In this week's New York Times Book Review: Hollywood Edition, Intern Alexis is forced to care about that great, golden city to the West and its ever-important entertainment industry. Sharon Waxman gets ripped a new one while her new book gets a beaten to a bloody pulp, and we're treated to more Eisner analysis than you can shake a stick at — all served with a side of traditional Queenan bitchiness. After the jump, Alexis' weekly review.

Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System
By Sharon Waxman

Reviewed by Ken Tucker

Grab some popcorn, ladies and germs, because this week, the NYTBR goes to the movies! The Times presents us with a whole slew of movie-related books that those of us of the entertainment-obsessed variety much appreciated. We almost wet ourselves when we got to Ken Tucker
s scathing review of Times' Hollywood reporter Sharon Waxman
s tome,
Rebels on the Backlot.
Not only does he essentially slam the book
s content, but he gets all grammar police on her ass and writes:
And perhaps William Safire could stop by Waxman
s desk to remind her that something is either unique or not:
entirely
is superfluous.
OMG, ouch! That is Harsh (with a capital
H
)! You can be mean and think her book was bad, but this strikes even ME as obnoxious.

Tucker goes on to make up a word to describe her tendency to repeat anecdotes about
Tarantino
s poor personal hygiene
and
Soderbergh
s problems with women
: Waxmanic. Move over AJ and Joe, there
s a new literary feud in town and we want front row seats! We await your response, Waxman. Make sure to mention that Ken Tucker
s book
Kissing Bill O
Reilly, Roasting Miss Piggy: 100 Things to Love and Hate About Television
is ranked 9,406 on Amazon.com and yours is ranked 2,181. If you could get your hands on any scandalous emails he's written, that would be super. The nitpickier, cattier and bloodier, the better, pleasethankyou.



Disneywar
By James B. Stewart

Reviewed by John Leonard

John Leonard reviews the loveable James B. Stewart
s Eisner-bashing
Disneywar
(btw, a little late, aren
t we?) and in typical Leonard fashion, the review is mildly incomprehensible. There
s something about him having dirty thoughts about Annette Funicello and a jungle boat, but after that we lost him. We do give Leonard props though for writing a 25-line, 177-word long sentence
that takes balls.



Essay: Ghosts in the Machine
By Joe Queenan

Oh goodness, remember when we thought Ken Tucker was the new Joe Queenan? Guess we thought wrong. Since they let A.J. Jacobs write an essay a few weeks ago, it appears as if Dan Okrent or some other Times referee-like hoo ha decided that it was only fair to let Joe Queenan write one this week. And write one he certainly does. Queenan tackles the drunk-uncle-of-whom-we-do-not-speak of the literary world, The Ghostwriter.
I personally would welcome the unghosted autobiography of Keanu Reeves or Paris Hilton or the un-ghosted memoirs of Michael Jackson,
Queenan writes. Us too! Us too! Queenan wraps up this clever and funny piece by claiming that Donald Trump is
one of the few
authors
who have succeeded in avoiding the pitfalls that increasingly ensnare ghostwritees

He then compares Trump to Thomas Mann and writes that
The intermediaries may come and go, but the Donaldian voice never wavers.
Way to mix the high-brow German literary reference with the low-brow huckster. Pretentious? Maybe. Funny? Yes, very. All right, fine: Queenan: 1, Jacobs: 1, Ken Tucker: 1, Sharon Waxman: 0.



God's Gym
By John Edgar Wideman

Reviewed by Terrence Rafferty

In his review of John Edgar Wideman
s collection of stories, Terrence Rafferty writes about something that hits a little close to this review-reviewer
s home:
Writing at this level of self-consciousness is a risky business: readers tend to smell a rat when a writer dwells on his own practice, to suspect (often correctly) that he
s writing about writing in order to disguise or justify the embarrassing fact that he has nothing to say.
T-Raff, are you saying that just because we write about writing we have nothing to say? And wait, doesn
t a book review, which you just wrote, qualify as
writing about writing?
We totally have something to say about that
um
hmm
anyway
So, yeah, never mind. You
re right — we have absolutely nothing to say. You win, we probably couldn
t have put it better ourselves, yadda, etc.