiter of what ends up on the page.”

Unless it has to do with puppies, that is. In the book, she writes that Mr. Keller noticed an increase in dog stories being pitched for page one after her blog debuted. “To curb the trend,” she added, “he urged me to recuse myself from any discussion about a proposed dog story.”

The book also offers a glimpse of her managerial style.

“In one’s relationship with dogs and with a newsroom, a generous amount of praise and encouragement goes much better than criticism,” she told The New Yorker.

The book review will be a pull-out section that will be inserted in one of the newly created sections for The Weekend Journal that will launch later this month. It is unclear how many pages will be dedicated to the new book review, but one source said it will be "significant," though it's uncertain if that means it will surpass The Times' usual 20-plus pages for its weekly Sunday Book Review, or if it will be in the same ballpark.

The section will be led by Robert Messenger who has been an editor at The Weekly Standard, a former editor of The Atlantic and — surprise! — one of the founding editors of The New York Sun. Mr. Messenger will be in charge of the weekly book review section and will also oversee the Journal's daily book reviews for the web and for the paper. Erich Eichman, who has been the books editor at the Journal since 1994, will now report to Mr. Messenger.

The book review pull-out will be inserted in a new section that will be edited by recent Journal hire Gary Rosen, a former editor at Commentary and, most recently, the chief external affairs officer at the John Templeton Foundation. Sources would not spill details about Mr. Rosen's new super secret section, but it will be distinct from Deborah Needleman's lifestlye section for the Saturday paper. In a memo announcing Mr. Rosen's hire, Journal editor Mike Miller said it would launch "later this month." Though the new book review will appear in Mr. Rosen's section of the Saturday paper, book review editor Mr. Messenger will report to Paul Gigot, the Journal's editorial page editor.

Book sections in newspapers have been killed left and right over the last few years. The Washington Post cut its standalone book section last year, The Chicago Tribune did it the year before, and the L.A. Times did it the year before that. There have been a lot of obituaries written in honor of book sections over the last few years, all lamenting a dying art in a printed newspaper that Rupert Murdoch — naturally — will now stubbornly try to revive.

One of the last remaining standalone book sections remains at — where else? — The New York Times. The section is produced on a weekly basis and edited by Sam Tanenhaus (Mr. Tanenhaus's name has circulated throughout the Times building as a potential replacement for Gerry Marzorati as editor of the Times Magazine). The Times Book Review has a staff of more than a dozen people. Clearly Mr. Murdoch, who is taking on The Times is New York, has chosen his next battle ground.

"The dream-power ratio is lived out most acutely - most oppressively, but also most variously and dynamically - within the family, since its members orbit one another at the closest possible range."

"These heckling strophes drip with spite, but spite is often the vehicle of premonitory truth."

"There are numberless such moments in 'Freedom,' crystalline instances of precise notation shaped by imaginative sympathy."

Dig in and pick out your favorite! One friend IMed me while reading the review, and basically summed it up pretty well: "what does inhere mean?"

Here's Bill Keller's memo:

To the Staff:
    For the past two years Sam Tanenhaus has performed the amazing feat of editing two weekly sections -- The Book Review and the Week in Review -- while writing enough sage prose of his own to fill one book, grace an acre or so of newsprint in our own paper, and lend a little intellectual heft to a few other publications.
    He has proposed to reorganize his workload, handing off the Week in Review and applying his ambidextrous labors to a mere two jobs: The Book Review, and writing for our pages. In addition to putting out the best (and not merely because it's the last) book review in America, he will be contributing periodic columns to the Arts & Leisure section -- his erudite riff on the case of Amy Bishop last Sunday was a foretaste -- and, it's fair to assume, will continue to pop up in the pages of the Week in Review.
    Dave Smith has been the heart and soul of the Week in Review for most of the seven years he has worked there as assistant and deputy, and each of the editors for whom he has labored will tell you that for long stretches he was the de facto editor of the section. Now he gets the title he has earned several times over.
    Since he joined The Times as a copy editor in Sports, Dave has worked the room -- Metro, The City, the media department -- acquiring a legion of friends and fans. As Katy Roberts said when he ascended to the deputy job at the Review, he "stands for everything that is best about The New York Times." He is a creative thinker, a tough competitor, an inspiring mentor.
    As the newspaper as a whole has taken on more of the analytical work that used to be a Review monopoly, and as features like Room for Debate have invigorated thoughtful discussion at the website, the Review has adjusted nimbly to reestablish its raison d'etre as a place where reporters -- mostly Times reporters -- can reflect on the deeper meaning of the news, tease out an idea that might have been overlooked in the rush of coverage, recount a back story, or advise readers what to watch for in upcoming events.
    Dave's promotion is effective next Monday.
    Best,
    Bill

According to an internal New York Times announcement, the paper's Book Review and Week in Review editor will be appearing every Friday at 7:45 a.m. on MSNBC's Morning Joe to preview that week's Book Review and Week in Review sections. According to Morning Joe's Guest Twitter feed, he'll appear tomorrow. Well, "San Tanenhaus" will, anyway.

Mr. Tanenhaus is a busy man. In addition to editing two sections for The Times, he's preparing for the release of his book The Death of Conservatism, which, The Observer's Leon Neyfakh reported grew out of a New Republic story from February and is due out in September. Oh, and if that's not enough, Mr. Tanenhaus still has his William F. Buckley biography to finish. And did we mention his weekly Times podcast duties?

A call to Mr. Tanenhaus about his new weekly gig has not been returned. Like we said, he's busy.

According to Random House veteran Bob Loomis, who is Mr. Tanenhaus’s editor, the book will take the form of a slightly expanded and restructured version of the 6,650-word magazine piece that came out in The New Republic in early February. In that piece, Mr. Tanenhaus argued that the 2008 election had brought movement conservatism to an end, while sounding a hopeful note on behalf of "authentic conservatives" who are now in a position to recover "their honorable intellectual and political tradition."

"The article appeared and I read it and we talked about it, and then we thought, 'Let’s do this!' And then we had to figure out what he'd need to do," Mr. Loomis said, noting that the deal was done about two weeks ago. "Then I had to take it to people here, and I had to get a contract with his agent [Andrew Wylie]. There’s a lot of little business to do to get things like this going."

Mr. Loomis said that Mr. Tanenhaus’s slim volume will be called The Death of Conservatism, but that a snappy subtitle is in the works. According to the Random House Web site, the book will retail for $17.

Mr. Tanenhaus is entering what many anticipate will be a crowded marketplace. Will Weisser, associate publisher of Sentinel, the conservative imprint of Penguin Group USA, said he expects to see a tall stack of books on the future of the conservative movement in the coming months and years.

"I would not be surprised if many conservative thinkers are working on books of this sort," Mr. Weisser said. "There’s a clear hunger for direction for the conservative movement in the age of Obama."

Mr. Loomis said that Mr. Tanenhaus, who essentially has two full-time jobs at The Times, would probably have to find a way to focus his energies at some point on completing the Buckley biography, which was originally due to Random House in 2005 but was put "on hold" when he took over the Book Review in the spring of 2004. 

"We’re hoping that will happen in the not-so-distant future," Mr. Loomis said. "The Buckley book really has to be written not a little bit now and a little bit later—it has to be done in a continuous stretch to make it work right." 

New York Times spokeswoman Diane McNulty said in an e-mail that Mr. Tanenhaus is "not taking time off at all except for normal scheduled vacations."

 Mr. Tanenhaus responded to requests for comment. 

In September, The Times replaced reviews editor and Rome-bound Rachel Donadio with a copy editor at the paper, Greg Cowles.

Here's the memo announcing Ms. Marmor's new positon:

As Mr. Tanenhaus writes, "Wood suggests that Updike’s fiction doesn’t work very well at all, in part because Updike’s prose, like Vladimir Nabokov’s, is oversaturated with pointillist descriptions that, Wood objects, 'freeze detail into a cult of itself.'" He then goes on to quote a particularly florid passage from Mr. Updike's Of the Farm, which Mr. Wood thinks is "an exaggeration of the noticing eye."

Mr. Tanenhaus then quotes the novelist Nicholson Baker on the same passage from his Updike tribute book, U and I as a "counter-argument." (In Mr. Tanenhaus' words.)

The reader is left to compare Mr. Wood's and Mr. Baker's takes on Of the Farm until Mr. Tanenhaus ends his post:

Uh-oh. Here come the commenters, many of whom seem to object to Mr. Tanenhaus' adversarial premise (the piece is headline, "Wood v. Updike v. Baker").

"Isn’t it silly to ask who is right about a work of art?" asks a commenter called lily. "Doesn’t it miss the point completely? How can an opinion be right or wrong?"

"Oh yuck. You ruined a nice thoughtful piece with a pointless instrumental question. Is this an American thing?, scolded someone named Reg Tippett.

"Your final question implies that novelists among themselves and critics among themselves agree about 'how fiction works,'" said a commenter named Kevin McNamara."That premise is implausible, to say the least."

We'd ask who's right here—Mr. Tanenhaus or the commenters—but in the spirit of the Olympic Games, we'll ask for unity and an end to the fighting.

Some reacted to the appointment of Mr. Tanenhaus at Week in Review—where he replaces Katherine Roberts, who’ll move to a senior editorial job at NYTimes.com—with concerns that the quality of the Book Review could decline as its top editor is pulled in two directions. The move comes at a time when many national papers have either been folding their book-review sections, or merging them into other sections. And a few weeks ago, Mr. Keller had announced that the paper would seek to fill new jobs from within.

“It certainly signals the demise of newspapers, that they would have two such important sections run by one person,” said one publishing executive at Random House. “It reflects how unimportant books seem to be at The Times.”

Mr. Keller had already prepared for that response from the book world in his memo announcing the news: “Nobody should mistake this for a diminution of enthusiasm for either the Book Review or for the Week in Review,” he wrote.

There’s no doubt the move is unusual. While there are some editors who head up multiple sections—Trip Gabriel oversees the Thursday and Sunday Styles sections, while Trish Hall runs Real Estate, Dining, and Home—it is rare for the paper to employ one person to head up two major Sunday sections of the paper. Not since the days when there was a Sunday editor—most recently, Max Frankel in the 1970’s, according to a spokeswoman—who oversaw everything from the magazine to the Week in Review, has it happened.

Mr. Keller told Off the Record in an e-mail that the idea initially came from Jill Abramson, the paper’s managing editor. Mr. Keller first broached the idea at an Oct. 1 dinner with Mr. Tanenhaus and Ms. Abramson. “It was a bolt out of the blue,” said Mr. Tanenhaus.

Though Mr. Keller admitted that asking one person to run two sections with separate staffs is a departure from recent Times tradition, he played that up as a feature, not a bug. “What we’re trying with Sam is something new,” he wrote. “Which is part of the appeal.”

“Sam has the Book Review humming along, with very strong deputies in place, and he seemed a little restless for a new challenge,” Mr. Keller wrote.

The old challenge was pretty big. In a speech at Harvard earlier this year, Barry Gewen, a longtime editor at the Book Review, described the section’s top editor as “a sitting target for every disgruntled author, agent, editor, publisher, you name it—and constantly the center of the attacks.”

“In my experience, the Book Review was a full-time job,” said Charles McGrath, Mr. Tanenhaus’ predecessor as editor of the Book Review and at present a writer-at-large for the paper. “The fact that [Sam] can do both proves he has a more compartmentalized brain.”

Mr. Keller believes Mr. Tanenhaus is capable of pulling it off. “Not every editor could do this kind of stretch, but one of Sam’s talents is to assemble and inspire a great team, give them strong conceptual guidance, and let them show their stuff,” he said in an e-mail.

“Sam knows what he wants the Book Review to be, in terms of its intellectual quality and its cultural impact, and his standards are clear,” said Dwight Garner, a senior editor. “But he isn’t the kind of head coach that needs to call every play—or even most of them.”

“There’s a general misconception that these sections are one-person operations,” Mr. Tanenhaus himself told Off the Record, echoing his marshal. He said he’s willing to log the extra hours to maintain the quality of both sections, which means much longer Fridays, when Week in Review closes. (“My daughter is 15 and she doesn’t talk to me anyway,” he said.)

And, Mr. Tanenhaus said, it may open another door for news coverage for publishers and authors. “This is a very good potential development for publishers,” he said. “The conversation that goes on about politics and culture is often generated by the interesting books coming out.”

Asked if that meant authors would have a larger voice in his Week in Review—which has recently been a platform for Times reporters to write analytical stories and first-person accounts--Mr. Tanenhaus said, “That’s something we all have to talk about.”

—additional reporting by Leon Neyfakh

Here's Bill Keller's memo:

Colleagues:

More than most sections, the Week in Review is in a constant state of ferment. As the main news pages become more analytical, the Review has to continually develop new ways to remain distinctive, finding interesting angles of entry to the week's news without toppling over into the more opinionated writing that is the proper job of Op-ed. More than most sections, the Review depends on the ability of its editors to entice original thoughts from overworked staffers on tight deadlines, mostly in their free time, by challenging them or provoking them or engaging them.

For five years and change, Katy Roberts and a terrific supporting cast have kept the Week in Review sharp and surprising. Her breadth of knowledge and range of interests; her ability to ask the intriguing question that makes the beat expert come at a subject fresh; and her impatience with the merely okay make her an editor that reporters (I can testify from personal experience) are glad to work with.

For her next act, Katy will be joining Jon Landman in the expanding experiment that is Nytimes.com.

Katy's first mission will be to vastly enlarge the ambition of our Topics Pages by designing a way to open them, selectively, to expert outside contributors. The idea is to recruit and cultivate a network of credentialed outsiders to stretch our resources far beyond anything we've done before to turn our Topic Page menu into an unimaginably rich reference source.

There's no blueprint here, so it will be up to Katy to assemble the network, construct a system for managing and supporting them, figure out (with a little help from her friends) how to build the right tools and develop the right standards. As one of her colleagues put it, it's about developing the ideas community. At first, she'll spend some time with John O'Neil's merry band, constructing pages herself and working with others in the newsroom. She'll study at the feet of product specialists and technical people. Then she'll invent.

And in keeping with the laboratory tradition of the Week in Review, we've come up with something completely different for that section.

In January, Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the Book Review, will expand his responsibilities to include the Week in Review.

Under Sam's leadership, the Book Review has been replenished. He, with a strong cast of TBR veterans and sharp recruits, has enlarged the review in size and influence. He has restored the big cover review, enlisted a sterling cast of writers, rejuvenated the best seller list (in large part by adding Dwight Garner's column), introduced more reporting and livelier debate, overseen a complete redesign, and pushed aggressively onto the Web. He has also found time to write, brilliantly, for his section -- and for the Magazine and, yes, the Week in Review -- and to curate an on-line reading group on the review's website, among other things. I can't wait to see what creative energy he will bring to the continual reinventing of the Week in Review.

Oh, by the way: Who was the astute talent-spotter who first brought Sam Tanenhaus to the NYT? Katy Roberts, when she was editor of the Op-ed page.

Nobody should mistake this for a diminution of enthusiasm for either the Book Review or for the Week in Review. Quite the contrary. Both are and will remain, undiminished, franchise sections of The New York Times. This new configuration would be unimaginable if Sam was the kind of editor who made himself indispensable to every assignment, who vetted every line of copy, who hoarded the responsibility. But he is a leader who -- as his Book Review colleagues will attest -- surrounds himself with tremendously capable people, sets a direction, and backs off. Editors under Sam stretch and grow. (Ask Dwight, or Bob Harris.) At the Week in Review, as at the Book Review, Sam will have talented collaborators -- beginning with the matchless Dave Smith, whose role will grow in the new arrangement. They are in for a treat, and readers are, too.

Cheers,

Bill

*This post has been edited from an earlier version.