I have to admit I really don’t feel all that much rush to read the new Bill Clinton book. For starters, it’s a genre (politician’s biography-policy-lite hybrid) that I studiously avoid in preference for nonfiction reading that takes a more distinctly analytical approach to its subject. Second of all, it’s a thousand pages - daunting no matter how much a page-turner it might be.
So I won’t be reviewing the book anytime soon, or likely ever. And I certainly won’t be reviewing reviews of the book without having read the tome itself. One liberal writer after another is doing just that, taking humbrage with the negative reviews. First, there’s Michael Tomasky attacking Michiko Kakutani’s review:
The culturally elite baby-boomer response, however, does deserve some consideration. It, too, is predictable in its own way; the self-righteous irritation on display in Michiko Kakutani’s review of My Life in Sunday’s Times is in tone and spirit exactly the same as that expressed down the years by Tim Russert and Chris Matthews, of a piece with the feral anguish that oozed out of the editorials penned during the Clinton presidency by former Times-man Howell Raines. But where conservative hatred of Clinton is easily explained, liberal anxiety about him is deep and weird and dark; it will never be resolved, and so it will never — ever — end
Meanwhile, Jack O’Toole complains about Anne Applebaum’s op-ed: “As I said in the opening, I don’t have a clue whether Clinton’s book is any good or not. For all I know, it’s as cluttered as Clancy, and as turgid as Turgenev. But I do know a hatchet-job when I see one — and Ms. Applebaum’s review is a flawless exemplar of the species.”
Isn’t this all getting a bit too meta? It’s as if everyone feels the rush to digest and comment on a thousand page book in the matter of 3 days, with the result that everyone’s opinion on it is exactly what one would have predicted before reading - or, as it turns out, without reading - the book.
It’s enough to make me appreciate cross-town blogger Dimmy Karras, who is summarizing and reviewing the book, 100 page chunks at a time.
As someone (not a baby boomer, by the way) quite cynical about the cultural forms of Clintonian liberalism while agreeing with most of its policy stances, I may at a future date take on Tomasky’s or Brad DeLong’s unwillingness to concede that the former president is open to any criticism. But for now, I’ll let those actually reading the biography-tome have the stage.
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