THE STANDARD READER
Bloom, Gotham, Granta, and Harold
The Standard Reader Christmas Books in Brief Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages, selected by Harold Bloom (Scribner, 570 pp., $27.50). What is Bloom up to? Every...
...My portfolio, which at one point reached $6,500, is now $114.62, and I revisit those days with great reluctance...
...Brustein can't see much good in Tom Stoppard...
...Most of the selections—such as Kipling's story "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi"—are brilliantly chosen for reading aloud...
...Kuo joined the Virginia-based Value America as senior vice president for communications...
...This isn't to say his latest collection of essays has no blind spots...
...But in general the evidence Cantwell and Wall hope for is sparse: Over the past 25 years, archaeologists armed by preservation laws have been able to hitch a ride on the heavy equipment that excavates foundations and basements well below the city's accumulated landfill, but little has resulted...
...Tammy Bruce is no conservative, but The New Thought Police demands a return to true freedom of expression so Americans can once again enjoy honest—and therefore dynamic—debates...
...An interesting look back at what was once the hottest magazine in the literary trade...
...And he promotes that much more ineradicable institution, Robert Wilson...
...New York City's archaeological record is mostly erasures...
...He confuses free speech with support for the NEA...
...Unearthing Gotham, a journeyman study by two urban anthropologists, aspires to speak for those "passed over" in the city's history: immigrants, the underclass, Native Americans, etc...
...Perhaps they could customize it to fit me...
...But he also provides knowledge, wit, and an unwillingness to lie or placate...
...He points out, for example, that Edward Albee's renewed popularity has been gained at the expense of sharpness...
...All in all, this is a very fine collection...
...In 1916, digging a subway tunnel at Greenwich and Dey, workmen discovered the charred keel and three ribs of what is probably Adrian Block's Tiger, which burned in January 1614...
...There's meaning in a vacant lot...
...Clinton thought he was talking about cultures and began lecturing him on China...
...He's America's best-known critic, and he seems to think that means he has to dance at everybody's ball...
...Still, Granta set a high standard for originality and topicality: No publication gave a more vivid sense of the intellectual and political atmosphere surrounding the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe more than a decade ago...
...Naipaul and Amitav Ghosh's affecting account of art and resilience in Cambodia during Pol Pot's murderous reign...
...Jonathan Leaf Granta 21: The First Twenty-One Years, edited by Ian Jack (Granta, 384 pp., $14.95...
...Kuo effortlessly brings his readers along for the ride as he relates those incautious days...
...He relates his own experience talking to the president about culture...
...If you agree with Bloom's almost Victorian sentiment that a child reading is "the true image of potential happiness," then this book is a marvelous Christmas present—for your children and yourself...
...Fortunately, in his latest entry, Bloom has stopped in at the sensible people's ball...
...Speaking to the David Mamet Society, he brutally mocks Mamet's stupid theories on acting...
...From GLAAD's attack on Dr...
...But Bloom urges perseverance, arguing that "reading well makes children more interesting both to themselves and others...
...It's a sad story of the decline of journalism...
...In the early 1990s, the government planned to build an office tower on the site of an 18th-century Negro burial ground...
...Over the years, Granta published a few too many drab, crabbed examples of "dirty realism" in fiction and too many accounts of seediness and corruption in exotic locales...
...For years conservatives have tried to alert us to the manipulations of the left, but that's something lefties can do a better job of when they try...
...It was somehow tragic that my oversize body didn't fit well in that nice little Jaguar convertible...
...The resulting collision of power and pieties might be rewritten as an opera for bureaucrats and activists— although one is forced to wonder whether anything in Manhattan can stay sacred space...
...Leading journalists have pulled their punches on high black crime rates, ignored "gender norming" in the Pentagon's politically correct campaign to integrate women into military life, suppressed data regarding a resurgence of high-risk sexual behavior among gay men, and suppressed recognition of mushrooming problems in health, corruption, and cut-throat economic competition wrought by massive waves of immigrants...
...Stephen F. Hayes The New Thought Police: Inside the Left's Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds, by Tammy Bruce (Prima, 300 pp., $23.95...
...I remember the days of dot.com fever...
...Nicole Topham The Siege of the Arts: Collected Writings 1994-2001, by Robert Brustein (Ivan R. Dee, 288 pp., $16.95...
...But David Kuo's Dot.bomb—about his days at Value America, a company that aimed to be the nation's largest online retailer—is so hilarious, it almost recoups my losses...
...A great drama critic must have a good playwright's facility with words, a large historical knowledge, perspicacity, and judgment...
...In The Siege of the Arts, Robert Brustein proves he's a great drama critic...
...McGowan's Coloring the News paints in grim detail how the diversity juggernaut conquered the nation's newsrooms, relentlessly documenting how quota hiring, identity politics, and self-censorship has slanted reporting on racial issues, gay and feminist topics, affirmative action, and immigration...
...Based in Britain, Granta magazine emerged in the early 1980s as a darker, hipper, more Eurocentric version of the New Yorker, offering a smart and readable blend of fiction, autobiography, photojournalism, and reportage...
...Take The New Thought Police, by the feminist and lesbian activist Tammy Bruce, who worked with the gay, feminist, and black civil-rights establishment...
...Brian Murray Unearthing Gotham: The Archaeology of New York City, by Anne-Marie Cant-well and Diana diZerega Wall (Yale University Press, 448 pp., $39.95...
...Intending his marvelous new anthology for "children of all ages," he laments the "dumbing-down" of children's literature, and he demonstrates how delightful intelligent works can be...
...Laurance Wieder Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism, by William McGowan (Encounter, 278 pp., $25.95...
...McGowan concludes that journalism's diversity crusade helped erode civic culture, while failing to deliver new minority audiences...
...Laura Schlessinger to NOW's silence about the scandals of Bill Clinton to the fund-raising tactics of Jesse Jackson, Bruce rips through the absurdities and dangers of the left's thought-police mentality...
...This volume includes a good sampling of the magazine's more memorable pieces, including Diana Athill's bemused recollection of friendship with the prickly VS...
...Frederick R. Lynch...
...The authors manage to relate a few interesting moments...
...Brustein denounces the McCarthy-ism of the left unsparingly, as when he writes of the drama professor at Arizona State who was fired for using Shakespeare, rather than black, female, gay, or Latino playwrights...
...A few fall over the cliff: Good luck to the parent who wants to try "My Cat Jeof-frey," the Christian-mysticism-meets-domestic-animals poem Kit Smart wrote in the insane asylum...
...His depiction of Craig Winn is particularly evocative, for the bravado that made the man believe he could be the world's largest online retailer is exactly what caused his undoing...
...Indeed, the effort to color the news ended up polarizing it: Alienated whites gravitated to talk radio, the Internet, and cable TV, exacerbating the trend diversity activists thought they would end...
...While the company's head, Craig Winn, described the generous employment terms, Kuo writes, "Inside I was wondering if I could afford a new beach house in Nantucket and a ski chalet in Switzerland or whether I'd be forced to choose between the two...
...Every time he publishes a book of nutty postmodernness, he follows it with a book so old-fashioned it's positively premodern...
...Every issue, it sometimes seemed, featured a cranky Englishman floating through Borneo in a canoe...
...Kuo didn't amass the hundreds of millions that at one point seemed strangely realistic, but his account of the time he spent trying is very rich, indeed...
...In talking about the NEA controversy he notes Jane Alexander's inability to get Clinton even once on the phone during her first years as head of the institution...
...Instead of providing balanced discussion of complex issues, reporters either avoid these topics altogether or yield to pressures for simplistic pro-diversity propaganda...
...I owed more in school loans than I made in salary, but as the Nasdaq inched toward 5,000, I invested what I could in tech stocks...
...In a manner unpredictable and uncontrollable, what is lost always manages to speak through the pieces of what remains...
...Didn't Trinity Church grow rich, and stay rich, on real estate...
...There's material in all this for contemplating the future of the site of the World Trade Center...
...Richard Datchery Dot.bomb: My Days and Nights at an Internet Goliath, by David Kuo (Little, Brown, & Company, 320 pp., $25.95...
Vol. 7 • December 2001 • No. 14
