Friday, April 20, 2007

The New York Times Book Review

Although I read this weekly review online each weekend I still much prefer to hold that actual section of the newspaper in my hand when reading. So when a bundle of them arrive in the mail from my daughter in NYC I am always delighted even though they may be a month or two old. Three copies arrived earlier this week so I tucked them in my briefcase and read them on the flight from Auckland to Brisbane on Thursday.

The cover story in the issue of February 4 is entitled American Dream Deferred by Kaiama Glover and comprises a review covering two pages of ‘Man Gone Down’ by Michael Thomas (Black Cat/Grove/Atalanta, paper US$14).

It is a superb review, thorough and thoughtful and beautifully written but it is an example of a review that is so comprehensive that having read it I do not need to read the book.

The reviewer, Kaiama Glover, is the subject of the editorial which says in part “Glover notes that the book raises the question of how the narrator negotiates a color line that runs smack through the middle of his family. She’s no stranger to that reality –“ My own family pretty much runs the color gamut, so I am well aware of the intricacies of skin tone dynamics in contemporary America. My mother is of Bahamian, African-American and American Indian extraction, and my father is a blondish-haired, green-eyed ‘black’ man of multiple ethnicity”
The first black female valedictorian at White Palms High School, Glover went to Harvard and majored in French history and literature, and Afro-American studies.
She now teaches in the French department and Africana studies program at Barnard and Columbia”.

Also reviewed in this issue is Paris – The Secret History by Andrew Hussey , Bloomsbury US$32.50
This is the opening paragraph of Caroline Weber’s review:

Years ago, while strolling through a Parisian flower market, I was accosted by a man with a posy in his hands and a poem on his lips. ”Here are some fruits, some flowers, some leaves and some branches,” he declaimed, quoting the poet Paul Verlaine, “And here is my heart, which beats only for you.” At which the stranger dropped his bouquet, unzipped his pants and presented me with an organ quite different from his heart. In Paris, I reflected as I hurried away, the boundary between lyricism and squalor is as fragile as a rosebud, and as permeable as a man’s fly.
With “Paris-The Secret History”, Andrew Hussey shows that it was ever thus, as he sifts through two millenniums of history to expose the dark side of the City of Light.. Addictively readable and richly detailed………….

I could quote all day but I must desist. If you want more go to www.nytimes.com/bookreview.

No comments: