The Clearing over Sam's Book Club
"This week's issue of the [New York Times] Book Review ranges over American politics but not, we hope, in a familiar way," its editors write Upfront. They mean not only that their special February. 10 issue, "Politics, Real and Imagined," is devoted almost exclusively to politics but also that it ranges across genres -- books about the politics of race, religion and gender, plus memoirs, and even fiction.
But something besides all that, too, is "not familiar" about this issue, I realized on Friday, when I received a message telling me to "Take a bow." It came from a reader of my excoriations of the Times Book Review last fall here at TPMCafe, The Nation and The Guardian.
"There are sixteen reviews here," my tipster wrote on Friday, "but not a one" by Peter Beinart, Paul Berman, David Brooks, Richard Brookhiser, Christopher Hitchens, Joe Klein, Leon Wieseltier, or the other pumped-up assailants of liberals whom I'd accused of turning the Sunday book section into a "neoconservative damage-control gazette" under editor Sam Tanenhaus. (Mediabistro's Galley Cat called the section a "shadow op ed page" ) So what gives?
I won't reprise my critique of the Book Review here; if you'd like the "what" of that critique -- the Book Review's record as I've characterized it -- read the TPM and Nation essays linked above. If you'd like the "why," in an exegesis of Tanenhaus' political odyssey, read (please do read!) The Guardian account.
This week's "new" Book Review has some leftish reviewers whom we've seen not seen for awhile under Tanenhaus, if ever -- Maurice Isserman and Jill Nelson on books about racial politics, for example. We also see Elsa Dixler, who actually works at the Review but has been confined mostly to surveying paperbacks and fiction, now reviewing, knowingly, two memoirs by the 1960s activists Carl Oglesby and Susan Sherman. The few leftish reviewers Tanenhaus has actually published on a semi-regular basis -- David Greenberg, Adam Hochschild, Tara McKelvey --are all trundled out here, too. And Alan Ehrenhalt, a judicious conservative writer and editor who hasn't been seen here in years, puts the neo-con apostle David Frum in his place -- despite the solicitous regard for Frum which Tanenhaus showed while giving a lecture at the conservative American Enterprise Institute which I described here in December.
This makes the absence of Berman, Brooks, Hitchens, et al from a special Times Book Review edition on "Politics, Real and Imagined" quite striking. They'll be back, no doubt, but more sparingly, and properly so. The Times should publish thoughtful conservative writers to keep liberals and leftists honest. To be honest myself here, some of this week's reviews could use more a bit more of the bite and panache we sometimes got from the war hawks, but most of the reviews are icher and more rewarding for their being less sardonic and melodramatic.
Judge for yourself. I'll add only that the scrutiny the Book Review has received seems to have struck home. Tanenhaus, who I suggested here last fall was already having second thoughts about how he'd borne himself politically and had skewed his reviewing assignments, undertook a charm offensive this winter on the occasion of his elevation to the editorship of the Week in Review even as he continues to oversee Books, with hands-on help from others who may have effected some of this marked shift in depth and tone. Last month Tanenhaus came to Yale, where I teach (and where he was once a graduate student) to plead the Book Review's case. I acknowledged then a scent of change.
The challenge for a general-interest Book Review such as the Times' isn't to swing "left," as it did almost laughably under editor Rebecca Sinkler in the mid-1990s, but to revivify an American civic-republican literary and political spirit that isn't a muddle between left and right. I hint at this in The Guardian essay linked above, and there is more to come.
Mr. Sleeper writes as though Beinart, Berman, et al are all rightist writers when they are in fact all are men of the left (even the pompous Christopher Hithcens)--albeit ones who, unlike orthodox liberals, acknowledge that the U.S. does face a threat from jihadis. Beinart and Berman in particular are two of the only liberals I know of who have attempted to answer the question of how liberals should respond to the challenges posed by terrorism (though I don't necessarily agree with them). In the last 7 years there have more books by the orthodox Left excoriating the Bush administration than books that attempt to devise a strategy (whether ideological or diplomatic/military) for dealing with the threat from radical Islam. Ironically, the orthodox left is at least just as guilty of focusing excessively on the "enemy within" as the neocons/liberal hawks are. Indeed, partially because of the Iraq War, most liberals can't say "radical Islam" without an ironic smirk. But it is irresponsible not to grapple seriously with the issue of how to confront the jihadist movement. Though I agree with the Left's call to abandon the dubious moniker "War on Terror," I have little sense of what conceptual framework the orhtodox Left would replace it with. The orthodox Left has offered a (predictable) critique, rather than a serious foreign-policy agenda. Until they acknowledge the necessity for the occasional use of force this struggle (and in foreign policy more generally), and devise some reasonable principles for the application of force, the Left will remain a marginal voice in foreign policy.
February 10, 2008 2:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
Sadly, Beinart, Berman, Hitchens, in fact the whole of orthodox American 'liberalism' and 'conservatism' is a series of dry holes, in oilman's terms. To admire these washed out hacks is merely to admit the thinness and hollowness of American discourse. The best one could say about 'orthodox liberals' is that they still occasionally go through the motions of pretending to think. Sadly, as far as American conservative 'thinking' of any stripe goes, most physicians would mistake it for some bizarre episode of tourettes in the midst of a grand mal seizure.
February 11, 2008 1:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
I would further add that I admire Beinart and Berman et al because, unlike other liberals, they have initiated the important process of renovating liberal ideology for a new age. What I would like to hear is a serious rebuttal from the orthodox Left that offers a meaninful alternative strategy for the struggle with Al-Qaeda and the like, rather than an excoriation of their liberal hawk colleagues who have tried to grapple with the issue.
February 10, 2008 2:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yisra'alQaeda. And such a "struggle"!
February 10, 2008 4:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
No book reviewer should ever put any author "in his place." This sentiment might explain why the NYT Book Review has become such a mess in the last fifteen years.
There is an art and craft to good book criticism, and ideology plays no part in that art and craft at all. It isn't the critic's duty to put an author "in his place" or to punish an author for his political beliefs - that's not criticism, it is complaint. A good book review is about the book, it is not about the critic, his views or his ideology. If we know what the reviewer will say by reading his by-line, then he should not be reviewing books - he should stick with editorials and opinions.
Critics are not priests and priestesses in the temple of civic spirit. The relationship between the critic and the reader is one of personal communication - he shares with the reader his love and knowledge of the art and the writer. There is no place in literary criticism for the reviewer to pontificate, to promote himself or his own political agenda or to castigate the author for his political agenda.
The responsibility of the New York Times Book Review isn't to find and promote reviewers to "revivify an American civic republican...spirit" - the responsibility of the New York Times Book Review is to find and employ critics who understand the art and craft of literary criticism.
February 10, 2008 4:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
Bev, I don't think that what you call "the art and craft of literary criticism" can be brought to bear very fruitfully on books like David Frum's -- books of political analysis and, as the reviewer in this case rightly says, bombast, that have to be assessed pretty much in political terms. In saying that, by the way, I don't mean "partisan" any more than I mean "literary."
What I mean by saying that the reviewer "puts Frum in his place" I mean that he helps readers to situate Frum's claims historically and politically in a field of discourse and struggle which Frum has staked out for conquest. Writing like that all too often just instrumentalizes literary skill and, unfortunately, is not very well addressed by the art and craft of literary criticism. By that standard, the Times probably shouldn't review most of today's "political" books at all, and, indeed, the Book Review during the past few years wasted a lot of space and energy promoting or bashing bad political books to advance a pro-war agenda and discredit the left -- as I recount in some detail in the Nation and Guardian pieces linked above.
Alan Ehrenhalt's review of David Frum's book is a cut above all of that. In that sense, he does put Frum in his place, assessing the good and bad points of his argument by a higher standard; and, for Sam Tanenhaus' Times Book Review, a review like that is a necessary and welcome change.
February 10, 2008 5:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
Aurelio,
I'm not sure what constitutes the "orthodox Left", but I, who holds many views likely considered "leftist" (I eschew such labels), can tell you my preferred "strategy for the struggle with Al-Qaeda and the like".
End USA government support for dictatorial regimes around the world, including those with predominately Muslim populations.
End USA government absolute support for Israeli hegemony and suppression of the Palestinians and assume the role as an honest, even-handed broker for a comprehensive settlement of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
End the USA military occupations in and remove USA military bases from foreign lands.
End USA invasions and occupations of foreign lands soly for the purpose of benefiting USA financial interests. Restrict USA military operations to actually defending the USA, intervening to end genocide and ethnic cleansing, and peace keeping missions.
End USA government interference in the internal political affairs of other nations.
February 10, 2008 9:08 PM | Reply | Permalink