Off the wire...
Here's a brief roundup of Book Sense Picks in the news...
The A.P.'s Charles J. Hanley (who was a member of an A.P. team that won a 2000 Pulitzer Prize
for reporting the U.S. military's killing of refugees in the Korean War) files a piece about David Halberstam's The
Coldest Winter. Hanley praises it as "a work destined to endure as a popular history of one of America's most unpopular wars," but also comments that the book's focus on notable battles and life in the trenches results in a work that "largely ignores the Koreans, a chronicle of war that forgets war's greatest victims."
In the New York Times, reviewer Janet Maslin says that Mister Pip, short listed for the Man Booker Prize, is "an improbably palatable visit to a pedagogue?s paradise." Hmm... (It's the "improbably part that threw me.) All in all, by her lights, it sounds like the novel steers clear of mawkishness, and "turns out to be genuinely affecting."
From Sunday's book coverage:
Louisa Thomas reviews Marina Lewycka's Strawberry Fields in the Los Angeles Times, where Susan Carpenter reviews Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (and sees a "master's hand" at work..).
In the San Francisco Chronicle, Daniel Alarcon (the author of Lost City Radio) reviews The Art of Political Murder, which is his estimation "brilliantly" recounts the murder of Guatemalan Bishop Juan Gerardi. Also in the Sunday Chronicle: a review of An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England (a "wonderful book").
Further north, in Portland, the Oregonian also looks at An Arsonist's Guide ("Brock Clarke, take a bow."), and considers How Starbucks Saved My Life and The Street of a Thousand Blossoms.
At the Chicago Tribune (where you download a PDF of the Sunday section..), Exit Ghost is reviewed by D.T. Max (I'm still waiting for the PDF to download. You'll have to read it on your own!) And a few blocks away, the Chicago Sun-Times, David J. Montgomery looks at The Reincarnationist by M.J. Rose (who, he says, "has followed Dan Brown's lead and done him one better.") Also in the Sun-Times features reporter Mary Houlihan has a Q&A with Amy Bloom, whose latest, Away, just keeps getting great reviews.
And, from the once-upon-a-time-in-another-life department, just in time for the end of Fashion Week, Saturday's Wall Street Journal has a roundup of notable fashion titles, including The Fashionable Mind, a title I worked on as an editorial assistant over 25 years ago at Knopf. If you thought you'd read everything before you'd consider reading about haute couture, read this example of superlative reporting.
And, the final note: For some Amy Bloom coverage off the book page, the New York Times' wedding announcements note that she and Brian A. Ameche were married on September 15.
Posted at 04:39PM Sep 17, 2007 by Dan Cullen in General | Comments[0]
