Sometimes it feels like the only break the New York Times Book Review can catch from the blogosphere is a bad one—and this blog has certainly been no exception to the rule—so I’m delighted to say that I rather enjoyed yesterday’s Rosh Hoshanah double-whammy of Ron Rosenbaum on Daniel Mendelsohn and Rich Cohen on Gus Russo, particularly the ways in which the latter review confronts the implicit anti-Semitism of the Sidney Korshak bio Supermob as it “deploys some very old notions of Jewish double-dealing and conspiracy.”
But not everyone was as happy with this week’s issue as I was: Over at the Huffington Post, Eric Boehlert slams Jennifer Senior for what he deems a “cheap shot” against his pal Sid Blumenthal. Now, Blumenthal actually gets off better in Senior’s piece than Lewis Lapham, who’s savaged as a preener and a heckler while Blumenthal’s “finer journalistic instincts” are celebrated. But it’s also true—and this is what gets Boehlert’s goat—that she ultimately dubs How Bush Rules “a depressing reminder of how important it is for writers to have a slight sense of humor about themselves, if they want to be taken at all seriously.”
“What makes this review so irksome,” Boehlert vents, “is it doubles as a swipe at an entire political movement; a calculated attempt to dismiss and ridicule Bush critics who time and again have been proven right about his incompetence, yet remain [mainstream media] targets.” He also calls Senior out on several facts she gets wrong about Blumenthal’s reporting…personally, my feeling is that Senior’s just a tad wrong about what’s wrong with Blumenthal’s book. The problem with his collection of Salon columns isn’t that it isn’t funny—it isn’t, but then neither is the incompetence and duplicity of the current administration—it’s that he never makes it anything more than a collection of Salon columns. As she says, the reporting is excellent, but it’s just one shot at Bush and Cheney after another, not a sustained argument.* As to whether Bush critics are being marginalized by the mainstream media, one does notice Thomas E. Ricks (Fiasco) on the NYT nonfiction bestseller lists, along with Michael Isikoff & David Corn (Hubris) and, on the extended list, Amy & David Goodman (Static). So maybe Bush criticism is holding its own in the public arena after all, even if individual Bush critics aren’t.
*It’s not like collections of George F. Will’s columns are any more fun to read, either, because they aren’t; the problem lies in the genre of the column collection, not the ideological bent of the columnist collected.