In this week's installment of her review of the Times Book Review, Intern Alexis gets a much-deserved respite from the literary scatology that's permeated the Review's pages as of late. Nevertheless, she's still forced to deal with another sort of crap: Lauren Weisberger's latest contribution to the pyre of chick-lit, which is enough to make Candace Bushnell seem like a blessing. After the jump, miracles happen.

Mark Twain: A Life
 By Ron Powers
Reviewed by Geoffrey Wolff

Wolff writes a lively and positive review of Ron Powers's Mark Twainathon, but finds some of the word choices he made troublesome:

Occasionally, Powers, excited by demotic idiom, is tempted into slangy silliness. He writes of "kicking some major Britannia butt"; reports that Mark Twain "was ready to rock." It's jarring to read that Twain "tried to get some shut-eye" or "partied hearty" with Nathaniel Hawthorne's daughter or "hung with" a friend or "tried his luck at hanging 10" during a Hawaiian "surfin' safari." Powers's most serious lapse of proportional judgment may be to insist that his subject, in his celebrity, was "the nation's first rock star."

We agree that it's uncouth to describe Mark Twain has having "partied hearty," but practice what you preach, Wolffy. A few paragraphs before the one mentioned above, he writes: "Twain was a bareback rider on cyclones of change during the second half of America's 19th century." Hooooooold up. There's only one way to use "bareback rider" as metaphor and, last time we checked, it did not involve any cyclones of change during the second half of America's 19th century. Yes, last time we checked, it involved the morning-after pill and the bathroom stalls of Boysroom.


Lipstick Jungle
 By Candace Bushnell
Everyone Worth Knowing
 By Lauren Weisberger
Reviewed by Leisl Schillinger

We were excited to see how Schillinger would treat these two highly anticipated chick lit tomes. Schillinger is not too mean about "Lipstick Jungle" and pretty mean about Lauren Weisberger's "Everyone Worth Knowing." Indeed, she refers to it as "her fatuous, clunky second novel" and that it's "spiked with more product placements than the movie 'Herbie: Fully Loaded.'" Speaking of product placements, we had to wonder, how much did those Gothamist kids pay for Schillinger to write that: "The marvelous, not-to-be-missed Web site Gothamist.com - a crystal ball that reflects everything worth knowing about this city "


Julie and Julia
 By Julie Powell
Reviewed by David Kamp

To add some closure to our poop-surrounded lives (this is it, we promise!), we're going to quote David Kamp, in his review of blogger Julie Powell's ode to Julia Child. "This last tic is actually part of a larger, troublesome trend among young memoirists, who seem to think that repeated references to their poor hygiene and the squalidness of their surroundings give texture and depth to their work. No, no, no! Being subjected over and over again to images of your piled-up dirty dishes and backed-up plumbing (bodily and otherwise) only makes me want to put down your book. Stop it!" Here here Kamp!


TBR: Inside the List

We guess Rachel Donadio and Dwight Garner have been drawing straws to see who gets to go "Inside the List" each week. This time, Garner picked the short straw, or maybe the long straw? Who knows? Rachel? Dwight? In any case, Garner muses on Zadie Smith's number seven spot on the Best Seller chart, and discusses Smith's aversion to fame. He quotes Smith as saying, "I refuse to do any television and I won't do anything which makes my life un-normal I won't go on the front cover of a magazine. I won't do any of it." Well, then we guess she didn't realize that her photo graced the front cover of the NYTBR two weeks ago and that there was an "un-normally" gigantic photo of her that accompanied the review. J-j-j-j-ust sayin!