“Books” Category Archive

A foolish person doesn’t recognize that one can learn much from opponents. So liberals have begun to understand that they need God on their side as much as the Christian Right does.

The lesson from conservatives, said Rabbi Michael Lerner, is that it’s okay to base policy on faith and spiritual values, and it’s important to stand up for what you believe in. “When they come to a decision about what they believe in, they fight for it,” he said of the Christian Right in a recent interview. “And they’re willing to lose an election for the sake of what they believe in.”

2007 will be the year of reading.

Having read exactly zero books from cover to cover in 2006, I decided that I would read two books a month this year.

I am a slow reader. I will choose short books.

It might sound like a lame excuse.

But if a man cheats on his wife, he might explain himself this way: “I couldn’t help it. My evolved psychological mechanisms made me have an affair.” And he’d be right.

Sort of.

David M. Buss, a psychologist at the University of Texas, has spent more than two decades studying sexual desire and behavior. And his research has led to one overarching observation: Across cultures, people’s mating strategies are universal.

Today marks the release of Brian De Palma’s adaptation of The Black Dahlia, and I’m torn.

• I love the work of James Ellroy — the crime writer on whose novel the movie is based.
• De Palma does virtually nothing for me.
• Ellroy has gotten more stylized, more sophisticated, and better over time, and 1987’s The Black Dahlia — the first book of his “L.A. Quartet” that closed with the fantastic L.A. Confidential and White Jazz — began a period of rapid growth. That’s a nice way of saying that the book is lesser Ellroy.
• Yet Matt Zoller Seitz is persuasive about the movie’s charms.
• And then Dana Stevens guts it.

Used in conjunction with author Robert Bly, “Iron John” has come to symbolize gatherings in which men drum and dance in the woods, unleashing their own wild sides. It has been credited as a spark to the “men’s movement,” and attacked as trying to equate the emotional suffering of men with centuries of oppression of women. All of those things carry at least a hint of truth, but they ignore what Bly’s Iron John is really about: the idea that men are worn down and worn out, even as they’ve become more sensitive to the planet and their mates.

A document of my film education and something that I hope will help guide people who are intimidated by the thousands of film books available — from omnibus guides to explorations of single works.

For the past three decades, Tim O’Brien has been trying to tell true war stories — even though most of them, strictly speaking, are fiction.

I’m not quite sure how one quantifies it, but Crain’s Chicago Business has decided that writers given half-million-dollar MacArthur “genius” grants become fat, slovenly pigs. Actually, the publication has found a correlation between getting one of these awards and a significant decline in the quality and quantity of an author’s output. There’s even a handy, authoritative chart! Is there a cause-and-effect relationship here, or is the MacArthur Foundation simply an excellent judge of when writers are past their primes? (Via Salon.)

The New York Review of Books has an excellent piece in its July 15 issue on the nature of criticism. It deals specifically with Dale Peck’s already notorious Hatchet Jobs — which, of course, I haven’t read — and concerns itself primarily with the role of the critic. The author’s conclusion is that Peck is too busy “punishing” the authors he’s slamming to effectively “judge” them, and that Peck needs to offer an alternative to the books he loathes to be a good critic.

Nick Clooney hit upon an interesting idea when he was approached about doing a book about film: that movies sometimes should be looked at outside the realm of entertainment. A persistent literary representative kept asking him to write a book, but he kept deferring because of his schedule as host of American Movie Classics. When he left the cable channel a few years ago, the representative told him, “Now you’ve got time.”

But time wasn’t the only obstacle. With list after list about great movies, and with the Internet democratizing film commentary, Clooney wondered, “What can anybody say about films that hasn’t been said before?”

The blog “Notes from Classy’s Kitchen” recently cited my essay on Stone Reader.

Although it would appear to be a collection essays about 31 disparate songs, the true subject of Nick Hornby’s Songbook is our relationship with music, particularly as we mature.

There is the sneaking suspicion reading The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster’s collection of short novels, that the works are related. The hunch is not only that the stories are related thematically or in their ultimate message or outcomes — they most certainly are — but that they represent a single, cohesive work rather than three repetitive novellas.

I had more fun at Holes at age 32 than I’ve had at an “adult” movie in ages, and Louis Sachar’s screenplay features a number of subtle but important improvements on his novel, and it’s a model of efficiency and pacing. It’s going to take a damned good batch of movies to knock Holes off my list of 2003 favorites.

The irony of the success of Michael Lewis’ wonderful Moneyball is that it should bring the Oakland A’s back to earth. The justice is that Oakland’s demise doesn’t appear imminent. This is baseball, after all, and there’s no reason to change something just because it’s never worked very well.

Get Culture Snob e-mail updates

Creative Commons license

• 

All words by Jeff Ignatius except where noted.

Contact the author using the feedback form or at snob@culturesnob.com.

Protected by a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Powered by Movable Type Publishing Platform.

Design by Eris. Icons by Some Random Dude. Search results powered by Fast Search. Stats by Visitor Stats Pro. Paged archives by Alden Bates.