Monday, April 19, 2004
Plan of Attack and the Politics of Book Reviews
The New York Times carries such clout in the literary world that a thumbs down from one of their reviewers can make the difference between a book making the bestseller list at Borders or the Bargain Bin at Wal-Mart.
And so it follows that the assigning editor of the book review section of the New York Times can make or break a book--and kick the rudder of the cultural ship to the left or right--simply by choosing whether to send the book to a likely ideological friend or foe.
Reader tip: Never read a Times book review--or anyone else's--without first Googling the name of the reviewer.
The new Bob Woodward book, Plan of Attack, is out on shelves, now, to fellative Hosanna by the Times' Pulitzer prize-winning Michiko Kakutani entitled "A Heady Mix of Pride and Prejudice Led to War."
Kakutani, it turns out, is no friend of neoconservatism. Indeed, here she is just last January on David Frum and Richard Perle's new book An End to Evil: Winning the War on Terror.
The title of this new book by David Frum and Richard Perle, ''An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror,'' says it all. It captures the authors' absolutist, Manichaean language and worldview; their cocky know-it-all tone; their swaggering insinuation that they know ''how to win the war on terror'' and that readers, the Bush administration and the rest of the world had better listen to them.
Neither the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that might have posed an imminent threat to America, nor the failure to establish a connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 seems to have given the authors pause. They argue that ''even in the absence of stockpiles of weapons Saddam was known to have created, the threat from his programs was undeniable.''
Link.
For any book critical of Administration hawks, the Times Book assignment editor could not have picked a friendlier book reviewer than Kakutani. The deck was stacked. Kakutani is a known ideological foe of Cheney, Bush, Rice, and neoconservatism. And the Times chose her.
This is how they keep the finger on the scale.
Now, in fairness, Kakutani cannot exactly be relied upon to slather praise upon the heroes of the left. Regarding Hillary Clinton's book, Living History, she writes:
Overall the book has the overprocessed taste of a stump speech, the calculated polish of a string of anecdotes to be delivered on a television chat show.
Link
So she can certainly swing a bat from both sides of the plate. But with Hillary, her problem was with the execution, not with the author herself. But when it comes to the neocons within the Bush Administration, it's clear that she holds a set of assumptions so diametrically opposed from them that they cannot be said to receive a fair shake.
But Woodward couldn't pay for a better reviewer.
At least in the Frum and Perle review, her world view is evident in the article. It's clear as Alaska air where she's coming from, and she writes the review one would expect of someone hostile to the neoconservative point of view. She is viscerally hostile to the Bush Administration.
But you can't tell that from her review of Plan of Attack. It reads like a normal review from a reasonably impartial critic who thought that Woodward wrote a very good book.
Here's an idea:
With every new book review the New York Times or anyone else publishes, include a link to the last ten reviews from that reviewer on books in a similar category. Or force reviewers to adhere to a star-rating scheme and provide 5-10 words describing each book they've reviewed over the last three years or so and include them with the dead-tree additions, right there with the article.
We cannot and should not expect book reviewers to be without biases. A truly objective reviewer would probably write a lousy column.
But we can expect transparency and disclosure from our newspapers.
Splash, out
Jason
And so it follows that the assigning editor of the book review section of the New York Times can make or break a book--and kick the rudder of the cultural ship to the left or right--simply by choosing whether to send the book to a likely ideological friend or foe.
Reader tip: Never read a Times book review--or anyone else's--without first Googling the name of the reviewer.
The new Bob Woodward book, Plan of Attack, is out on shelves, now, to fellative Hosanna by the Times' Pulitzer prize-winning Michiko Kakutani entitled "A Heady Mix of Pride and Prejudice Led to War."
Kakutani, it turns out, is no friend of neoconservatism. Indeed, here she is just last January on David Frum and Richard Perle's new book An End to Evil: Winning the War on Terror.
The title of this new book by David Frum and Richard Perle, ''An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror,'' says it all. It captures the authors' absolutist, Manichaean language and worldview; their cocky know-it-all tone; their swaggering insinuation that they know ''how to win the war on terror'' and that readers, the Bush administration and the rest of the world had better listen to them.
Neither the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that might have posed an imminent threat to America, nor the failure to establish a connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 seems to have given the authors pause. They argue that ''even in the absence of stockpiles of weapons Saddam was known to have created, the threat from his programs was undeniable.''
Link.
For any book critical of Administration hawks, the Times Book assignment editor could not have picked a friendlier book reviewer than Kakutani. The deck was stacked. Kakutani is a known ideological foe of Cheney, Bush, Rice, and neoconservatism. And the Times chose her.
This is how they keep the finger on the scale.
Now, in fairness, Kakutani cannot exactly be relied upon to slather praise upon the heroes of the left. Regarding Hillary Clinton's book, Living History, she writes:
Overall the book has the overprocessed taste of a stump speech, the calculated polish of a string of anecdotes to be delivered on a television chat show.
Link
So she can certainly swing a bat from both sides of the plate. But with Hillary, her problem was with the execution, not with the author herself. But when it comes to the neocons within the Bush Administration, it's clear that she holds a set of assumptions so diametrically opposed from them that they cannot be said to receive a fair shake.
But Woodward couldn't pay for a better reviewer.
At least in the Frum and Perle review, her world view is evident in the article. It's clear as Alaska air where she's coming from, and she writes the review one would expect of someone hostile to the neoconservative point of view. She is viscerally hostile to the Bush Administration.
But you can't tell that from her review of Plan of Attack. It reads like a normal review from a reasonably impartial critic who thought that Woodward wrote a very good book.
Here's an idea:
With every new book review the New York Times or anyone else publishes, include a link to the last ten reviews from that reviewer on books in a similar category. Or force reviewers to adhere to a star-rating scheme and provide 5-10 words describing each book they've reviewed over the last three years or so and include them with the dead-tree additions, right there with the article.
We cannot and should not expect book reviewers to be without biases. A truly objective reviewer would probably write a lousy column.
But we can expect transparency and disclosure from our newspapers.
Splash, out
Jason
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