In her latest review of the Times Book Review, Intern Alexis is forced to endure yet another cranky reviewer's bitching about some author who, in an attempt to write about a bygone era, uses modern language. Well, God fucking forbid. And then there's the unshakable suspicion that, in the era of Judy Miller's crimes against her colleagues, the Book Review is jumping the Times' self-loathing express. Self-flagellation and errant Bridget Jones references after the jump.

Letters

There's a super-serious back and forth between Jonathan Kozol and Nathan Glazer, in which Kozol, who we love, goes slightly nuts. In addition to stomping on Glazer (no stiletto-grinding here), Kozol bashes the Times ("The New York Times may rightly be embarrassed by the segregation educational and residential it has calmly tolerated in its own backyard for far too many years; but it was a cynical injustice to drag out a neoconservative war horse, gifted at genteel equivocation, to sweeten this story for consumption by your readers.") Glazer responds the way we imagine doctors at mental hospitals do when trying to calm down their patients who they fear might rise up and kill them, gently saying: "I hold no animus against Kozol." Keep your hands where we can see 'em Kozol!

Speaking of Times-bashing, Lynne Goldhammer of New York City, is annoyed with John Leonard's piece on James Agee: "Leonard expends seven paragraphs on the most sordid details of Agee's troubled life before even mentioning Agee's work, which, in comparison, merits a mere four paragraphs of tepid anecdotes. In Leonard's hands Agee appears defenseless and stripped of dignity, his literary talents reduced to drunken folly. Nevertheless, even under theses tabloid conditions, Agee still manages to appear more honorable than Leonard or The Times." Goodness, the Times is feeling a bit masochistic this week. Maybe it's Judy Miller-inflicted self-hatred and even the Book Review feels the need to self-flagellate.


A War Like No Other
 By Victor Davis Hanson
Reviewed by Paul Johnson

This was an irritating review, several-fold. First off, we're not going to lie and claim that we can't be classics snobs sometimes ourselves. Oh, we arma virumque cano, all over town. But, this shit is super-snobby! It is never a good sign when paragraphs start out with: "My old tutor at Oxford, A.J.P. Taylor always insisted " Blech. Then, oh geez, just like there was recently a trend in the NYTBR for TMI-ing about the intricacies of gastrointestinal intricacies, there seems to be a new trend: kvetching about modern-day jargon in books about the olden-times! Not surprisingly, our Oxford boy Paul Johnson writes:

Hanson tells this tragic tale with great force and enthusiasm. I could have done without his literary populism and up-to-date jargon: "roughneck Lacedaemonian granddads, oligarchic fundamentalists, the Athenian global village, slugfest, without a clue, ethnic fault lines" and the like. I do not believe the attempt to export Athens's institutions, or "Athenianism," as he calls it, was "the Western world's first example of globalization." Nor was Athens "hyperdemocratic": after all, it was a slave society.

Oh, hush up, Johnson — go cry to A.J.P. Taylor about the decline of the English language, weep into your OED, and smoke on ye olde cracke pipe.


Shalimar the Clown
 By Salman Rushdie
Reviewed by Laura Miller

Laura Miller's baaaack! Oh, how we missed you! She returns with a relatively unkind review of Salman Rushie's latest, Shalimar the Clown. "It gets better," she writes, "but reading the first 100 or so pages of 'Shalimar' often feels like wearing an ill-fitting, itchy sweater." This sort of reminded us of the scene in "Bridget Jones's Diary," when Bridget (Ren e Zellweger) is at a book launch party and asks Salman Rushdie where the toilets are.


Mao: The Unknown Story
 By Jun Chang and Hon Halliday
Reviewed by Nicholas D. Kristoff

We had to seriously consider the fate of our musical Mao cigarette lighter after reading Nicky Kristoff's review of Chang and Halliday's expos . If that's not some hard-hitting book-reviewing, we don't know what is.