I’ll have to confess—I’m not a big Sunday New York Times business section reader; I go straight for arts & leisure and the magazine. So it’s only because of Seth Godin‘s outrage that I found out about a review of Suze Orman‘s new book that ran in last week’s edition. What pisses Godin off is Harry Hurt III‘s opening:
“There are many things more flammable than the subject of mammon and women, but most of them come in steel canisters stamped ‘hazardous materials.’ Among the substances that need hazmat warning labels are the liquid that bronzes Suze Orman’s hair, the paste that whitens her teeth for her publicity photographs and her latest financial advice manual, Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny.”
Godin’s right to complain; that’s the sort of ad hominem cheap shot that would fill the NYTBR letters page for weeks if it had happened there; I bet the Review editors are still getting complaints about William Logan‘s review of the Hart Crane anthology. Godin objects that Hurt “goes on for paragraphs in a personal attack that has nothing whatsoever to do with the book or its value,” which strikes this reader as a bit exaggerated—the middle section of the article actually does seem to nail Orman’s themes, glibly perhaps but no more so than what any other mainstream non-literary critic might produce. Even the later comments about “Ms. Orman’s sometimes obstreperous television style and her aforementioned grooming habits” are couched in the solicited opinions of other women and, let’s face it, it’s true some women find Orman obstreperous. But that first salvo against Orman’s hair and teeth is still a lame gambit—even if the Times editors would probably allow the same cracks to be used to undercut a pop financial adviser named Stewart Orman based on his physical appearance—and Hurt’s lucky he chose to toss his bricks from a distance; when regular Sunday magazine interviewer Deborah Solomon got in close with Orman, Orman hit back harder than her interviewer.