February 24, 2008
One liners on Strauss, Kazin, Auslander, Mann, Bolano
A few Jewish literary items from around the Web:
• In today’s edition of The Independent, William Sutcliffe reviews Shalom Auslander’s “Foreskin’s Lament,” and says that “[i]f you wish Richard Dawkins could quip like David Sedaris, then this is the misery memoir for you.”
• In the Houston Jewish Herald-Voice, Yale University professor Steven B. Smith, who’s latest book is “Reading Leo Strauss,” says Strauss was not “the Darth Vader of American neoconservatives, the dark side of a sinister Jewish cabal of Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and William Kristol, the poster child for the Bush administration’s war on Iraq.”
• In The Forward, senior book critic Mark Oppenheimer takes on Richard M. Cook’s “Alfred Kazin: A Biography.” You should read the complete review but here’s one bit from Oppenheimer’s critique:
… Cook never really approaches the question of why Kazin was such an attractive beneficiary of review assignments. He was a great writer, but that is not the end of the story. Editors must always ask themselves, “Why this reviewer and not that one?” It may simply have been that Kazin’s mix of speed, avidity and competence was unmatched. Or it may have been that editors knew Kazin was that rare animal, a true appreciator. For all his life, the people around Kazin were joining camps, separating into alcoves: Trotskyite, Menshevik, anarchist, New Critic, postmodernist. Kazin knew them all, learned from them, but ultimately kept his own counsel. Insecure though he may have been, he knew what he loved (in women and books), and no one would dictate how he related to them.
• In The New York Times, novelist Stacey D’Erasmo